History, Memory, and Jewish Identity [1 ed.] 9781618114754, 9781618114747

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History, Memory, and Jewish Identity

History, Memory, and Jewish Identity, Academic Studies Press, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,

North American Jewish Studies

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Series Editor—Ira Robinson (Concordia University)

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History, Memory, and Jewish Identity Edited by IRA ROBINSON,

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NAFTALI S. COHN, and LORENZO DITOMMASO

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Boston 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2016 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-61811-474-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61811-475-4 (electronic) Cover design by Ivan Grave

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Published by Academic Studies Press in 2016 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

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Table of Contents

Preface............................................................................................. viii Ancient Period

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The Causes of the Alexandrian Pogrom and the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria in 38 CE................................................. 2 Lionel Jehuda Sanders Sectarianism in the Mishnah: Memory, Modeling Society, and Rabbinic Identity.................................................31 Naftali S. Cohn Power and the (Re)Creation of Collective-Cultural Memory in Early Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah................................................ 55 Jack N. Lightstone

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Medieval and Early Modern Periods Maimonides vs. Nahmanides on Historical Consciousness and the Shaping of Jewish Identity.............................................................. 92 James A. Diamond Community and Sacrality: Jewish Customs and Identity in Early Modern Worms......................................................... 117 Dean Phillip Bell Criticism and Tradition: Leon Modena, Azariah de’ Rossi, and Elijah Levita Bahur on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Vowels....................... 147 Howard Tzvi Adelman Modern and Contemporary Periods American Jewish Immigrants and the Invention of Europe...................... 172 Beth S. Wenger North American Hasidim: Between Modernity and the Old World.......... 192 Steven Lapidus

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The Challenge of Memory for Yiddish Language Activists in Montreal..... 211 Pierre Anctil Identities, Communities, and the Infrastructures of History: Creating Canadian Jewish Archives in the 1930s and 1970s................................... 233 Richard Menkis The Shoah, the Sacred, and Jewish Victim Identity in Postwar Germany and North America: The Scar Without the Wound and the Wound That Did Not Close........................................................... 257 Benjamin M. Baader

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Macro and Micro Insights into Contemporary Jewish Identities: Europe, Israel, and the United States....................................294 Calvin Goldscheider Interfaces between Eras Rallying All of Israel: David Ben-Gurion and the Book of Joshua............. 316 Rachel Havrelock Who Is a Marrano?: Reflections on Modern Jewish Identity.................... 337 Ira Robinson

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The Authors.............................................................................................365 Index....................................................................................................... 371

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Preface

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I

n May 2011, a conference was held at Concordia University that brought together specialists in Jewish history to take a fresh, panoramic view of the role representations of the past play in the construction of Jewish identity.1 Since Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s seminal work, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, was published some thirty years ago,2 there have been significant developments in the study of Jewish history, memory, and identity. Little of this scholarship, however, has brought these developments directly to bear on the interrelationships between Jews, Jewish culture, and the shifting nature of “Jewishness” throughout the ages. Yerushalmi made a fundamental distinction between history, writing about the past for its own sake, and memory, preserving the past for its meaning according to archetypal patterns. This distinction has since been challenged. Scholars argue that the boundaries between ways of looking at the past are often blurred and that there are multiple ways of identifying, evaluating, and representing past events. 1 For more on the conference, including the program, see http://religion.concordia. ca/jewishid/ [accessed September 25, 2014]. 2 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: ­University of Washington Press, 1982).

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Furthermore, the telling of a single, simplified narrative of Jewish history has become problematic. Given that there has always been a multiplicity of “Judaisms,” as Neusner has called them, the molding of a singular narrative of Jewish history constituted a highly selective interpretive act. “Judaism” and “Jewishness” have become recognized as highly problematic concepts and terms, and there has been a concerted shift toward the use of a polythetic or “family characteristics” definition of these terms. As these trends have unfolded, numerous studies of particular Jewish groups in specific time periods have taken up the question of Jewish representation of the past. Many of these studies have recognized—as Harold Bloom did in his introduction to Zakhor—that the ways in which groups represent the past are fundamentally connected with the construction of their identities. The study of how Jews construct the past, therefore, can help in interpreting how they understand the nature of their Jewishness. The chapters of this book, which developed out of the conference papers, illuminate the multiple ways in which Jews have responded to and made use of the past. They discern patterns of continuity and discontinuity, the nuanced imbrication of pastconsciousness and identity, and the role that scholarship plays not only in uncovering but also creating relationships between the past and Jewish identity. The articles on Jewish individuals and groups included in this volume reveal surprising similarities across time and place at the same time as they reveal the diversity of these individuals and groups. Both through its in-depth individual studies and its broader, collective perspective, this volume contributes not only to the study of Jewish past-consciousness and identity but also to the study of Jewish history and Jewishness more generally. If Jews’ choices of what to include, emphasize, omit, and invent in their representation of the past can be considered a fundamental variable or factor that contributes to a polythetic definition of Jewishness, this volume contributes to the creation of a nuanced, contemporary approach to the construction of the histories of Jews and their thought.

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Preface

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The reader should note that the editors did not impose on the individual authors a standard system of transliteration or reference to the books of the Hebrew Bible or Rabbinic literature. The editors would like to thank Andrea Lobel and Cimminnee Holt, who worked with the editors to create this volume. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s generous grant made the original Concordia University conference possible and is gratefully acknowledged. The conference was also supported by the Department of Religion and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Concordia University, as well as the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies. The Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies’ support for the publication of this volume is likewise acknowledged with gratitude. The editors would also like to thank Cambridge University Press for its permission to publish James Diamond’s essay, which was first published in his 2014 book Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon. Ira Robinson Lorenzo DiTommaso Naftali S. Cohn Montreal, September 25, 2014

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ANCIENT PERIOD

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The Causes of the Alexandrian Pogrom and the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria in 38 CE Lionel Jehuda Sanders Concordia University

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iscussion seeking to discern the causes of the pogrom in Alexandria in 38 CE has tended to veer in two, not necessarily incompatible, directions. In the first approach, following Philo’s lead in the In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, as well as that of these texts’ counterpart, the Acta Isidori, emphasis is placed upon causation determined by the chief personages in the drama: on the one hand, Flaccus, prefect of the Roman Province of Egypt, the Roman emperor Gaius Caligula, the Alexandrian leaders Isidorus, Lampon and Dionysius and the Alexandrian populace; and on the other hand, Philo and the Jewish community of Alexandria. The alternate approach has been to consider the subject from the point of view of the social and political issues underlining the friction between the Jewish and Alexandrian communities, with particular emphasis placed upon the negative consequences of the Roman conquest of Egypt under Octavian (Augustus) for both

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Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, and the quest by the Jews for improved civic status in the city. This article is not concerned with these academically valid, though highly contentious issues. On the contrary, the focus here is on the one incident that, according to Philo, directly propelled the city of Alexandria to its path to violence—the visit of Agrippa I in 38 CE to Alexandria. I emphasize this event for two reasons. First, I maintain that the episode possesses greater significance than that which it has generally been accorded by the ancient sources and by modern scholarly consensus, which emphasize personalities and socio-political issues. Historical memory has, in fact, seriously obscured the incident’s importance. Secondly, it places the search for Jewish identity in Alexandria in a broader context than one might initially suspect, involving rival identity quests by Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. The facts about this incident as described by Philo in the In Flaccum are simply stated. Agrippa I, close friend of Gaius, en route to his newly acquired kingdom1 in Northern Palestine2 (territory belonging to his uncle Philip’s former tetrarchy, possibly with an addition),3 agreed to await the Etesian winds4 before embarking at Dicaearchia (Puteoli) upon the advice of the emperor, and take the

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1

Of interest is the fact that Josephus (AJ 18.237) emphasizes that Agrippa was made king rather than given the title that Philip had possessed, tetrarch: καὶ βασιλέα καθίστησιν αὐτὸν τῆς Φιλίππου τετραχίας. André Pelletier, In Flaccum. Introduction, traduction et notes (Paris: Cerf, 1967), 26, believes that Claudius was actually the one who first bestowed the title of king on Agrippa, when he confirmed Agrippa’s authority (Jos., AJ 19.274). Daniel R. Schwartz, Agrippa I: The Last King of Judaea (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1990), 60, denies that real promotion characterizes the change from tetrarch to king. Descriptions of Agrippa as king are found in Philo, In Flacc., 29, 33, 35, 39, 103; Leg., 179, 261; Jos., BJ 2.181; AJ 18.194, 237, 239, 273, 289; 19.236, 265. 2 Currently modern Lebanon. 3 Added to land belonging to Philip’s former tetrarchy was that of Lysanias, the former ruler of Abilene (Jos., AJ 18.237). This additional fact is absent from the reference in BJ 2.181. In AJ 19.275 and BJ 2.215, Claudius is associated with the grant of Lysanias’ land. See Nikos Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role in Society and Eclipse (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 280. 4 I.e., the northwestern summer winds. See Pieter W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2003), 111.

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Alexandrian Pogrom and the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria

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allegedly speedier southern, rather than northern, route to his kingdom, which necessitated a brief stop in Alexandria.5 A deliberate attempt to enter Alexandria unobtrusively by night failed.6 Agrippa was verbally attacked by the Alexandrian mob, mocked,7 and then subjected to a parody or mime8 of Agrippa’s ostentatious march through Alexandria, which the mime followed.9 The parody was centered upon the town fool Carabas,10 addressed as Marin11—Aramaic or possibly Syriac for “my lord”12—who was attired with a cloak made from carpet, a crown of   5 Philo, In Flacc., 26. Disagreement on the date of Agrippa’s visit is encountered between Alla Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria in AD 38,” Journal of Jewish Studies 51 (2000): 225–242, and Sandra Gambetti, “A Brief Note on Agrippa I’s Trip to Alexandria in the Summer of 38 CE,” Journal of Jewish Studies 58 (2007): 34–38. While the former dates the visit to June 38, the latter favors July/August of the same year. Allen Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I and the Mourning Rights for Drusilla,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 37.3 (2006): 394, offers a compromise between these two views, opting for the last week of June and the first week of July.   6 Philo, In Flacc., 28.   7 Philo, In Flacc., 33.   8 On the prevalence of mimes in Alexandria, see Herbert G. Box, Philonis Alexandrini In Flaccum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), 88, and van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 126, citing Cicero, Pro Rab. Post. 12.35; Dio Chrys., Or. 32.4, 86; Phil., Agr. 35; Mos. 2.21.   9 Philo, In Flacc., 34–39. 10 Generally regarded as Aramaic for cabbage, though Pelletier, In Flaccum, 69, n. 4, regards it as related to the Greek word for a boat, κάραβος, while van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 128, refers to the possibility that it is related to the same Greek word κάραβος for crayfish or beetle. See “κάραβος” in Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek–English Lexicon, rev. Henry Stuart-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 877. 11 Philo, In Flacc., 39. 12 John P. V. D. Balsdon, The Emperor Gaius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 130, regards the term as Aramaic. Similarly, Schwartz, Agrippa I, 75; Samuel Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria (New York, Oxford: University Press, 1979), 176, n. 23; Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Greek in the Ancient World (Princeton: University Press, 1993), 115; Louis H. Feldman, “Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World,” in History and Hate: The Dimensions of Anti-Semitism, ed. David Berger (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986), 23. On the other hand, Box, Philonis Alexandrini, 89, followed by H. Idris Bell, Juden und Griechen im römischen Alexandreia (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1927), 18, records it as being Syrian. Similarly Erwin R. Goodenough, The Politics of Philo Judaeus (New Haven: Yale University Press 1938), 8; Arnold H. M. Jones, The Herods of Judaea (Oxford: University Press 1938), 192. Van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 130, notes the fact that Syriac is a Western Aramaic dialect renders the distinction between Syriac and Aramaic moot. Pelletier, In Flaccum, 71, n. 7,

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bark, and a scepter made of papyrus.13 Carabas was saluted, received appeals for justice, and consulted on state affairs. Flaccus refused to support the Jews against the mob.14 Images15 were subsequently placed in the synagogues by the Alexandrians.16 Violence then erupted between Jews and Alexandrians, and the pogrom followed.17 In virtually every modern source consulted, this episode is either totally ignored as the direct cause of the pogrom18 or perceived as a relatively superficial cause of the pogrom, no more, indeed, than the spark that ignited it—in Thucydidean terms,19 as an αἰτία (a direct followed by Katherine Blouin, Le conflit judéo-alexandrin de 38–41: l’ identité juive à l’épreuve (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2005), 82, n. 245, on Marin as the equivalent of the modern use of the terms duce or Führer. 13 Sandra Gambetti, The Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE and the Persecution of the Jews: A Historical Reconstruction (Leiden-Boston: E. J. Brill, 2009), 159, notes that that there was an historical logic to this display given that Agrippa until recently had been a penniless wretch. Also plausible is her suggestion that Isidorus who had witnessed Agrippa’s change of fortune was the likely organizer of this demonstration. 14 Philo, In Flacc., 40. 15 The images (εἰκόνες) in Philo, In Flac. 41, are not identified with any particular personage but are generally presumed to have been representations of Caligula. Thus van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus; 134; E. Mary Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), 239–40; Pelletier, In Flaccum, 73; Erich Gruen, Diaspora: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1998), 55–64; Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I,” 395, on the contrary maintains that the images were of the emperor’s late sister Drusilla. 16 Philo, In Flacc., 41.44. 17 Philo, In Flacc., 55ff. 18 Modern authorities who ignore discussion of Agrippa’s role include Marcus Brann, Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Agrippa I”; Hyman G. Evelow, Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. “Caligula”; Isaiah Gafni, Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Alexandria”; Menachem. Stern, Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Caligula”; Edna Elazari, Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “Agrippa I”; Joseph G. Milne, “Egyptian Nationalism and Greek and Roman Rule,” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 14. 3–4 (1928): 231; H. Idris Bell, Cults and Creeds in Graeco Roman Egypt (Liverpool: University Press, 1953), 41; Naphtali Lewis, Egypt under Roman Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 29; Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (London: Penguin, 2007), 421, and Martin Goodman, The Roman World 44 BC–AD 180 (London: Routledge, 1997), 269, who totally ignores Agrippa’s visit within the context of Agrippa and Alexandria; Alan Bowman and Martin Goodman, “Alexandria” and “Judaea,” Cambridge Ancient History 10, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 701, 744–55; Allen Kerkeslager, s.v. “Agrippa I,” Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 613. 19 Thuc. 1, 23.5–6.

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cause) as opposed to an ἀληθεστάτη πρόφασις (the truest, i.e., long-term cause).20 This minimalist interpretation of Agrippa’s intervention is likely based upon the ancient testimony, which tends to downplay or 20 Leo Fuchs, Die Juden Aegyptens in ptolemäischer und römischer Zeit (Vienna: M. Rath Verlag, 1924), 20–21, barely comments upon Agrippa’s role. Theodor C. M. M. Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, trans. William P. Dickson (London: Scribners and Sons, 1887), 2, 190, describes Agrippa’s visit as a “trifling occasion.” Similar views in Balsdon, The Emperor Gaius, 130–31; Box, Philonis Alexandrini in Flaccum, xl–xlii; E. Mary Smallwood, Philonis Alexandrini, Legatio ad Gaium (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 17–19; Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule, 237–38. On the “spark that ignited an increasingly tense situation,” see Herbert A. Musurillo, The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs: Acta Alexandrinorum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 127; Anthony A. Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 186; Tessa Rajak, “Agrippa,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. s. v. “Agrippa”; Pieter W. van der Horst, “The First Pogrom: Alexandria 38 CE,” European Review 10.4 (2002): 483; van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 33. Bell, Juden und Griechen, 18, describes the Agrippa incident as relatively insignificant (“ein verhaltnismässig unbedeutender Zwischenfall”). H. Idris Bell, “Egypt under the Early Principate,” Cambridge Ancient History 10 (Cambridge: University Press, 1934), 310, where Alexandrian Jews and not Agrippa provoke the riot. H. Idris Bell, “Anti-Semitism in Alexandria,” Journal of Roman Studies 3 (1941): 5, where the Agrippa incident is considered a “trivial, more or less accidental cause.” Victor Tcherikover in Victor Tcherikover and Alexander Fuks, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum I (Harvard: University Press, 1957), 65, on Agrippa’s chance visit as a “pretext for violent agitation amongst the Alexandrian mob.” Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ I, rev. and ed. Geza Vermes et al. (Edinburgh: T. S. T Clark Ltd, 1973), 390, views Agrippa’s visit as a signal for the outbreak of the pogrom. Emil Schürer, Jewish Encyclopedia. s.v. “Alexandria” on the Agrippa incident as a prelude to the riot and pogrom. Aryeh Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985), 20, on Agrippa’s arrival as “unexpected”; Louis H. Feldman, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities 18–20 (London, Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann, Harvard University Press, 1965), 152, on Agrippa’s visit as the “immediate cause for strife”; Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 115, on the visit as a pretext; Schwartz, Agrippa I, 77, viewing Agrippa’s visit as a “mere catalyst”; Arthar Ferrill, Caligula: Emperor of Rome (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 145, and Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes towards the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 139, on Agrippa’s original intention to enter Rome incognito, implying its original insignificance. The view that the Agrippa incident was a mere pretext is also found in Joseph Mélèze Modrezejewski, The Jews of Egypt from Ramses II to Emperor Hadrian, trans. Robert Cornman (Philadelphia, Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 169. The incident is dismissed by Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I,” 370, as “a crude piece of impromptu entertainment.” See also Gil Gambash, reviewing Gambetti’s The Alexandria Riots in Scripta Classica Israelica 32 (2013): 283, noting that “Agrippa’s vilification in the Gymnasium adds little to our understanding of the reasons for the tension.”

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even dismiss the event’s long-term significance. Thus, Josephus, in his discussion of the pogrom at Alexandria in the Jewish Antiquities,21 is succinct, concentrating his attention to Jewish Diaspora affairs upon events in the city of Rome.22 Hence, the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Tiberius in 19 CE, no minor event but clearly secondary in magnitude and importance to the first anti-Jewish pogrom in Western history in Alexandria, is allotted more attention and importance than the Alexandrian crisis,23 where discussion of Agrippa’s intervention is conspicuously absent. The brevity of treatment of the crisis in Alexandria and silence on Agrippa’s role in the incident are initially surprising, given that Josephus was no stranger to Alexandria and to its Jewish community. After the fall of Jotapata and Josephus’ surrender to Vespasian, Josephus informs us24 that he accompanied Vespasian to Alexandria where he met and married an Alexandrian, who became the historian’s second wife. Moreover, the evidence of the Contra Apionem indicates that Josephus was far from a stranger to the chief currents of Alexandrian intellectual opinion directed against the Jews in the first part of the first century CE.25 Josephus’ silence about Agrippa’s role preceding the outbreak of violence and about the Carabas incident is particularly surprising.26 Josephus, after all, wrote extensively about Agrippa in the Jewish Antiquities,27 discussing both his early rather reckless life, spent largely at Rome, and the brief period when he was king in Judaea. In the light of Josephus’ ample and broad interest in Agrippa, the inevitable question posed is: why would the historian pass over what seems, from Philo’s narrative, to constitute an intervention by Agrippa in Alexandrian affairs, which had such major repercussions?28 21 Jos., AJ 18.257–60. 22 In addition, Jos., BJ 2. 487, maintains somewhat unconvincingly that strife between the Jews and the Alexandrians went back to Alexander. 23 Jos., AJ 18.81–83. 24 Jos., Vita, 416. 25 See Menachem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Academic Press, 1974), 382 and 386; Gruen, Heritage of Hellenism, 45–72. 26 Agrippa is covered relatively sketchily in the BJ 2.206–220. 27 Jos., AJ 18.126–252; 19.236–353. 28 Van der Horst, The First Pogrom, 470, conversely maintains, surprisingly in my view, that Josephus’ brevity suggests that Philo exaggerated the significance of the pogrom.

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Alexandrian Pogrom and the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria

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Turning to the testimony of Philo’s In Flaccum, the only narrative source of Agrippa’s visit and the humiliating Carabas incident, the event is depicted as little more than a spark that ignited the subsequent crisis. Agrippa’s arrival is described29 as a matter of chance (συντυχία τις). A similar view of the Jewish monarch’s arrival is sustained in a brief reference in the Legatio ad Gaium,30 wherein Agrippa chanced to visit the city (ἐκ τύχης γὰρ ἐπεδήμησε τῇ πόλει). Thus, the king’s appearance is perceived as an event quite independent of the schism between Jews and Alexandrians. The insignificance of Agrippa’s intervention is, moreover, underlined by three facts furnished by Philo: Agrippa is described as coming to Alexander only on the friendly suggestion of the emperor because it was the speedier route to take;31 Agrippa, in order to avoid publicity, made his entry by night as unobtrusively as possible;32 and Agrippa appears to have departed shortly afterwards, as there are no other references to him in Philo until he reappears pleading the cause of the Jews before Gaius in the Legatio ad Gaium.33 Three difficulties lead us to question Philo’s thesis that Agrippa’s visit was a matter of mere chance.34 In the first place, there is some reason to believe that the description of Agrippa’s entry into Alexandria is formulaic. As Willrich noted long ago,35 this passage bears a 29 Philo, In Flacc., 25. 30 Philo, Leg., 179. 31 Philo, In Flacc., 26. 32 Philo, In Flacc., 27. 33 Philo, Leg., 261–333. 34 Schwartz, Agrippa I, 74, anticipates me in voicing suspicion regarding the historicity of Philo’s overall thesis. Aryeh Kasher, reviewing Schwartz’s Agrippa I in Jewish Quarterly Review 84.2–3 (1994): 331, sustains the veracity of Philo’s account on the grounds a) that Philo possessed moral integrity, and b) was an eyewitness of the events that he described. Against such reasoning, I suggest that eyewitness accounts ought not to be automatically absolved of bias. As regards the issue of moral integrity, I can only emphasize that philosophic truth is not inevitably compatible with historical truth. Certainly Joseph G. Milne, A History of Egypt under Roman Rule (London: Methuen, 1898), 29, suspected that Agrippa I and, indeed, Agrippa II were more profoundly involved with the Jewish-Alexandrian schism than Philo was willing to admit. At the same time, the same scholar, in “Egyptian Nationalism under Greek and Roman Rule,” ignores totally Agrippa’s role in igniting the pogrom. 35 Hugo Willrich, “Caligula,” Klio 3 (1903): 402, n. 3, followed by Fuchs, Die Juden Aegyptens, 21, n. 1.

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striking resemblance to Philo’s account of Bassus’ later arrival to arrest Flaccus:36 an emphasis on a rapid passage; a wait at the island of Pharos; the late afternoon arrival; the order to the pilot to remain at sea until sunset; and the avoidance of ostentation by both figures. Accordingly, the validity of Philo’s account of Agrippa’s chance visit to Alexandria is questionable since it seems to be based upon a template. Secondly, the argument that Philo presents regarding the advice given to Agrippa by the emperor that determined Agrippa’s decision to visit Alexandria quite by chance37 is unsustainable on three counts. In the first place, had Agrippa awaited the Etesian winds before embarking at Dicaearchia (Puteoli) for Alexandria, this would have entailed considerable delay and, in fact, rendered the journey by the southern route the longer route.38 Moreover, such reasoning would run counter to all we know about Agrippa’s tendency to idle away time while in Rome.39 Finally, at a later point in the narrative, Philo40 admits that Gaius did more than simply advise Agrippa to take the Alexandrian route. Indeed, Philo admits that Gaius “compelled” (ἠνάγκαζεν) rather than suggested that Agrippa travel to his Palestinian kingdom via Alexandria.41 Once again, we are led to believe that much more than a quirk of fate brought Agrippa to Alexandria. Thirdly, and most importantly, Philo may have reinforced his marginalization of Agrippa’s role by deliberately excluding, and therefore actually expunging, significant evidence from his narrative pertaining to Agrippa’s importance as an agent of the emperor sent to intervene in the Alexandrian schism, a phenomenon suggesting that the appearance 36 Philo, In Flacc., 110. 37 Box, Philonis Alexandrini in Flaccum xl, describing Gaius’ advice as “fussy interference.” 38 See Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 231; though against, see van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 116, following the implicit support for the emperor’s suggestion in the works of Lionel Casson. See Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 236; Lionel Casson, Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 297; Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), 158. 39 Thus Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I,” 369. 40 Philo, In Flacc., 31. 41 See Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 228.

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Alexandrian Pogrom and the Visit of Agrippa I to Alexandria

of Agrippa at Alexandria was more than a matter of mere chance. This information, which is only admitted at a later point, includes details about the emperor’s conferral of praetorian status marked by the bestowal of the στρατηγικαὶ τιμαὶ (i.e., ornamenta praetoria) upon Agrippa42 and about his meeting with the Gerousia, the representative council of the Jews. We are told that the purpose of this meeting was to deal with a letter that the council had sent congratulating Gaius on his elevation as emperor, the dispatch of which Flaccus had impeded.43 Agrippa subsequently forwarded this letter to the emperor with another letter explaining the delay along with an additional document written by Agrippa underlying the injustice that marked the attack upon the Jews.44 Together Gaius’ conferment of praetorian status upon Agrippa and Agrippa’s meeting with the Jewish community suggest that Agrippa went to Alexandria both on imperial business and to meet with the Jews of the city, not simply to expedite passage to his new kingdom.45 Moreover, Philo makes no mention of a formal procession of the Jews of Alexandria in the city with Agrippa at its head within its proper chronological context. This omission certainly sustains the impression given by Philo that Agrippa’s visit to Alexandria had no other purpose than to pass through the city as speedily as possible en route to his Palestinian kingdom. Only later, within the context of a reference by Flaccus’ companions to the attention that Agrippa’s bodyguard of spearmen being “decked in armour overlaid with gold and silver” inspired,46 are we made aware of the fact that there was an ostentatious procession of Agrippa and the Jews of Alexandria that led to the procession of the mock king Carabas and the outbreak of the pogrom.47

42 Philo, In Flacc., 40. 43 Smallwood, Legatio,16, argues that Flaccus’ failure to dispatch the letter was a genuine error. 44 Philo, In Flacc., 103; Leg., 179. 45 See Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 238, who believes that the chronological misplacement of the episode of Agrippa’s meeting with the Jewish gerousia was deliberate. 46 Philo, In Flacc., 30. 47 See Smallwood, Legatio, 18, on Philo’s passing over the incident “as if aware that it made a wrong psychological approach to the situation”; similarly Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 238.

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The seeming difficulties posed by both Josephus’ elimination and Philo’s marginalization of Agrippa’s important role in Alexandria are easily explained. Josephus’ decision to minimize the significance of the Alexandrian crisis, concentrate on Rome as a Diaspora center, and specifically ignore Agrippa’s intervention in Alexandria scarcely needs lengthy explanation. It is evident that for Josephus, a resident of Rome intimate with the Flavians, who, indeed, were his patrons48 in the years following the collapse of the northern campaign of the Jewish War, the affairs of the city of Rome were of greater importance than those of Alexandria, notwithstanding Alexandria’s pre-eminence as a Jewish center in the Roman world.49 In this context, the superficial and brief treatment of the Alexandrian crisis by the Jewish historian, and the omission of any reference to Agrippa’s role in the crisis are readily explained. It, moreover, stands to reason that precisely because ­Josephus eulogized Agrippa in his lengthy assessment of the Jewish king, he would have been disinclined to discuss Agrippa’s Alexandrian intervention as a cause of the pogrom that could have compromised the historian’s amenable portrayal of Agrippa.50 The picture of Agrippa as a troublemaker in Alexandria would undoubtedly have diluted ­Josephus’ overall positive depiction of Agrippa. Further, there is little doubt that if Agrippa II, Josephus’ benefactor at Rome,51 was still living at the time that Josephus wrote about the Alexandrian crisis in the Jewish ­Antiquities, such a compromising portrait of Agrippa as a fomenter of violence in a major city of the Roman Empire would not have appealed to the Jewish monarch. Even if Agrippa II was no longer alive when Josephus 48 The evidence is Jos., Vita, 361–66, and CAp., 1.50; though see the caution of Tessa Rajak, Josephus (London: Duckworth, 1983), 164. 49 On the importance of the city of Rome to Josephus, see H. St John Thackeray, Josephus: The Man and the Historian (New York: Jewish Institute of Religion Press, 1929), 68. 50 Josephus’ account of Agrippa’s earlier years, of course, contains material less than flattering to Agrippa. The fact, however, remains that he never censures Agrippa and utilizes every avenue at his disposal to excuse Agrippa’s less attractive traits. See Alla Kushnir-Stein, “Agrippa I and Josephus,” Scripta Classica Israelica 22 (2000): 153–61. 51 See Jos., Vita, 362–66; Thackeray, Josephus, 23; Roland J. H. Shutt, Studies in Josephus (London: SPCK, 1961), 22–23; Rajak, Josephus, 164.

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described the Alexandrian civil strife, respect for his former patron likely impelled Josephus to avoid discussion of Agrippa’s questionable role in Alexandrian internal affairs at the time of his visit of 38 CE. Philo’s underestimation of Agrippa’s intervention in the affairs of Alexandria, as a chance occurrence leading to the outbreak of hostilities between Alexandrians and Jews, can be equally easily accounted for. Overestimation of Agrippa’s role would, quite simply, have jarred with the chief thesis that Philo was attempting to propagate, namely that all the trouble in Alexandria emanated from the enemies of the Jews—the prefect Flaccus, the Greek leaders of ­Alexandria Isidorus, Lampon and Dionysius, the Alexandrian mob and, to a more limited extent, the emperor Gaius.52 Casting Agrippa as an agitator would undoubtedly have weakened the strength of Philo’s thesis laying the blame for the pogrom entirely on the enemies of the Jews. Moreover, in the Legatio, Agrippa is depicted as a positive force working responsibly for the Jewish cause. Depiction of Agrippa as a provocative and negative force would most certainly have undermined this estimate of Agrippa. Hence, there developed the need on Philo’s part in the In Flaccum to minimize the significance of the incident and dispose of Agrippa’s presence as expeditiously as possible.53 Given my conclusion that Agrippa’s visit to Alexandria was more important than Philo conveyed and was far from circumstantial, I am obliged to offer an alternative solution to Philo’s assessment of the reasons for Agrippa’s presence in and purpose in Egypt. 52 On the didactic nature of both the In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium, see Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria, 40; Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 51, 227; van der Horst, “The First Pogrom: Alexandria 38 CE,” 469, 472–73; van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 1–2, 14. This leads Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 237, to what seems to me to be a somewhat extreme conclusion that Philo concocted the idea that Gaius influenced Agrippa to travel to his kingdom via Alexandria. What I do believe is that while Gaius’ friendly advice was concocted, this cannot be said of the compulsive character of this advice also attributed to Caligula. My reason for believing this is that the element of compulsion manifested by Gaius occurs in a later incidental context where the didactic element is absent. 53 This defensive attitude on Philo’s part accounts for the statement (In Flacc., 28) that Agrippa, having visited Alexandria before, was not impelled to come to the city to sightsee. Thus van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 119.

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Two answers are provided. First, we could invoke Agrippa’s personal relationship with the customs officer (the alabarch) A ­ lexander, the brother of Philo, who could be seen to have played a pivotal role in Agrippa’s visiting Alexandria. Thus, we could maintain that Agrippa, who had incurred a heavy debt to Alexander at the time of his earlier visit to Alexandria,54 went to Alexandria to discharge his debt in the wake of his changed personal economic circumstances following the emperor’s granting him a kingdom.55 We could also argue that Agrippa could have traveled to Alexandria to arrange the imminent marriage between his daughter Berenice and the alabarch’s son Marcus.56 It could be conjectured within the context of these two possible reasons for Agrippa’s visit, on the basis of Philo’s reference to a host expecting Agrippa,57 that this host was the alabarch himself.58 While it is likely that an incidental purpose of Agrippa’s visit was to pay off his debt59 or arrange a marriage, these factors alone cannot explain the pomp and circumstance of Agrippa’s procession through the city accompanied by the display of praetorian powers. To put it bluntly, praetorian prestige and glory, including a sella curulis, toga praetexta with latus clavus, flashy bodyguard and procession of six lictors in order to discharge a debt or arrange a marriage, smacks of overkill. Having eliminated the possibility that personal ties with the alabarch and his family accounted for Agrippa’s presence in Alexandria, the possibility presents itself that Agrippa came to Alexandria with a political purpose in mind. Accordingly, we could follow Barrett and argue that Caligula sent Agrippa to Alexandria to investigate

54 Jos., AJ 18.159. 55 Thus van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 121. 56 Jos., AJ 19.276–77 See Schwartz, Agrippa I, 75; van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 121. 57 Philo, In Flacc., 27. 58 See Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria, 176, n. 22; van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus who also mentions the alternative view that Philo himself was the host. 59 Smallwood, Legatio, 17, argues that Agrippa’s debt would have actually been a factor that would have dissuaded Agrippa from traveling to his kingdom via Alexandria. Against this, I would argue that the necessity of cementing the marriage deal with the alabarch would have obliged Agrippa to expedite the debt settlement.

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Flaccus’ misdemeanors.60 The validity of this thesis is difficult to sustain, given that an imperial freedman in Egypt would have better served the emperor in such an operation.61 An alternative explanation for Agrippa’s visit suggested recently by Gambetti62 derives from the fact that Flaccus’ tenure as prefect of Egypt was about to lapse and that his appointment required renewal. The agent sent by the emperor to reconfirm Flaccus in his position, she argues, was Agrippa. Moreover, the official nature of the mission with which Agrippa was associated necessitated a conferment of office. Agrippa, after all, could not go on an imperial mission of such importance as a private individual. Accordingly, it was important for Gaius to confer upon Agrippa some official status and he chose to grant him praetorian office. The grand procession stemmed from Agrippa’s exalted official praetorian position.63 This thesis is problematic on four counts. In the first place, neither Philo nor, indeed, any other source, presents the view that Agrippa came to Alexandria as imperial agent to renew or reconfirm Flaccus in his position as prefect of Egypt. Secondly, had Agrippa been sent as an envoy of Gaius to reinstall Flaccus, how could the governor have accepted the Alexandrian patent lack of respect for Agrippa m ­ anifested 64 in the theatre? Thirdly, if Gambetti’s thesis is accepted, the question is then posed: why was Flaccus later arrested?65 Finally, given that Flaccus was out of favor with Gaius, the latter would likely not have wanted to renew Flaccus’ position as prefect of Egypt. The reasons for this are delineated unambiguously by Philo.66 Flaccus had backed the wrong horse to succeed Tiberius, namely Tiberius Gemellus, Tiberius’ 60 Barrett, Caligula, 80. 61 See Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I,” 369, n. 7. 62 Gambetti, The Alexandrian Riots, 152–54. 63 As Gambetti notes (The Alexandrian Riots, 152), Agrippa appears to have been the first foreigner to have had this honor bestowed upon his person. Dio Cassius 60.8.2, notes that Claudius upgraded Agrippa’s rank with the bestowal of consular powers; thus Pelletier, In Flaccum, 72, n. 2. 64 See Torrey Seeland, review of The Alexandrian Riots of 38 CE, by Sandra Gambetti. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 12 (2010): 63. 65 Seeland, ibid. 66 Philo, In Flacc., 8–15; cf. Leg., 32–61.

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grandson and Gaius’ cousin, who had been eliminated by Gaius in 38 CE. He had, moreover, been friendly with Q. Naevius Cordus Sutorius Macro, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard who had also been murdered by Gaius in 38 CE. Finally, while Tiberius had been emperor, Flaccus had been involved in the prosecution of Gaius’ mother Agrippina. Accordingly, given Flaccus’ identification with Gaius’ enemies, the last thing that Gaius would have wanted to do was to reconfirm Flaccus in office, particularly by an ostentatious imperial display. The threat from Gaius to Flaccus was, moreover, the main factor driving the latter into an alliance with his old enemies, the Greek magnates of Alexandria. Since neither motivation on Agrippa’s part to repay an old debt to the alabarch nor a wish to arrange a marriage of his daughter to the alabarch’s son, nor Gaius’ utilization of Agrippa in an official capacity either to investigate Flaccus’ problematic actions or to effect Flaccus’ reappointment as prefect of Egypt adequately explain Agrippa’s presence in Egypt as the emperor’s envoy, a third reason, I submit, has to be entertained. Agrippa’s deliberate purpose in traveling to Alexandria was to meet with the Jewish community of the city and to help it in its struggle against the Alexandrians, doing so, moreover, as official representative of the emperor.67 This view presupposes that Agrippa, and possibly Gaius, had been contacted by the Jewish community prior to Agrippa’s departure from Rome.68 67 A view originally suggested by Ulrich Wilcken, “Alexandrinische Gesandschaft vor Kaiser Claudius,” Hermes 30.4 (1895): 491. John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes towards Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 47, suggests this possibility without working out the argument in detail. This theory does not appeal to van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 117, on the grounds that no direct evidence sustains this viewpoint. In my view, in the absence of direct evidence, arguments based upon plausibility remain a justified option. 68 See Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 241. Kushnir-Stein, ibid, 221, quite correctly dismisses attempts to deny that Agrippa’s arrival was non-accidental; e.g., the view of Balsdon, The Emperor Gaius, 131, that Agrippa changed his plan, at first being unobtrusive and then adopting a more pro-active stance; similarly Bell, Juden und Griechen, 18; Box, Philonis Alexandrinum in Flacco, xl–xli; Francis H. Colson, Philo In Flaccum (London, Cambridge, MA: Heinemann, Harvard University Press, 1954), 318–19, n. a.; William O. E. Oesterley, A History of Israel 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 406; M. Grant, The Jews in the Roman World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 123; Smallwood, Jews under Roman

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Several factors appear to favor such an interpretation. In the first place, as Tacitus (Ann. 2.59) asserts unequivocally, any official of the highest rank entering the economically important province of Egypt could do so only with the express approval of the emperor. This suggests that any reasons for doing so had to be quite important. A mere hint concerning the advisability of the non-Roman Agrippa’s taking the southern route to his kingdom seems a somewhat paltry reason for Agrippa’s trip to Alexandria. Secondly, we have Flaccus’ own words that he was in fear of Caligula, who had sent (i.e., not merely recommended) Agrippa to Alexandria, whence his need to manifest an appearance of friendship to Agrippa.69 Finally, confirming the likelihood that Agrippa had gone on an imperial mission to Alexandria is the fact that in the In Flaccum 32 Caligula is said to have exerted pressure upon Agrippa to do so.70 Thus, Philo contradicts his earlier view that a mere suggestion induced Agrippa to enter Alexandria. Against acceptance of such a thesis, we might be tempted to invoke Gaius’ attempt to impose the imperial cult upon the Jews of Judaea by erecting his statue in the temple at Jerusalem—a move that indicates that Gaius would have been the least favorable person to the Jews of Alexandria.71 But Gaius, at the time that Agrippa journeyed to Alexandria,

Rule, 238; Barrett, Caligula, 186. In contrast, Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 221, argues convincingly that Agrippa deliberately went to Alexandria to help the Jewish community and that Philo concocted Gaius’ advice to take the southern route in order to absolve Agrippa of making trouble. She follows the originator of this view, Wilcken, “Alexandrinische Gesandschaft vor Kaiser Claudius,” 491–92. While I accept her view that Agrippa deliberately intended to journey to Alexandria to intervene in the Judaeo-Alexandrian conflict, I believe, against her, that Gaius’ role in encouraging Agrippa to go is plausible for three reasons. First, Gaius had endowed Agrippa with praetorian powers. This indicates the emperor’s positive role in Agrippa’s plans. Secondly, the emperor’s close friendship with Agrippa reinforces this likelihood. Finally, Gaius’ hostility to Flaccus for his alliance with Gaius’ enemies Gemellus and Macro renders his support of Agrippa likely. 69 Philo, In Flacc., 31. 70 Philo, In Flacc., 32. 71 Thus Colin Wells, The Roman Empire, 2nd ed. (London, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 109, where Gaius’ “conviction in his own divinity . . . led to anti-Jewish outbreaks in Alexandria.”

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had not embarked upon such a policy72 and was, of course, on the most cordial of terms with Agrippa, described by Philo in the In Flaccum as a friend of Caesar (φίλος τοῦ καίσαρος).73 Moreover, the real enemies of Rome in Alexandria, as the emperor was likely only too aware of, were the Alexandrian opponents of Roman rule who were attacking the Jews in order to ultimately attack Rome. Finally, Philo in the Legatio reveals the distinct absence of intense anti-Jewish feeling on the part of Gaius at the time of Philo’s representation to Caligula following the pogrom.74 Support of Agrippa and the Jews of Alexandria by the emperor at this time is therefore plausible. Agrippa’s support for the Alexandrian Jews, and the fact that he did so as an official representative of the Roman emperor, could easily explain the intense hostility to the king that broke out and led to the procession of the mock king. At the same time, deeper, more specific, reasons appear to have determined the hostility of the Alexandrian mob towards Agrippa. In the first place, Philo’s testimony suggests that the purpose of the mock king procession was to underline the fact that the honor shown by the Alexandrian Jews to an alien king betokened dual loyalty on their part.75 This accusation is implicit in the Aramaic or possibly Syriac appellation accorded Carabas as Marin (my lord), a word that, according to Philo, substantiated the fact that Agrippa was a Syrian by birth and ruled a section of Syria.76 The implication was that Agrippa and his Jewish followers in Alexandria were aliens. A similar conclusion can be derived from the dismissal by the Alexandrians of the validity of Agrippa’s choice to travel to ­Alexandria via the Alexandrian route to his 72 Mommsen, The Provinces of the Roman Empire, 2, 192, n. 1, pertinently writes, “The special hatred of Gaius against the Jews was not the cause, but the consequence of the Alexandrian Jew hunt.” 73 Thus Philo, In Flacc., 40. Close relations between prominent Jews and the emperors were, by no means, untypical. See Adrian N. Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome (Cambridge: University Press, 1967), 96. 74 See especially Leg., 367, where the Gaius regards the Jews as unfortunate rather than wicked in believing that Gaius does not have the nature of a god (οὐ πονηροὶ μᾶλλον ἤ δυστυχεῖς εἶναι μοι δοκοῦσιν ἂνθρωποι καὶ ἀνόητοι μὴ πιστεύοντες ὅτι θεοῦ κεκλήρωμαι φύσιν). 75 See Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 115; Feldman, History and Hate, 23; van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 131. 76 Philo, In Flacc., 39.

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kingdom because of its alleged superiority to the northern route with the comment that “a fair wind could have carried him [i.e., Agrippa] to his own.”77 The expression “to his own” strongly suggests that Agrippa’s “own” was most certainly not Egypt and that he was, indeed, perceived as an alien in Alexandria and Egypt as a whole.78 The mob’s hostility towards Agrippa has, however, a further and deeper dimension.79 Quite simply, the Alexandrian community was enraged that the Jews had a king while it was denied such a luxury.80 Philo is explicit on this point. He writes that the Alexandrian mob “was resentful of the fact that the Jews had made a king just as if each of them had thereby been deprived of an ancestral throne.”81 An echo of the jealousy of the Alexandrians of Agrippa is further heard in their comment to Flaccus, within the context of their attempt to win the prefect to their side, to the effect that Agrippa, by his presence in ­Alexandria, eclipsed the prestige of the Roman prefect of Egypt.82 The Alexandrians were attempting to infuse Flaccus with resentment about the presence in Alexandria of a Jewish king.83 We are, therefore, faced with the possibility that a not insignificant factor in the hostility between the Jews and Greeks of Alexandria was their antithetical claims of entitlement to a monarch.84 77 Philo, In Flacc., 31: εἰς τὴν οἰκείαν. 78 Sandmel, Philo of Alexandria, 176, n. 23 argues that the employment of the Aramaic term Marin simply reflects the fact that Aramaic was the principal tongue of the Jews at that time. Sandmel thus discounts the fact that the use of this word indicated that Agrippa’s kingdom was in Syria and that Agrippa’s lineage on his father’s side was Syrian. 79 Cf. Kasher, The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, 21, who views the Carabas incident as simply a “mocking comedy at Agrippa’s expense.” 80 See Ralph Marcus, “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman World,” in Essays in Anti-Semitism, ed. Koppul S. Pinson (New York: Horney Press, 1946), 78, who wrote that “it was the proud behaviour and royal ceremonial of Agrippa which was the real reason for the anti-Jewish riots that resulted in the loss of Jewish lives and property.” 81 Philo, In Flacc., 29. Rephrased by van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus, 33: “The scum of the world had the affront to hail the king of their own, while the others had not even a modicum of self rule. This was the bloody limit.” 82 Philo, In Flacc., 31. 83 See Kushnir-Stein, “On the Visit,” 229. 84 Martin Charlesworth, Five Men: Character Sketches from the Roman Empire. Martin Classical Lectures 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 5, oddly

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The strength of the animus that the Alexandrian opponents of the Jews had for the whole Herodian dynasty and specifically for an individual named Agrippa (probably Agrippa I rather than Agrippa II)85 is well illustrated by two passages in the historical fiction, the Acta Isidori.86 This text dated circa 41 CE is an account of an alleged trial of the anti-Jewish leaders, Isidorus and Lampon, before the emperor Claudius. In the first passage,87 Isidorus denigrates Agrippa on the grounds that he is “a three obol Jew” (Ἰουδαίου τριωβολείου).88 Whether we are dealing here with some obscene reference to Agrippa89 or to a more precise allusion to the monarch’s earlier years as a debtor, Isidorus is attempting to establish Agrippa’s worthlessness and undermine his pretensions to genuine kingship. A second attempt to denigrate Jewish kingship in the Acta Isidori,90 specifically that of the house of Herod and probably the current Herodian dynast Agrippa I, centers upon an insulting reference to Claudius as a response to Claudius’ insult to Isidorus as the son of a female musician; Claudius is referred to as the cast-off son of the Jewess Salome (σὺ δὲ ἐκ Σαλώμης τῆς Ἰουδαίας υίος ἀπόβλητος). Whoever this Salome is (probably Herod the Great’s sister),91

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85

86

87 88 89 90 91

injects Messianic overtones into Agrippa’s stance at Alexandria by maintaining that Agrippa was of Davidic descent. The fact that his grandmother, the Hasmonean Mariamne, derived from priestly stock seems to have had escaped him. The old view that the Agrippa mentioned in the Acta Isidori is Agrippa II (e.g., Musurillo, The acts of the Pagan Martyrs, 124, and Milne, History of Egypt under Roman Rule, 29) has been abandoned; thus Schäfer, Judeophobia, 154; Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, 175–86. On the historically fictitious character of the Acta Isidori, see Tcherikover, CPJ 2, 56; followed by Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 250; Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, 173–74; Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism, 49; Sherwin-White, Racial Prejudice in Imperial Rome, 96. CPJ 2, 156b, col. 1, 18. In modern terminology, we might translate this as a “three penny Jew.” Specifically to a prostitute’s fee. CPJ 2, 156d, col. 3, 11–12. Thus Musurillo, Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, 128–30. Herod’s sister, of course, would have been too old to have been Claudius’ mother. But, as Musurillo, ibid., 130, points out, we are here dealing with a “vulgar jibe that circulated about the streets and clubs of Alexandria about the birth of the crazy Claudius and in such assertions we need hardly look for historical exactitude.”

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the fact remains that Isidorus’ response to Claudius’ insult impugned not merely Claudius’ descent but Agrippa’s as well. The message of the text is to question the validity of the Herodian monarchy in general, and that of Agrippa I as its current representative in particular. Two questions remain. Firstly, what was the composition of the mob that took exception to the presence of a Jewish king in its midst and attacked Agrippa by staging the Carabas farce? Secondly, was the hostile Alexandrian reception accorded Agrippa simply ignited by the king’s appearance in 38 CE or did Agrippa’s appearance reignite complex issues that had long plagued the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors? In answer to the first question, I note initially that generally scholars have argued that the mob opposed to the Jews was composed of ­Alexandrian Greeks,92 and the view that it might have been, to some extent, composed of non-Greeks (i.e., Egyptians) is discounted. If this view were accepted, then we should have to conclude that the monarchy-deprived mob was the Ptolemaic one, which had been obliterated by the Romans less than seven decades earlier. However, while I accept that disgruntled Alexandrian Greeks, who were grieving their loss of independence with the Roman conquest of Egypt, were voicing their displeasure at the presence in Alexandria of the Jewish king while their own dynasty was extinct, I submit that a case can be presented that the Alexandrians

92 Thus Balsdon, Emperor Gaius, 126, n. 1, on Greek anger: “With the disappearance of the kingdom of Egypt had disappeared the pomp of the Egyptian court and the glory of Alexandria as the residence of that court.” Fuchs, Die Juden Aegyptens, 27: “Der Hass zwischen den Juden und Griechen Alexandreias zieht sich wie ein chronishe Krankheit.” The same sentiment appears in Milne, History of Egypt, 29; Milne, “Egyptian Nationalism,” 231; Oesterley, History of Israel 2, 405–406; Barrett, Caligula, 186; Bell, “Anti-Semitism in Alexandria,” 5; Goodenough, The Politics of Philo Judaeus, 15; Smallwood, Jews under Roman Rule, 238; Stewart H. Perowne, The Later Herods: the Political Background of the New Testament (London and Southampton: Hodder and Stroughten, 1958), 68; John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000), 137. Charlesworth, Five Men, 12, on “Greek intellectuals, infuriated by the landing of a Jewish force where once the Ptolemies had ruled in splendour, arranged to give him a mocking welcome”; van der Horst, “The First Pogrom: Alexandria 38 CE,” 483.

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who attacked Agrippa were not exclusively Greeks but were composed of Egyptians as well. Three considerations propel me in this direction.93 In the first place, I emphasize that ever since the late third century BCE—more specifically after the enrolment of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army for the battle of Raphia in 217 BCE—the Ptolemaic realm had been wracked by convulsions, strikes, demonstrations, violence and revolts from native Egyptians, angered at being discounted and economically exploited by the Graeco-Macedonian ruling class.94 As a consequence of this turbulence, native Egyptians managed to exert pressure upon the European establishment to gain admission to the Graeco-Macedonian ranks and play an increasingly important role in Ptolemaic affairs. Examples of such individuals breaking into the ranks of the elite include the arch-antisemites, Apion95 or Helicon,96 an individual who represented the Alexandrians against the Jews before Caligula, who, Philo asserts,97 was seemingly an Egyptian who had been

93 Support for this argument might appear to derive from the Third Book of Maccabees if we follow Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 125–30, who, reviving a view held by Heinrich Ewald, History of Israel, trans. R. Martineau (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1869), 468–73, Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte de Jüden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart 3 (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1888), 613, and Hugo Willrich, “Der historische Kern des 3 Makkabaeerbuches,” Hermes 39 (1904): 256, arguing that this work was created during the reign of Caligula and reflects the hostile relationship between Caligula and the Jews, maintains that sections 215 to 219, which depict the Greek Alexandrians positively during a persecution of the Jews, were composed to emphasize the duplicity of the native Egyptians at the time of the pogrom. This view, however, has been effectively repudiated by Cyril W. Emmet, in Robert H. Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 155–73; John M. G. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1996), 448; Gruen, Heritage of Hellenism, 225; Sara R. Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in its Cultural Context (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 132–134. Hence I am obliged to ignore 3 Maccabees as evidence to support the thesis that follows. 94 See Mikail I. Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 709–10; Samuel K. Eddy, The King is Dead: Studies in the Near Eastern Resistance to Hellenism (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1961), 297. 95 Joseph., CAp., 2.69. 96 Philo, Leg., 166, 205. 97 Philo, Leg., 166.

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poorly educated, presumably in Greek culture.98 This increasing importance of the native Egyptian factor in Egyptian society, which undoubtedly continued unabated after Egypt was incorporated into the Roman Empire, whence the phenomenon of the likes of Apion and Helicon, certainly suggests the probability that the mob that attacked Agrippa and the Alexandrian Jews included native Egyptians encouraged by their own elite consisting of Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians. The second reason for believing that the Alexandrian opponents of the Jews contained a significant Egyptian element is the fact that Philo’s hostility towards Alexandrians throughout the Philonic Corpus,99 but for our purpose specifically in the In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium,100 seems predominantly focused upon the Egyptian element,   98 On Apion as an Egyptian posing as a Greek, see Jos., CAp., 2.28–29. A pagan response to such a type of accusation against the Jews is encountered in Acta Isidori (CPJ 2, No. 156c): “They are not of the same nature as the Alexandrians, but live rather after the fashion of the Egyptians. Are they not on the level of those who pay the poll tax.” =οὒκ εἰσιν Ἀλεξανδρεῦσιν ὁμοιοπαθεῖς, τρόπῳ δὲ Αἰγυπτίων ὁμοῖοι. Οὒκ εἰσι ἲσοι τοῖς φόρον τελοῦσι;   99 See Alan Mendelson, Philo’s Jewish Identity. Brown Judaic Studies 161 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 116–17. 100 Thus in the In Flaccum, 29, the Egyptians are described quite clearly as the arch-enemies of the Jews, hating, defaming, and harming them—a jealous and envious folk. In Legatio, 162–3, Philo contemptuously castigates the Alexandrian mob— flatterers and imposters (162)—for its cheapening the title god by permitting it to be shared with indigenous ibises, venomous snakes, and other ferocious beasts; See Schäfer, op.cit. 143. A further attack on the Egyptians—in this case upon those clustering around Caligula, led by Helicon the Egyptian (In Flacc., 53)—also occurs in Legatio, 166, where the Egyptians are described as an evil seed in whose souls both the venom and temper of the native crocodile and asp are reproduced. Also in Legatio, 139, Philo attacks the Egyptians for deifying dogs, wolves, lions, crocodiles, and many other animals of land, sea, and air and for establishing altars and temples, shrines, and sacred precincts to these throughout Egypt. Finally, the arch antisemite Helicon, taught by the noisiest element in the city of the Alexandrians (Leg., 170), is described in the explicit Egyptian terms as the scorpion in the form of a slave who vented his venom upon the Jews (Leg., 205). Comments in ancient sources upon Egyptian animal worship are widespread. Jos., CAp. 1. 249–50; Tac., Hist. 5.4.3; Strabo, 16.2.35–36; Wisdom 11.15; 12.24–27; 15.18–161; Aristeas, 138; Syb. Or.5. 275–80; Philo, De Decalog., 76–79; De Vit. Contempl., 8–10. See on this topic, Klaas A. D. Smelik and Emily A. Hemelrijk, “Who Knows what Monsters Demented Egypt Worship? Opinions on Egyptian Animal Worship in Antiquity as

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particularly for its worship of animals, which Philo contended had negatively affected the Egyptian character.101 Finally, Philo’s view that Alexandrian opposition to the Jews included a strong native Egyptian contingent is confirmed by important testimony from Josephus’ Contra Apionem,102 where the historian explicitly states that the real promoters of sedition were Alexandrians under Apion, a Hellenized Egyptian,103 who headed the Alexandrian embassy that appeared before Caligula. Equally importantly, Josephus ­emphasizes that the Greeks and Macedonians of Alexandria became serious threats only when they were joined by the Egyptians. Further, Josephus stresses the virtues of the Greeks and Macedonians, the former possessing Part of the Ancient Conception of Egypt,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt (Berlin, New York: Walter der Gryter, 1984), 2.17.4, 1887–1918. 101 Whether or not Philo’s references to Egyptians are to be taken at face value is admittedly a matter of dispute. Thus the term “Egyptian” has been assumed as a “basic theological dualism” and the references to Egyptians perceived as really references to Greeks, according to Peder Borgen, “Philo and the Jews of Alexandria,” in Ethnicity in Hellenistic Egypt, ed. Per Bilde, Troelo Engsberg-Pederson and Lise Hannestad, Jan Zahle (Aarhus: University Press, 1992), 128, following Smallwood, Legatio, 225. Jones, The Herods of Judaea, 192, argues that the mob was constituted of Greeks alone. Smallwood, Legatio, 225, believes that Philo’s hostility is basically focused upon Greeks rather than Egyptians; similarly Sarah Pearce, “Belonging and not Belonging: Local Perspectives in Philo of Alexandria,” in Sian Jones and Sarah Pearce, Jewish Local Patriotism and self-Identification in the Graeco-Roman Period (Sheffield: University Press, 1998), 92. Those who believe that native Egyptians were actually part of the mob include Anne Fitzpatrick-McKinley, ­ “Synagogue Communities in the Graeco-Roman Cities,” in Jews in the ­Graeco-Roman Cities, ed. John R. Bartlett (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), 85–86, concluding that the distinction between Greeks and Egyptians was blurred; Mendelson, Philo’s Jewish Identity, 121, concluding that native Egyptians played an important role in the anti-Jewish riots; similarly Angelo Segré, “Anti-Semitism in Hellenistic Alexandria,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946): 133; Schäfer, Judeophobia, 143; Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev, “New Perspectives on the Jewish-Greek Hostilities in Alexandria during the Reign of the Emperor Caligula,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 21.2 (2004): 230, argues that Philo fabricated the role of the masses since he wanted to propagate the idea that the upper class Greeks and Macedonians were able to cooperate with the Jews. For biblical and Roman influence upon Philo’s anti-Egyptianism, see Pearce, “Belonging and not Belonging,” 83–86. 102 Jos., CAp. 2.68–70. 103 See Schäfer, Judeophobia, 160. See also Jos.,CAp. 1. 225; 2.128, echoing Philo’s negativity towards the religion of the native Egyptians.

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character, the latter strength, and the fact that the Alexandrians attacked the Jews only once they had been affected by the habits of the Egyptians. The upshot of all this information is that, according to Josephus, Apion and his associates were more Egyptian than Greek or Macedonian. The probability that opponents of the Jews included native Egyptians suggests that the anger expressed by the mob attacking Agrippa on the grounds that the Jews possessed a king while it was denied its own monarch might well have constituted native Egyptian bitterness at the eclipse of ancient Egyptian monarchs as well as of wistful Greek memory of former Ptolemaic kings. This likelihood is confirmed by evidence illustrating that native Egyptians had long sought solace for the eclipse of their ancient monarchy at the hands of Persians and Graeco-Macedonians by invoking the memory of ancient rulers, both mythical and historical, whose deeds were depicted as equaling and, indeed, surpassing those of their Persian and Graeco-Macedonian monarchic oppressors, including Alexander the Great. Considered alongside such figures were Osiris, Rameses, and Sesostris.104 104 On the Sesostris legend, see Martin Braun, History and Romance in Graeco-Oriental Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1938), 13–18; Eddy, The King is Dead, 280–88; Alan B. Lloyd, “Nationalistic Propaganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Historia 31.1 (1982): 37–40. For an early form of the Sesostris legend dating back to the fifth century BC where it assumes an anti-Persian guise, see Herod. 2.102.10. The Hellenistic reproduction is found in Diod. 1.53–58. The Ramses legend is encountered in Diod. 1.46.8–47.6 while that of Osiris is found in Diod. 1.17; 20.6. With the figure of Nectanebo, the last native Pharaoh, nostalgic memory took a more proactive turn by depicting that monarch as an avenger who would drive the European invader from Egypt. On this, see Peter M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 680–84; Lloyd, “Nationalistic Propaganda,” 46–50. Judging by Demotic, as opposed to Greek, documentation such theorizing on ancient idealized monarchical figures appears to have actually bred concrete native or semi-native Egyptian rebel rulers during the turbulence in the era following the battle of Raphia—individuals with the Egyptian or semi-Egyptian nomenclature of Harmachis, Anchmasis and Dionysius-Peta-Serapis. See Eddy, The King is Dead, 297–300. On Dionysius-Peta-Serapis, see Edwin.R. Bevan, History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (London: Methuen, 1927), 290–93; Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, 2, 709–10. On the native Egyptian rulers, see Pieter Pestman, “Harmachis et Anchmasis, deux rois indigenes du temps de Ptolémées,” Chronique d’Egypte 40 (1965): 157–70; Smelnik and Hemelrij, “Opinions on Egyptian Animal Worship in Antiquity,” 1888.

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It is certainly not unreasonable to conjecture that because the Alexandrian native Egyptian element glorified the contributions of past dynasts such as Sesostris and Rameses, it also developed disdain for the contemporary Herodian monarchs whose concrete existence in the first century CE underlined the reality of the extinction of the ancient pharaohs. In fact, a passage in Josephus’ Contra Apionem105 reveals that this is not merely a matter of speculation. Here Josephus responds to Apion’s verbal onslaught upon the Jews as mere slaves of other regimes, implicitly incapable of maintaining their own existing monarchical government.106 This text was written over a generation or so after the pogrom. However, it presents Josephus’ account and his rebuttal of the views of Apion, who, of course, had lived at the time of the pogrom and participated in the embassy attacking Jews, which appeared before Gaius together with Philo’s embassy. Basic to Apion’s argument is his recourse to the ancient Sesostris legends to underline the antiquity of Egyptian monarchy. In response to Apion’s depiction of the Jews as slaves, in contrast to the Egyptians who had been free and ruled by their Sesostris, Josephus first asserts that Apion is basing his claim to legitimate Egyptian monarchy on the tradition about Sesostris, which, Josephus insists, is not historical but legendary in origin—a mere fable. Josephus then proceeds to accuse Apion of not acknowledging that the halcyon days of native Egyptian monarchs were long past. On the contrary, the historian asserts that, in the recent historical past, Egyptians had long been slaves of the Persians and Macedonians. Josephus then attempts to further deflate Apion’s argument by emphasizing how the Jews, in contrast to the Egyptians, maintained a continuous tradition of monarchy. They claim David and Solomon and, more recently, native rulers—a clear reference to the Hasmonean dynasts—were friends of the Romans at the very time that the Eastern (i.e., Hellenistic) monarchies crumbled before Rome. Of course, Josephus’ sketch of the kings of the Jews to prop up his assertion of Jewish monarchical identity vis-à-vis a lack of such an identity among the Egyptians is propaganda and scarcely historically accurate for numerous reasons. In the first place, a strong case could be made that David and Solomon, as well as Sesostris, had become 105 Jos., CAp. 2. 132–34. 106 See Braun, History and Romance, 14.

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as much the stuff of legend as of history. Further, Josephus omits the crucial fact that the ancient Jewish monarchies had been eliminated by Assyria and Babylon and that the more recent Hasmonean rulers were scarcely independent monarchs but rather quasi-independent rulers appointed by Seleucid kings107 who had, indeed, gained their independence from the Seleucids as clients of Rome.108 Notwithstanding these serious flaws in Josephus’ line of argumentation, Josephus’ text provides vivid testimony 107 See Gruen, Heritage and Hellenism, 3–25. 108 The view that the Jews were clients of Rome is, of course, based upon the account of the treaty between Judas Maccabaeus and Rome in 161 BCE found in I Macc.8, followed by Jos., AJ 12.414–19; cf. the brief reference in Jos., BJ 1.38. The importance of the relationship with Rome is underlined in a passage of Justin 36.3.9 stating that the Jews “a Demetrio cum descivissent, amicitia Romanorum petita, primi omnium ex Orientalibus libertatem acceperunt, facile tunc Romanis de alieno largientibus” (“when they rebelled against Demetrius I, sought the friendship of the Romans and were the very first peoples of the East to accept their independence from Rome who found it easy to be lavish with other people’s property”); John C. Yardley, trans., Justin. Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994). Justin contradicts this evidence in 36.1. 10, where the Jews gain independence from the Seleucids by force of arms (“armis se in libertatem vindicaverant”). The divergent viewpoints probably reflects Trogus’ use of different source material in the two passages. References to renewals of the treaty under Judas’ successors, Jonathan, Simon and John Hyrcanus I encountered in 1 Macc. 12.1–4; 1. Macc. 14.24; 15. 15–24; Jos., AJ 13.227; 13.278. Despite initial scholarly skepticism concerning the historicity of the treaty of 161 BCE, recent scholarship has tended to accept its authenticity. For the history of scholarship on this issue, see Schürer, History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ I, 171–2, n. 33; also Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’empire romaine (Paris: Librerie Paul Geuthner, 1914), 130–32. For the view that the treaty with Rome turned the Maccabaean state into a client kingdom, utilized as a weapon against Syria, see Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule, 4–6; Thérèse Liebmann-Frankfort, “Rom e le conflit judéosyrien 164–161 avant notre ère,” Antiquité Classique 38 (1967): 114–120; John J. Briscoe, “Eastern policy and Senatorial Politics,” Historia 18 (1969): 53; Edouard Will, “Rom et les Seleucids,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, 1.1 (1972), 625–26; Ernst Badian, Foreign Clientelae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 108, n.2; Ernst Badian, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 78. Denial of the significance of the treaty and its implications for Judaea as a client of Rome, encountered in Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 44, on the grounds that there were “no concrete implications” of the treaty. Against Gruen, we maintain that this fact should not exonerate Rome of utilizing its ally or client to foment intrigue indirectly against the Seleucids. A similar viewpoint to that maintained by Gruen is encountered in Adrian N. Sherwin-White, Roman Foreign Policy in the East (Norman, London: University of Oklahoma Press,

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regarding propaganda disseminated by both Jews and their native Egyptian opponents in their attempt to substantiate respective claims to monarchical authenticity. In the light of the aforementioned evidence, I conclude that the attack on Agrippa by the Alexandrian mob and its hostility towards a real Jewish king would appear to possess far greater significance than Philo would have us initially believe. We are, indeed, faced with an identity crisis affecting not two, but three segments of the Alexandrian population—Jews, Graeco-Macedonians, and native Egyptians—each asserting their own legitimacy, and belittling others within a monarchical context. Each argues that their claim to authentic monarchy has primacy over the claims of others. There remains the second question posed above. Was the hostile Alexandrian reception accorded Agrippa simply a response to the Jewish king’s appearance in Alexandria in 38 CE or did Agrippa’s arrival in Alexandria reignite ancient sources of discord between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors? While a clear cut answer to this question is probably unattainable, some evidence leads me to infer that Agrippa’s arrival reignited ancient antagonisms between the Jews and their opponents pertaining to what can only have been perceived by the Greek and native Egyptian population as the Alexandrian Jewish community’s dubious commitment to Egyptian political interests. Thus, the perception by the Greeks and native Egyptians of Alexandria that the Jews were long-time agents of the Jewish leadership in Judaea, and hence were guilty of maintaining divided political loyalties, certainly dates back to 102 BCE, when the supreme commander of the military forces of Cleopatra III, the Jew Ananias, dissuaded the Egyptian monarch from annexing the kingdom of Alexander Jannaeus on the grounds that hostile action against the Hasmonean monarch would provoke the hostility of the Jews of Egypt.109 This perception was intensified in 55 BCE, when the de facto ruler of Judaea, the Idumaean Antipater, successfully urged Jews in the Ptolemaic army who were Duckworth, 1984), 73, who emphasizes that the Jews gained their freedom from the Seleucids without the help of Rome. 109 Jos., AJ 13.353–55.

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guarding the frontiers of Egypt to allow Gabinius, the Roman proconsul of Syria, to enter Egypt.110 This event, moreover, must have fueled a suspicion that the Jews of Egypt, so closely tied to the Idumaean regime and its supporter Rome, constituted a fifth column. A similar negative perception of Jewish divided loyalty and adherence to Jewish and Roman, rather than Egyptian, interests by the non-Jewish Alexandrian community is likely to have greeted the moves of Jewish soldiers in the Ptolemaic army to allow Caesar entry into Egypt in 48 BCE.111 In all these cases, Alexandrian animosity towards the Jewish community of Egypt on account of its dubious nationalistic credentials is likely to have fueled hostility towards the Judaean Hasmonean and Herodean rulers who commanded the loyalties of the Jews of Egypt and particularly those of Alexandria and spawned attempts to delegitimize the Judean monarchy which, in turn, likely provoked similar counter accusations against Egyptian monarchy, either Ptolemaic or Pharaonic. Hence it would appear that the dispute over monarchic legitimacy between Apion and Josephus in the Contra Aponem112 is likely to have possessed a substantial prehistory, certainly stretching back to at least 102 BCE. That this conflict of identity between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, both Greeks and native Egyptians, was long-standing, originating in Ptolemaic times and extending to the period following Egypt’s incorporation into the Roman Empire and directed at earlier Jewish monarchs, Hasmonean and Herodian, is suggested by Philo’s verbatim rendering of the wording used by the Alexandrians to denote the distress they were feeling. Thus, within the context of Philo’s description of the distress of the Alexandrians for having to witness a Jewish king in their midst, we note the use of the imperfect ἢσχαλλον of the verb ἀσχαλάω (“to be in a state of distress”).113 The imperfect tense generally, though not always, suggests past action continuing into the present. Philo’s use of the imperfect of ἀσχαλάω, therefore, appears to allude to a sense of continuity of distress on the part of the Alexandrians, a distress that came to fruition with Agrippa’s entry as Jewish king into Alexandria. We could 110 Jos., AJ 14.99. 111 Jos., AJ 14.131–2. See Feldman, Jew and Gentile, 51. 112 Joseph., CAp. 2. 132–34. 113 Philo, In Flacc., 29.

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then conclude that the Alexandrians had been in a continuous state of unease not simply because one Jew, Agrippa, had been made a king while “each of them had been deprived of an ancestral throne.”114 Agrippa was, in the eyes of the Alexandrian non-Jewish population, perceived as merely the last example of a brood of Jewish monarchs whose concrete existence cast shame upon the Greeks and native Egyptians of Alexandria. What confirms our sense that this irritation was a long-standing and ongoing process, not solely provoked by Agrippa’s ostentatious entry into Alexandrian affairs, is the fact that Philo’s text clearly states that the innate hostility of the Alexandrians to the Jews was ancient.115 To conclude, this paper has sought to demonstrate how the significance of Agrippa I’s intervention in Alexandrian affairs in 38 CE that caused the first pogrom against Jews in Western history has been totally obscured or, at the very least, minimized by the ancient historical record. An incident whose roots were very likely deep with major implications for the issue of Jewish identity and, indeed, for the identity of other elements of the Alexandrian population during the first century CE, who were in competition with the Jews, which was either ignored (Josephus) or relegated to the status of a very minor incident (Philo). Hence, it is hardly surprising that modern accounts have tended either to ignore totally or minimize the significance of this episode. The considerations of the two ancient accounts of this episode presented in this paper lead me to conclude that the historical memory of Agrippa’s intervention in Alexandrian affairs should be perceived as an unreliable and distorting tool for assessing the significance of the event that apparently provoked the outbreak of the pogrom. Put simply, if we were obliged to rely on Josephus, we would have no information at all about Agrippa’s role. Philo is demonstrably more informative but he reveals his importance as a source only if we take note of the contradictions that mar his central assessment. In contrast to the assessment of these writers, both ancient and modern, I have presented the case that Agrippa’s arrival in Alexandria 114 Philo, ibid. 115 Thus Philo, In Flacc., 29: Τήν παλαιὰν γεγενημένην πρὸς Ιουδαίους ἀπέχθειαν; see Sevenster, The Roots of Pagan Anti-Semitism in the Ancient World, 168–69.

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was more than a matter of mere chance, simply dictated by the emperor’s suggestion regarding the speediest route to Palestine. Evidence culled from Philo, contrasting markedly with the main thesis that Philo posits, suggests that Agrippa arrived in Alexandria with praetorian honors on an imperial mission to support the Jewish community in the difficulties it encountered with its opponents. Agrippa’s grandiose entry into A ­ lexandria inevitably aroused the ire of the Greek and Egyptian element in the city. To add insult to injury, the Jewish monarch was perceived by the Alexandrians as an agent of the hated Roman Emperor. In addition, the Jews of Alexandria were indicted for having dual loyalties. Above all, identity sensitivities relating particularly to competitive claims to legitimate monarchy between the rival communities were ignited or, possibly, reignited. The arrival in Alexandria of a Jewish king, albeit a Jewish king without ruling territory that contained a Jewish population, provoked the sensitivities of the rival Alexandrian community—a conglomerate of Greeks, Egyptians, and mixed Egyptian-Greek stock. It brought home, not for the first time, we venture to suggest, the reality of the eclipse of that community’s own independence of yore at the hands of Graeco-Macedonians or Romans and threatened to shatter its dreams of national regeneration. The friction that ensued pitted the two communities against one another in respective bids to ensure their own identity116 and their own monarchy’s legitimacy over the monarchical aspirations of the other.117 116 Of course, the identity issue was not solely associated with monarchical considerations. For the broader sociological identity implications, see Blouin, Le Conflit judéo-alexandrin, 116–26. By contrast, Kerkeslager, “Agrippa I,” 367–400, argues that hostilities against the Jews from the Alexandrians stemmed from the fact that the Jews had violated the funerary celebrations for Drusilla. This leads Kerkeslager to the surprising conclusion, given Alexandrian hostility to Roman dominance, that the Alexandrians were defendants of Roman honor. 117 One must obviously be cautious before viewing Herodian Agrippa in the eyes of the Jews of Alexandria as a Messianic figure. Yet given Agrippa’s semi-Jewish origins—his descent from his grandmother the Hasmonean Mariamne—such a possibility should not be totally discounted. It is certainly noteworthy that the Testimony of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Zaddokite Fragments state that the Messiah shall stem from the tribe of Levi—an obvious attempt to tie up the Hasmonean house with Messianic expectation. See Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 2, 294, 788. It is also worth noting that Jewish messianic pretenders emerged in Egypt (Jos., AJ 20.167–72; BJ 261–43).

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Sectarianism in the Mishnah: Memory, Modeling Society, and Rabbinic Identity1 Naftali S. Cohn Concordia University

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T

he early rabbis who created the Mishnah at the end of the second or beginning of the third century may not have been historians, but there was one aspect of the past in which they were deeply interested—the ritual performed in the Jerusalem Temple. On a somewhat regular basis in the Mishnah, the mishnaic rabbis described how rituals used to be performed in the Temple when it still stood. Their descriptions, which can be called “Temple ritual narratives,” do differ from the kind of writing about the past found in the books of Kings, 1–2 Maccabees, and the works of Josephus, which we conventionally think of as historical writing in ancient times. Nevertheless, the Mishnah’s narratives about what used to happen in the Temple are representations 1 This piece was first presented at the symposium on History, Memory, and Jewish Identity that I co-organized with my colleagues Ira Robinson and Lorenzo DiTommaso at Concordia University in May 2011. I wish to express my gratitude to them for the rewarding experience. And I would like to thank all the participants for their feedback that helped improve the article.

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of past events. They purport to tell what actually happened in the past.2 Like all accounts of the past, and like representations in general, the Mishnah’s descriptions of how Temple rituals used to be performed were filtered by their authors. The rabbinic authors of the Mishnah made choices in describing past Temple ritual that very much reflect back on them. One curious feature of these Temple ritual accounts is the repeated reference to sectarianism and sectarian conflict. For the most part, the Mishnah speaks of smoothly functioning ritual and a unified polity of Israel. Looking back, the accounts could have easily erased the memory of conflict in the past and presented an ideal version of how Temple ritual was performed by simply omitting reference to such conflict. The rabbis need not have mentioned sectarians and sectarianism at all. But they did.3 A useful paradigm for explaining the choice to recall sectarian conflict, and the choice to recall the Temple ritual of the past more generally, can be provided by the theoretical study of what is typically called collective memory or cultural memory. Many theorists of collective 2 These narratives may have legal import, yet they are fundamentally different and distinct from more strictly legal passages in the Mishnah. For more detailed discussion of this type of passage, see Naftali S. Cohn, The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). See also Moshe Simon-Shoshan, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 3 My assumption here is that there were no sectarians in the late second or early third century. See more detailed discussion of this point in Naftali S. Cohn, “Heresiology in the Third Century Mishnah: Arguments for Rabbinic Legal Authority and the Complications of a Simple Concept,” Harvard Theological Review, forthcoming. There I discuss the recent scholarly views that there were indeed sectarians in the rabbis’ own time. For these views, see Martin Goodman, “Sadducees and Essenes After 70 CE,” in Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Paul Joyce, and David E. Orten (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 347–56; Joshua Ezra Burns, “Essene Sectarianism and Social Differentiation in Judaea after 70 C.E.,” HTR 99 (2006): 247–74; and Jodi Magness, “Sectarianism Before and After 70 CE,” in Was 70 CE a Watershed in Jewish History?, ed. Daniel R. Schwartz and Zeev Weiss (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 69–91. I note that I treat only the Mishnah, not the Tosefta, Halakhic Midrashim, or baraitot in the Talmuds. This provides a picture of only what the Mishnah has to say about sectarianism. Relevant passages in the other texts could potentially be post-mishnaic, and hence I have excluded them from the analysis.

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memory, tracing their understanding back to the work of Maurice Halbwachs, argue that when groups collectively look back at the past, their shared conception or reconstruction of that past tends to reflect the group’s “needs, problems, fears, mentality, or aspirations” or, more generally, its “social reality.”4 The group’s construction of the past is fundamentally shaped by these components of its present and so reflects them.5 But memories of the past are not simply identical to present realities; the past is not merely a canvas onto which groups project their present. Barry Schwartz, a scholar of collective memory who has focused especially on the changing collective memory of Abraham Lincoln in the United States, has argued forcefully that groups’ shared memories provide not only a “model of society,” but also a “model for society.”6 The past, remembered by groups in ways that make it relevant to their present experience, also orients their lives in the present. As Schwartz puts it, the past “embodies a template that organizes and animates behavior, and a frame within which people locate and find meaning for their present experience.”7 My argument here is that the memory of sectarianism, together with the larger memory of the Temple, functioned in both of these ways for the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah; it was for the rabbis both a “mirror and a lamp.”8 The past they imagined was shaped by and reflected the social reality of a highly variegated and diverse Judean (or, Jewish) society in third-century Roman Palestine and the legal role the rabbis claimed for themselves within that society. Simultaneously, the past provided a “model for society,” a vision for a better, less fragmented, and more ideal Judean society. What directed each of these aspects of rabbinic collective memory, I suggest, was the rabbis’ 4 Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 910, col. 1. 5 See this part of my methodological framework in more detail in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 11–12. 6 Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System,” 910, col. 1, using the terminology of Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 93–4; Barry Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7, 18. 7 Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory, 18. 8 Ibid., 306, 308.

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group identity as authoritative experts of traditional law and practice who preserved the true Israelite way of life. Rabbinic legal opinion defined the very nature of the sectarianism and the diversity of the past; it was prefigured by that of the authoritative Court of Temple times that quashed sectarian dissent; and it provided the basis for a future Israel once again united as one. The rabbis, as they understood themselves, stood at the juncture between the past and the future of the people of Israel.9

SECTARIANISM AND DIVERGENCE IN TEMPLE TIMES ACCORDING TO THE MISHNAH

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In mishnaic accounts, the elaborate ritual procedures of the Temple usually ran quite smoothly, with almost everyone agreeing on the one proper way of doing them. On more than one occasion, however, the Mishnah mentions that sectarians posed a threat to the proper functioning of the ritual. Further, on a few additional occasions, it provides hints that there were small divergences from proper observance that were even tolerated. Each of these phenomena can be seen in the Mishnah’s narrative about how the ‘omer offering, the public offering of the first of the barley harvest, used to be performed when the Temple still stood: How did they used to do [the mitzvah of the ‘omer]? Emissaries of the Court would go out before Yom Tov [i.e. the first festival day of Passover] and make the barley stalks into bundles while still attached to the ground—so that it will be easy to cut them. All of the towns nearby would gather there so that it would be harvested with a big spectacle. Once it got dark, he said to [the crowd]: 9 This chapter on sectarianism overlaps in certain ways with my article on heresy and rabbinic heresiology, “Heresiology in the Third Century Mishnah,” forthcoming in the Harvard Theological Review. In addition, I draw on a number of places on my work in The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis.

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“Has the sun set?” And they say, “Yes!” “Has the sun set?” They say, “Yes!” “With this sickle?” They say, “Yes!” “With this sickle?” They say, “Yes!” “With this basket?” They say, “Yes!” “With this basket?” They say, “Yes!” And if it is on the Sabbath, he says to them, “On this Sabbath?” They say, “Yes!” “This Sabbath?” They say, “Yes!” “Shall I cut?” They say to him, “Cut!” “Shall I cut?” “They say to him, “Cut!” Three times for each thing, and they say to him, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” And why all of this? Because of the Boethusians, who used to say that the harvesting of the ‘omer is not on the day after the festival day. (Menahot 10:3)10 The verb usage in this first paragraph of the narrative makes clear that these are the regular events of the past—how they “used to do” the ritual. Every year, according to the account, the ‘omer ritual began with a large gathering, an elaborate set of utterances, and the ritual harvesting of the barley. Throughout most of the narrative, the ritual functions smoothly, and all of the people seem to be behind the way it is done. Yet the very end of the paragraph suggests that sectarians and sectarianism loomed as a threat to the proper performance of the ritual. The Boethusians, one type of sectarian, held a different view about how the ritual ought to be performed, and if they had a chance they would undermine this and other important rituals.11 The reference to sectarians at the very end of the paragraph throws light back onto the entire description of the spectacle. According to the Mishnah, the elaborate procedure—which

10 The text follows MS Parma, but with standard enumeration. 11 For an important treatment of the term Boethusians, see Adiel Schremer, “The Name of the Boethusians: A Reconsiderations of Suggested Explanations and Another One,” Journal of Jewish Studies 48 (1997): 290–99.

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did always go as planned—was meant to neutralize the threat and put the sectarians in their place. There is an additional hint of divergence of practice later on in this narrative, but this time the divergence is not actually suppressed. After the subsequent description of the processing of the barley, the offering of the barley, and the priests consuming it (Menahot 10:4), the narrative continues with the immediate aftermath of the offering: “Once the ‘omer was offered, one would go out and find the Jerusalem market [shuk] filled with roasted flour—not in accordance with the will of the sages” (10:5). Outside of the Temple, according to this version of events, merchants have already prepared flour to be available for sale immediately upon the completion of the sacrifice, which the sages did not consider proper practice. This surprising intimation of improper behavior, it turns out, is only according to “the view of Rabbi Meir; Rabbi Judah holds that the practice was in accord with the will of the sages” (10:5).12 Though the insertion of a typical rabbinic dispute tends to limit the notion that Judeans were in fact acting improperly (to the the view of a single rabbi), there is still a surprising admission that, outside of the Temple at least, national ritual practice may not have functioned quite so smoothly, and that there may have been a divergence of the ways in which Judeans practiced the ­traditional way of life. Each of these three aspects of the ‘omer narrative that I have highlighted is not unique to this particular narrative, and also appears in other accounts of how rituals were performed in Temple times. The descriptions of how the Passover sacrifice were slaughtered (Pesahim 5:5–10), how the first fruits were brought to the Temple (Bikkurim 3:2–8), and how the daily tamid offering was made (Tamid 1:1–7:4), to take only three examples, all imagine elaborate Temple rituals functioning smoothly and properly. The threat posed by sectarians and its containment through ritual action occurs in the red heifer narrative (Parah 3:7) and perhaps in other narratives as well.13 And a further 12 This formulation may imply that it is, nevertheless, not proper. 13 See also Yoma 1:3–5, which is not explicitly about sectarian divergence of practice, but is interpreted as such in the Tosefta and Talmuds, and Rosh Hashanah 2:1–2,

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hint of unsuppressed (non-sectarian) divergent practices, this time inside the temple itself, occurs in Pesahim 5:8, where “the priests would mop up the Temple Courtyard [even when the Paschal sacrifice was being slaughtered on the Sabbath], against the will of the sages.” The tension between an unwaveringly correct performance of Temple ritual and divergence of opinion and practice is a key component of the larger set of narratives about how ritual used to be performed in the Temple, and so of the wider rabbinic memory of the past represented in these narratives.

PAST AS MIRROR: SOCIAL DIVERSITY IN THE SECOND AND THIRD CENTURIES

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Literary evidence from non-rabbinic authors well before the time of the Mishnah attests that sectarianism and divergence of opinion about Temple practice did exist in the time of the Temple and beyond. Indeed, it cannot be a coincidence that what Mishnah Parah 3:7 calls the sectarian, “Sadducean” view on the purification of those performing the red heifer ritual is nearly identical with the view declared in the sectarian Dead Sea document known as 4QMMT.14 which appears to be about sectarianism, but uses the terms “heretics” and “Samaritans.” For further discussion, see Naftali S. Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists: On the Representation of Past and Present Legal Institutions in the Mishnah,” Journal of Jewish Studies 60 (2009): 258–59; Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 45–47. 14 See 4Q394 frags. 3–7 col. 1, and 4Q395 = 4QMMT A 19–21 and B 1–16. And see Joseph M. Baumgarten, “Red Cow Purification Rites in Qumran Texts,” Journal of Jewish Studies 81 (1980): 157–70. For a comparison of law in the Mishnah and those in the Dead Sea Scrolls (including the law of waiting after immersing), see Yaacov Sussman, “Heker toldot ha-halakhah umegillot midbar yehudah: hirhurim rishoniyim le-or megillat miktsat ma’aseh hatorah,” Tarbiz 59 (1990): 11–76; Yaacov Sussman, “Appendix 1: The History of the Halakha and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Preliminary Talmudic Observations on Miqsat Ma’aseh Ha-torah,” in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert: Volume 10. Qumran Cave 4: Miqsat Ma’aseh Ha-torah, ed. Elisha Qimron and John Strugnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 179–200; and Lawrence H. Schiffman, “The Pharisees and Their Halakhah According to the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Dead Sea Discoveries 8 (2001): 262–77 (see 273), who problematically refers to the Mishnah’s law as “pharisaic.” For an important treatment of the relationship between purity law in the Dead Sea Scrolls and that in the Mishnah (written before the publication of 4QMMT), see Joseph M. Baumgarten, “The Pharisaic-Sadducean

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Furthermore, pre-mishnaic sources, such as Josephus and the Gospels, attest to divergences of opinion about appropriate worship in the Temple.15 That the Mishnah is not inventing the sectarianism or Controversies about purity and the Qumran Texts,” Journal of Jewish Studies 81 (1980): 157–70. 15 In the Dead Sea Scrolls, see especially 4Q394 frags. 3–7 col. 1, and 4Q395 = 4QMMT A 19–21 and B 1–16 (see previous note) and CD-A VI.11–12 and XI.17–21. On whether 4QMMT ought to be considered polemical, see Steven Fraade, “To Whom It May Concern: 4QMMT and Its Addressee(s),” Revue de Qumran 76 (2000): 507–26. On disputes surrounding the Temple, see also CD-A IV.15–18, CD-B XX.23, 1QpHab XII.8, and perhaps CD-A V.6–7. On the Temple in Qumran texts, see Bertil E. Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament: A Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism of the Qumran Texts and the New Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), which takes a slightly outdated but still useful approach. See also Albert I. Baumgarten, “Setting the Outer Limits: Temple Policy in the Centuries Prior to the Destruction,” in Redefining First-Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E Udoh, with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 88–103. For the example of dispute about correct Temple practice in Josephus, see The Judaean War 2, 409–410. On divergence/sectarianism regarding the Temple especially in Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, see Martin Goodman, “Religious Variety and the Temple in the Late Second Temple Period and Its Aftermath,” Journal of Jewish Studies 60 (2009): 202–213. In the Gospels, Jesus’ action in the Temple implies some critique, though precisely what that critique is remains ambiguous; see Matt. 21:12–13 (and perhaps 18–22); Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45; and John 2:14–21. For helpful scholarly discussions, see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 61–90; Craig A. Evans, “Jesus’ Action in the Temple and Evidence of Corruption in the First-Century Temple,” in Jesus and His Contemporaries: Comparative Studies, ed. Craig A. Evans (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 319–44; Paula Fredriksen, “Gospel Chronologies the Scene in the Temple, and the Crucifixion of Jesus,” in Redefining First Century Jewish and Christian Identities: Essays in Honor of Ed Parish Sanders, ed. Fabian E Udoh, with Susannah Heschel, Mark Chancey, and Gregory Tatum (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 246–82; and Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 213–45. On the relationship between various New Testament passages, including those in Paul, and attitudes to the Temple more generally, see Klawans’s helpful discussion (ibid.). Additional post-destruction New Testament texts, including Hebrews and Revelation, understand the Temple to have been superseded, but these are post destruction (for further brief discussion, see Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 102–7). Helpful scholarly literature on Paul and the Temple and Temple sacrifice includes: Daniel Stökl Ben-Ezra, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 197–205; Gärtner, The Temple and the Community; R. J. McKelvey, The New Temple: The Church in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Newton, The Concept of Purity at

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differences of opinion of the past, however, does not explain why its rabbinic authors chose to mention them at all, especially considering their penchant for idealizing Temple ritual performance.16 One explanation for this component of rabbinic collective memory is that the divisions within Israelite society implied by sectarianism and by hints of essentially improper ritual practice mirrored the fragmented nature of Judean society in the rabbis’ own time. This aspect of the past thus resonated with the rabbis, and so it was part of the past that they chose to represent in their accounts of Temple ritual. Both the Mishnah itself and non-mishnaic literary and archaeological evidence show that Judean society within Roman Palestine was highly variegated, composed of multiple subgroups that overlapped in complex ways.17 In the Galilee, the wealthier elites of the larger towns of Sepphoris and Tiberias seem to have thoroughly embraced most or all aspects of Roman culture, including pagan images and perhaps even practices, at the same time that they continued to adhere to some aspects of Judean culture and practice, including the use of stepped

Qumran and in the Letters of Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53–58; Albert L. A. Hogeterp, Paul and God’s Temple: A Historical Interpretation of Cultic Imagery in the Corinthian Correspondence (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), 295–378; and Nijay K. Gupta, “Which ‘Body’ Is a Temple (1 Corinthians 6:19)? Paul Beyond the Individual/Communal Divide,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 72 (2010): 518–36. I do not even mention here reference to the Pharisees and Sadducees (and Essenes) in the works of Josephus, the New Testament, and other texts. A helpful study on sectarianism in general is Albert I. Baumgarten, The Flourishing of the Jewish Sects in the Maccabean Era: An Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 16 The Mishnah does invent some aspects of the past, such as the ritual role of the Court and its members (see further below and see Cohn, The Memory of the Temple), but it does not invent all aspects of the past. 17 For an earlier, generally more detailed discussion of the reconstruction of Judean society presented in this section (with more extensive references to earlier scholarship), see Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 27–35. I note that the picture I offer of a diverse Judean society differs markedly from that offered by Seth Schwartz in Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Schwartz holds that the majority of Judean society was— relatively homogeneously—Roman, while a small minority preserved the traditional way of life. I believe that the various pieces of evidence point to a radically more complex subsociety within Roman Palestine.

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pools and stone vessels.18 The same may have been the case for some Judeans in other areas as well.19 The Samaritans (kutim), who lived not only in Samaria, but even in places like Legio/Kefar ‘Otnay, were considered by the rabbis of the Mishnah, at least, to be in many ways a part of the people of Israel, though they adhered to a different temple and held a slightly different version of the traditional ritual practices than most Judeans.20 Despite the Samaritans being a socially distinct group, the Mishnah does imagine important social overlap between them and those they consider fully Israelite, as in the case of those normally subject to rabbinic law who have Samaritans signing their ketubah marriage contract in Gittin 1:5.21 Further subgroups in Israelite society seem to have been demarcated on the basis of positions taken on matters of traditional practice and other aspects of traditional culture. Though there is limited evidence for the existence of followers of Jesus in Roman Palestine itself, it is quite likely that there were multiple subgroups who would fall under this rubric, as there were throughout the Roman Empire, and so this subgroup would likely have been defined by following Jesus. Further variety among subgroups of followers of Jesus seems to have been based, at least in part, on divergent approaches to traditional practices. This can be seen in the way Didiscalia Apostolorum 23 distinguishes 18 See this argument in more detail, with discussion of the evidence, in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 29–30 (with notes). My argument here draws heavily on Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, and Mark A. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19 Such as those who called themselves ioudaioi and dedicated a monumental building with a stone eagle to the emperor Septimius Severus and his sons. See Zvi Ilan, Ancient Synagogues in Israel [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Ministry of Defense, 1991), 57–59; Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 131; and Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 30. 20 On Samaritans in Kefar ‘Otnay, see Mishnah Gittin 1:5. Samaritans as part of Israel: see Berakhot 7:1; Demai 3:4; Ketubot 3:1; and Niddah 7:3 (cf. Niddah 4:1). Classed with the Israelite, but having distinct ritual practices: Mishnah Berakhot 8:8; Demai 7:4 (where the Samaritan is similar to the ’am ha’arets; see also Demai 3:4); Shevi‘it 8:10 (according to Rabbi Eliezer); and ’Ohalot 17:4. And see an example in which the legal status goes in both directions in Mishnah Gittin 1:5. For further discussion and further relevant sources, see Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 30–31 (and notes). 21 See Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 30–31.

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multiple heretical groups of Christians based on positions they take on the biblically-based dietary restrictions, as pointed out by Charlotte Fonrobert.22 Assuming there was a diversity of Jesus followers in Palestine, their differences would likely have been defined in the same way. This accords with the fact that a particular attitude regarding Temple sacrifice seems to have been a defining factor among subgroups of Jesus followers, as in the case of the authors of the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–71, pointed out by Annette Reed.23 In the Mishnah, the variety of Judean groups is also defined in terms of different practices, in this case whether or not they adhere to the ritual system as laid out in the Mishnah itself. Most famously the ‘ammei ha’arets, literally the “people of the Land” (a biblical term), are defined as not following the agricultural and purity laws properly, that is, according to the laws laid out in the Mishnah. The ‘ammei ha’arets are fully Israelites, and are expected to observe properly, yet they are treated as a distinct subgroup, who may even have their own synagogues (Avot 3:10) and their own elders (Kinnim 3:6).24 The second unique term the rabbis of the Mishnah use to describe non-rabbis is “sinners” (‘ovrei ‘aveirah). While it is less clear that this term denotes a

22 Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 492–93. For a very helpful model of this variety, see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 17–22. And see further discussion in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 28–29, 33. The most important evidence of followers of Jesus specifically in Roman Palestine is Tosefta Hullin chapter 2. On this, see also Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 22–41, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, Who Was a Jew? Rabbinic and Halakhic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Schism (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV, 1985), 62–73. 23 Annette Yoshiko Reed, “‘Jewish Christianity’ after the ‘Parting of the Ways’: Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines,” in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007 [originally published 2005]), 208–9. 24 See more (with references to earlier literature) in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 154–55 n. 67.

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particular group, it again classifies Israelites by their observance, or lack thereof.25 A third term that the Mishnah uses to categorize a distinct group of Judeans, pointed out originally by Stuart Miller, is the “people of” a particular town.26 Most often in the Mishnah, the “people of the town” are simply a legal abstraction. Yet in a few cases they are considered a real group that may have interacted in some way with rabbis. Thus, the Mishnah refers to the people of Tiberias (Shabbat 3:4), Jericho (Pesahim 4:8 and Menahot 10:8), Jerusalem (Makhshirin 1:6, and see Sukkah 3:8, likely set in Temple times), and an unnamed town (perhaps meaning the town of Mehoza, Makhshirin 3:4).27 The Mishnah also imagines the people of towns outside of Roman Palestine as distinct groups of Judeans who communicate with rabbis. These include the people of Alexandria (Nega’im 14:13) and Meidaba (Mikva’ot 7:1). In the Tosefta, the list extends to the two fully or heavily Judean towns of Sepphoris (Tosefta Sotah 3:16 and Makhshirin 3:5) and Lydda (Tosefta Hagigah 2:3). The people of the various towns in Roman Palestine, too, according to what the Mishnah presents, typically engage in practices that tend to go against the rabbinic understanding of the traditional law. The people of Tiberias build water piping to heat water on the Sabbath, the people of Jericho engage in certain agricultural practices, and the people of an unnamed town (or Mahoza) practice purity in a particular way. In each case, the townspeople’s practices are not quite right, but the rabbis involved provide them instruction on the proper practice. If, as many now hold, the rabbis were not particularly influential, it seems likely that the people of the town would not have heeded the rabbinic instruction. But the rabbis, in these examples, see their own 25 References to “sinners” can be found in Mishnah Shevi‘it 4:1, 5:9, and 9:1; Shekalim 1:2; and Gittin 5:9. See also Tosefta Shevi‘it 3:9, Shabbat 3:3, Pisha (Pesahim) 2:4, and Shevu’ot 3 (MS Erfurt only). On minim (heretics), see further below. 26 Stuart S. Miller, Sages and Commoners in Late Antique ’Erez Israel: A Philological Inquiry into Local Traditions in Talmud Yerushalmi (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). 27 This builds on my discussion in The Memory of the Temple, 155 n. 68, itself based on Stuart Miller’s treatment of the term throughout Sages and Commoners. An additional reference to Temple times is to the “people of Mount Tsevo‘im” in Bikkurim 1:3.

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role as providing the townspeople instruction on proper practice.28 The people of the town, according to the Mishnah, are thus a distinctive social group whom the rabbis ultimately define according to their relationship with them and according the people’s observance of what the rabbis consider correct practice. It is unclear how these different groups designated by the Mishnah correspond to those suggested by the non-mishnaic evidence, and even to possible additional groups hinted at by the Mishnah itself.29 However we might choose to piece together the specific details, in general the evidence all points to multiple subgroups within Judean society and a larger society that does not appear to heed rabbinic instruction on proper practice.30 This background suggests why the rabbis chose to remember sectarianism and different opinions about practice in the past: it mirrored the social diversity and differences of practice of their own time. Even if the precise makeup of society in the past was not identical to that of their own time, the essential fact of its diversity seems very much to have been relevant to them in their present. Though the Mishnah never makes this connection between the past and the present explicit, a strong hint can be found in the larger narrative about how the red heifer used to be burnt in Parah 3:1–11—one of the narratives that describes the quashing of the sectarian view. Early on in this narrative, before the account of how the sectarians were put in their place, the narrator describes a rather convoluted procedure of tying a stick contraption to a ram’s horns in order to spill the sacred ashes out of their container to be 28 See Cohn, “Rabbinic Heresiology.” There I speak at much greater length about another category, the heretic (min), which I do not include here, as it seems more an abstract construct than a claim that there is a specific group labeled heretics (though some of the sources may hint that there is). 29 I mean especially those in the synagogue, as in Ta’anit 2:5, who pray in a way of which rabbis—who are not themselves in the synagogue—do not seem to approve. See also further in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 34–35. 30 On rabbinic powerlessness and the role the rabbis claimed for themselves, see further below and see in greater detail, Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 17–27. Note that Martin Goodman, in State and Society in Roman Galilee, A.D. 132–212, 2nd ed. (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), used the mishnaic references to the ‘ammei ha’arets as a major basis for his important argument that most Judeans did not heed the rabbis.

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mixed with water. One rabbi, Rabbi Yose, cuts in at this point and objects to the narrator’s version of events out of concern about the reaction of non-rabbis in his own day. He says, “Do not give heretics the opportunity to mock [or, rebel] (Parah 3:3). While it is rather ambiguous who the rabbis mean when they refer to heretics, the context of this passage makes clear that these “heretics” exist in the rabbis’ own day and their conflict with the rabbis (if they are even a coherent group) is somehow exacerbated by a convoluted account of how this part of the ritual was once performed. Throughout the Mishnah, heretics, or, minim, more often than not are non-rabbis whose ritual practice differs from what the rabbis consider correct, much like the various other non-rabbis to whom the Mishnah refers.31 In Parah 3:3, these non-rabbis of postTemple times seem to hold a different opinion about how Temple ritual ought to have been performed in the past. And the threat posed by these heretics mirrors the very similar threat posed by sectarians in Temple times described in the very same narrative. The mishnaic accounts of social conflict and divergence of practice surrounding Temple ritual thus appear to reflect the rabbinic concerns about the rabbis’ own place with respect to other Judeans and about the nature of the larger Judean society of post-Temple times.

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ANOTHER MIRROR: COURT AUTHORITY AND RABBINIC AUTHORITY In addition to modeling the diversity of their own times, the rabbinic memory of sectarianism in Temple times seems to have served as a screen onto which the rabbis could project an image of the social role they desired for themselves—in the form of the authoritative court 31 See Mishnah Megillah 4:8–9, Hullin 2:9, and Rosh Hashanah 2:1. I developed this argument in detail in a paper presented at the University of California, Berkeley, in April 2012, and which I am preparing for publication. Heretics are not identical to other non-rabbis, a distinction I delve into in that paper. Earlier literature on minim tends not to separate out the Mishnah. But most helpful among this literature is Martin Goodman, “The Function of Minim,” and Adiel Schremer, Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity, and Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). And see especially, Boyarin, Border Lines.

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that quashed the sectarian resistance of the past. A second reason why the rabbis chose to recall sectarianism, therefore, is that the memory of sectarianism helped establish the authority of those whom the rabbis considered their predecessors, which thus offered an argument for their own authority in post-Temple times. On more than one occasion I have argued that the rabbis of the Mishnah presented themselves as jurists—in the model of Roman jurists—who ruled on ambiguous matters of traditional Torah-based Judean law and whose rulings were to be followed in practice.32 The primary focus of this legal activity, as evidenced by the numerous stories in the Mishnah purporting to be about rulings actually issued by rabbis, is the realm of ritual. Since the Roman governor and those under his authority controlled all legal venues in Syria Palaestina, the rabbis could not have had any legal role in those areas of law relevant to the Romans, including civil and criminal law. Yet ritual law was irrelevant to the Romans, and so the rabbis seem to have laid a special claim to this area of law. As Martin Goodman and subsequent scholars have argued, Judeans do not seem to have heeded rabbinic dicta, yet the rabbis did claim that they ought to.33 When looking back at the past, the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah tied themselves to the institution of the Great Court (beit din hagadol), or, Sanhedrin, of Temple times. They saw the Court, its members (the “elders” [zekenim]), and its leaders (the pairs, who were nasi and “chief of the Court”), as those who carried tradition from “Moses at Sinai” (Avot 1:1) down to the rabbis themselves.34 And, as I have shown, they invented a hybrid legal-ritual role for the Court of the past that mirrored the legal-ritual role that they claimed for themselves. In the Mishnah’s memory of Temple ritual, the Court had authority over the way ritual was performed in the Temple. This memory argued for the antiquity of the rabbinic role, creating a myth 32 Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists,” and Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 17–37. 33 Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, esp. 93–118. And see further in Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists,” and Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 17–37. 34 For the grounding of this claim see Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists,” 254–57, and Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 52–56.

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of origins for the rabbis as a group and authorizing a particular place for them in post-Temple Judean society. The threat of sectarianism and divergence regarding Temple ritual practice played quite naturally into this rabbinic memory of the Court as the legal authority that controlled Temple ritual practice. Sectarian resistance is what made possible the exercise of the Court’s power against sectarians. The sectarianism of the past was thus useful to the rabbis for demonstrating the power of their predecessors, which, in turn, provided the foundation for the power they claimed for themselves. The special role of the Court in containing sectarianism and its threat is only hinted at in the narrative about the ‘omer barley offering quoted above. Here, the ritual itself—the great spectacle that is meant to deny the Boethusians—is performed by anonymous ritual actors, presumably priests. Only the “emissaries of the Court” are present here, helping to set up the ritual by binding the sheaves together in advance. In other examples, the Court’s preparatory role is much more central. In Parah 3:6–8, the narrative about the burning of the red heifer, it is the elders of the Court themselves that ensure that the ritual is performed against the view of the sectarians:

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(3:6) The priest who burns the heifer, the heifer, and all its attendants go out to the Mount of Olives. (3:7) [ . . . ] And the elders of Israel used to walk ahead to the Mount of Olives, and there was a place of immersion there. And they would [intentionally] render the priest who burns the heifer impure. Because of the Sadducees. So that they would not say [the ritual] was performed by one whose purification included waiting until sunset. (3:8) They placed their hands upon him and said, “Sir, high priest, immerse yourself once.” He went down, immersed, came up, and dried off.

The group termed here “elders of Israel,” a biblical term, which in Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 2:9 is understood to refer to “the Court of

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Moses,” seems almost certainly to refer to the members of the Court.35 As with the Court’s emissaries in Menahot 10:3, the members of the Court here are involved in the preparatory stages of the ritual, and their role is precisely to ensure that the ritual is not performed in accordance with the sectarian view. Allowing the priest to have immersed himself the day before and then to have waited until sunset the previous night would in theory accord with what is deemed the correct view, yet this would also satisfy the sectarians.36 Thus, according to the Mishnah, the Court members ensured ritual was done in such a way that intentionally violated the sectarian view, but not the commonly accepted, Court-approved understanding of how the ritual ought to be performed. In a third example, Yoma 1:3–5, the role of the Court is similarly explicit. Here the high priest who will be performing all of the day’s rituals is assigned “elders from the elders of the Court,” who instruct him in the proper procedures, restrict his eating and drinking on the eve of the Day of Atonement, and famously adjure him—as “emissaries of the Court”—not to “change anything from what [they] have told him.” In this example, the Mishnah does not explicitly say that the high priest is a sectarian, yet in the Tosefta and subsequent rabbinic texts it is understood that this is the case. According to this interpretation, the Court has a special role in the preparatory phases of the ritual not only to ensure that the ritual is performed properly, but that it is not done in accordance with sectarian views.37 35 A biblical usage of “elders” is also taken as members of a Court in Sotah 9:1 and Yevamot 12:6, and the term “elders” appears to refer to Court members in Ta’anit 3:6, Sanhederin 1:3, and perhaps ‘Eruvin 3:4. In addition, the elders are sometimes specifically tied to the Court, as in Yoma 1:3–5, discussed below. See also Sukkah 4:4, where the elders seem likely to refer to the Court members. And see further in Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 162 n. 11. Note that in the toseftan version of this narrative, in Parah 2:8, it is Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the earliest rabbis (said to have “received” the Torah/tradition from the two pairs Hillel and Shammai in Avot 2:8), who acts against the sectarian priest (in a different way). 36 The Mishnah’s sectarian view is very close to the view espoused in 4Q394 frags. 3–7 col. 1, and 4Q395 = 4QMMT A 19–21 and B 1–16; see further above. 37 See Tosefta Kippurim 1:8, where the need to adjure the high priest is attributed to the time a Boethusian high priest performed the incense according to the incorrect sectarian view. See also Talmud Yerushalmi Yoma 39a and Talmud Bavli Yoma 19b. For more on the Court’s role in ritual, see Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists,” 257–60, and

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In each of these cases, as understood here, the members and/or emissaries of the Court played a special role in the ritual precisely because of the threat of sectarians and their views. Without sectarians, the Court could in theory not have had any part at all. Recounting the threat that sectarians posed therefore helped to establish the authority of the Court to ensure that ritual is performed correctly. And the related examples in which the Court makes an enactment (takkanah) to fix failed ritual procedures show further that, according to the Mishnah, the Court members were the ones who determined in general what that correct practice would be.38 By choosing to remember the sectarianism of the past and by framing that sectarianism in terms of the power of the Court to keep it fully in check, the rabbis of the Mishnah were creating a past in which their own (largely fictional) predecessors were in control of ritual performance in the Temple. This way of recalling the Temple ritual of the past made a further argument for the rabbis’ own authority to determine how Judeans ought to practice traditional rituals in post-Temple times. The diversity of the past in the mishnaic accounts does not, however, fully support the uncontested authority of the Court, and by extension that of the rabbis. Mention of merchants and priests who acted in ways not fully in accord with what “the sages” deemed proper creates cracks in the idealized version of the past in which the rabbis’ predecessors maintained full legal and ritual control. These fissures, and the tension they create with the ideal version of the past, must have resonated for the rabbis as well, and perhaps provided them with a note of hope. Ultimately, these accounts envision a Court more in control than not, a court that restricts diversity and divergence. Even in the few cases in which Judeans acted against the “will of the sages,” it seems likely that the pre-rabbinic authorities maintained their power simply by “not Cohn, The Memory of the Temple, 40–50. Two additional examples of the Court acting because of the threat of what loosely appears to be sectarianism can be found in Rosh Hashanah 2:1–2, where they are, however, labeled “heretics” and “Samaritans.” 38 See Shekalim 7:5 and 7:6 and especially Yoma 2:2 and Sukkah 4:4. In addition, in Rosh Hashanah 2:1 and 2:2 it is likely that the anonymous takkanah is made by the Court, the institution in charge of the ritual declaration of the new moon.

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objecting.” This seems to have been the strategy imagined for later rabbis in relation to the people of Jericho (Pesahim 4:8 and Menahot 10:8) and toward a non-rabbinic “court of priests” (Ketubot 1:5). A past fraught with conflict and even some divergences in practice may thus have suggested to the rabbis that just as their predecessors overcame such conflict to maintain control, they could too.

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PAST AS MODEL FOR SOCIETY: SOCIAL HARMONY FOR “ALL” As Barry Schwartz has suggested for collective memory in general, the memory of the sectarianism and Temple ritual of the past seems to have provided the rabbis not only with a model of society and of the present, but also a model for the rabbis in the present. Notwithstanding the small divergences from proper practice, the rabbis imagined a past in which all the people were unified in the practice of Temple ritual, under the direction of their predecessors. This notion that proper ritual practice was a focal point uniting all of Israel seems to have served as a “lamp,” a remembered past that orients the present and provides a way forward for the future. As it was in the past, so now, and in the future, the people of Israel could be united if only they would practice traditional rituals in the correct way, as the rabbis instruct.39 This reading of what the past meant to the rabbis is suggested by a number of the Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives, including the ‘omer barley offering narrative with which I began. In the ‘omer narrative, the people involved in the ritual come from “all of the towns nearby” and form an audience. The word “all” stresses the size of the crowd and its cohesion. The crowd’s repeated, simple, responses that are made in unison—“yes!” and “cut!”—further stress the cohesion of the group as it performs the ritual. In other narratives, the audience is taken to be even more inclusive and national. The spectators, who at times are also 39 The notion of rabbinic ideal of a “national” Israel has been suggested by Cynthia M. Baker in “Imagined Households,” in Religion and Society in Roman Palestine: Old Questions, New Approaches, ed. Douglas R. Edwards (New York: Routledge, 2004), 113–128.

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participants, are labelled: “Israel,” “all of Israel,” “the nation,” “all the nation,” “all spectators,” or “all the community of the congregation of Israel.”40 Each of these formulations (almost all of which stem from biblical usage) stress the fully national scale of the ritual and the inclusiveness and the unity of the group that participated. Further elements of how these rituals are described throughout the genre add to the picture of a harmonious whole people of Israel. In Pesahim 5:5–10, discrete subgroups of Israel are imagined working together to make the entire ritual function properly. On the literary level, the priests and Israelites, two of the fundamental subcategories of the people of Israel, are made parallel by the concise description of paired subject and verb: “the Israelite slaughtered and the priest received [the blood]” (5:6). Both groups, in turn, would work together among themselves to fulfill their own roles within the ritual. Perfectly choreographed rows of priests passed along containers of blood in unison to and from the Altar (5:6), while Israelites helped each other with the hanging and flaying of the carcasses (5:9). All of this collaborative effort among and between Israelites and priests was further accompanied by the singing of psalms, which, it is clear from other mishnaic passages, was done by the third fundamental group within the people of Israel, the Levites.41 The Passover sacrifice ritual, performed by “all the community of the congregation of Israel” (5:5), involved every subgroup working together as one. A similar picture of subgroups within Israel working together, and thus unifying the people as a whole, is painted in Bikkurim 3:2–8, the 40 Israel: Yoma 1:8, 5:1, and 6:2; and perhaps Ta’anit 4:8; see also Ta’anit 3:8. All of Israel: Sanhedrin 6:4 and 11:2–4; Sotah 7:5 and 7:8 [biblical references]; and see Pesahim 1:5 and Rosh Hashanah 3:1; see also Eduyot 3:10. The nation (‫)עם‬: Yoma 3:4 and 3:6, Tamid 5:1, 6:3, 7:3, and 7:4; Sotah 7:2, 7:6, 8:1, 8:2, 8:5, and 8:6 [biblical references]. All the nation: Sukkah 4:4 and 4:9, Rosh Hashanah 2:7; see also Sukkah 3:9 and 3:13. All spectators: Sukkah 5:1, implied by the negative formulation (“All those who did not see”). All the community of the congregation of Israel: Pesahim 5:5, quoting Exodus 12:6. 41 Here it is not made explicit that the Levites are the ones singing psalms, but Levites are always the ones who sing psalms; see Bikkurim 3:4, Sukkah 5:4, Rosh Hashanah 4:4, Arakhin 2:6, Middot 2:5, and Tamid 5:6 and 7:3–4. See also the parallel to this passage, Tosefta, Pisha 4:11.

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narrative describing the bringing of the first fruits to Jerusalem. According to this narrative, the people from all over a given district would gather together and travel as one to Jerusalem. At this beginning stage of the ritual, the people were first unified on the local level. Then, as they approached Jerusalem, they engaged in a fundamental way with those from another region, from Jerusalem itself. First they were greeted officially by Temple officials and, second, on a more personal level, they received a rather warm welcome by the artisans of Jerusalem, who would stand up as they entered and say, “Our brothers from such-andsuch place, you have come in peace” (3:3).42 Within the ritual itself, as in the Pesahim example, the group of Israelites would work in unison with the priest to make the offering (3:4) and this would be accompanied by Levites singing psalms (3:4)—all parts of Israel being brought together by the proper performance of the ritual. The sense of inclusiveness is extended even further by mention of the unique ways in which opposite types of Israelites would have participated in the ritual: those who live near and those who live far (3:3), those who can read Hebrew and those who cannot (3:7), and the rich and the poor (3:8).43 The overwhelming impression created by these narratives is that the entire people of Israel participated in Temple ritual, and that the ritual itself brought together distinct groups within the larger nation. As in some of the narratives, there was indeed a small minority of sectarians in the past whose heretical views threatened Temple ritual performance and there may have been further minor deviations in practice, but on the whole, in the rabbinic memory of the past, Israel was united as one by the Temple and its ritual. And as I argued above, it is

42 This aspect of the Mishnah’s pilgrimage narrative seems similar to Philo’s emphasis on the camaraderie created by pilgrimage to the Jerusalem Temple in Special Laws 1.69–70. Overall, though, Philo’s message is quite different. 43 Some of these points appear in Naftali Cohn, “‘Our brothers from such and such place, you have come in peace,’” Mosaic (1995): 19–24. See also Jackie Feldman, “‘A City that Makes All Israel Friends’: Normative Communitas and the Struggle for Religious Legitimacy In Pilgrimage to the Second Temple,” in A Holy People: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Religious Communal Identity, ed. Marcel Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 109–126.

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precisely the Court, its members, and its emissaries who ensure that Temple ritual is done properly and thus serves its unifying function. When the rabbis were creating these accounts of past Temple ritual in the second or third centuries, Judean society was not unified but fractured and diverse. The past they remembered, however, provided them with a model for an improved Judean society. If only other subgroups within Judean society—indeed its majority—would observe what remained of the traditional biblically-derived ritual practices correctly, the people could become unified again; harmony among the people would reign; and perhaps the Temple might be built again “speedily in [their] days” (Ta’anit 4:8 and Tamid 7:3). Of course, it was the rabbis, as they understood themselves, who would determine the correct practice that would bring together “all of Israel” once again.

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MISHNAIC MEMORY AND RABBINIC IDENTITY In the reading of rabbinic memory put forth here, it is the rabbis’ group identity as purveyors of authentic and correct Judean ritual practice that shaped their memory of the past and provided them with a way forward for themselves and all of Israel. The sectarians of the past disagreed, by definition, with what the rabbis present as correct and the views the rabbis associate with their own predecessors. Even the small deviances from proper practice are defined in rabbinic terms as “not in accordance with the will of the sages.” Like those non-rabbinic Judean subgroups of their own day—‘ammei ha’arets, sinners, the people of specific towns, and even Samaritans—the divergent groups of the past were understood in relation to rabbinic law, which was presumed to be absolutely correct. Just as deviance was defined in rabbinic terms, so too was the role of the Court. According to multiple Temple ritual narratives, the Court, its members, and its emissaries enforced what they understood to be the correct way of doing things. In the context of the Mishnah, the Court’s views are identical with the later rabbinic views. Further, as I have argued elsewhere, the very role the rabbis gave the Court,

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determining the proper way of performing ritual, was their own invention, created in the mold of the hybrid legal-ritual role they claimed for themselves.44 My analysis here suggests, moreover, that beyond simply remembering the Court of the past in the image of their own role and in line with their own correct legal views, the rabbis were making an argument for the Court’s—and by extension their own—rightness. In the ‘omer narrative, the repeated affirmations in the course of the ritual cutting of the barley may suggest that the whole people, or in this case a full subset of the people, acknowledged that the version supported by the Court’s emissaries was the correct one. Their many “yeses!” and their “cuts!” could even be considered to authorize the version of the ritual put forth by the rabbinic narrators and, within the narrative, by the Court. The nostalgic version of the past in which the entire people goes along with and actively affirms the Court and its essentially rabbinic view is precisely what points to a more desirable present and future. From the rabbis’ perspective, if only the people of the towns would heed rabbinic instruction and the various other groups who do not practice correctly would perform the rituals as the rabbis understand they must be performed, all of the people would be better off. Though all indications suggest that the entire people did not follow the rabbis in post-Temple times, certain passages imply that they ought to. In the narrative of the ‘omer barley offering in Menahot 10:1–5, this seems precisely the message of what can be considered a postscript to the story of the ritual in Temple times. Right at the end of this narrative, the passage moves ahead in time to the immediate aftermath of the destruction: “When the Temple was destroyed, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai decreed that the day of waving [i.e., offering the ‘omer offering, on the second day of Passover] would be forbidden [to eat the grain of the new harvest that entire day, until the end of the day]” (10:5). Juxtaposed to a narrative that imagines all the people (of a particular region) performing the ritual as one, this post-Temple addendum suggests that not only is the rabbinic version 44 Cohn, “Rabbis as Jurists” and The Memory of the Temple.

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of the traditional law and practice the correct one, but that it applies to the entire people just as the rules of Temple times would have. That a wider embrace of what the rabbis consider appropriate practice will lead to a better future is never explicit in the Mishnah itself, but it does appear in the later text of the Talmud Yerushalmi: “Rabbi Levi said: If Israel would observe one Sabbath properly (ketikanah), the son of David would come” (Ta’anit 64a, 1:1). All of Israel united in the observance of traditional Sabbath ritual—and doing this ritual properly, that is, as the rabbis say—would lead to a better future in the messianic era, to the rebuilding of the Temple “speedily in [their] days” (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8 and Tamid 7:3). Though there never really was a unified practice during the Temple era, the rabbis imagine the past in such a way in order to argue for a future in which all of Israel is unified behind them.

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Power and the (Re)Creation of Collective-Cultural Memory in Early Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah Jack N. Lightstone Brock University

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Who controls the past . . . controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. . . . All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

PART I: INTRODUCTION: FRAMING THE THESIS Over the course of the latter decades of the second century CE and the initial decades of third, the early rabbis in Roman Palestine consolidated themselves into a professional guild1 and proffered members of 1 I use the word “guild” to describe the institutionalized rabbinic movement of the third century, because the term is the most apt in describing what I have concluded are the key features of their sociology within the frame of late Roman social institutions. They very much resemble a collegium, a Roman association, with a strong occupational bent. There seem to be well-defined processes for becoming a member of the group, and commitments, obligations, practices, and rules, the observance of

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their new social formation as highly qualified and authoritative personnel to staff various posts within the government and administration of the Palestinian Jewish Patriarch. Over the same period, the rabbis produced the Mishnah, a legal text the study of which constituted the core curriculum of becoming and remaining a member of the rabbinic guild. This chapter argues that the Mishnah’s pervasive literary and rhetorical features model the privileging of certain types of memory, both in form and in substance, over others. To be a bona fide member of the early rabbinic association required one, together with like others, to devote oneself to the preservation, contemplation, and ramification of these specific types of collective or cultural memories. In so doing Mishnah, or more properly, the lifelong study of the Mishnah, is central to creating and maintaining the social identity that underpinned the early rabbinic guild as a distinct social formation within Palestinian Jewish society. But all this in itself would do little to recommend the members of the early rabbinic guild as agents of patriarchal government over the Palestinian Jewish populous. The rabbis, certainly by the mid-third century, if not before, openly claimed a certain status for their privileged collective memories and for the Mishnah. Why else devote a life of learning to them? They saw them as the completion of God’s revelation to Israel. As the sole or expert purveyors of these special collective memories, who qualified more than them to staff the positions of the patriarchate’s administration? Underlying the aforementioned claims are theoretical and conceptual constructs about the social construction of memory in the individual, collective, or cultural memory within a social formation or community, about socialization, and about the relationship between which constitute the bona fides of remaining a member. The members see the group not as set off apart from society at large. Rather their relationship and contribution to society at large are mediated and facilitated by their membership in the group. It is their vehicle for civic and civil participation. In all this they resemble Greco-Roman associations. I add to this the definite sense that members of the rabbinic group in the third century saw that membership as a professional qualification for employment as retainers and agents in the patriarch’s administration, and would, if they could, assert their monopoly over such employment. In this respect they resemble an occupational association, that is, what came to be known as the guilds in late Roman society.

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personal and social identity. The articulation of these constructs would constitute a chapter in its own right, so I shall not attempt to do so here, but for these few remarks. Among those things binding a group together is a shared normative narrative.2 Whether an accurate, selective rendition of historical events or a fictitious one, or some combination of both, the elements of this narrative comprise a socially constructed collective memory that combines with other elements (such as shared norms and institutions) to create a sufficiently robust common social identity. Is it just a handy metaphor to talk of “memories” when talking about collectives? After all, strictly speaking individuals have memories.3 There is a meaningful sense in which such talk is more than metaphorical, precisely because individual or personal identity and group identity are intertwined. Individuals have an identity that is also founded to some significant degree upon constructed memory and personal narrative. The integration of particularly salient and authoritative constructed shared memories of the group (family, community, people) into those of the individual is also part of the individual’s personal identity formation.4 Indeed, it is part of socialization. And upon such socialization the existence of the group depends.5 2 James A. Sanders, in his Torah and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), redefined the area of canonical criticism in light of this claim. 3 See Martin A. Conway and Christopher W. Pleydell-Pierce, “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System,” Psychological Review 107, no. 2 (2000): 261–288. 4 See Monisha Pasupathi, “The Social Construction of the Personal Past and its Implications for Adult Development,” Psychological Bulletin 127, no. 5 (2001): 651–72. For a relevant collection of essays, see Collective Remembering: Inquiries in Social Construction, ed. David Middleton and Derek Edwards (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1990). Essays representing a broad spectrum of the human science disciplines may be found in Memory, Identity, Community: the Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001). For a critique of memory studies in the humanities, see Wolf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (2002): 179–97. With respect to the field of sociology, see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40. 5 A “classical” sociological framework for conceptualizing the development of social identity and the role of socialization may be found in Peter Berger and Thomas

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Within the early rabbinic guild, study of the Mishnah, with its highly stipulated and delimited types of authoritative memories, seems to have been a central element of the socialization of the rabbinic novice into the group, as well as part of the continuous re-socialization of already full-fledged members of the rabbinic guild. Such then is our thesis, as we turn to the Mishnah itself to see what it privileges in terms of what is worth remembering.

PART II: MEMORY, POWER, AND THE MISHNAH IN THE EARLY RABBINIC GUILD The Mishnah’s Most Pervasive Literary and Rhetorical Traits: Written Production, Memorization, and Oral Transmission6

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It is not entirely uncontroversial to say that the Mishnah is the earliest opus of the rabbinic movement,7 produced and promulgated within the early rabbinic guild near the end of the second century CE. That the authors of the Mishnah worked with both scripture and a body of early rabbinic teachings is most probable. But we are not in a position to say what the extant forms or formulations of these antecedent traditions were. The Mishnah’s authors have pretty much masked that, because of the degree to which they formulated language, as opposed to preserving that of antecedent bits.8 Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). See also Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). 6 There are many issues of modern scholarly debate concerning the Mishnah that do not bear on the issue at hand in this paper. So, I run roughshod over these issues, providing my own perspective solely on those matters most germane to this chapter. 7 Judith Hauptmann, for example, would proffer a somewhat different statement than my own. I do not subscribe to the principle elements of her conclusions. See Judith Hauptman, Rereading the Mishnah (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005). 8 Jacob Neusner, in every work of his on the Mishnah, from Judaism: the Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) on, makes this point and probatively defends it. See, for example, his more recent, Jacob Neusner, “The Mishnah Viewed Whole,” in The Mishnah in Contemporary Perspectives, II, ed. A. J. Avery-Peck and J. Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 3–90. It is certainly borne out by my own work on the rhetoric of the Mishnah, in Jack N. Lightstone, Mishnah and

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The meaning of “produced” in the preceding paragraph is a complex issue on a number of fronts. Rabbinic evidence from the third and subsequent centuries shows that to a significant extent the Mishnah was memorized and promulgated orally,9 a claim that is central to the argument of this chapter. But there is considerable disagreement about whether the Mishnah was produced orally or in written form. And, consequently, there are differing views about whether oral and written transmission of the Mishnah occurred in tandem from the time of its production near the end of the second century until the compilation of the Palestinian Talmud in the early fifth century.10 I lean toward the view that there was a strong cultural penchant within the rabbinic movement to memorize the Mishnah and promulgate it orally. At the the Social Formation of the Early Rabbinic Guild: A Socio-Rhetorical Approach (Waterloo, ON: Wildrid Laurier University Press, 2002). Catherine Hezser endorses this view, and refers to Neusner’s opinion on the matter; see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 430–431.   9 Many passages in post-mishnaic rabbinic texts so portray matters. But more importantly, philological evidence confirms this. Mishnah’s dominant literary forms lend themselves to memorization, and many decades ago, Y. N. Epstein’s study, in Mavo LeNusah HaMishnah (Tel Aviv: Dvir and Magnes Press, 1964), of evidence for a certain fluidity in the Mishnah’s text throughout Late Antiquity are consistent with what one would expect from oral transmission. See especially Martin Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001): Jacob Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah and his many other subsequent works on the Mishnah. Cf. Jacob Neusner, The Memorized Torah, the Mneumonic System of the Mishnah (Chico, CA: Scholars Press: 1985). See also David Kraemer, “The Mishnah,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism: The Late Roman Rabbinic Period, ed. W. D. Davies, S. T. Katz, L. Finkelstein (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 309, where he sides with Martin Jaffee in asserting that the Mishnah was composed as a written text meant to be memorized. See also Elizabeth Alexander, Transmitting Mishnah: The Shaping Influence of Oral Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). In short the penchant for, and valuing of, memorization of the Mishnah, and the fact that the Mishnah’s literary traits expressly facilitate memorization does not preclude the existence of written texts of the Mishnah as well, both at the outset when the Mishnah was produced and during the subsequent centuries of transmission. And I lean toward this latter position, while recognizing the difficulty of probatively settling the matter. 10 Catherine Hezser has provided a full account of the varying modern scholarly opinions on this point in Jewish Literacy, cf. 422–431; see also her essay titled, “The Mishnah and Ancient Book Production,” in The Mishnah in Contemporary Perspectives, II, 167–192.

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same time, the Mishnah’s literary traits bespeak the production of a written text, notwithstanding the fact that the text’s traits expressly facilitate memorization. The degree of formulation (or reformulation) of language, not just redaction, at evidence across the text, together with the consistency of core literary and rhetorical traits throughout11 (notable exceptions aside), to my mind suggest that the Mishnah’s authors did their work in written form. Hence, the cultural preference among the early rabbis for the memorization and oral transmission of a written text must be seen as an important, principled, ideological stance of the early rabbis, since it makes too little sense to do so, when the practicalities of referencing, analyzing, and interpreting a written text would otherwise normally dominate in the literate circles of the late Roman world, including rabbinic circles. This penchant for the memorization and oral promulgation of the Mishnah is not an incidental, peripheral curiosity of the early rabbinic movement because the Mishnah is not just the first opus of the movement. It remains the core opus, as I have stated earlier, until supplanted by the Babylonian Talmud toward the end of the sixth century. To master the Mishnah was to be a rabbi. And almost all rabbinic literature produced between those bookends concerns itself with the explication in one way or another of either the Mishnah or the Hebrew scriptures (or in the case of several documents, like Sifra, drawing the links between scripture and mishnaic dicta12). Later in this discussion we must consider the significance of this ideological preference for memorizing the Mishnah. 11 See Jacob Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah, and Mishnah, An Introduction (Northvale, NJ and London: Aronson Press, 1989); Lightstone, Mishnah and the Social Formation. 12 See, for example, Jacob Neusner, Uniting the Dual Torah: Sifra and the Problem of Mishnah (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Neusner’s views on Sifra have been significantly nuanced and qualified by Howard Apothaker, Sifra, Dibbura deSinai: Rhetorical Formulae, Literary Structures, and Legal Traditions (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003), cf. 401–409; Apothaker argues that some of Sifra does indeed accord with Neusner’s claims about its overall agenda, but other parts do not. Sifre Numbers in part accords with the same agenda; for an example and analysis of a passage from this document, see Jack N. Lightstone, The Rhetoric of the Babylonian Talmud: Its Social Meaning and Context (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 215–35.

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The Mishnah’s Topical Focus, a Deliberate Myopia Earlier, I spoke about selectivity as a necessary aspect of not just personal, but also collective-cultural memory. In the latter instance, it is via this selectivity that individuals come to identify themselves as members of one social formation over another. The early rabbis inherited a biblical literature, the authority of which they were not in a position to buck. Nor would the thought even have occurred to them. What they did was to produce the Mishnah as the Hebrew Bible’s companion, and they imbued the Mishnah with an authority, not equal to scripture (for them, a theological impossibility), but close to that of scripture. Indeed, at some point in the century and a half following the Mishnah’s production, they piggybacked onto their ideological penchant for memorization and oral transmission of the Mishnah the dogma that the traditions captured in the Mishnah’s formulations were themselves orally transmitted through a train of tradents from Moses down to the rabbis.13 This made the Mishnah’s teachings a full, equal, and integral partner with biblical scriptures as an authoritative source of God’s revelation to Moses on Sinai. And it made the rabbis, who alone had mastery of the Mishnah, the sole purveyors of God’s “whole Torah.” That being said, what is important in this discussion is that the Mishnah, scripture’s companion, proffers a very particular “take” on Scripture. And one of the most obvious ways in which it does so is by exercising considerable selectivity in building its agenda when viewed against scripture’s. How so? To even the casual reader, the Hebrew Bible’s literary agenda is broad indeed: • narrative and chronicles about the acts of God, about the People of Israel, and about their leaders and heroes down to the early Persian period in the fifth century CE; 13 The embryonic form of this view is found in Avot. Evidence of the full articulation of the notion of the dual/whole Torah is found in later documents, such as Avot de Rabbi Nathan and b. Meg. 19b.

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• cultic poetry and hymns such as the Psalms and the Song at the Sea in Ex. 15; • “wisdom” as exemplified in such literarily diverse works as Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes; • prophetic/oracular poetry and prose, such as contained in Isaiah and the Apocalypse of Daniel; • one book of love poetry; • a lengthy poetic dirge, Lamentations; • and cultic, civil and criminal legal injunctions portrayed as God’s teachings—torot, huqim, mishpatim—(almost) exclusively mediated through Moses. The appearance of Moses’ exclusivity as the agent of YHWH’s revelation of his law to Israel has been achieved by the Bible’s authors and editors by cramming almost all of the legal content of the Hebrew Bible into the narrative about Moses’ career as leader of the people. That is why by the fifth century BCE, the Torah of Moses came to mean interchangeably (1) Moses’ legal teachings, and (2) the first five books of the Hebrew Bible from the story of creation to the story of Moses’ death. This phenomenon is a powerful element of the social formation of the Jerusalem/Judean community associated with the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah as it asserted its claims first to legitimacy against, and soon after its hegemony over, their Israelite competition for control of Judean society and its cult. With one notable exception (tractate Avot), the Mishnah’s agenda is overwhelmingly legal. Moreover, whether biblical verses are cited or not—and usually they are not—the legal injunctions of the Torah of Moses constitute the set of axioms upon which the Mishnah builds. This is why, for example, the Mishnah’s tractates treat the Jerusalem-Temple cult, and the civil, criminal, and cultic institutions of administration and national governance associated with the Temple’s hegemony over Israel as if they were contemporary realities.14 And all 14 See the essay by Naftali Cohn in this volume as well as his The Memory of the Temple in the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

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of this, the Mishnah’s authors/redactors have done a century or more after that world’s historical collapse. The Mishnah, however, proffers one important qualifier to the above. It imagines rabbis telling everyone what the law is and is not. The rabbis, for the Mishnah, are the ultimate purveyors and interpreters of the Torah of Moses. Professionally, they are Moses’ heirs as pertains to all matters of law and praxis.15 Such is the upshot of the Mishnah’s myopia with respect to scripture’s agenda, namely, the Mishnah’s focus on legal matters over against the breadth of biblical literature. None of this is to say that the early rabbis, or specifically those who produced and promulgated the Mishnah, were uninterested in, or did not revere and study the entirety of the biblical tradition. There is more than ample evidence that they did. But in the movement’s first magnum opus, the one that the early rabbis issued as the core curriculum within the rabbinic guild, it was on the legal content of scripture that they focused their attention and upon which they advocated devoting especial intellectual energy, including the extraordinary effort required to commit the Mishnah to memory. This is a highly salient element of their foundational professional-guild identity and initial social formation, precisely because it could have been otherwise. After all, we have much Judaic literature from the Roman world that is otherwise, that appropriates the biblical tradition in other ways and does not focus exclusively on legal matters founded in biblical law. Yes, legal documents abound among the Dead Sea Scrolls too, notably, the Community Rule (1QS), the Code of Damascus (CD), the Temple Scroll, and the texts 15 The opening chapters of Avot assert this claim outright, but Avot is generally recognized as a later (third century) addition to the Mishnah. We cannot say for certain what the historical relationship was between the nascent rabbinic movement in the latter part of the second century and the Pharisees of the first century. But any scholar of the Gospel of Matthew will, in light of this discussion, immediately think of the Matthean passage (23:2) that states that the Pharisees “sit in the seat of Moses.” There is an archaeological treatment of, and controversy about, whether stone seats that occupy a prominent place in ancient synagogues (e.g., excavated at Chorazin and Capernaum) are to be deemed the “seat of Moses.” To my knowledge, no inscription so designates these seats. The stone chair in question at Chorazin, for example, bears an inscription honoring one Yudan the son of Ishmael as a benefactor of the synagogue.

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of 4QMMT. However, the Community Rule and the Code of Damascus focus on rules governing their respective communities; they are not primarily studies of Pentateuchal Law, as can be said of the Temple Scroll and parts of 4QMMT. Moreover, much else in the Qumran collection is not sectarian “studies” of Pentateuchal law. The Genesis Apocryphon, the War Scroll, the pesharim, for example, bespeak of a wider range of foci, other than just biblical law. And the same may be said for the vast majority of “post-biblical” Ancient Judaic writing outside of early rabbinic circles. So it is not self-evident at all that the early rabbis should produce as their foundational document a Mishnah. And if it is not self-evident that it should be so, then it is highly significant that it is so. That is why one cannot found a cogent objection to the foregoing conclusion by stating, “Yes, but the Mishnah focuses on the legal content of scripture, (only) because the Mishnah is a legal opus.” Such an argument is utterly circular, and without force. How so? It begs the question of why the early rabbinic movement produced the Mishnah as its foundational text and core curriculum for some 400 years, when patently they could have done something else (as many non-rabbinic, post-biblical texts as well as much post-mishnaic, rabbinic literature itself show). And the answer to the question has, to my mind, much to do with the following claim: the Mishnah’s particular traits are what they are, because the Mishnah is authored as a reflection of, and a model for, a particular “professionally-oriented,” institutionalized, social identity—the identity of being a member of the rabbinic guild of masters. The ethos of memorizing and studying the Mishnah, above all else as a rabbinic activity, is the mechanism by which novices are socialized into that identity. To sum up matters thus far—memory and memorization of biblical law and of the Mishnah above all else are at the foundation (1) of the creation of the rabbinic guild, (2) of the self-understanding of the early members of that guild, that is, their professional identity, and (3) their own conceptions of their exclusive authority over others, which a little later in Avot 1 is re-cast in their self-representation as the true heirs of Moses. How, and over how long (and, indeed, whether) others in Palestine or the Jewish communities beyond came to recognize their claims as legitimate is another matter entirely and beyond the scope of this paper.

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Rabbi x said: Remembering the master’s teachings as a core guild value It is not just the non-legal content of biblical tradition that is sidelined by the Mishnah’s focus. The Mishnah seems uninterested in speculating about history and its meaning overall. The Mishnah is uninterested in any sustained post-biblical historical narrative. There is not a single extended historical narrative about the Persian period following Ezra and Nememiah, or the Hellenistic Era and the Maccabean dynasty, or the history of the Jewish People under Roman Rule, in or outside of the Land of Israel. More curious still for a document that was produced and promulgated to be foundational for a newly institutionalized rabbinic movement, the Mishnah has no sustained biographical narratives of the movement’s founders or of those who prefigured the rabbis. There is no biography, short or long of Hillel, Shammai, Rabban Gamaliel I, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, Gamaliel II, Rabbis Aqiva, Eliezer, Joshua, Simon bar Yohai, Judah, Meir, Yose, Simeon ben Gamaliel, or of Rabbi Judah the Prince, to whom the authorship of the Mishnah is (honorifically) attributed. So for those studying and memorizing the Mishnah, there is no part played in “remembering” the “lives” of the first rabbis or their predecessors as a vehicle for forging a shared social identity as rabbis. Again, one cannot respond to this observation by objecting: But the Mishnah is a legal document, so why would you expect it to be interested in the “lives of the early rabbis”? This is just one more question of the same order as noted earlier. Moreover, it is all the more significant that the Mishnah contains no “lives of the rabbis,” because the names of these early rabbinic masters appear throughout the Mishnah, from beginning to end. Throughout the Mishnah, specific legal rulings are attributed to named rabbinic authorities. In some instances, an attributed legal ruling stands on its own as the mishnaic legal view on the matter in question. These are independent sayings. “Independent sayings present dicta . . . which are intelligible on their own and which do not stand in close literary relationship to other named or anonymous opinions.”16 Most often, such 16 Jack N. Lightstone, Yose the Galilean: Traditions in Mishnah-Tosefta (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 154.

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sayings link a legal opinion to a rabbinic tradent by means of one of two attributional formulae: Rabbi x says + legal opinion; or Legal opinion + the words of Rabbi x But much more frequently, attributed rulings appear when the Mishnah registers dissent: • either dissent from an unattributed ruling; • or dissenting views of two named authorities; • or dissent from a ruling attributed simply to the anonymous “sages.”

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The registration of dissent through attribution to named rabbinic figures is cast in the Mishnah in a very tight range of literary variations of the “dispute form.”17 And the formulation of what is attributed to named rabbinic masters tends often to be laconic and stylized in the extreme—showing balance, parallelism, assonance, and alliteration more suggestive of poetry than of prose. The literary style is so tight and lean that one might describe it as rabbinic legal haiku. It is worth looking at a few examples. M. Ket. 3:3 (my own translation) provides two opposing rulings as apodoses to one and the same protasis that defines a “case.” A. [Concerning] a girl who was betrothed and divorced [and subsequently raped]— 17 The identification in the Mishnah of the variations of the dispute form is, in my opinion, one of two key empirical observations that sparked a revolution of mind for Jacob Neusner at the beginning of the 1970s. The other observation is that narratives about rabbinic figures (other than legal precedent stories), tend to appear in later rabbinic compilations and are for the most part absent from the Mishnah and the Tosefta, and these narratives do not amount to anything like a “life of rabbi x.” The latter observation is reflected first in Neusner’s Development of a Legend (Leiden: Brill, 1970), which in effect repudiates his Life of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai (Leiden: Brill 1968). The former is spelled out first in his Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1971).

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B. Rabbi Yose the Galilean says: She has no fine [that is, the rapist is not fined], C. Rabbi Aqiva says: She has a fine, and her fine is hers. —‫נערה שנתארסה ונתגרשה‬ ;‫רבי יוסי הגלילי אומר; אין לה קנס‬ .‫ וקנסה של עצמה‬,‫רבי עקיבה אומר; יש לה קנס‬

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Even in the English translation, the penchant for repetition of exact language in the sayings attributed to Yose (at B) and Aqiva (at C) is evident. Only the shift from the negative particle to the positive—“has not” (‫ )אין‬vs. “has” (‫—)יש‬carries the weight of the dispute. In the “purest” formulations of a dispute, the second clause of the saying attributed to Aqiva (“and her fine is hers”) would not appear, since it addresses an issue not raised in A or B at all. That being said, one finds assonance and alliteration between the second clause of Aqiva’s saying and the protasis, (‫ שנתארסה ונתגרשה‬vs. ‫)וקנסה של עצמה‬. Perhaps the last clause is a later gloss, perhaps not. Who can say? Let us look at another dispute pericope, this time from m. Ber. 2:3. A. One who recites the shema,18 and does not [do so loud enough] to cause oneself to hear [one’s own words]— B. has fulfilled [one’s obligation to recite the shema]. C. Rabbi Yose says: One has not fulfilled [one’s obligation to recite the shema]. D. One recited [the shema], and did not precisely enunciate its letters— E. Rabbis Yose says: [Such a one] has fulfilled [one’s obligation to recite the shema]; F. Rabbi Judah says: [Such a one] has not fulfilled [one’s obligation to recite the shema].

18 That is, the recitation in the morning and evening prayer services of Deut. 6:4–9, 11:13–21 and Num. 15:37–41.

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,‫הקורא את שמע ולא השמיע לאוזנו‬ ;‫יצא‬ .‫רבי יוסי אומר; לא יצא‬ ,‫קרא ולא דיקדק באותותיה‬ ;‫ יצא‬,‫רבי יוסי אומר‬ .‫ לא יצא‬,‫רבי יהודה אומר‬

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Here we have two variations of the dispute form: a protasis (A) and anonymous ruling (B), with an opposing ruling attributed to Rabbi Yose (C); and another protasis (D), followed by opposing rulings attributed to Yose (E) and Judah (F). The highly laconic, repetitive, and balanced language of the apodases or rulings is evident. All comprise one verb in the perfect, third person, singular form—with or without the negative, “not.” The two protases (A and D) also exhibit balance and repetition. Both open with a form of the verb “recite” (albeit the first in the substantive participial form, the other in the perfect tense) followed by the negative, “and did not.” The balance and assonance within A itself (‫ שמע‬vs. ‫השמיע‬, shema vs. hishmi‘a) simply cannot be rendered into the English language. This is not the appropriate place to present and discuss examples from the Mishnah of each of the several variations of the dispute form. But I can schematically represent the principal variations quite quickly. They are: 1. Circumstance Rabbi x says + ruling (or: operative verb) Rabbi y says + opposing ruling (or: operative verb) 2. Circumstance + ruling Rabbi x says + opposing ruling 3. Circumstance + ruling, the words of Rabbi x And Rabbi y says + ruling

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4. Circumstance Rabbi x says + ruling And the sages say + opposing ruling

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5. Rabbi x says + circumstance + ruling Rabbi y says + opposing ruling M. Ket 3:3 is a case in point of variation No. 1. The two disputes of m. Ber. 2:3 are instances of variation No. 2 and No. 1 respectively. However, a glance at all five schemata suffices to indicate that the same penchant for laconic, balanced phrases showing alliteration and assonance are just as easily achieved. And, indeed, they very often evince these traits. I have focused on the stylized language of the rulings attributed to named rabbinic masters. But it is worth saying something of the formulation of the legal circumstances, the protases, to which the rulings are cast to respond. Toward the end of the 1970s, Neusner came to the conclusion that these too were formulations of the penultimate redactors of the Mishnah, since a series of protases on a single topic often tend to be similarly formulated in terms of language and literary traits. This contributes to the sense of unity and coherence of the group of individual pericopes (mishnayot) comprising a topical essay (a “chapter”). My own work on the literary-rhetorical traits of the Mishnah is probative in this regard.19 A series of protases abstracted from m. Gittin, chapter 1 show this quite clearly: 1:1 One who brings a writ [of divorce] from a Mediterranean province . . . Also one who brings [a writ of divorce] from Reqem and from HaHeger . . . 19 Lightstone, Mishnah and the Social Formation, 33–78; see Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah.

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. . . only the one who brings [a writ of divorce] from a Mediterranean province, And one who takes and one who brings [a writ of divorce] from province to province in the Mediterranean provinces . . . 1:3 One who brings a writ [of divorce from one region to another] within the Land of Israel . . . One who brings a writ [of divorce] from a Mediterranean province . . . 2:1 One who brings a writ [of divorce] from a Mediterranean province, and said . . . ,‫ המביא גט ממדינת הים‬1:1 ‫אף המביא מרקם ומן ההגר‬ ‫אלא המביא ממדינת הים‬ ‫והמוליך והמביא ממדינה למדינה במדינת הים‬ ‫ המביא גט בארץ ישראל‬1:3 ‫המביא גט ממדינת הים‬

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‫ המביא גט ממדינת הים ואמר‬2:1 The protases that provide the markers of the beginning, conclusion, and intermediate shank of the topical “chapter” amount to just two substantives formed from the heh-emphaticus and the third person singular participle (“one who brings” and “one who takes”), and one or another iteration of the phrase “writ from a Mediterranean province.” When these markers end, so does the larger topical unit, which deals with the declaration and validation of the witnesses to the writ. m. Gittin 2:2 and following go on to another, quite unrelated matter, the materials used to write a valid writ of divorce. Therefore, much of the language of the protases of individual pericopes within a topical

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“chapter” is itself highly formalized and stylized, and, more important still, must come from the formulators of the entire “chapter” (and, therefore, in all probability, from the penultimate authors of the Mishnah tractates). What is the upshot of all of this? As Neusner and Green20 pointed out more than two decades ago, the language attributed to named rabbinic figures is the highly laconic and stylized language of the penultimate authors of the Mishnah, and so too is the language comprising the cases upon which the named rabbis have allegedly ruled. Consequently, even if the rulings attributed to Yose or Judah or Yose the Galilean have some basis in legal traditions faithfully passed on by their disciple-tradents—something that we can never really prove or disprove—they cannot have ruled on legal circumstances exactly defined as the Mishnah does. For not only is so much of the language of the protases and apodoses the highly stylized words of the penultimate authors of the Mishnah, but also in so extensively undertaking to (re)formulate language used to covey the legal issues about which the Mishnah and named rabbis are seen to rule, the penultimate authors have determined the very substance of the pericope as well. In short, one cannot imagine a probable historical instance where what is attributed in the Mishnah’s disputes to named rabbis is an actual response to the Mishnah’s precise formulation of the legal issue.21 20 This observation figures heavily in Neusner, Judaism, the Evidence of the Mishnah. See William S. Green, “What’s in a Name?,” in Approaches to the Study of Ancient Judaism, vol. 1, ed. William Scott Green (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979). See also Jack N. Lightstone, “Names without ‘Lives’: Why No ‘Lives of the Rabbis’ in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” Studies in Religion 19, no. 1 (1990): 43–57; and “When Speech is No Speech: The Problem of Early Rabbinic Rhetoric as Discourse,” Semeia 34 (1985): 53–58. 21 As Neusner once put it to me in conversation, although with reference to another Mishnah passage: “Do we think that Judah and Yose were in a room and some third party said: ‘One recited [the shema], and did not precisely enunciate its letters,’ to which Yose said: ‘has fulfilled one’s obligation,’ and Judah responded, ‘has not fulfilled his obligation?’” This is not impossible, but so highly improbable as to not warrant serious consideration. Of course, Yose and Judah might have at various times met face-to-face, but the language of the Mishnah as formulated cannot be the result of any such historical meeting.

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It is, then, noteworthy that there is no attempt in the use of the dispute form to portray or imply that the two historical figures are disputing (or disputed) one another in “real time.” Two opposing opinions are being registered, cast in highly stylized form. In fact, this is nothing like how real people talk. Nor would any fictionalized account of how people talk look like this either. Nor would any fictionalized narrative context likely result in dialogue of this nature. In sum, it would be utterly preposterous to see in mishnaic disputes any attempt at narratization. Rather, the dispute form, at least, represents a shunning of narratization. All of this begs a question. Given that a Yose and a Judah were (in all likelihood) important historical figures, and their views patently of importance to the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah, why in the Mishnah’s disputes have all vestiges of their personal language been so eradicated and so harmonized and homogenized with the language not only of other attributed rulings, but also with the anonymous voice of the Mishnah? Moreover, because the dispute form is used rather liberally throughout the Mishnah, and since the literary-rhetorical traits at hand are in evidence not only in this pericope or in the case of these disputants, but at many, if not most, junctures in the Mishnah where the dispute form is used, the question holds generally for the bulk of the Mishnah. We are well beyond asking whether this is how the Mishnah is formulated; it is far more salient to think about why. What do our observations suggest by way of a response? First, they serve to emphasize and reinforce the Mishnah’s general disinterest in histories and biography, real or fictional. Second, while devaluing biography of foundational rabbinic masters, as well as their personal traits, the Mishnah emphasizes the importance of preserving traditions about individuals’ legal rulings.22 After all, the Mishnah could have been written without disputes. It could have conveyed only those rulings supported by the anonymous framers of the text. Indeed, the unattributed rulings in the 22 I do not mean to imply that one can accept the historical accuracy of the attributions of legal positions to named individuals. That is another matter entirely—one that is not relevant to our analysis.

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Mishnah are more numerous than the attributed ones.23 In fact, a Mishnah that differed in this manner from the one in hand would more easily have stood proxy for an early rabbinic law code, such as the one that Maimonides fashioned in his Mishneh Torah nearly a millennium later. Attribution of dissenting rulings to named early rabbinic authorities is one of the literary-rhetorical traits that gives the Mishnah its decidedly “un-code-like” literary appearance. Moreover, a Mishnah without disputes and named disputants might have been easier to memorize. But the Mishnah’s framers expressly did not do that. Rather, it is only the fullness and texture of the early rabbis’ individual “lives” that are veiled, including any personal texture of their language. Third, a value is placed on all rabbinic masters appearing to speak in the same stylized manner. They are all made to speak like some prototypical (or archetypal) rabbi—all in the same voice, with the same cadences, and same vocabulary. And for novices of the rabbinic guild, for whom the study (and memorization) of the Mishnah is paramount, that voice, cadence, and vocabulary thereby becomes normative, formative, and socially unifying. Post-mishnaic rabbinic circles promoted the memorization of the Mishnah. The Mishnah’s literary and rhetorical traits seem to facilitate memorization—we might say deliberately so. And the names and “essential” legal heritage (only) of major rabbinic figures of the several generations preceding the Mishnah’s production are also to be committed to memory by those who study the Mishnah in order to take up, and retain, a place in the social formation of the early rabbinic guild.

Said to him Rabbi x: Rabbis’ “debates” Thus far I have stressed the lack of narratization in the Mishnah’s reduction of the lives of Rabbinism’s historic, foundational figures to highly laconic and stylized legal “sayings” attributed to named rabbis in the mishnaic dispute-form. There are, however, two other mishnaic forms in 23 See Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah.

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which teachings attributed to named early rabbis do appear in what might be deemed as minimalist narrative. They are the “debate” and the “precedent story.” If the relationship between memory and identity-formation (personal or collective) is closely related to the construction of narrative, then the peculiar traits of the mishnaic debate and precedent story bespeak a very idiomatic and focused identity-structure within the early rabbinic guild. Let me begin with the debate form. Debates are nowhere nearly as common in the Mishnah as disputes. When debates do appear, they almost always follow upon a mishnaic dispute. So, not all disputes engender debates. But virtually all debates are literarily dependent upon disputes. As we did in the previous section, I will present an example of a typical mishnaic dispute-debate and then map schematically its fundamental formal traits. M. Nega‘im 10:1–2 provides an apt doublet. 10:1 A. The balding spots [of the head and beard] are rendered unclean over a two week period, B. 1. and with [the appearance of] two symptoms: 2. [viz.,] with [the appearance of] thin yellow hairs [within the circumference of the spot] 3. and with [the appearance of] spreading [of the area affected]. C. “‘With [the appearance of] thin yellow hairs’ [means] afflicted [with] short [yellow hairs],” the words of Rabbi Aqiva. D. Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri says, “Even long [yellow hairs suffice].” E. Said Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri, 1. “What [is the meaning of what] they commonly say: This staff is thin; this reed is thin? 2. [It signifies that] thin [means either] afflicted [with] short [yellow hairs], 3. or thin [means] afflicted [with] long [yellow hairs].” F. Said to him Rabbi Aqiva, 1. “Before we learn [i.e., draw conclusions] from the reed, let us learn from hair [itself],

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2. [about which they commonly say:] So-and-so’s hair is thin— 3. [signifying that] thin [means] afflicted [with] short [yellow hairs], 4. and thin [does] not [also mean] afflicted [with] long [yellow hairs].” 10:2 A. 1. “Thin yellow hair [in the circumference of the bald spot] renders unclean, 2. [whether the thin yellow hairs] are gathered [together within the spot], 3. or spread [throughout], 4. [whether] forming a circle [within in the spot], 5. or not forming a circle, 6. [whether] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance], 7. or not preceding [the bald spot’s appearance],” the words of Rabbi Judah. B. Rabbi Simeon says, “[The thin yellow hair] render unclean only [when] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance].” C. Said Rabbi Simeon, 1. “And [lo] it is reasonable [from an argument a fortiori]; 2. if [in the case of the appearance of] white hairs, [with respect to] which [the presence in the affected spot of] other [normal colored] hair does not forefend from its [i.e., the white hair’s] power [to render one unclean], [nonetheless, the white hair] renders [one] unclean only [when] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance], 3. [then in the case of the appearance of] thin yellow hair, [with respect to] which [the presence in the affected spot of] other [normal colored] hair does forefend from its [i.e., the thin yellow hair’s] power [to render one unclean], is it [then] not [all the more so] reasonable that [thin yellow hair] renders [one] unclean only [when] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance]?”

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D. Said [to him] Rabbi Judah, 1. “[In] every case where one is required to say [i.e., rule, that abnormally colored hair renders one unclean only when] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance], it [scripture explicitly] states: ‘Preceding.’ 2. But [concerning] the bald spot, about which it is said [in scripture], ‘and there not be in it yellow hair’ (Leviticus 13: 32)— 3. [the appearance therein of yellow hair] renders unclean [whether] preceding [the bald spot’s appearance], 4. or not preceding [the bald spot’s appearance].” 10:1 ‫ בשיער‬.‫ בשיער צהוב דק ובפסיון‬,‫ מיטמאין בשני שבועות; בשני סימנין‬,‫הנתקים‬ ;‫ דברי רבי עקיבה‬,‫ לקוי קצר‬,‫צהוב דק‬ .‫ אפילו ארוך‬,‫רבי יוחנן בן נורי אומר‬

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‫ או‬,‫ דק לקוי קצר‬,‫ דק קנה זה‬,‫דק מקל זה‬--‫ מה הלשון אומר‬,‫אמר רבי יוחנן בן נורי‬ .‫דק לקוי ארוך‬ ‫ דק שיערו של‬:‫ נלמוד מן השיער‬,‫ עד שאנו למדין מן הקנה‬,‫אמר לו רבי עקיבה‬ .‫ ולא דק לקוי ארוך‬,‫דק לקוי קצר‬--‫פלוני‬ 10:2 ‫ דברי‬,‫ ושלא הפוך‬,‫ הפוך‬,‫ ושלא מבוצר‬,‫ מבוצר‬,‫ ומפוזר‬,‫שיער צהוב דק מטמא מכונס‬ ;‫רבי יהודה‬ .‫ אינו מטמא אלא הפוך‬,‫רבי שמעון אומר‬ ‫ אינו‬,‫ שאין שיער אחר מציל מידו‬,‫ מה אם שיער לבן‬,‫ ודין הוא‬,‫אמר רבי שמעון‬ ‫ אינו דין שלא יטמא‬,‫ שיש שיער אחר מציל מידו‬,‫שיער צהוב דק‬--‫מטמא אלא הפוך‬ .‫אלא הפוך‬ ‫ אמר הפוך; אבל הנתק שנאמר בו «ולא‬,‫ כל מקום שצריך לומר הפוך‬,‫אמר רבי יהודה‬ .‫ ושלא הפוך‬,‫מטמא הפוך‬--)‫לב‬,‫היה בו שיער צהוב» (ויקרא יג‬ Schematically, both dispute-debates follow the same formal pattern. Circumstances + ruling, the words of Rabbi x Rabbi y says + opposing ruling.

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Said Rabbi y + argument in support of y’s position Said (with or without: to him) Rabbi x + argument in support of x’s position

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There are several variations of the debate form (just as there are of the dispute form), but these variations have little significance for this paper. Rarely, a debate may go ‘two rounds’; usually they are one-round affairs. Commonly, nothing in the debate form itself signals who has won the round. Since post-mishnaic rabbinic texts sometimes needed to extract normative rulings from mishnaic disputes and debates, later texts devised some standard rules of thumb for doing so. And some of these rules are the result of keen observation of the Mishnah and the induction of some principles from multiple examples. However, to repeat my point—the formulaic traits of the dispute-debate are themselves of little help. Just as both disputants’ views are formally speaking appropriate (even if by necessity only one ruling can ultimately be correct), so in the debate form, both arguments are, prima facie, cogent. What is the case, however, is that there seems to be a limited number of types of arguments that are used in mishnaic debates. Several of the most common are represented in our sample texts. They are: 1) arguments from analogy (of which arguments a fortiori and a minore are subcategories); and 2) arguments from scripture. An argument from analogy generally uses some version of the following form: If with respect to case a, which has characteristic b, the law is c, then with respect to case a’, which has characteristic b’, the law should also/should not be c.

Whether an argument from analogy lends itself to being cast as an argument a fortiori or a minore depends upon the relative “strengths” of characteristics b and b’. Arguments from scripture simply adduce proof texts, with or without some interpretive gloss. Moreover, the two forms

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of normative argument are not mutually exclusive, since arguments from analogy may also appeal to scriptural data, as when characteristics b and b’ are replaced with scriptural verses, as in:

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If with respect to case a, regarding which scripture says b, the law is c, then with respect to case a’, regarding which scripture says b’, the law should also/should not be c.

Again, then, in the mishnaic debate we are dealing with something that is highly stylized. The broader range and richness of how people really converse or argue their points is reduced to a limited number of formulaic possibilities. As with disputes, the language of debate is highly laconic—generally, not a feature of living prose. I began this subsection by saying that debates, unlike disputes, represent some level of narratization. But to say that the level of narratization is low is an understatement, since one and only one formulaic word of the debate form must carry in its entirety the weight of that apparent narratization. It is the word “said” (sometimes “said to him”). The present participle (“says”) of the dispute form is turned into the perfect (“said”). That is the sum total of it. In the end, therefore, much of what we have said of the significance of the mishnaic dispute holds as well for the mishnaic debate. This with one important addition—the debate models authoritative forms of reasoning for or against a legal position, although it does so in a very stylized and highly laconic fashion. The authority for these stylized and formalized modes of reasoning derives from the attribution of these arguments to named rabbinic masters. This is important, because as in the case of mishnaic disputes, it need not be this way. Arguments for or against a legal position could just as easily have been presented anonymously, in the same fashion that most of the Mishnah’s rulings bear no attribution at all to named rabbis. Again we see that the memory of the founders of the rabbinic guild is paramount. For the Mishnah’s framers and students we must say that beyond the memory of the Pentateuch, and especially of its legal content, the memory of the several generations of rabbis immediately preceding the Mishnah’s production appears foundational. But it is an alleged

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memory of very much reduced persons. They are reduced to the highly formalized legal rulings attributed to them, and the few formalized, laconic arguments presented as the defense of their rulings. The latter give the appearance only of a more personalized, individualized narrative by the simplest rhetorical-literary device: the use of the verb “to say” in the perfect rather than in the present participial form. That is it. By these means, whatever memories existed of a cadre of historical individuals, each rich in their own individuality, blend into some formalized, highly restricted model of the ideal rabbinic mind.

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There was the incident involving Rabbi x, who was . . . I come now to the last mishnaic literary form that I intend to discuss in this paper: the precedent story. Precedent stories in the Mishnah evince the highest degree of narratization of any of the literary forms presented thus far. By my count, there are roughly one hundred of them in the Mishnah (give or take ten). (My impression is that precedent stories are more common in the Tosefta than in the Mishnah, just as are instances of the debate form.) When we commonly think of memories, we tend to think especially of stories that have meaning for us as individuals or for communities of which we feel a part. The selection and construction of the former is an important factor in our construction of personal identity, and the selection and construction of the latter plays an integral role in the formation of group identity. So one would think that precedent stories in the Mishnah should tell us much about shared identity within the earliest rabbinic guild, for which study of the Mishnah was the sine qua non of being a member. As I have done in previous sections, permit me to cite several typical mishnaic precedent stories, together with the immediate literary contexts in which they appear. Let us look, therefore, at m. Gittin 1:5 and 4:7 in their entirety. 1:5 A. Any writ that has upon it [the signature of] a Samaritan witness

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B. is unfit, C. except for writs [of divorce] of women and manumission papers of slaves. D. 1.  It once happened (‫)מעשה‬ 2. that (‫ )ש‬they brought before Rabban Gamaliel 3. in (‫ )ב‬Kefar Otnai a writ [of divorce] of a woman, 4. and (‫ )ו‬its witnesses were Samaritan witnesses, 5. and (‫ )ו‬he declared [it] fit E. Any bonds issuing from [court] bureaus of the gentiles— F. even though their signatories are gentiles— G. are fit, H. except for writs [of divorce] of women and manumission papers of slaves. I. Rabbi Simeon says: Also these are fit. J. They specified [that the latter were unfit] only when they were done in a non-professional tribunal.

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1:5 .‫ חוץ מגיטי נשים ושיחרורי עבדים‬,‫כל גט שיש עליו עד כותי—פסול‬ ;‫ והיו עדיו עדי כותים‬,‫מעשה שהביאו לפני רבן גמליאל לכפר עותנאי גט אישה‬ .‫והכשיר‬ ‫ חוץ‬,‫כשרים‬--‫אף על פי שחותמיהן גויים‬--‫כל השטרות העולות בערכיות של גויים‬ ;‫מגיטי נשים ושיחרורי עבדים‬ .‫ אלא בזמן שנעשו בהדיוט‬,‫לא הוזכרו‬--‫ כולם כשרים‬,‫רבי שמעון אומר‬ 4:7 A. One who sends forth [i.e., divorces] his wife, on account of [her having gained] a bad reputation [Bertinoro: for fornication] B. may not bring [her] back [in order to remarry her]. C. On account of a vow [Bertinoro: made by his wife that he will not tolerate]— D. [he] may not bring [her] back. E. Rabbi Judah says: [On account of] any vow that many know [about], F. [he] may not bring [her] back,

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G. and [on account of any vow] that many did not know [about], H. [he] may bring [her] back. I. Rabbi Meir says: [On account of] any vow that requires examination by a sage [i.e., only a sage, upon examination, may annul her vow], J. [he] may not bring [her] back, K. and [on account of any vow] that does not require examination by a sage [i.e., her husband may himself annul her vow, because it does not please him], L. [he] may bring [her] back. M. Said Rabbi Eleazar: They forbade [him taking her back] only on account of this [i.e., the case of a vow that would require a sage to annul it, as specified by Rabbi Meir, and not upon the other grounds mentioned earlier]. N. 1. Said Rabbi Yose the son of Rabbi Judah: An incident once happened (‫)מעשה‬ 2. in (‫ )ב‬Sidon 3. concerning (‫ )ב‬one 4. who (‫ )ש‬said to his wife: I swear that I shall divorce you— 5. and (‫ )ו‬he divorced her [and subsequently repented of his decision], 6. and (‫ )ו‬the sages permitted him to take her back [in marriage], 7. by reason of [the merit to contribute to] the mending of the world. 4:7 ;‫ לא יחזיר‬,‫המוציא את אשתו משום שם רע‬ .‫ לא יחזיר‬,‫משום נדר‬ .‫ יחזיר‬,‫ לא יחזיר; ושלא ידעו בו רבים‬,‫ כל נדר שידעו בו רבים‬,‫רבי יהודה אומר‬ ;‫ לא יחזיר‬,‫ כל נדר שהוא צריך חקירת חכם‬,‫רבי מאיר אומר‬ .‫ יחזיר‬,‫ושאינו צריך חקירת חכם‬ .‫ לא אסרו אלא מפני זה‬,‫אמר רבי אלעזר‬ ,‫ קונם שאני מגרשיך‬,‫ מעשה בצידן באחד שאמר לאשתו‬,‫אמר רבי יוסי ברבי יהודה‬ .‫ מפני תיקון העולם‬,‫וגירשה; והתירו לו חכמים שיחזירנה‬

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Before dealing with the literary-narrative traits of these two mishnaic precedent stories, let me talk briefly of their function in context. In the case of m. Gittin 1:5, the precedent story (D1–D5) provides warrant for the anonymous ruling at C, in which writs of divorce and manumissions are deemed exempt from the general rule given in A-B. The next section of the pericope (specifically E to I) is the literary and substantive continuation of A-C, now with the force of gentiles’ courts being at issue rather than Samaritans. The attributed opinion at I produces a dispute, and J (perhaps also intended to be read as attributed to Rabbi Simeon) provides an explanatory gloss for I. The role of the precedent story in m. Gittin 4:7 is very different. Unlike the case of m. Gittin 1:5, the precedent story (N1–N7) of 4:7 is topically related to the rest of the pericope, but is substantively apart from it. Here the story concerns not a wife’s vow, the topic of the shank of the passage, but a husband’s vow. With the story we have moved on to a new circumstance that differs from the group of cases considered in A-M. The story is, as it were, a pericope unto itself, within the larger topical frame of the “chapter.” Indeed, m. Gittin 4:8 moves on to the next theme of the “chapter.” So the story effectively ends the consideration of vows, whether by husband or wife, by supplementing what precedes it. We have, then, in our examples two different mishnaic precedent stories performing two distinct functions. Now let us turn to the formal literary features of precedent stories, as represented by our exemplars. First, it goes without saying that they are short. They would hardly fit anyone’s normal understanding of what counts as a story.24 They are bare bones—not quite as laconic as the Mishnah’s anonymous rulings, sayings and disputes, 24 There is no question that Moshe Simon-Shoshan takes a rather different view of narrative discourse in the Mishnah. He sees narrative as far more central in the Mishnah than I tend to do. But I would maintain that in the second part of his recent book, Stories of the Law: Narrative Discourse and the Construction of Authority in the Mishnah (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2012), he treats several of the most elaborated narratives in the Mishnah. His analyses of these are insightful. But I maintain that the formal norms for the precedent stories in the Mishnah are as I present them in this section of the paper. And these norms are stark when compared with pre-mishnaic narrative traditions in Judaic literature that the rabbis would have inherited.

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but not much more elaborated either. Second, they include three of the core elements common to any attributed ruling in the Mishnah: a very brief statement of the legal circumstances; a ruling; an attribution of the ruling to a named rabbinic figure or to the anonymous sages. Sometimes is it is the behavior of the rabbi or the sages that conveys the substance of the ruling. Often the ruling is attributed to the named rabbi or the sages in exactly the same fashion as would happen in the Mishnah outside of precedent stories. The latter is the case in our two exemplars. So far, then, there is nothing story-like about the literary features of our two stories. What gives them the flavor of a story is the following:

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• the use of one word—[an] incident [happened] (‫;)מעשה‬ • followed by one or both of two prefixes—‫ ב‬or ‫—ש‬connoting or denoting, as appropriate, the actors, the time and/or the place; • the conjunction, ‫ו‬, is then used, just as it is throughout the Mishnah outside of precedent stories, to concatenate elements of circumstance in order to define a “case” that requires a ruling; • the conjunction, ‫ו‬, is used once more to join to the foregoing some authoritative action or ruling by a rabbinic sage. Here, then, is the schema: ‫ מעשה‬+ ‫ ב‬and/or ‫ ש‬+ dramatis personae and/ or place + ‫ ו‬+ case circumstances [repeat as needed] + ‫ ו‬+ ruling or act indicative of a ruling. Presto, we have a mishnaic precedent story. With these elements and the formularies that link them, one has covered, in my estimate, 90% of the Mishnah’s precedent stories. Moreover, it would be rather easy using these formal elements to turn a mishnaic ruling, whether unattributed or attributed to a named rabbi or to the “sages,” into a precedent story, or turn a precedent story into a typical mishnaic ruling attributed to a named figure or the anonymous sages. Let me show you how easily this may be done. Below I transmute the precedent story at m. Gittin 4:7, N1–N7 into (1) an anonymous mishnaic ruling and (2) a dispute

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1. One who said to his wife: I swear that I shall divorce you, 2. and (‫ )ו‬he divorced her [and subsequently repented of his decision]— 3. [he] is permitted to take her back [in marriage], 4. by reason of [the merit to contribute to] the mending of the world. There is no reason to indicate that the sages are the ones making the ruling, since attributions to “the sages” are required in a Mishnah passage only when there is a dispute. But we could easily construct one out of this story too.

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1. One who said to his wife: I swear that I shall divorce you, 2. and (‫ )ו‬he divorced her [and subsequently repented of his decision]— 3. Rabbi x says: [He] is not permitted to take her back [in marriage], 4. And the sages say: [he] is permitted to take her back [in marriage], 5. by reason of [the merit to contribute to] the mending of the world. Why indulge in this literary forgery? Because it shows so vividly how thin and bare bones the narrative elements of mishnaic precedent stories are—only the thinnest sense of a time and place is required in the recipe in addition to the formal pieces used in most mishnaic passages that are not precedent stories. Standard mishnaic rulings or disputes can be transformed into precedent stories, and vice versa, with little effort and the re-use of virtually all of the same language. The resulting story or ruling would look quite normal by mishnaic rhetorical-literary standards. So, with mishnaic precedent stories we are dealing with highly contrived, highly laconic, and highly formalized “memories” that are extremely focused as regards substance and topic. They are truly, as I have shown, the narrative counterpart of the Mishnah’s sayings attributed to either named rabbis or to the anonymous “sages,” or presented without attribution.

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This being the case, and given the culture of memorization that seemed so important in the early rabbinic movement’s adoption, study, and promulgation of the Mishnah as its foundation document, why should one produce, and, presumably, then memorize such precedent stories? Why should the Mishnah have such precedent stories to begin with? After all, their content could have been cast (or recast?) as non-narrative mishnaic rulings. (Indeed, some of the precedent stories may have been formulated in their current forms from standard mishnaic rulings.) We can never know the answer to this question, since there is no evidence that would permit us to do so. But we can say something of the likely socio-rhetorical effects of having such precedent stories from time to time in the Mishnah. I suggest that use of the precedent-story form in order to lend weight to, or to supplement, a mishnaic ruling conveys something of the ethos and core shared perceptions, norms, and values that became formative of the early rabbinic guild. We have argued that the lives of the early rabbis, the founders of the guild, are of no importance. Rather, the would-be rabbi must focus only on the preserved (memorized) teaching of the early rabbis. Hence, one finds no biography or extended biographical narratives in the Mishnah. Now we must qualify that claim. What a rabbi says or does that is indicative of his legal teachings is also a worthy object of study, analysis, preservation, and memorization. A rabbi’s behavior indicates God’s law, just as his teachings do. For the Mishnah, nothing more, and nothing less, is worthy of elevating to the level of “mishnah,” the core, formative literary oeuvre of the nascent rabbinic guild.

III. MEMORY, THE FORMATION OF THE RABBINIC GUILD, AND (THE) RABBINIC (CLAIM TO) POWER AND AUTHORITY In the latter part of the second century CE and the first decades of the third, the early rabbis were occupied with (a) the consolidation and institutionalization of their professional guild and with (b) promoting themselves to the Jewish patriarch in Roman Palestine as the “natural”

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body of competent and authoritative professionals to staff the patriarchy’s institutions of governance and administration of the Jewish communities within the partriarchate’s geographical ken. Professionalization of the senior civil service of the Roman provinces was a trend that was gaining momentum in the Roman Empire in this period.25 Previously, such posts had been the privileged domain of the curial/senatorial and equestrian classes of Rome itself. Members of these classes sought out such provincial positions as a means of mounting the cursus honorum back in Rome, of gaining valued clients across the empire, and of amassing personal wealth by being first on the ground with emerging business opportunities. To some degree local provincial aristocracies were also afforded positions of high authority in the governing structures of the province. I believe there is merit in viewing the establishment of the Jewish patriarchy in this historical context. But Roman Emperors of the latter half of the second century began to tire of amateurism in the senior civil service and of the temptations to corruption that inhered in the system. Encouraging the emergence of a local-indigenous, professional, administrator class appeared highly preferable. As I indicated earlier in the paper, the early rabbis, it appears, sought to form just such an occupational association. Curiously, in Roman Egypt, Palestine, and southernmost Syria this was a case of “back to the future.” This type of administrator class had existed as part and parcel of systems of governance characteristic of the Eastern Mediterranean in areas that had been under Ptolemaic rule: a class of scribes (sofer/grammateus) had served as senior bureaucrats under the authority of a “head” or “ruler” (archon). The Ptolemaic kings divided and subdivided their lands into “nomes,” “toparchies,” and “komes.” Each had its assigned “ruler” supported by a chief “scribe” and a cadre of bureaucrats bearing the same professional title. Of course, the profession of temple or court scribe had been well defined in the Near East long before Hellenistic rule. The Ptolemaic kings were making good use of a well-established social institution in their centralized, hierarchical system of imperial rule. In Judea, the Hasmonean 25 See my discussion and references in Lightstone, Mishnah and the Social, chap. 5.

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kings seem to have maintained the Ptolemaic system, as did the Romans in the late republican and early imperial eras. In post-mishnaic rabbinic literature there is no doubt that the rabbis saw their class as standing in a relationship of direct continuity (a) with this earlier scribal class26 as well as (b) with an alleged national, pre-Hasmonean, curial-like council, the Great Assembly—that is, with both ancient aristocratic rule and its associated bureaucratic virtuosi. Consequently, near the end of the second century and beginning of the third, when the Mishnah was composed and promulgated as the most authoritative text within and for early rabbinic circles, the rabbis were in the business of constructing for themselves an authoritative professional identity, organizing themselves as a professional cadre, and promoting the use of their members (perhaps, the exclusive use of their members) in the patriarch’s administration. The identity of such an authoritative, professional class within a larger social context requires, of course, that members of the special guild share the social identity of the community over which they hope to exercise their power. But at the same time, the institutionalized cadre of specialists must share an identity among themselves that sets them apart (and, at least in their own minds, above) those whom they would rule. How and when their claim to authority by reason of their membership in the cadre was in fact recognized by others outside their professional circles is another matter. As stated at the outset, a strong sense of individual identity relies on fashioning a personal narrative out of constructed memory. And to have a strong sense of belonging to a defined group or community, the individual’s identity and narrative must have integrated into his or her own constructs sufficiently robust elements shared with others. We may see socialization as, in part, reliant on just this process. 26 Post-mishnaic rabbinic literature is replete with rabbinic teachings that portray the rabbis as heirs to the legal teachings of “the scribes” of the Second Temple period. As noted, “scribes” played the professional roles in the Ptolemaic form of administration that characterize Egypt and the land of Israel well into the Roman period that the rabbis seem to have “imagined” for themselves in their imaginative reconstruction in the Mishnah of Temple-centered society.

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The Mishnah is about many things. But one important thing that the Mishnah is about is modeling what is important to remember and memorize if one aspires to be a member of the rabbinic class, understood as a special cadre within, and with special authority over, the Jewish people. To share in the identity of the Jewish people at large, one must, of course, “remember” the acts of biblical patriarchs, the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai (as if one had been there) by the agency of Moses, and the divinely-aided conquest of the Land of Israel. The members of the rabbinic class, as members of the Jewish people, will have shared in those “memories” and will have integrated them into their personal narratives as Jews. But what makes them members of the rabbinic class specifically is dominated by what the Mishnah prioritizes as objects of memory over against others—including over against scripture’s broader canvas. The Mishnah privileges: • a special analytic focus on biblically-based law, within an imaginative context in which the central Temple still functioned as expressed in the legal content of the Mishnah; and • the legal dicta, disputes, and debates on the same, attributed to the named rabbis or the anonymous “sages” of the Mishnah, but cast in laconic and formalized language devoid of individual personhood; • and in equally highly-formalized precedent “stories” about what the rabbis of the Mishnah did or said that provides warrant for one ruling over against another. Memorization of the foregoing—so focused and delimited—is what makes one a rabbi, makes one a member of the professional rabbinic guild, gives one the authority, and makes one qualified, in their view, to operate as agents of the administration of the Jewish patriarchy in Roman Palestine. Even the memory of the history of the guild is not (as) important. Nor are the full “lives” of its founders germane. Remember the legal teachings that expound biblical law; remember the legal dicta of one’s rabbinic “masters,” as they themselves have done; observe, or transmit “stories” about, the masters’ behavior for evidence of their

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legal views; engage one’s intellect in comprehending these. Do all of these constantly, for the course of one’s life, and you will be a master in your own right to rabbinic novices who, in turn, will preserve your legal dicta. Herein lies the form and substance of early rabbinic guild identity as reflected and promoted by the Mishnah and its study. We know from post-mishnaic rabbinic literature that the structure of the rabbinic class’ identity was more elaborated and ramified than I have just characterized it. We cannot know how much of what we glean from post-mishnaic rabbinic literature can be read back into the late second and turn of the third centuries, when the Mishnah was authored and promulgated. But how I have characterized matters based on mishnaic evidence can reasonably be seen to be at the core of these more elaborated constructs. When Avot defines the notion of the chain of tradition by which contemporary rabbinic teachings are portrayed as having been passed from master to disciple, beginning with God to Moses, they are carrying the message of the Mishnah as I have characterized it to its logical conclusions. They are implicitly and retroactively painting all earlier authorities referred to in the chain as rabbis, focused on the same central exercise that makes one a rabbi: memorizing one’s master’s teachings. Their lives are relatively unimportant in every other respect. Their historical settings are irrelevant. What a third century rabbi has faithfully memorized from the Mishnah, or from his own rabbinic master, is no more or less than what Moses memorized from God. In Judaism, this is a justification of authority that cannot, in principle, be trumped. Therefore, I end where began: Who controls the past . . . controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. . . . All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. (George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four)

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MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIODS

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Maimonides vs. Nahmanides on Historical Consciousness and the Shaping of Jewish Identity James A. Diamond University of Waterloo

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oses Maimonides (1138–1204), and posthumously, his ideological opponent, Moses Nahmanides (ca. 1195–1270), arguably two of the greatest medieval expositors of Jewish thought and law, vehemently disagreed on virtually every substantive issue crucial to Judaism as a belief system. Their positions diverged so drastically on notions such as prophecy, providence, ritual, biblical history, and even the very nature of God, and thus consequently what qualifies as authentic monotheism, that it would be no exaggeration to infer they adhered to two different faiths. Though, barring any technical disagreements endemic to Jewish law, they practiced more or less the same religion, as embodied in the rabbinic legal tradition known as halakha, their theoretical and dogmatic frameworks within which they expressed that practice radically conflicted. Nahmanides’ mystical conception of God is a composite one of the kabbalistic intra-deical components known as sefirot, bearing a

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multiplicity of attributes, who can be affected and about whom much can be known and positively asserted.1 Maimonides’ God, in contradistinction, is an irreducibly unified being, absent of any attribute whatsoever, who can only be described in negative terms,2 while all linguistic attempts to grasp this concept fail. Nahmanides’ God is a god of history, affected by, and interacting with the material world, responding to human conduct, and intervening in temporal matters, while Maimonides’ Divine Being transcends all time and space so absolutely as to allow for no possible nexus between their respective concepts of God. For Maimonides, He is absolute perfection and therefore stable, constant, immutable, and invulnerable by definition to any affectation. Miracles are commonplace in Nahmanides’ worldview, to the extent that he considers belief in them as the basic fabric of the world and a fundamental principle of faith as “no one has a portion in the Torah unless he believes that everything about us and all our occurrences consist of miracles and are not nature or order at all.”3 Natural causation, however, is the operative rule of Maimonides’ universe,4 rendering it virtually impenetrable to any divine historical

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1

For but one example see his explanation of the secret behind sacrifices in Commentary, Lev. 1:9, and Dov Schwartz’s explication of the theurgy it expresses in “From Theurgy to Magic: The Evolution of the Magical Talismanic Justification of Sacrifice in the Circle of Nahmanides and his Interpreters,” Aleph 1 (2001): 167–174. 2 See Harry Wolfson, “Maimonides on the Negative Attributes,” in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume (New York: AAJR, 1945), 411–446. 3 Nahmanides, Commentary, Exod. 13:16, 1:347. All references to Nahmanides’ Torah commentary are to volume and page number of Nahmanides’ Commentary on the Torah, 2 vols. (Heb.), ed. Charles Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1958–59), hereinafter referred to as Commentary. Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own. ‫שאין לאדם חלק בתורת משה רבינו עד שנאמין בכל דברינו ומקרינו שכלם נסים אין בהם טבע ומנהגו של עולם‬. See also Sermon on Qohelet, in Writings of R. Moses ben Nahman (Kitvei Ramban) 2 vols., (Heb.) [hereinafter referred to as KR], ed. Chaim Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1971), vol. 1, 192. 4 See Maimonides commentary regarding ten miraculous events “created” during the twilight hours of the sixth day of creation to mAvot 5:5 and ch. 8 of the Eight Chapters in Mishnah im Perush Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon, 3 vols., ed. and trans. Joseph Kafih (Jerusalem: Mossad HaRav Kook, 1976), [hereinafter PM] vol. 2, 262, 298. According to Maimonides, these are particularized by their specific time of input but are emblematic of all miracles, having been pre-programmed at creation, only at different intervals of the Genesis account. However, in Guide of the Perplexed, ed. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 2,

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intervention subsequent to creation, whose operative principle is captured by a rabbinic maxim of which he was particularly fond: “the world goes its customary way” (olam keminhago noheg).5 As a result, their disagreement on the nature of Judaism is nothing less than theologically schismatic.6 Maimonides would have considered Nahmanides’ worship, at best, directed toward a non-existent deity, or, at worst, idolatry. Nahmanides would counter that Maimonides has philosophically emasculated God to such an extent as to vacate spirituality and worship of any relational dimensions traditionally associated with them, leaving a lifeless, sterile faith, absent a divine presence in history. Indeed, Nahmanides considers belief in natural causation as opposed to an overarching miraculous order tantamount to one of the most egregious theological offenses that would “exclude one from any portion in the Torah of Moses our Master,”7 implicitly disqualifying Maimonidean naturalism as a legitimate Jewish belief. Though David Berger has convincingly argued for a much tempered understanding of Nahmanides’ apparently extreme dismissal of nature, where “except in the rarest of instances, the natural order governs the lives of non-Jews, both individually and collectively, as well as the overwhelming majority

29, 345, he seems to accept the occurrence of miracles but limit their duration. Some scholars have argued that Maimonides shifted his position on miracles from the maximalist one taken in the PM to a more moderate view in the Guide. See Hannah Kasher, “Biblical Miracles and the Universality of Natural Laws: Maimonides’ Three Methods of Harmonization,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1998): 25–52; Tzvi Langermann, “Maimonides and Miracles: The Growth of a (dis)belief,” Jewish History 18 (2004): 147–172, and Kenneth Seeskin’s discussion of miracles in Maimonides on the Origin of the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 160–165. Regardless of Maimonides’ position on miracles, it cannot entail some change in God. 5 See Guide, 2:19, 25, 29, and Letter on the Resurrection of the Dead, chap. 6. Nahmanides specifically targets this maxim as one subscribed to by Maimonides indicating a disbelief in the uninterrupted divine governance of the world by way of miracles in Torat HaShem Temimah (hereinafter TT) in KR, vol. 1, 153. 6 For a good overview of the fundamental differences see Jose Faur, “Two Models of Jewish Spirituality,” Shofar 10, no. 3 (1992): 5–46, who details how the Andalusian tradition represented by Maimonides was “systematically challenged” by Nahmanides, Commentary, 19. 7 Nahmanides, KR, vol. 1, 153.

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of Jews,”8 it is still fundamentally opposed to the Maimonidean model. This is especially so on the issue of providence, which Maimonides views as in direct correspondence with one’s intellectual development while, in Nahmanides, as Berger also notes, “this central point of the Guide vanishes entirely.”9 These alternative theological frameworks within which the two expressed their Judaisms in turn shape their accounts of their religion, a religion that shares its name, origin, and biblical founding fathers, but presents divergent exegeses. As such they provide alternative memories and historical consciousnesses from which emerge opposing definitions of what constitutes Jewishness. Any investigation of these alternatives must first focus on their differing views of the purpose served by the historical dimension of the Torah. The opposition between Maimonides’ and Nahmanides’ overarching alternative rationales underlying the benefits of biblical narratives could not be more pronounced. Nahmanides subscribes to a cyclical view of Israelite history as a perpetual re-enactment of its biblical antecedents encapsulated by the rabbinic adage “everything that happened to the fathers is an indication of what will happen to the children.”10 Indeed, the biblical annals enfold all of human history as indicated by the verse, “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” taken literally to refer to the book of the Torah, “which in its entirety is a record of the history of man.”11 The first couple is named corporately by the generic term Adam, or species, “because all of them [mankind] are contained in them potentially.”12 The same verse reiterates Adam’s origins on the day he was created in “the image of God” to stipulate   8 David Berger, “Miracles and the Natural Order in Nahmanides,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 126.   9 Ibid., 120. 10 See Nahmanides, Commentary, Gen. 12:6, 1:77, where he offers this as a guiding principle of the biblical patriarchal narratives. Amos Funkenstein noted the Christian influence that inspired Nahmanides’ typological exegesis with some essential differences, but in essence all the biblical characters are “historiosophical symbols,” which “foreshadow, prefigure, and even predetermine events in the future of Israel.” See Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 114–115. 11 Nahmanides, Commentary, Genesis 5:1, 1:47. 12 Ibid.

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that he is the work of God and the image of God. What follows then is that history charts, not just mortal events, but divine life as well, since the human species is invested with a divine component. The Garden of Eden story, for example, transpires along parallel lower and upper lines, the human characters and environment mirrored by their metaphysical counterparts within the divine realm.13 Mortal history, and singularly Jewish history, discloses mythic history.14 General history, however, is ancillary to Jewish history; the patriarchal narratives in which it begins map out solely the nation of Israel’s political and spiritual future. The historical record is crucial for Nahmanides, not for any arcane scholarly appeal, but for elevating Jewish history to a metaphysical plane that expresses the unfolding of divine will and governance. The actual physical enactment of the narratives recorded in the bible ensures their re-enactment in Israel’s future just as prophets often instantiate their predictions with physical acts to secure their realization.15 More importantly, the biblical record becomes 13 See Bezalel Safran, “Rabbi Azriel and Nahmanides: Two Views of the Fall of Man,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Literary Virtuosity, supra, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1983), 75–106. 14 Nahmanides comments, for example, on Deut. 21:22 that a midrashic analogy of God and Israel to “twin brothers” “contains a secret” (Commentary, vol. 2, 447). As Elliot Wolfson’s astute exegesis explains, “For Nahmanides, Israel below and God above are brothers not only in a figurative sense, but also in a mystical sense. For the secret he alludes to here involves the symbolic, and hence ontological parallelism between the Jewish soul and the divine paradigm.” “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” AJS Review 14, no. 2 (1989): 161. 15 Nahmanides, Commentary, Gen. 12:6, 1:77: ‫ ולכן יעשו‬.‫ תהיה הגזרה מתקיימת על כל פנים‬,‫ודע כי כל גזירת עירין כאשר תצא מכח גזירה אל פועל דמיון‬ ‫ ולפיכך החזיק הקדוש ברוך הוא את אברהם בארץ ועשה לו דמיונות בכל העתיד‬. . . ‫מעשה בנבואות‬.‫הנביאים‬ .‫ והבן זה‬,‫להעשות בזרעו‬ Interestingly, Nahmanides’ perspective here adumbrates modern scholarly interpretations of concrete symbolic prophetic actions accompanying prophecies, referred to by those such as Johannes Lindblom as a “visible word” paralleling the divine word where “such an action served not only to represent and make evident a particular fact, but also to make this fact a reality.” See Johannes Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1962), 172. For Maimonides, these actions are extremely problematic if taken literally, for they would have God “turn his prophets into a laughingstock and a mockery for fools by ordering them to carry out crazy actions.” They are therefore to be taken as visionary rather than historical enactments. See Guide, II:46. Once again, this

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a crystal ball through which Israel’s immediate destiny can be envisaged “for when a circumstance of one of the patriarchs occurs one can better understand from it what is decreed to occur to his descendants.”16 Biblical history is so all encompassing as to collapse all of Jewish history throughout time, including post-biblical history, into biblical time. Nahmanides concludes in his summary of the book of Genesis that it is “a book of formation (yetzirah) regarding the creation (hidush) of the world and the formation of all that has been formed, and all the events of the fathers that are like a formation (yetzirah) for their descendants since all their occurrences are figurae (tziyurei) of things alluding to and informing about everything that will happen to them in the future.”17 The entire book is about creation. The clever sense in which Nahmanides manipulates the term “formation,” which is the type of creation that transpires after the initial big bang of hidush, renders creation as the theme that runs through the entire book of Genesis. All patriarchal narratives are creation stories in the sense that they prefigure and generate all of Jewish destiny.18 The book of Genesis is entirely about creation, the creation of the world, and the creation of history. Maimonides, however, views the Torah functionally, as an ideal teaching concerned with thought and practice, and reads the biblical chronicles in kind as a primer.19 Their role in the Torah’s uniquely ideal blending highlights Maimonides’ systematic devaluation of the bible’s historicity in favor of the reality of the mind. 16 Nahmanides, Commentary, Gen. 12:6, 1:77: ‫ו‬:‫כי כאשר יבוא המקרה לנביא משלשת האבות יתבונן ממנו הדבר הנגזר לבא לזרעו‬: 17 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:279. ‫שהוא ספר היצירה בחדוש העולם ויצירת כל נוצר ובמקרי האבות שהם כענין יצירה לזרעם מפני שכל מקריהם‬ ‫ ציורי דברים לרמוז ולהודיע כל עתיד לבא להם‬I have adopted Amos Funkenstein’s translation of tziyurei devarim as figurae, which is a conscious approximation of the Christian equivalent of prefiguration. See Funkenstein, Perceptions, 112–113. 18 The reason these biblical narratives achieve this relates to the nature of the text they are embedded in which, according to Nahmanides, preceded the creation in a different form captured by the phrase “black fire on white fire.” The Torah therefore is, as Nina Caputo correctly states, “divorced from temporality or historical circumstance, and according to Nahmanides’ reading, it transcends and defines time.” See Nina Caputo, “In the Beginning . . . Typology, History, and the Unfolding Meaning of Creation in Nahmanides’ Exegesis,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 1 (1999): 67. 19 It should be noted that both these views of biblical history do not treat it as historiography and are no exceptions to Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s determination that

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of practical and theoretical philosophy is supplemental to the overall teaching in clarifying law and ethics for “either they give a correct notion of an opinion that is a pillar of the Law, or they rectify some action so that mutual wrongdoing and aggression should not occur between men.”20 In some sense Maimonides’ view of biblical narratives prefigures the legal philosopher Robert Cover’s groundbreaking study, “Nomos and Narrative,” which argues for the mutual integration of law and narrative using the biblical canon as his paradigm in which “every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse . . . and every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral.”21 The biblical narratives can be viewed as a kind of legal storytelling that assumes their formal shape in biblical law. A paradigmatic case in point that highlights the two contrasting models of biblical history is the curiously extraneous account of various internecine military battles between ancient Near Eastern kings in Genesis 14. That passage culminates with Abraham’s victory, rescuing his captive nephew Lot, and retrieving all his seized possessions. Nahmanides believes that those seemingly inconsequential events are in fact of utmost consequence in not only presaging the ultimate political redemption of the Jews but guaranteeing it. The four kings portend the four political empires within whose oppressive orbit Israel will be caught, climaxing in the final overthrow of Edom, the medieval sobriquet for Rome or Christianity, whose repressive hand is the lived experience of Jews contemporaneous with Nahmanides’ own time.22 There is no historical significance to this narrative either for Israel’s past or future for Maimonides and it is of no intrinsic interest as history.23 “Historiography never served as a primary vehicle for Jewish memory in the Middle Ages,” in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 39. 20 Maimonides, Guide, 613. 21 Robert Cover, Narrative, Violence and the Law, ed. Martha Minnow, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 96. 22 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:83.‫המעשה הזה אירע לאברהם להורות כי ארבע מלכיות תעמודנה למשול‬ ‫ וישיבו כל שבותם ורכושם‬,‫ בעולם ובסוף יתגברו בניו עליהם ויפלו כלם בידם‬Commentary, Gen. 14:1, 1:83. 23 For Maimonides’ conceptions of history see David Novak, “Does Maimonides have a Philosophy of History?,” Proceedings of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy 4 (1983).

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First, its miraculous historical facticity is confined to Abraham’s experience alone, simply “making known to us” a military victory he achieved against all odds.24 More importantly, its relevance is in its portrayal of Abraham as a political and moral archetype for human values in general. His actions are a testament to the power of ideas and common beliefs as a socially cohesive force since it “gives us knowledge of his defense of his relative because of the latter’s sharing his belief.”25 In addition, Abraham’s refusal of any material gain offered him as tribute for his victory is emblematic of an ethical constitution which is easily contented, eschews material gain, and “of a striving for moral nobility.”26 What is critical to note here is that Maimonides’ view of the utility of this memory coincides with his notion of a national identity that is forged by knowledge rather than ethnicity. Abraham’s courageous self-sacrifice specifically for a blood relative is precisely tailored to accentuate this notion. It is decidedly not motivated by tribal attachment or biological ancestry, as one would expect, but because of Lot’s “sharing his belief.”27 Abraham does not risk his life for his nephew out of devotion to family but rather out of dedication to opinions mutually held by the two. The lesson is that ideas, not blood, bind a nation together. That is why, in Maimonides’ writings, one is considered to be of the “seed of Abraham” (zera avraham), a phrase commonly denoting Abraham’s descendants, not by virtue of a common ancestor, but by how one conducts oneself. As Maimonides asserts: “It follows that he alone is a descendant of Abraham (zera avraham) who maintains his religion (dat or law) and his straight way.”28 The implication is that Jewish heredity is a function of ethics. Ancestral claims are consequently forged not in genetics, but in conduct that manifests notions of morality “fathered” by Abraham. For 24 Maimonides, Guide, 614. 25 Maimonides, Guide, 614. 26 Abraham’s selfless sacrifice for Lot’s safety is also identified as the trait of the “good eye” associated with Abraham, the imitation of which warrants classification as a “disciple of Abraham.” See Commentary on Avot, 5:17 in Maimonides, Mishnah im Perush, vol. 2, 303. 27 Maimonides, Guide, 614. 28 Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, 7 vols., ed. Shabse Frankel (Jerusalem: Ohel Yosef, 1975–2001), Kings 10:7.

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Nahmanides Jewish history inheres in Abraham’s biography physically and metaphysically, to be played out by his biological descendants, while for Maimonides Abraham’s life provides a manual on how to qualify as his ideological offspring. It is trite to state that Jews throughout history have traced the roots of their Jewishness back to the first biblical patriarch Abraham, beginning with his initial divine encounter in Genesis 12:1, when Abraham is ordered by God to abandon his own familial roots for an undisclosed destination. On its biblical face, Jewish history then is grounded in a naive break with the past for an indeterminate future. However, as with all the Hebrew biblical narratives, they offer only a skeletal account, one that is, as Eric Auerbach famously characterized it, “fraught with background,”29 inviting the embellishment and “gap-filling” that the subsequent rabbinic midrashic tradition so enthusiastically provides. That tradition did not cease with the end of the classical rabbinic period in the first five or so centuries of the Common Era, but continued with a flurry of medieval exegetical activity in a recurring reconstruction of Abraham’s pioneering challenges to the pagan ideology of his time. Nahmanides ostensibly adopted Maimonides’ version of Abraham’s beginnings by directly citing the pertinent section in the Guide of the Perplexed,30 while subtly substituting its theological tendentiousness with his own. Maimonides depicts Abraham as engaging in persistent debate against pagan belief, which, much like Socrates’ indictment for corrupting the youth in Athens, is viewed as politically subversive. This causes the king to first imprison him, then confiscate all his property, and finally expel him.31 Abraham’s success, eventually garnering “the consensus of the greater part of the population of the earth,” was due to his formidable powers of persuasion in convincing others of the truths of monotheism.32 While deferring to Maimonides’ historical rendering,33 29 Eric Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 18. 30 Maimonides, Guide, 514–15. 31 Ibid., 515. 32 Maimonides, Guide, 515. 33 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:72–73 and its parallel in Nahmanides’ Torat Hashem Temimah: Kitvei HaRamban, 1:145, which approvingly cited Maimonides’ account

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Nahmanides subverts its naturalistic attribution of Abraham’s accomplishments in favor of a supra-natural one, which singles out its miraculous nature: “Regardless, in that place of Ur Kasdim, either a miracle or hidden miracle, was performed on behalf of Abraham our father in that the king was moved to save him and not execute him and release him from prison without constraints, or it was a renowned miracle in being rescued from a pit of fire as our Rabbis have said” [emphasis mine].34 Except as an object of Abraham’s own independent intellectual efforts, God’s participation, if any, is minimized in Maimonidean Abrahamic achievements, while Nahmanides charts Abraham’s ­ evolving personality along a divinely orchestrated script. Both construct “mythic” origins in their own ideal images of the Jew and the nation of Israel. If the primary mandate of the Jew is to know the existence of God and his unity, not via revelation or tradition, but by human reason, a mandate shared with all of humanity, then the Jewish story must begin in kind. It does so with a human being who, having been raised in a culture steeped in pagan theology, perfects his humanity by philosophical demonstration, and, not being the beneficiary of any monotheistic tradition, arrives at the truth of one God. He then gains followers by teaching other human beings to follow suit, uniting them by a “way of truth” into a community that coalesces as a “nation that knows God.”35 The political glue of this nation is a shared knowledge of universal truths rather than a common ethnicity, or, as Nahmanides would have it in his own subscription to the rabbinic maxim, “Israel has no mazel,”36 Israel merits the singular focus of divine attention of Abraham’s rabble-rousing in Kutha based on the pagan Sabian historical source, The Nabatean Agriculture, in Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, ed. and trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), III: 29, 513–514. See also Maimonides’ parallel account in Mishneh Torah, Avoda Zara 1:3. See also Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 91a, for differences of opinion on Abraham’s time spent in Kutha and for one that identities it with Ur Kasdim. 34 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:73. Gen. 11:28, 1:73 ‫והנה על כל פנים במקום ההוא בארץ כשדים‬ ‫ שנתן בלב אותו המלך להצילו ושלא ימיתנו והוציא אותו מבית הסוהר‬,‫ או נס נסתר‬,‫נעשה נס לאברהם אבינו‬ ‫ או נס מפורסם שהשליכו לכבשן האש וניצל כדברי רבותינ‬,‫שילך לנפשו‬ 35 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Idolatry,” 1:1. 36 See bSabbath 156a. According to Nahmanides, the world is governed by a myriad of powers, with each individual nation subjected to the authority of one or the other. Israel is distinct in its direct governance by God. See Commentary, Gen.

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enjoyed by no other nation. Maimonides does refer to Abraham’s escape aided by a “miracle” in his parallel Mishneh Torah account, but it is conspicuously missing in the relevant passage in the Guide to which Nahmanides refers, and plays no ensuing role in gaining adherents to Abraham’s ideological camp in either account.37 Nahmanides, though, places the miracle front and center as the cause of Abraham’s fame and influence, as conveyed by his comments on the significance of the name Ur Kasdim, taking the very name of the city from which Abraham was banished as commemorating the miracle for “the place was called that [taking Ur in the sense of flame] because of the miracle.”38 Nahmanides further reshapes, or rather with this move contorts, Maimonides’ account by drawing an analogy between Abraham’s release from Ur Kasdim and Israel’s later liberation from Egypt in that both are attributed to the same divine activity of “brought you out” (hotzetikha). This term, according to Nahmanides, uniquely denotes a miracle, and “therefore the verse states ‘I am the God who brought you out (hotzetikha) of Ur Kasdim to give you this land as an inheritance (Gen.15:7),’ as the term hotzetikha connotes a miracle, for it did not state ‘who took you out of (loqachtikha) Ur Kasdim’ but rather ‘hotzetikha,’ indicating that he brought out a captive from prison just like ‘who brought you out of the

15:18,1:96; 17:1; Exod. 12:3, 1:325; 20:2, 1:388; Lev. 18:25, 2:109; Num. 11:16, 2:233. 37 In the Mishneh Torah’s version of Abraham’s career, the detail that “a miracle was performed on his behalf” is overshadowed in the larger narrative of Abraham’s natural efforts of persuasion. Maimonides may have inserted it there as a minor concession to the more general audience of the Mishneh Torah most familiar with the midrashic tale of Abraham’s miraculous escape from a fiery furnace. It can also be read more naturally by its more intellectually sophisticated audience as a euphemism for any escape from imminent disaster as the same phrase (na’aseh lo nes) is used in the Laws of Divorce (12:5). 38 The miracle is maintained consistently as the focal point of Abraham’s life gaining him followers and fame. Later on, according to Nahmanides, a miracle is performed on behalf of a foreign king “in honor of Abraham,” thus further corroborating the veracity of the miracle that rescued Abraham, for “if a miracle was performed for the king of Sodom in honour of Abraham, how much more probable would it be to believe that a miracle was performed on behalf of Abraham himself to save his life” (Nahmnaides, Commentary, 1:86).

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land of Egypt’ (Exod. 20:2).”39 Nahmanides’ originating myth places Abraham’s historical debut, as a microcosmic focus of divine attention, on a macrocosmic continuum with Israel’s, anchoring both in the miracle. The historical retrieval of Abraham’s biography is a retrojection of the way Nahmanides conceives of the first of the Ten Commandments, which conditions belief in the existence of God on a miracle and a particular historical experience of this belief. As he asserts: “It states ‘who brought you out of Egypt for’ bringing them out from there teaches divine existence and will since we went out from there through His knowledge and providence, and it also teaches creation, because nature cannot change if it is eternal, and it teaches His power, which in turn teaches His unity . . . and this is the reason for ‘who brought you out’ (hotzetikha) for they know and are witnesses to all these things.”40 Maimonides’ formulation of the first commandment strategically omits the second half of the verse referring to the historical exodus, and presents only the first half as its biblical source: “I am the Lord your God.” The Exodus is neither a re-enactment of Abraham’s political travails, nor a presentation of empirical data that substantiates God’s existence. Divine will, miracles, and eyewitness observation play no role in establishing the veracity of God’s being for Maimonides, whereas the independent exertion of human thought does. Abraham is the founder of Israel because he conveyed universal truths through the medium of reasoned instruction. Abraham is constructed as the Socrates of his age who first reasons the existence of God by “thinking and wondering day and night,” until he “attained the way of truth and apprehended the correct line of thought,” and then proselytizes that truth in kind by “sowing doubt,” “engaging in debate,” “informing,” “overpowering with demonstration,” “accumulating a following,” informing each follower “in 39 Nahmanides, Commentary, Gen. 11:28, 1:73: ‫ כי מלת‬,‫וזהו שאמר הכתוב (להלן טו ז) אני ה› אשר הוצאתיך מאור כשדים לתת לך את הארץ הזאת לרשתה‬ ‫ שהוציא ממסגר‬,»‫ אבל אמר «הוצאתיך‬,»‫ כי לא אמר «אשר לקחתיך מאור כשדים‬,‫«הוצאתיך» תלמד על נס‬ ‫ כמו אשר הוצאתיך מארץ מצרים‬,‫אסיר‬ 40 Nahmanides, Commentary, Exod. 20:2, 1:388. ‫ כי הוצאתם‬,‫אמר אשר הוצאתיך מארץ מצרים‬ ‫משם תורה על המציאות ועל החפץ‬ , ,‫ כי עם קדמות העולם לא ישתנה דבר מטבעו‬,‫ וגם תורה על החדוש‬,‫כי בידיעה ובהשגחה ממנו יצאנו משם‬ ‫ וזה‬.‫ כמו שאמר (לעיל ט יד) בעבור תדע כי אין כמוני בכל הארץ‬,‫ והיכולת תורה על הייחוד‬,‫ותורה על היכולת‬ ‫ כי הם היודעים ועדים בכל אלה‬,‫טעם אשר הוצאתיך‬

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accordance with his capacity,” and ultimately “authoring treatises.”41 Successive generations, although privileged with seasoned teachers and textual guides, cannot receive their identities by simple transmission, but must re-establish them anew by approximating Abraham’s lead. Jewish identity is perpetuated by self-generated convictions based on philosophical demonstration, guiding others in that same methodology, and leaving written testaments to it for posterity. Nahmanides views the uninterrupted Jewish historical continuum of intergenerational memory as the instrumental vehicle for preserving the correct God concept. Jewishness is in part passed on and received. Those essential monotheistic principles regarding the existence of God and His nature are perpetuated by recalling the witnessing of those original events that testify to them. Nahmanides imports the same rationale he offered for the first commandment’s conditioning of knowing God’s existence on the deliverance from Egypt to the parental prescription for transmitting the details of the exodus to children. The bible standardizes those historical details as a formulaic response to children’s inquiries about the rationale for the commandments. When the child asks about them, a filial inquiry traditionally associated with Passover, the response is prescribed, consisting of God’s “bringing us out” of Egypt by way of the miracles He performed “in Egypt, against Pharaoh and all his house in front of our eyes.”42 The reason for this specific response, Nahmanides claims, is “precisely the same as why it refers to ‘who brought you out of Egypt’ in the Ten Commandments . . . and that is the reason the verse states ‘in front of our eyes’ because we are the ones who know and are witnesses to the signs and miracles for we saw there that our Lord is the God in

41 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Idolatry” 1:3. Similarly, the parallel passage in the Guide, portrays Abraham having “assembled the people and called them by way of teaching and instruction to adhere to the truth that he had grasped . . . attracting them by means of eloquent speeches and by means of the benefits he conferred upon them” (Maimonides, Guide, 379). 42 Deut. 6:21–22.

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heaven and earth and there is none beside Him since all this is known through the Exodus as I explained the first commandment.”43 Maimonides rationalizes all holidays as in some way functional, variously serving emotional, social, and political needs, since “they are all for rejoicings and pleasurable gatherings which in most cases are indispensable for man; they are also useful in the establishment of friendship, which must exist among people living in political societies.”44 The particular purpose of Passover is to inculcate a moral lesson as well as an opinion that “consists in the commemoration of the miracles of Egypt and in the perpetuation of their memory throughout the periods of time.”45 Passover observance conjures up a nation conceived out of an experience of miracles whose memory must be perpetuated as a testament to a creator God but not as proof of it. Creation out of nothing eludes unequivocal philosophical demonstration, but is accepted on a balance of arguments so that biblical law, miracles, and sanctions for proper conduct are not vitiated since belief in an eternal world, “destroys the Law in its principle, necessarily gives the lie to every miracle, and reduces to inanity all the hopes and threats that the Law has held out.”46 Memory and history for Maimonides serve to preserve the community, to consolidate the social unit, and to buttress the Torah, its foundational constitution, which provides the framework in which each individual must cultivate independently the fundamentals of religion related to the knowledge of God. In other words national Jewishness is expressed through a shared history while “religious” identity is expressed autonomously. Nahmanides, on the other hand, considers that memory and history intrinsically promote those fundamentals with the knowledge of and belief in God emerging organically from a retelling of the past.

43 Nahmanides, Commentary, 2:376–377, Deut. 6:20, 2:376–377.‫ הוא הטעם‬,‫והכוונה בזה‬ ‫ כי יתכוון שנודיע לבן השואל כי ה› הוא‬,‫במה שאמר בעשרת הדברות (לעיל ה ו) אשר הוצאתיך מארץ מצרים‬ ‫ כי אנחנו היודעים ועדים מן‬,»‫ וזה טעם «לעינינו‬.‫הבורא והחפץ והיכול כאשר נתבאר לנו ביציאת מצרים‬ ‫ כי כל זה יודע‬,‫האותות והמופתים שראינו שם כי השם אלהינו הוא האלהים בשמים ובארץ ואין עוד מלבדו‬ ‫ביציאת מצרים כאשר פירשתי בדבור הראשון‬ 44 Maimonides, Guide, 570. 45 Ibid., 572. 46 Ibid., 328.

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Maimonides’ version of the Sinaitic revelation replicates Abraham’s intellectual journey on a national scale for each and every individual present, who, according to a prominent rabbinic tradition, heard the first two commandments, “I” and “Thou shalt not have,” directly from God (mipi hagevurah: “from the mouth of the Force”).47 He interprets this to mean that the people bypassed Moses in accessing the two truths of divine existence and unity since “they are knowable by human speculation alone . . . with regard to everything that can be known by demonstration, the status of the prophet and that of everyone else who knows it are equal.”48 The rabbinic understanding of the divine immediacy of the first two commandments is turned on its head by Maimonides who displaces God from any involvement in their apprehension, severing Him from the sensual experience, except as the object of human thought. However, the other commandments are Mosaically mediated since “they belong to the class of generally accepted opinions and those adopted in virtue of tradition, not to the class of the intellect.”49 Knowledge concerned with politics, ethics, and correct conduct, as opposed to that concerned with universal absolute truths, is subjective and therefore fickle, requiring the ordinances of an expert in governance, a prophet or philosopher king, to maintain an ordered society. The shift from the noetic quality of the first two commandments to the others echoes the intellectual journey of primordial Adam whose intellectual focus declined from one centered on universal truths (true and false) to one on “generally accepted things . . . judging things to be bad or fine.”50 This reconstruction of the Sinaitic theophany startlingly imbues the core of what is supremely emblematic of Israel’s particularity, chosenness, and uniqueness, with a universal dimension denoting the state of the human condition. When Jews recollect their historically pristine formative moment, they are at the same time projected back to the embryonic historical moment of all humankind. 47 bMakkot 24a. 48 Maimonides, Guide, 364. 49 Ibid., 364. 50 Ibid., 25.

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Maimonides traces a history of Jewish origins from Abraham to Sinai that evolves, and at times devolves, along intellectual patterns, while Nahmanides plots one that is animated by miracles. It is a transcendent history of a people witnessing the transtemporal and transnatural within time and nature. Nahmanides’ view of the direct communication of the first two commandments is the mirror image of Maimonides’ who anchored them in reason. It is the quality of divine communication that distinguishes the first two commandments from the others, whereby the first two are heard and comprehended while the rest are articulated by an unintelligible sound made intelligible by Moses’ elucidation. The midrashic intent is so that “all are prophets with respect to belief in God and the prohibition against idolatry, for they are the foundation of the entire Torah and the commandments” [emphasis mine].51 Where Maimonides equalizes all of Israel and Moses in the intersection of intellect, all being engaged in the same philosophical quest, Nahmanides equalizes them in a prophetic experience that uniformly renders them privy to a divine revelation of the same content. Only a miraculous channel can access a being defined by miracles, or one that intervenes supranaturally into nature and history, as opposed to the Maimonidean deity who is defined by the simple ontology of an irrefutable necessary existence. These opposing notions of what determines the contours of Jewish historical consciousness translate concretely into a halakhic debate concerning normative expressions of memory mandated by the Torah. The positive injunctions for transmitting the memories of both Sinai and the Exodus are reinforced by negative admonitions to inhibit the loss of those memories prescribing the greatest of precautions, “so that you do not forget the things you saw with your own eyes and so they do not fade from your mind as long as you live” (Deut. 4:6), in the case of the events at Sinai, and, “so you do not forget the Lord who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage” (6:12), in the case of the liberation from Egyptian servitude. Nahmanides considers these to consist of formal laws and vigorously challenges Maimonides’ 51 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:397.

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conspicuous omission of these two legislative prescriptions in his enumeration of the negative commandments. The latter is so paramount as to ­ constitute the negative concomitant of the very first positive commandment to believe in the existence of God since its intent is to preserve the memory of “what transpired in the exodus from Egypt that was realized by new signs and miracles changing nature indicating a pre-existent God that wills, is powerful, and creates, for this matter of the exodus from Egypt, for those who are familiar with it, silences any denier of the creation of the world and sustains the belief in God’s knowledge, providence, and power over all generalities and particulars.”52 Likewise Nahmanides takes Maimonides to task for “forgetting” to enumerate a mandate “not to forget” the Sinaitic theophany which establishes beyond all doubt its historical veracity and which all are obligated “not to be remiss in their transmission to all children and descendants of all future posterity.”53 Maimonides’ only juridical citation of Deut. 4:9 is of its latter half, “and you shall make it known to your children and children’s children,” to endorse the extension of the obligation to teach Torah beyond the first generation.54 This halakhic dispute crystallizes conflicting views on the purpose of commemorating national history with far reaching implications for sustaining national survival, which hinges on parental nurturing. For Nahmanides the fundamental teaching that forges the generational links in the chain of Judaism is the historical narrative of its origins. Recollecting the past constitutes the very essence of the “Jewishness” imparted from parent to child because the past is an intrinsic vehicle for theology. Maimonides’ normative reading of Deut. 4:9 adopts an unequivocal rabbinic application of the verse to the general prescription of teaching Torah to children. Nahmanides acknowledges the problem of the apparent inconsistency between his interpretation of the verse and that of a long-standing rabbinic one but resolves it with a casuistry that sharply distinguishes his view of Jewish 52 Moses Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvot, ed. Shabse Frankel (New York: Congregation Bnei Yosef, 1995), 406. 53 Nahmanides in Frankel, Sefer, 406. 54 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Talmud Torah” 1:2.

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survival, and the role of memory in ensuring it, from that of Maimonides. He asserts the identity of his reading with the classic rabbinic interpretation of simply teaching Torah by equating the “teaching of faith in the Torah” with “the teaching of Torah.”55 The primary goal of teaching Torah is not to impart knowledge and to train one in the art of deduction and independent derivation of it, but to perpetuate the memory of an originating event on which all Jewish faith hinges. Nahmanides reduces the rudimentary mitzvah of transgenerational teaching to the inculcation of a national memory, while Maimonides simply views it as the art of pedagogy and all that is associated with cultivating the next generation of autonomously thinking human beings who can proceed in kind with their successors. Their respective positions on the content of transmission in the perpetuation of Judaism also explains their differing conceptions of the relationship between father and child. When accounting for the order of the Ten Commandments, Nahmanides relates the first four to the most important principles regarding God—unity, governance, omnipotence, omniscience, providence—and their practical grounding in the concrete action of Sabbath observance. The remainder deals with “corporeal matters and begins with the father for just as you are commanded to honour the first Creator, so I command you to honour the second creator who brought you into existence and they are the father and mother.”56 The parallel drawn between the earthly and heavenly creator is critical since all knowledge about the latter is inherently substantiated by the former. Constructed as a creator/creation relationship, every gesture of respect by the child evokes the primary Creator since it is inspired by the parent as a living signifier of the deity. In addition, the truth of the Creation is authenticated by an uninterrupted succession of fathers and children that can be traced back to Adam as recorded in the Bible. Moses’ father saw Levi, who in turn saw Jacob, who himself studied with Shem the son of Noah, who personally experienced the flood which then corroborates creation, “for whoever admits to the Flood, by necessity admits to the creation 55 ‫כי לימוד אמונת התורה הוא הלימוד בתורה‬ 56 Nahmanides, Writings, 1:152.

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of the world.”57 Finally, the evidentiary chain of earthly creators culminates in the heavenly creator since Adam, its primogenitor, “was aware that he himself was alone in the world without a father or mother.”58 Thus, any warrant of respect to the parent from the child conjures the One who had no parent, transporting the child along a finite regress that ends only penultimately in primordial man and ultimately, by inference, in the Creator. For Maimonides the duty to respect parents is purely a function of political and social welfare, which “preserves correct relations between human beings,” and whose goals are accomplished in this world since “if one conducts himself in this way and another does the same, he will benefit from its effect.”59 Respect for parents does not generate a historical continuum back to primordial time but instigates benefits contemporaneous with its performance, guaranteeing treatment in kind, for “if you don’t respect your father, your son will not respect you.”60 Nahmanides understood that identity, as defined by the tenets of Jewish faith, is transferred by parental pronouncements, and the respect commanded by parents preserves the integrity of its transfer. Maimonides simply maintains an environment within which the independent shaping of identity can flourish. A striking distinction in the details of Judaism’s origins through Abraham’s own discovery of monotheism (or, in Nahmanides’ case, more appropriately monolatry)61 crystallizes much of what has been discussed to this point. Abraham’s intellectual journey toward the truth of a single creator deity within the Maimonidean version is sui generis. Having been raised in a thoroughly pagan culture, Abraham, 57 Ibid., 1:144. 58 Ibid. 59 Maimonides, PM, “Peah” 1:1. 60 Maimonides, Guide, 556. 61 I use this term consciously to indicate Nahmanides’ acknowledgment that other gods do in fact exist besides the one God of Israel who is the exclusive object of worship. See for example his explanation of the ritual known as the sacrifice to Azazel on the Day of Atonement, which he claims is offered “to the power that rules over desolate areas” (‫( )לשר המושל במקומות החורבן‬Nahmanides, Commentary, 2:89; see also 1:389–393). See Josef Stern’s discussion of Nahmanides’ “elaborate metaphysical hierarchy consisting of three classes of celestial beings,” or demigods in his Problems and Parables of Law: Maimonides and Nahmanides on Reasons for the Commandments (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), 144–154.

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Maimonides recounts, independently began to question the regnant ideology while still a minor, emphasizing a consummate intellectual void within which his philosophical doubts germinated: “and he had no teacher, and no one to inform him as to anything, but he was steeped among the ignorant idolaters in Ur Kasdim. And his father, his mother, and the entire nation were idol worshippers, and he worshipped along with them.”62 Biblical genealogy, Nahmanides calculates, has Abraham’s and Noah’s lives overlap. Therefore, in opposition to the utter monotheistic vacuum suffused by its absolute idolatrous antithesis in which Maimonides first locates him, Nahmanides thinks that Abraham does in fact have a mentor in his quest for theological truths. As he insists, in a passage that actually begins by subscribing to Maimonides’ historical reconstruction, “Abraham, our ancestor, conversed with Noah, the second Adam to the creation, who, with his children, reported to him about the Flood, their stay in the ark, their departure from the ark and how the world was renewed like the day of creation.”63 Since, according to Nahmanides, the Flood is proof of creation ex nihilo, Abraham was educated about the Flood by those who could provide first hand testimony as to its historical veracity. Inasmuch as history provides incontrovertible evidence of the foundational principles of Jewish belief, Nahmanides cannot tolerate any radical breaches in its continuous flow. Abraham must have some historical nexus to the creation via those who witnessed it. A succession of fathers who preserve that memory is crucial for the survival of the Jewish faith. Maimonidean history, on the other hand, is punctured by a series of caesuras where ideas have been nearly irrevocably lost, only to be autonomously retrieved and reintroduced by outstanding individuals such as Abraham. Since it is not history that demonstrates an idea but the intrinsic cogency of philosophical argument, Maimonides can not only dispense with the carriers of history and historical memory embodied by parents, but actually necessitates it in order to inculcate how truth is preserved (i.e., not by history but by independent thought). 62 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Idolatry” 1:3. 63 Nahmanides, Writings, 1:145.

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The lesson of Maimonides’ reconstructed history is for its expandability in the ongoing process of generating thought anew each generation. An instructive model that practically manifests theoretical conceptions of identity, belonging, and the role of memory in a group is the outsider who somehow gains entry into a group, and how that newly enlisted member is viewed by others already well ensconced within the establishment. In the case of religion, and in our particular discussion of Judaism, that model is of course the convert; what kind of a welcome is extended to him by the veteran members of the group? In this model it is the significance of initiation into the group by way of circumcision, the supreme symbol of entry into the Jewish covenant, and thus of Jewishness, that underscores the difference between Nahmanides and Maimonides on identity. Though the topic is large and has been dealt with extensively and cogently by Josef Stern64 suffice it for our purposes to summarize that Maimonides views circumcision as serving theological, social, and ethical utilitarian purposes. Socially, it promotes empathy and cohesion among its bearers, while ethically it diminishes that sensual aspect of man Maimonides most abhors as a distraction from intellectual endeavors. Most importantly, it signifies an incomparably ardent commitment to the theological and philosophical tenets of Judaism as fostered by Abraham, its founding father. One of the most radical halakhic implications of this conception of circumcision is Maimonides’ unique and, in defiance of accepted rabbinic law to the contrary, ingenious subsumption of the descendants of Ishmael, in other words Muslims, in the obligation of circumcision.65 This ruling is not surprising given 64 Josef Stern, “Maimonides on the Parable of Circumcision,” in Problems and Parables of Law, supra, 87–108; Shaye Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 146–154. 65 Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Kings,” 10:7–8. See Stern who concludes that Islam satisfies all of Maimonides’ criteria for membership in the “Abrahamic covenant,” which is not meant to be “coextensive with any other term specifically for the Jews such as the ‘people of Israel’ or ‘the Mosaic covenant,’” Stern, “Maimonides,” 95–98. See also David Novak, “The Treatment of Islam and Muslims in the Legal Writings of Maimonides,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions, ed. William M. Brinner and Stephen David Ricks (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 233–250.

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Maimonides’ biographical account of Abraham’s turn to monotheism, subsequent formation of a monotheistic community bound ideologically, and classification of Islam in his time as pure monotheism. It is nothing less than revolutionary considering rabbinic jurisprudence on the matter.66 What is traditionally the quintessential insignia of exclusiveness and parochialism in the construction of Jewish identity is deconstructed into an inclusive gesture that transcends ethnicity and heredity precisely because history and national memory are not the essential ingredients of Abrahamic descent. Nahmanides, who views the lives of Abraham and the other patriarchs as not just prefiguring Jewish history, but embodying it, cannot tolerate a covenantal inscription that is decoupled from the body. That is why Nahmanides reads Gen. 17:4, “Behold my covenant is with you and you shall be a father to all the nations” in a way that conditions the second half of the divine pronouncement on the first. The covenant is identified as circumcision and “it is only after the covenant that you become a father to all the nations.”67 What is for Maimonides a physical symbol of Abraham’s accomplishments, is for Nahmanides an integral stage of their realization, achieving a metamorphosis in his very being. This is confirmed by a further observation on the same verse praising God for his calculated timing of the circumcision command, which “preceded Sarah’s conception ‘in order that his seed be holy’” [emphasis mine].68 Circumcision ontologically transforms Abraham, enabling a transfer of his genetic makeup consisting of

66 See b Sanhedrin 59b. 67 Nahmanides, Commentary, 1:100. 68 ,‫וברוך השם אשר לו לבדו נתכנו עלילות שהקדים וצוה את אברהם לבא בבריתו להמול קודם שתהר שרה‬ ‫להיות זרעו קדוש‬ See also his use of the term “holy seed” in Nahmanides to refer to the origins of the descendants of Edom who stem from Esau, born after the circumcision of Isaac his father (Commentary, 2:457). Subsequent kabbalists pick up on this notion of Isaac’s conception in “holiness.” For but one example see Ibn Gabbai “for Sarah did not become pregnant before Abraham’s circumcision so that the holy soul would be generated through a pure and holy drop from which Isaac was born, so that the nation that would emerge from him would be uniquely suited for the worship of God.” Meir Ibn Gabbai, Avodat HaQodesh (Jerusalem: Yerid HaSeforim, 2004), 2:424.

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holiness chromosomes to his descendants, to the express exclusion of Ishmael who was conceived prior to Abraham’s circumcision.69 Maimonides concludes his responsum to the convert Ovadyah,70 which extended to the convert a wholehearted welcome to participate fully in liturgical expressions of particularist history and ancestral memories with encouraging words that reverse the preconceived roles of born Jew as insider and convert as outsider.71 Lack of ethnic pedigree is actually superior to biological heredity, for “we [natural born Jews] can only trace our lineage back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—whereas you [convert] can trace it to ‘He who spoke and the world came to be.’”72 The natural-born Jew’s faith is always suspect since one can never be certain whether adherence to the faith is not somehow motivated by national memory, shared history, and familial allegiances. The convert’s intentions, however, like those of his archetypical predecessor, Abraham, are not subject to challenge since he arrived at the essential truths of Judaism by reason. Tradition and upbringing played no role in his acquisition of the truth of God’s existence and oneness. Therefore his relation to God is direct and free of extraneous cultural and social factors. In some sense, authentic membership in Judaism entails an overcoming of history, memory, and heredity, by connecting 69 This notion of Israel’s ontological uniqueness becomes a staple of the kabbalistic tradition. For a book length study of this feature of Jewish mysticism see Elliot Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 70 The letter is one of a series of three responses on different issues to Ovadyah and was most probably written in Hebrew. They appear in Maimonides Teshuvot Ha-Rambam, ed. Moshe Yehuda Blau (Jerusalem: Mekitze Nirdamim, 1958), nos. 293, 436 and 448. Shailat believes they all form parts of the same correspondence. Letters of the Rambam, 2 vols. (Heb.), ed. Isaac Shailat (Jerusalem: Maaliyot Press, 1987). An English translation is available in Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader (New York: Library of Jewish studies, Behrman House, 1972), 475–76. See also Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991) for a well-developed thesis regarding Maimonides’ non-essentialist view of the Jewish people, especially pages 49–58 (as opposed, for example, to Judah Halevi and the Zohar). 71 For a detailed examination of this responsum see Diamond, “Maimonides and the Convert: A Juridical and Philosophical Embrace of the Outsider,” Journal of Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11, no. 2 (2003): 125–146. 72 Maimonides, Letters, 1:235, lines 5–6.

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directly with God who transcends all such mundane dimensions of human experience. Ironically, for Maimonides, the true Jew is one who can claim a universal heritage in the Creator God, the truth of which he has arrived at through the universal means of reason available to all human beings. For Nahmanides, since access to the idea of God as creator is through the historical experience of miracles at Egypt and Sinai, the convert must adopt his new host’s national consciousness in terms of history and memory, and therefore, can never be completely domesticated. Ontologically, the convert is not a product of a “holy seed” and, biologically, he does not share a common ancestry with his new compatriots. A subtle halakhic consequence of this condition is Nahmanides’ interpretation of the verse regarding an alien’s obligations regarding the Passover sacrifice, the ultimate symbol of national historical origins since the Egyptian exodus is “the archetypal locus of Jewish historical reference”73 and the original cultic prototype of distinguishing the Israelite from outsiders: “And if a stranger who resides with you would offer a Passover sacrifice to God, he must offer it in accordance with the rules and rites of the Passover sacrifice. There shall be one law for you whether stranger or citizen” (Deut. 9:14). The general consensus among traditional commentators is that, given the context of this passage, it refers to the “second Passover” that is a kind of a make-up for those who were ritually disqualified from performing the sacrifice on the regular Passover. Nahmanides however asserts that this verse is directed toward converts, charging the newcomer with the same sacrificial obligation as the natural born Jew. What is problematic with this interpretation is that there already exists precisely this prescription as formulated previously by Exod. 12:48. His resolution of that problem, and thus the need for this verse’s apparently redundant command, is that the previous verse “refers to the specific Passover celebrated in Egypt, for that passage relates to the Passover of Egypt, as I have explained there; the implication of that passage is that the converts, or the mixed multitude, who left Egypt are included since they also experienced the miracle, however those who converted afterward in the desert or in the land of 73 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 43.

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Israel would not have been obligated in the Passover since neither they nor their fathers were included in ‘and He took us out of there’ (Deut. 6:23); therefore it was necessary here to obligate those generations of the desert and Israel regarding the Passover.”74 Two separate commands highlight a distinction rather than a seamless inclusion. The convert’s duty to conduct the Passover sacrifice results from a formal norm that is secondary to the normative basis for the native Jew whose rationale is anchored in history and memory. Even the convert who actually experienced the original historical exodus is contemplated by the primary norm since he is addressed just as the native Jew is by its historicity. Thus, for Nahmanides, the convert’s celebration of Passover will always be a reminder of his difference since it is a formalistic expression of a divine command, while the indigenous Jew, though also in obeisance to a divine imperative, expresses an identity shaped by historical consciousness.75

74 Nahmanides, Commentary, Num. 9:14, 2:227.‫ויתכן כי מה שאמר בסדר בא אל פרעה (שמות יב‬ ‫ כי הפרשה ההיא על פסח מצרים נאמרה כאשר פירשתי‬,‫ הוא על פסח מצרים‬,‫מח) וכי יגור אתך גר ועשה פסח‬ ‫ כי הגרים היוצאים ממצרים ערב רב יעשו פסח שאף הם היו באותו הנס אבל‬,‫ והיה במשמע‬.)‫שם (בפסוק מג‬ ‫המתגיירים אחרי כן במדבר או בא»י לא יתחייבו בפסח שלא היו הם או אבותיהם בכלל ואותנו הוציא משם‬ ‫ לפיכך הוצרך בכאן לחייבם בפסח דורות במדבר ובארץ‬,)‫(דברים ו כג‬ 75 David Novak cites this passage to support the very opposite implication demonstrating that “one need not have experienced the miracles directly, or even be descended from ancestors who did.” The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 117–118. However, for the reasons laid out here regarding a norm that is divorced from ancestral experience to cover the convert I respectfully disagree with Novak’s conclusion.

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Community and Sacrality: Jewish Customs and Identity in Early Modern Worms Dean Phillip Bell

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies

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INTRODUCTION Jewish identity is a much discussed issue in contemporary scholarship. How individuals and communities identify themselves and fashion boundaries varies a great deal depending upon context. There are many ways to establish and perpetuate identity. In early modern German Jewish communities, historical narration and the recording of communal customs were among the most practiced means to develop and strengthen identity. While we possess notoriously few works written by early modern German Jews that fit modern categories or notions of history, early modern German Jews frequently engaged and narrated the past for a variety of reasons and in a wide range of modalities—for example, in memory books, pinkasim, rabbinic responsa, miracle stories, and books of customs. The past presented in such works raises intriguing questions about how early modern German Jews understood history and time, but also how they engaged the external world and attempted to organize internal Jewish

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communal and social structures. Medieval and early modern German Jews placed a good deal of weight on the power of properly established customs (minhagim), which could themselves attain the status of law (halakhah). Recording such customs was particularly popular and important as a means of establishing authority, contesting external influences, and demarcating identity markers for current and future generations. Combining these significant themes, in this article I examine select cases in which early modern German Jews narrated the development of customs (often in relation to local historical events). In each of these cases, I ask how our authors understood and presented such historical events and I consider how responses to established customs reflect both tensions and continuity in the engagement of the past (between the poles generally demarcated as memory and history). I assert that Jews engaged the past in many important ways, even if they did so outside formal historical genres, and I argue that such engagement can tell us a great deal about Jewish identity in early modern Germany and beyond. Given the broad and growing scholarship on early modern German and Jewish history and the ongoing historical and sociological research on the concepts and manifestation of identity and community, there is a valuable opportunity to examine anew Jewish experiences in early modern Germany. In what follows I focus on select customs in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Jewish customs books and rabbinic responsa in Worms, a central German Jewish community, in the Middle Ages and early modern period. Given its expansive population, range of surviving documentation, at times conflicting layers of authority, and complex interactions between Jews and Christians, Worms is a particularly intriguing subject for such an examination. Before turning directly to Worms, it is worth reviewing some of the underlying notions that inform this analysis.

NOTIONS OF COMMUNITY As a wide range of scholarly studies over the past several decades has taught us, “community” can be a complex concept. Communities can be defined in many ways and for different reasons. Communities often exist

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and are frequently imagined in various contexts and at different levels.1 They can be constructed for a range of needs. The term community can simultaneously refer to a group of people, a social system, a shared geographical space, or certain characteristics, rituals, or behaviors that a group of people has in common.2 More recently, community has been discussed as a set of relationships,3 with the result that community can include divergent groups with common purposes and sensibilities as well as dissenting and conflicting groups that nevertheless share certain commonalities, such as language, geographical settlement, or adherence to a common system of laws.4 Turning to early modern Germany, it should be pointed out that Jewish communities could vary a great deal by size, location, historical development, and form of governing structures and functions. Jews themselves did not all understand Jewish community in the same way. While Jews often identified with a particular location—a city or even a territory—they also frequently saw themselves as part of a broader Jewish people, a sensibility that allowed them to remain connected to other Jews despite differing customs and contexts. Increasingly in the seventeenth century many German Jewish communities formalized communal structures and governing tools.5 The hevra kadisha, or burial society, to take one example, was a central association increasingly organized according to written statutes. Its work went far beyond guarding and burial of the dead. It included various acts of charity and stipulated, as in the case of Worms and other communities, learning regimens and social events as well. The statutes of the burial society 1

George A. Hillery, Jr., Communal Organizations: A Study of Local Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 8–9. 2 Hillery, Communal Organizations, 3. 3 See, for example, David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4 See, for example, Otto Brunner, Land and Lordship: Structures of Governance in Medieval Austria, trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984; orig. 1939) and David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 5 See Dean Phillip Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (Aldershot, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 44ff.

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reflected a multi-level understanding of community, distinguishing between heads of house and bachelors of the community,6 as well as between residents of the community and those outside the community.7 The statutes also differentiated between members of the society (havurah) and other people of the community (kehillah), specifying types of membership within the Jewish community.8 As the seventeenth-century ordinances of the burial society indicate, not only was the community in Worms complex, it also extended, in important ways, beyond those living in the city and those with formal membership rights.9 A central Hebrew term used to denote community in the early modern period was kehillah, a term that was fairly ambiguous in its biblical and rabbinic context and that was often cast about with little precision by early moderns.10 In its biblical and Talmudic context this word had a rather general meaning of an assembly of people.11 Throughout the early modern period community often continued to refer primarily to an assembly of Jews, and most generally it denoted simply the inhabitants of a particular city or region. In this regard it was the people gathered in a particular location—almost regardless of the size—who constituted a “community.” There were other terms, to be sure, such as edah, tzibur and kahal, that were also frequently used to denote community or some aspect of community, often meaning “congregation” and used specifically within the context of religious   6 See Register of Statutes and Protocols of the “Hevra Kadisha” of Worms, for the Years 5476–5597 (1716–1837), ed. Avigdor Unna (Jerusalem: Mosah ha-Rav Kuk, 1980) [Hebrew], 31 (for 24 Sivan 476).   7 Register of Statutes and Protocols of the “Hevra Kadisha” of Worms, 65 (for 23 Shevat 491). Compare 31.   8 Register of Statutes and Protocols of the “Hevra Kadisha” of Worms, 41 (27 Sivan 483), where the text distinguishes between a member of the havurah (the hevra kadisha) and the other people of “our” kehillah.   9 Register of Statutes and Protocols of the “Hevra Kadisha” of Worms, 33 (11 Adar 480). 10 For a fuller treatment of this topic more generally, see Dean Phillip Bell, “Jewish Community in Central Europe in the Sixteenth Century,” in Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, ed. Michael J. Halvorson and Karen E. Spierling (Aldershot, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 143–62. 11 Consider Exodus 12:6, Numbers 14:5. For the term kahal, see Joshua 8:35, for example. Regarding Talmudic notions, see, for example, Babylonian Talmud Pesahim 64a or Kiddushin 41b.

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worship or related, as in the last term, to the council that governed and represented the Jewish community.

NOTIONS OF SACRALITY

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In one of his many groundbreaking articles, the Reformation historian Bob Scribner noted that religious and cosmic order as well as human relationships were affected by the manifestation of sacrality in the secular world.12 In early modern Germany, as in other historical contexts, the sacred was characterized by extraordinary and extraordinarily effective power. For Scribner, although the sacred is itself connected with holiness, it is experienced within the profane (secular or worldly).13 Not surprisingly, then, manifestations of sacrality and sacred power are always located in history, and they are greatly variable and often very transient.14 Sacrality, according to Scribner, is frequently imparted through ritual cycles that utilize sacraments and various sacramentals.15 As such, in the medieval and early modern Catholic model of sacrality the clergy bore the power of channeling the sacred for use within the profane world via sacred rituals. While Protestantism rejected such direct mediation, it replaced it with an alternate sacramental structure, one based on morality in which disorder was seen as the result of human weakness and sinfulness.16

12 Robert W. Scribner, “Cosmic Order and Daily Life: Sacred and Secular in PreIndustrial German Society,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany, ed. Robert W. Scribner (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 1. 13 See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), regarding the notion of the sacred within the profane world. 14 Scribner, “Cosmic Order,” 2. 15 Scribner, “Cosmic Order,” 7—for example, private conjurations—and consider the narration of the actions of Rabbi Gedalia in this context (see Dean Phillip Bell, “Worms and the Jews: Jews, Magic, and Community in Seventeenth-Century Worms,” in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Folklore and Traditional Belief in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kathryn A. Edwards [Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002], 93–118 and below). 16 Robert W. Scribner, “Anticlericalism and the Reformation in Germany,” in Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany, 243–56, here at 254–55.

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In what follows, I will examine how Jews in early modern Worms understood community and sacrality by considering how some of them discussed particular rituals and customs. By the Middle Ages, and building from some Talmudic discussions, it was fairly common for Jews to denote their communities as “holy.”17 But why was the Jewish community denoted as intrinsically sacred, what was intended by the term “holy,” and did that designation change or vary under different circumstances? To understand early modern Jewish notions of community and sacrality we must first provide historical context—a context to which Jews reacted and in which they themselves also participated.

EARLY MODERN WORMS AND THE JEWS

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The early modern city of Worms18 was multi-confessional,19 it was the locus of interaction and conflict between competing and overlapping sources of legal authority, and it possessed a rich religious and political legacy from the Middle Ages, being a free city since the eleventh century. Although the bishop maintained the title of Stadtherr,20 the city had slowly removed itself from his yoke over the course of the later Middle Ages. A major disagreement in the early 1480s regarding the nature of the city’s oath to the bishop reflects this tension. The disagreement was important in the reformulation of the relationship between the city and 17 See Bell, “Jewish Community in Central Europe in the Sixteenth Century.” 18 Among the synthetic overviews, see Fritz Reuter, “Mehrkonfessionalität in der Freien Stadt Worms im 16–18. Jahrhundert,” in Städtische Randgruppen und Minderheiten, ed. Bernhard Kirchgässner and Fritz Reuter (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1986), 9–48; and Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Anti-Jewish Politics in Early Modern Germany: The Uprising in Worms, 1613–17,” Central European History 23, no. 2–3 (June–September, 1990): 91–152. 19 Consider for example the variety of legislation of the interim council between 1548 and 1552 regarding evangelical worship or the string of attempted expulsions of the Jews throughout the sixteenth century. See Fritz Reuter, Warmaisa: 1000 Jahre Juden in Worms (reprint, Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987 [originally, Worms: Verlag Stadtarchiv Worms, 1984]), 21, 26. 20 For the late tenth and early eleventh century transfer of power from the emperor to the bishop, see Germania Judaica. vol. 1: Von den ältesten Zeiten bis 1238, ed. M. Brann, I. Elbogen, A Freimann, and H. Tykocinski (Breslau: Marcus, 1917– 1934; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1963), 437–38.

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the bishop and in the consolidation of the city’s sense of legal authority and independence. Not surprisingly, the conflict was described in a variety of chronicles. In explicating the competition for authority, the Worms chronicler Friedrich Zorn (1538–1610), for example, summarized the differing forms and understandings of the traditional oath sworn by the city council21 to the bishop.22 The bishop demanded that the entire “community” (gemein) be included in the formula, not just the burgomaster and council, and that the specifics of his name and his lordship be referenced, and not simply his ecclesiastical office. Finally, the bishop removed the council’s language of a free city, and any accompanying legal implications and privileges. The council, for its part, expressed concern over the entry into the city of many foreign people associated with the bishop, the friendly relations of the bishop with the Pfalzgraf, as well as the bishop’s unfriendly and coarse words against the city council.23 The debate between the council and the bishop, therefore, involved a range of issues related to the conception and boundaries of community as well as the location of authority.24 Although the bishop maintained some authority into the early modern period, much of that authority was eventually usurped by the municipal authorities. Signaling what we might call the sacralization of the city, by the middle of the sixteenth century the municipal as well as imperial authorities referred to the city with the appellation “holy” imperial city Worms.25 21 See as well, for further discussion and several key documents, Heinrich Boos, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte der Stadt Worms, vol. 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1893), including 270–72, 276–78, and 587–604. On the conflict in a legal perspective, see Friedrich Battenberg, “Gerichtsbarkeit und Recht in spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Worms,” in Residenzen des Rechts, ed. Bernhard Kirchgässner and Hans-Peter Becht (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1993), 37–76, especially 40–42 and 52ff. In this context, the growing articulation of common good could be utilized in the argument to circumscribe what was considered the external authority of the bishop. 22 Wormser Chronik von Friedrich Zorn, ed. Wilhelm Arnold, Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins in Stuttgart, XLIII (Stuttgart: Litterarische Verein, 1857), 192ff. 23 “Eintritt Johann von Dalbergs: Schädigungen der Stadt Worms durch Bischof Joh. Kämmerer (1483),” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stadt Worms, ed. Hans Soldan (Worms: E. Kranzbühler, 1896), 68. 24 For an extensive contemporary treatment, see “Eintritt Johann von Dalbergs,” 65ff. 25 Consider a city edict from 1557 and an imperial mandate from 1561, for example, in Gerson Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms und des deutschen Städtewesens (Breslau: H. Skutsch, 1862), 37, 45.

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The conflict between the city and the bishop naturally affected political and religious relations between those two factions—and, in fact, the late medieval chronicles are rife with discussions of various excommunications and interdicts imposed by bishops upon the city.26 But the conflict also transformed the relationship of the city to the Jews. While the Jews were still technically bound by the authority of the bishop, and at a higher level by that of the emperor himself, the ordinances issued at various times during the later Middle Ages and the early modern period reflected a changed understanding of authority and notions of civic community.27 Earlier agreements between the bishop and the Jews in Worms from the early fourteenth century, for example, were rather open-ended, with few specifics regarding dates, Jewish economic endeavors, or communal infrastructure beyond the appointment of the Judenbischof and the twelve-member Jewish council.28 Although the bishop retained some force in the city, as did the emperor and the local Schutzherr, the elector of the Palatinate,29 by the beginning of the sixteenth century the city had denied the bishop his right to install the burgomaster and the city council members and had even reconstituted the city council. In the same year, 1505, in a Jewish ordinance, the council usurped the bishop’s right to install (and to collect a fee for the installation of) the Jewish council.30 Subsequent and numerous Jewish ordinances were promulgated by the Worms civic authorities throughout the sixteenth century.31 The twenty-point ordinance of 1524, for example, was issued for a period of four years.32 In one of the more interesting clauses of that ordinance, 26 Zorn, Wormser Chronik, 92ff, regarding the 1251 ban and interdict; 204, regarding the actions of the bishop against the recalcitrant city in 1501. 27 For the legal position of the Jews in medieval Worms, see Guido Kisch, “Die Rechtstellunng der Wormser Juden im Mittelaler,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland V (1934): 122–33. 28 Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 29–31. 29 See Leon J. Yagod, “Worms Jewry in the Seventeenth Century,” Yeshiva University Dissertation (1967), 7–12; and Reuter, Warmaisa, 57. 30 Reuter, Warmaisa, 58. 31 Boos, Geschichte der Rheinischen Städtekultur, vol. 3 regarding the Judenordnung in the 1550s—the complete 1584 ordinance is given on 165ff. See also Reuter, Warmaisa, regarding ordinances from the 1520s and 1540s. 32 Reuter, Warmaisa, 68ff.

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the language and scope of the oath taken by the Jews to the city mirrored, in some ways, that of the city to the bishop noted earlier. Article 6, for example, stipulated that the Jews were to be true to the Stättmeister, burgomaster, council, and commune (Gemeinde), and that they should warn them day and night of any dangers. The Jews were also to pledge to obey civic law, ordinances, and policies (Polizei).33 Unlike late medieval ordinances, the more detailed legislation of the sixteenth century went to great lengths to spell out Jewish obligations within a specifically civic context. The ordinance of 1557, to take another example, included clauses by then standard, such as Jews should: not seek protection anywhere except Worms; take an oath that they would pursue the law only in the city of Worms; remain true to the city Worms; and accept no foreign Jews without the consent of the city council.34 Jews were also commanded to maintain their houses and buildings in good condition, clean and organized (and not, the ordinance declares, reluctantly and untidily as had been the case until that point), and at their own expense.35 The ordinance dealt with some ostensibly socio-religious concerns as well—as in other late medieval and early modern legislation, Jews were not to accept Church items as pledges36 nor play games of chance with Christians.37 Unlike the broader late medieval ecclesiastical arrangements, but like other sixteenth-century ordinances, the 1557 ordinance was issued for a limited period—four years.38 Particularly at times of increasing hostility from religious or civic leaders—manifested in occasional attempts to garner official support to expel the Jews—the Jewish community could navigate and turn to various levels of external authority. Frequently such politics could lead representatives of the Jewish community to the emperor and the imperial court. In early March, 1551, for example, a petition of the Jewish community of

33 Reuter, Warmaisa, 71. 34 Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 8–9; 39. 35 Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 37–38. 36 Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 40. 37 Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 43. 38 For discussion of the 1609 ordinance and some later provisions leading up to the expulsion of the Jews, see Friedrichs, “The Uprising in Worms,” 104ff.

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Worms resulted in the following privilege (making the reference to the law of Worms in the 1557 ordinance noted above all the more striking):

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From ancient times it was the general condition for citizens and Jews in the city of Worms, by valid custom, that the one who brought a complaint before the city court but afterwards consulted another court, could be compelled by the imperial and territorial courts to accept the ruling of the city court of Worms. This custom was injurious regarding the Jews, who were thereby harmed. The Jews of Worms [Wormser Judenschaft] called upon Emperor Charles V, and petitioned [him] regarding the continuation of this old custom, as well as regarding the confirmation of all favor, freedoms, and customs, which have been given by the emperors and kings to their ancestors as well as for themselves, as together with the city of Worms and further for all the Jews in the Empire. He [the Emperor] bids all Electoral Princes, Princes, authorities, especially the Stadtmeister and the Council in Worms, to protect the Jews [Judenheit] there and their descendants in their old customs and other freedoms; for offense against the aforementioned, he threatens severe disfavor and a fine of 20 Mark pure gold, payable to the Imperial Chamber.39

As noted above, Jews lived under multiple, at times competing structures of authority. In this case, princes and civic authorities were instructed to protect the customs and privileges of the Jews. While the term “customs” used in this context could be multivalent and referred primarily to issues of law, the interest in customs within the Jewish community itself had a long-standing tradition, with proper and accepted customs themselves attaining the status of law. Perhaps the growing interest in recording local Jewish customs was related to efforts to anchor ancient practices and behaviors in a permanent and legitimate legal system. As Jewish law was becoming more broadly codified, and increasingly accepted in such terms by the early seventeenth century,40 local customs had to be recorded to remain relevant and accepted. Particularly during periods of crisis, when the Jewish population was fluid and highly fluctuating because of various conditions, 39 Adolf Kober, “Die deutsche Kaiser und die Wormser Juden,” in Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland V (1934): 134–51, here at 140. 40 Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shulhan ‘Arukh and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26, no. 2 (2002): 251–76.

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from warfare, to plague and immigration, the status of local customs was a central discussion in the search for power and authority.41 The same might be said of the larger civic community, which, as the document above noted, possessed various freedoms and privileges. In petitioning against legal processes that they felt disadvantaged them, the Jews presented their community as resident within the boundaries of Worms but comprising a separate entity with customs and privileges. As the civic authorities sought tighter control over their own affairs, as epitomized by their relationship with the bishop (as well as the emperor), they continued their efforts to legislate over the Jews in the city. The Worms Jewish community was one of the four largest in the early modern empire (Prague, Frankfurt, and Vienna were the others) and one of the five central Jewish courts established by the Frankfurt synod of 1603 (the others being Frankfurt, Fulda, Friedberg, and Günzburg).42 Despite sixteenth-century restrictions on foreign Jews43 and several expulsion attempts at the end of the century,44 the Jewish community continued to grow. By 1610 the Jews in Worms numbered more than 750,45 approximately two and one half times larger than the Jewish population from the early 1590s (300) and constituting something like twelve percent of the total city population. The history and development of the Jews in Worms during the Thirty Years War reflected many of the general challenges facing other Jewish communities, such as Frankfurt, as well as the broader 41 Consider Theodore Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 42 Yagod, “Worms Jewry,” 37. 43 Yagod, “Worms Jewry,” 36. 44 In 1558 the city obtained from Ferdinand I a privilege to expel the Jews; the attempt was again thwarted, however, this time by the bishop and his powerful vassals, the Dalbergs—see Friedrichs, “Anti-Jewish Politics,” 101. 45 Reueter, Warmaisa, 96; Friedrichs claims 700 with houses including multiple generations and inhabited by an average of seven people per household (see Friedrichs, “Anti-Jewish Politics,” 96–97). Based on a census of Jewish households from 1610, Friedrichs has reassessed the total Jewish population in Worms, which he now believes to have been 765 at a minimum. See Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Jewish Household Structure in an Early Modern Town: The Worms Ghetto Census of 1610,” The History of the Family 8 (2003): 481–93, here at 485.

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population. In 1635, the Jewish community, like the residents of the city more generally, was struck by epidemic and poor harvests.46 During the ensuing winter, 200 people died in the ghetto and many houses were almost completely depopulated.47 Jews were expected to respond in the same way as other citizens and residents, for example in the demolition of dilapidated houses. Jews were also pressed to support the winter quartering of troops, in the amount of 40,000 fl., even as the city council demanded its regular payment of 35,000 fl., and threatened noncompliance with imprisonment.48 The emperor ordered any such imprisoned Jews to be released, however, and admonished military commanders against molesting the Jews in the imperial city of Worms, particularly through quartering of troops or executions, since the Jews were under imperial protection. Finally, in mid February, 1637, an agreement between the municipal authorities and the Jews regarding the Jews’ share in the contributions to the war effort was concluded before the imperial war commissioner and confirmed by the emperor. This was not, however, the end to what would be an ongoing series of complaints and negotiations between the Jewish community and the city over the next several years, leading to the Jewish ordinance of 1641.49 Despite such challenges, Worms remained a central Jewish community and a city of refuge for Jews fleeing other areas. Capitalizing on this situation and attempting to regulate the size of the Jewish population, the ordinance of 1641 stipulated that anyone who wanted to move to Worms with their entire household, including wife and children, had to pay the high sum of 60 golden pieces as well as a yearly tax on their assets.50 The Jewish population, which had sunk to 56 families by 1647, was nevertheless revitalized and re-grew to 105 heads of household by 46 See, for example, Bacharach, Havot Yair, vol. 1, siman 60. 47 Kober, “Die deutsche Kaiser und die Wormser Juden,” 142; see more recently, Ursula Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” Der Wormsgau 26 (2008): 7–24, here at 13. 48 Kober, “Die deutsche Kaiser und die Wormser Juden,” 142; see also Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 21–22. 49 Kober, “Die deutsche Kaiser und die Wormser Juden,” 142, 143; Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 23. 50 Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 14.

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1666/67—though that year would itself be marked by a significant demographic downturn, with the eruption of an epidemic that claimed 27 heads of house (men and widows).51 The general conditions of wartime society impacted the Jewish community in other ways as well, resulting in a shift in occupations and an increasing impoverishment of many Jews.52 Although succumbing to some external political and popular pressures as well as natural disasters, such as floods in the middle of the seventeenth century and epidemics in the 1630s and 1660s,53 the community remained vital and showed a capacity to bounce back from adversity even after destruction of the main Jewish institutions and much of the broader city by the French at the end of the seventeenth century.54 By the late sixteenth century, the Jewish community in Worms was well developed, with a significant communal infrastructure, including an oligarchic council, communal officials, settlement policies, rabbinate, and an extensive network of formally supervised education for children and adults. 55 The community also had a very clear history, identity, and range of communal customs. In this complex historical context of conflicting authority, at times volatile Jewish and Christian relations, and significant, if complicated, Jewish demographic and structural development, notions of Jewish community in early modern Worms could be both variable and flexible. Jewish community could exist in different contexts and it could be understood in different ways: politically, socially, economically, or religiously—consciously placed in sacred time or space, often through liturgy or ritual.

51 Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 14. Regarding Juspa’s mention of this situation, see Shlomo Eidelberg, “Minhagim of Warmaisa,” in his Medieval Ashkenazic History: Studies on German Jewry in the Middle Ages: I English Essays (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1999), 117–54, here at 135f. For Juspa’s description of his role as a mohel in the midst of the contagion, see Shlomo Eidelberg, R. Juspa, Shammash of Warmaisa (Worms): Jewish Life in Seventeenth Century Worms (Jerusalem: Magnes, Hebrew University, 1991), 83–84. 52 Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 17ff. 53 Yagod, “Worms Jewry,” 38–42, 45. 54 Yagod, “Worms Jewry,” 46. 55 Yagod, “Worms Jewry,” 78–82, 97, 98–104, 106.

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THE ROLE OF CUSTOMS IN COMMUNAL IDENTITY

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The customs books of Worms provide a good opportunity to see some of the ways in which the Jewish community defined itself.56 The customs recorded in these books were intended to remind future generations about specific communal practices, but also to demarcate the unique aspects of religious life in Worms. In addition to customs themselves, these collections and subsequent commentaries also provide a fair amount of “historical” material that may help to shed important light on early modern notions of Jewish community. Such sources, however, must be used with caution. They often formed part of personal collections and in many cases they were published generations or centuries after composition, if at all.57 Although not “published,” such collections must also be seen within the context of Ashkenazic discussions and compilation of customs, the ongoing debate about the codification of law (which could itself lead to both universalism and particularism),58 as well as broader German legal developments.59 The collection and recording of customs in Worms might be directly related to individual motivations, as well as to broader crises or ruptures within the Worms Jewish community.60 With such precautions in mind, 56 For information on this genre as well as earlier and later customs books for Worms, see the introduction to Juda Löw Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, ed. Israel Mordechai Peles (Jerusalem: Mekhon Yerushalayim, 1987), 22ff. 57 Regarding Kirchheim and the work of the eighteenth-century Rabbi Sinai Loans, for example, see Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, introduction, 36–44. For Juspa, see the introduction to Juspa Shammash, Minhagim d-k.k. Vermaysa, ed. Benyamin Shlomo Hamburger (Jerusalem: Mekhon Yerushalayim, 1988), 2 vols., here at 1:66–68. See Lucia Raspe, “‘Eine Zierde des Museums’: Über zwei verschollene Handschriften aus dem Jüdischen Worms,” in Der Wormsgau 26 (2008): 25–37, regarding David Oppenheim/Oppenheimer and his collections, 28 or 33ff for the circulation of Kirchheim’s work. 58 See Joseph Davis, “The Reception of the Shulhan ‘Arukh,” for example. 59 The fact that terms such as “Jewish ceremonies” [nach Ihren Jüdischen Ceremonien]—to be sure in this case in relation to specific Jewish laws and practices (See the 1641 ordinance, in Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 82) and not the order of prayers in the synagogue—or “old customs,” referring to both traditional legal practices and privileges, could be referenced perhaps added to the need for legitimization through the compilation of Jewish customs and laws. 60 See, for example, Raspe, “‘Eine Zierde des Museums,’” 26–27.

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these sources are, nevertheless, quite valuable. In what follows, therefore, we will examine two central customs books and corresponding commentary, as well as select related rabbinic responsa. In his book of the customs of the Jewish community of Worms, especially as they pertained to prayer, Levi (Juda Liwa (Löb) b. Joseph Mose) Kirchheim sought to explicate the unique aspects of liturgical practices in that community, drawing from the wisdom and teachings of the great scholars who had resided there.61 Kirchheim, following in long-established Ashkenazic tradition, stressed the significant role and binding nature of local and established custom. Kirchheim placed historical events into a liturgical context and used them to explain the order or the unique combination of prayers and passages as recited in Worms, particularly in the synagogue. A good example of this is the order of prayers he noted for the fast related to the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 during the First Crusade.62 Not surprisingly, therefore, the notion of community that Kirchheim most frequently expressed was one situated within a liturgical sense and represented by the term “congregation”—the kahal of the synagogue that responds to the chants and prayers of the hazzan. In several places, the congregation, as Kirchheim understood it, appears to have enveloped all Jews in the city, including women who would have been in attendance at certain broader communal events.63 The Worms customs books were generally organized according to the Jewish calendar, Jewish holidays, or specific lifecycle events or topics, such as marriage and childbirth. Juspa, the Shammash of Worms and author of another important book of customs, for example, provides an intriguing and detailed discussion of rites associated with marriage that included a number of local customs. While Juspa also focused on the specific Jewish customs of Worms, he frequently and consciously differentiated customs that were generally observed in Ashkenaz or the Jewish world at large from those that were unique to the region or to

61 Particularly his teacher, and relative, Moses Luria. See Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, introduction, 7–8. 62 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 251–53, or briefly regarding recitations left out, 266. 63 See Juspa, Minhagim, 2:124.

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Worms specifically,64 and which lent Worms particular status or sacrality. To give one example, Juspa spent several pages discussing the preparation and sale of kosher wine in Worms. This discussion is of interest not only because of the customs surrounding wine, but also because we possess halakhic discussions of the topic65 and civic ordinances66 that address the theme. Juspa himself appended comments to his customs book that dealt with recent events, including the damage to wine cellars in the Jewish community caused by the great floods after the middle of the seventeenth century.67 Civic authorities had become increasingly aware of Jewish wine handling. In 1605, by order of the city council, an inventory was taken of wine held in various Jewish houses.68 Early seventeenth-century city Jewish ordinances also addressed the issue in some detail, permitting some commercial handling of wine by Jews, especially as related to the needs of individual households. Juspa began his description of the “custom of wine in Worms,” as follows: The wine is pressed only in the street in which the Jews have their houses, not in the houses of the Gentiles [uncircumcised], and barrels full of crushed grapes, together with the grape stones, are purchased from Gentiles, who bring [it] to the street of the Jews. And afterwards, the wine is made in wine presses and oil presses that are in the houses of the Jews in the street and by means of the Jews. And [this custom has] already taken hold in all of the diasporas of Israel, even [among] those individuals who do not generally drink wine, except wine that is made by them or by those in their house. At any rate, the wine that comes from the holy community of Worms is drunk . . . because the wine of our kehillah has the status of kosher [wine] in every place.69

64 Juspa, Minhagim, 1:15 (“like the custom of all of the kehillot”), 1:84, 1:124, 1:164, etc., for example. 65 For one aspect of this issue, for the early Middle Ages, see Haym Soloveitchik, Wine in Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages: Yeyn Nesekh—A Study in the History of Halakhah [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2008). 66 See for example article 14 of the 1617 Stättigkeit (Wolf, Zur Geschichte der Juden in Worms, 75), allowing Jews to shop for wine for their household needs. 67 See Juspa, Minhagim, 2:260, for example. 68 See Reuter, Warmaisa, 81–83. 69 Juspa, Minhagim, 2:127ff.

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As Juspa subsequently noted, the highly regarded status of Worms kosher wine was not attained by other communities that produced wine. The process followed in Worms was strictly monitored and controlled. As in other areas of Jewish life, Worms stood out as a central community, with practices and a level of stringency that made it sacred. As the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has noted, medieval Jews often understood the past typologically, through rituals and liturgy. In this way historical and communal events could be co-opted into a cohesive theology.70 But the early modern customs books reveal that even as such events were melded into typologies and conjoined with other events sharing calendrical coincidences (occurring on the same or closely proximate days, but in different years), their authors also took great care to explain such events, especially recent or contemporary events, and they often provided a good deal of specific details. Seventeenth-century Jews were clearly aware of recent history and events unfolding around them. In their often brief narrations, we see both reversion to typologies as well as the ability to discern temporality and, for our purposes, important conceptions of community. Juspa, in his customs book, occasionally commented on contemporary affairs and historical events. Regarding the withdrawal of foreign troops after the last phases of the war, he noted: Frankenthal: The soldiers of the Spanish king marched from there on Friday, the 25th of Iyyar in 412 [by the shorter calculation = 1652], and Frankenthal was returned and came under the authority of the Duke Charles Ludwig, Pfalzgraf. And it was more than thirty years before the land came into the hand of the Duke from the Spanish soldiers. And the entire time when [the region] was under the Spanish travel ceased because of the danger of the Frankenthal war, because they went and scorned those who traveled the paths, and inflicted wounds [upon] them with cruel blows and injurious mortal assaults, and sometimes murdered them. And from the day that [Frankenthal] came under the authority of the Pfalzgraf, the land was quiet.71 70 See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 71 Cited in Reuter, “Die Wormser Judenschaft im Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” 24; translated from Juspa, Minhagim, 2:259.

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But Juspa’s notion of community was articulated in the next paragraph: On Sunday, 11 Tammuz the French marched from here, [the] city of Worms, and returned our place Worms near the town, because the peace was completed between the kingdoms. And this [situation], that the city of Worms, along with all the places of Ashkenaz, was in the hands of soldiers, lasted more than thirty years. Blessed is God who provides us protection of his peace, so should we be blessed with the blessing of the peace forever.72

While Juspa distinguished a Jewish section of Worms, he clearly placed his construction within an understanding of local and regional developments more broadly, a practice that comes through in some of his brief addenda as well. For the important seventeenth-century rabbinic scholar Yair Hayim Bacharach, historical events were similarly often cast in specifically Jewish terms. Bacharach wrote regarding the destruction of Worms by the French in 1689, for example:

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Our city was destroyed and because of our great sins our Beit-haMikdash, our small synagogue, was desolate. The residents of our holy congregation [of Worms] left in terror and became wanderers and roamers. I too was among the unhappy who were exiled . . . These are the words of the troubled who writes in haste, as an artisan without tools in the days of my poverty . . . of the destruction of our congregation in a mother city in Israel, Worms.73

Like Juspa, Bacharach referred to the traumatic events that affected the broader civic community, as well as the particular Jewish community or congregation. Bacharach wrote further that, “whoever did not see Worms in its splendour and order, had never truly viewed a noble

72 Juspa, Minhagim, 2:259–60. 73 Yair Hayim Bacharach, Havot Yair, in Shlomo Eidelberg, “The Jews of Worms during the French Conquest (1688–1697),” in Medieval Ashkenazic History I, 155–78, here at 168.

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community.”74 In being forced to flee, like other citizens, and witnessing the destruction: [T]he Jews experienced terrible anxiety, for the majority of houses in the Jewish quarter were constructed on the city wall . . . We had to leave our houses and our courtyard and allow our holy synagogue to be ruined. We had to pack all our belongings and flee.

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In the end, Bacharach proclaimed that the Jews would return to the city and that “God would be compassionate to us.”75 The engagement of contemporary and historical events was extremely important in the case of the traumatic expulsion of the Jews from Worms in the early part of the seventeenth century. In narrating the events of 1615, Kirchheim noted that, “the Jews were expelled from their streets and the evil mob destroyed our little sanctuary (mikdash).” Continuing the metaphor, he noted a few lines later that, “we were there in exile on the banks of the Rhine river.”76 As with Bacharach, here the broader, more general notions of Jewish community across the Diaspora played an important role, with destruction of the local synagogue compared to that of the Temple and the expulsion from the home city of Worms with Israelite exile.77 The Worms commu74 Reuter, Warmaisa, 124. 75 Reuter, Warmaisa, 124. 76 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 109. 77 It should be noted that with the destruction of much of the city, including churches and public buildings, and the evacuation of many burghers, the forced movement of the city government temporarily until 1697 to Frankfurt was also depicted by some Christian chroniclers as an “exile.” See Reuter, Warmaisa, 123. Later, in the eighteenth century some Jewish writers would go so far as to discuss the same events, but add the alleged “detail”—that we noted above—that the Jewish community in the city had actually predated the destruction of the First Temple, here not imitating but actually superseding sacred history. Compare David Oppenheim, writing in the early eighteenth century regarding the events of 1689 (in Eidelberg, “The Jews of Worms during the French Conquest (1688– 1697),” 169): “The fire was unquenchable. In a short time the entire city, including the Jewish community, which predated the destruction of the First Temple, was consumed.” See also the rich store of Worms legends described in Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany, 148–51.

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nity, in all its antiquity and its historical development, was a sacred reflection of central Jewish spaces and experiences. The important place of Worms in Ashkenaz as well as more general Jewish history, typologically, was established with such discourse. For Kirchheim, as well as Juspa and later commentators, the 1615 expulsion was a major marker in the history and identity of the Jewish community in Worms, one that impacted the physical, as well as the ritual and liturgical.78 Kirchheim wrote that on the eve of the new month of Shevat there was in Worms a fast imposed on the congregation (tsibur) because of a miracle that occurred “for us.”79 The miracle was the re-admission of the Jews after 600 evil people (baalei bubim) “descended upon us with a strong hand . . . From our houses and from our city and from everything that we had, we were completely expelled to the shores of the Rhine . . .” As Juspa would point out later as well, the event was memorialized in this context because the fast was to serve as a custom associated with the return of the Jews on the eve of the month of Shevat on the Jewish calendar. But the initial actions, as Juspa reported, unfolded in sacred time and space as well—on the seventh day of Passover (a day memorialized for other events in the history of the Jews in Worms),80 and, as Kirchheim explicated, in the synagogue, at the very time that the hazzan was praying aloud after the Kedushah in the Shemoneh Esreh.81 Kirchheim noted that, “they expelled us, our wives, our sons, and our daughters and our babies and all our guests from our houses and from our city and from everything that is ours [. . .].”82 78 See, for example, the comments on Juspa’s customs book by Bacharach, 1:28, 48, 95. See the order of selichot, or penitential prayers, for that day as explicated by Juspa (Minhagim, 2:248). 79 Epstein, Die Wormser Minhagbücher, XIII. 80 See Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany, 136–38. 81 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 209. Similarly, an attack mounted against the Jews, but dispersed through the power of the kabbalist Rabbi Gedalia, is contextualized as occurring on the eve of Tishah b’Av at the time of reading Lamentations. See Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 264. This story is also presented as part of the magical lore of the Jewish community in Juspa’s Ma’aseh Nissim. See Eidelberg, R. Juspa. 82 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 209. Shortly after he notes that the Jews were expelled from “our streets.”

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For Kirchheim, the community was the assembly of individuals living in Worms at the time, including men, women, and children. This is a notion that was closely related to traditional fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury discourse, in which it was primarily the Jews themselves and their possessions that constituted the community. Such a position was well represented by an entry from Josel of Rosheim’s sixteenth-century chronicle. Josel wrote of the Jews expelled from Oberehnheim in 1505– 07, for example, that, “Eventually the community [tsibur] was unable to endure [the situation] any longer, and [we] were compelled to make wide detours around the city [. . . ].”83 The community here was a group of assembled individuals, who continued to constitute a cohesive unit even beyond the actual boundaries of the city. I should also point out that Josel used the term tsibur, not kehillah, indicating a conflation of congregation and community. Community, in this sense, was portable and comprised of members of the community regardless of their physical location. In his account, Juspa utilized slightly different language. He noted that: In the year 5375 [1615], the Jews were expelled from the sacred community of Worms on the seventh day of Passover. The synagogue was destroyed and remained desolate until 29 Av, 5380 [August 28, 1620]. On the eve of the month of Shevat, 5376 [January 9, 1616] the Almighty, in his mercy and great kindness, returned us to our community in peace. Each individual was fully restored to his home. We established that day, the eve of the New Moon of Shevat, as a fast day on which selichot would be recited in the morning prayers, as found in “Customs of the Eve of the Month of Shevat.”84

83 Josel ben Gershon of Rosheim, The Historical Writings of Joseph of Rosheim: Leader of Jewry in Early Modern Germany, ed. Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt, trans. Naomi Schendowich (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 311. For the Hebrew, see Joseph of Rosheim, Historical Writings, ed. Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt (Jerusalem: Magnes, Hebrew University, 1996) [Hebrew], 284. 84 Eidelberg, “Minhagim of the Holy Community of Warmaisa,” 134. Juspa writes similarly in another place in the customs book: “. . . the Jews were expelled from the holy community of Worms here . . . on the eve of Rosh Hodesh Shevat 5376. God, in his great mercy and charity, returned us in peace to our houses with great honor here in our community (kehillah)” (Minhagim, 1:95).

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Juspa wrote that, “the Jews were expelled from the sacred community of Worms” and not that the sacred (Jewish) community was expelled from Worms. Presumably Juspa referred to the Jewish section of Worms (as noted above). In any event, lest one think that the Jews gathered in the city constituted the sacred community, the passage makes it clear that it was the Jewish “community” itself, with its rich traditions and customs (and, as we learn in the next few lines, ability to survive) that was holy. Juspa’s Worms possessed a certain longevity and sense of identity that one was not likely to find in most early modern German Jewish communities. A similar understanding of community— defined through rituals that connected various temporal periods—which existed on a plane beyond the individual members of the community, was presented by Bacharach in his notes to another passage of Juspa’s customs book. There, Bacharach took the opportunity to point out that the rabbi (rav) and community (kahal) received upon themselves the fast of the community in commemoration of the expulsion, for generation upon generation.85 How should we understand the different language and focus of these various accounts? The background, context, and even genre of each compiler and commentator, of course, need to be considered. Juspa was born later than Kirchheim, in 1604, and outside Worms, in Fulda (he died in 1678). The first version of Juspa’s book dates from 1648, with additions and marginal notes until 1656.86 Juspa, therefore, was writing after the new and very extensive ordinance of 1641,87 which had many limitations but clearly reflected the presence and function of a large and well-established Jewish community in a period of re-growth after the ravages of the great war and the impact of significant pestilence. Kirchheim, by contrast, was probably born in the 1560s. He was married already by 1581 and was mentioned in the city’s “Green Book” in 1586 and 1594. He died in 1632.88 Kirchheim was from a notable 85 Juspa, Minhagim, 1:95. 86 Epstein, Die Wormser Minhagbücher, XXI. See Ezra Fleischer, “Prayer and Piyyut in the Worms Mahzor,” in Worms Mahzor, introductory volume, ed. Malachi BeitArie (Jerusalem: Jewish National and University Library 1985), 36–78, here at 65. 87 Wolf, Zur Geschichter der Juden in Worms, 78–94. 88 Epstein, Die Wormser Minhagbücher, VI.

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Worms family that included rabbis, parnasim, and other communal officials.89 Kirchheim had lived through numerous expulsion attempts and he was probably in his fifties when the Jews were expelled in the early seventeenth century, although he had not begun his customs book until late in his life, beginning it in 1625 and working on it until his death.90 In the imperial inquests and negotiations with the city after the expulsion, Kirchheim may have had a less secure sense of the position of the Worms Jewish community and its long-term viability. His idea of community was more about the people living in a certain geographical location at a certain time. For Juspa, despite challenges and setbacks in the seventeenth century, a more developed sense of geographic roots began to emerge. One additional voice needs to be considered in this context. Rabbi Yair Hayim Bacharach (1638–1702)—who authored a commentary on Juspa’s customs book and a large number of responsa and recorded responsa from his own father—was a major rabbinic authority of the seventeenth century, though he was denied formal rabbinic appointment in Worms until the end of his life. Given the political tensions he himself experienced from within the community and the fact that his father had preceded him as the community rabbi in Worms, Bacharach had a particular interest in recording customs and establishing halakhic authority. The properly established and collective customs of the community were central to communal identity. Commenting on the order of the liturgy, Bacharach wrote, for example, that he had heard that there was a custom to say particular verses before the expulsion that occurred in the year 1615. But since non-Jews occupied the synagogue until 1620, people did not pray collectively in the synagogue, but rather individually and in an abbreviated form in their own houses. Bacharach observed that many recalled that certain verses were recited before the expulsion and that these same people complained that they did not have the strength to return to the good custom of the past.91 Concerned with the authority of properly established customs, Bacharach’s notion of 89 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, introduction, 27. 90 Epstein, Die Wormser Minhagbücher, VII. 91 Juspa, Minhagim, 1:48.

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community not surprisingly transcended individuals and was defined by collective practices that were intended to last for many generations, even amid and after significant challenges and displacement. Characteristically, in commenting on the communal fast on the eve of the new month of Shevat, Bacharach wrote that, “the scholar, our teacher and our rabbi, Vital, who was head of the bet din after the expulsion . . . took upon himself the fast.”92 The fast was imposed upon the community, but it was also taken up by others who settled in the community later, as an ongoing form of communal memory and identification.93 Regarding the fast associated with the 1615 expulsion, Kirchheim, like others, had narrated in detail the specifics of the expulsion of the Jews, as well as their return to the city, and the subsequent establishment of the fast day, complete with the order of prayers. He concluded the section on the customs of the eve of Rosh Hodesh Shevat with a discussion of attempts to nullify the associated fast. While Kirchheim clearly disagreed with those laboring for such nullification, his comments were brief and undeveloped, in part, perhaps, because of the nature and focus of his composition: And at this time when we accepted upon ourselves the fast the rabbi and rosh yeshiva here was the Gaon, our teacher and our rabbi Rabbi Vital from Vienna, and afterwards the aforementioned rabbi moved from our community to his land and to his birthplace . . . and immediately in that year that the rabbi moved from our community some men arose and nullified the fast, but I do not know on what grounds or why; happy is the man who does not have a part in this legacy and nullifies what those who came before accepted.94 92 Juspa, Minhagim, 1:248. 93 One question directed to Bacharach revolved around questions of desecration of the Sabbath. The inquirer asked if it was appropriate to declare a fast on the community (tsibur) because of the sins of the community (kahal), noting that many authorities, such as Asheri and the author of Terumas haDeshen, prohibited such fasts [on the Sabbath] in general (Bacharach, Havot Yair, vol. 2, 663, responsum 236). Bacharach responded that it was appropriate for an individual in danger to desecrate the Sabbath to lament and to impose upon himself a fast. The inquiry also asked whether it was a desecration of the Sabbath to save the community by means of money [which would not be allowed to be handled on the Sabbath], if there was not a general threat to life. 94 Kirchheim, Minhagot Vermaysa, 210.

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Bacharach was even more insistent than Kirchheim upon the centrality of customs, especially regarding the fast in question. He emphasized that the continuity of and adherence to properly established customs was, in essence, what made the community holy. While Kirchheim was dismayed that established customs might be attacked or nullified, Bacharach staunchly and consistently appealed to the traditional Ashkenazic sensibility that elevated properly established customs to the realm of halakhah. Bacharach went so far as to assert that pious customs practiced, even those not formally and publicly adopted by the citizens of a community, were incumbent upon succeeding generations.95 Responding to inquiries about whether members of the Worms community were bound to continue to observe special fasts and customs of the community after its (physical) destruction, Bacharach contended that:

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Even if some few individuals had given up hope, they must follow the feeling of the entire congregation (who must be assumed not to have despaired) . . . The summary is that this destruction was only like an expulsion, or a flight before an earthquake, or before an oppressor. Even if all of the people left, nevertheless we hoped every day for the salvation of the Lord in a natural way. Hence, it was certainly their intention to return and therefore it was incumbent upon them to maintain all the strict observances of the earlier community.96

95 Solomon Freehof, A Treasury of Responsa (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963), 173; see Kaufmann, R. Jaïr Chajjim Bacharach, 77ff. 96 Freehof, A Treasury of Responsa, 174–75 (Bacharach, Havot Yair, vol. 1, 347–49, responsum 126, here at 349). Compare Juspa, who himself recorded a similar discussion regarding the custom of where to begin prayers for Shabbat Hanukah. He wrote that a certain elder had “heard directly from the elders among the communal leaders that all prayerbooks and mahzorim were burned at the time of the evil decrees. For a great while after the fury subsided, when a smaller number returned and resettled in the community, they recited that which they found of the remaining prayers. The half of the aforementioned prayer, which they discovered, was treasured as a brand saved from fire. Hence, they recited only half of the prayer to avoid abandoning the custom even momentarily; later the practice was established as a permanent custom.” (1:238, in Eidelberg, “Minhagim of the Holy Community of Warmaisa,” 132).

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For Bacharach the identity of the community had important moorings in its physical location. But the customs and traditions of the community gave it a sacred status that transcended mere geography, especially at times of stress or dislocation. In one of his responsa Bacharach provided an extended analysis of similar issues. In responsum 126, Bacharach was asked by “a learned and very God-fearing man” whether that man was obligated to honor those abstinences and fastings on Mondays and Thursdays that his father had been accustomed all his days through a vow. The man’s father had also been accustomed on the tenth day of the month of Adar every year to fast and to distribute charity because of a great miracle that had happened to him personally. The inquirer ended his question with a reference to the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Pesahim (50b). In that passage, the Gemara comments on the Mishnah discussing the restrictions placed upon a person when the place he is leaving and the place he is going have different customs.97 The specific reference from the Gemara on this Mishnah involved “The citizens of Beyshan [in the Galilee],” who “were accustomed not to go from Tyre to Sidon on the eve of the Sabbath.” Their children,” the Gemara continues, “went to R. Johanan and said to him, for our fathers this was possible; for us it is impossible.” R. Johanan “said to them: Your fathers have already taken it upon themselves, as it is said [Prov. I:8], Hear my son, the instruction of your father, and forsake not the teaching of your mother.” Bacharach responded to the inquiry at length. He began by noting that the citizens of Beyshan were obligated to follow every matter that their fathers took upon themselves, and not only the abstinence that they accepted, but even the specific customs or habits, for a custom is established through a vow. Such obligations, Bacharach went on to 97 The Mishnah (50a-b) states: “Where it is the custom to do work on the eve of Passover until midday one may do [work]; where it is the custom not to do [work], one may not do [work]. He who goes from one place where they work to a place where they do not work, or from a place where they do not work to a place where they do work, we lay upon him the restrictions of the place whence he departed and the restrictions of the place whither he has gone. And a man must not act differently [from local custom] on account of the quarrels [which would ensue].”

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note, were incumbent at all times and places. After a lengthy discussion about pious behavior, Bacharach turned to a broader application of the issue. He asked whether something accepted by the majority in the kehillah could be binding on the individual. In an important discussion, Bacharach noted that communities are constituted by the generations that came before and will come later. Provided that the customs in question were “not maliciously formed, derived from foreign ways, or far-fetched,” he argued that there is an obligation “in each kahal and edah that they carry [with them] their sons and their daughters a little bit and [that] the strong [establish] for the other communities.” Such was the case, Bacharach noted regarding a fast in “our holy community until this day . . . [for the] decree of 4856 [1096, related to the murder of Jews during the First Crusade],” even if many no longer even knew the reason for the fast. Bacharach went on to write that it seemed to him that this reasoning should compel even the kahal and that the obligation persists in the land for all time.98 While Jewish communities throughout the Middle Ages fashioned themselves as “holy communities,” it was their customs and traditions that helped to define and sacralize them. Customs, which could be practiced beyond the geographical borders of the city in which the community was located allowed Jews to maintain a sense of sacred community in the midst of turmoil and change. In a very real sense, late medieval and early modern German Jews were following in rabbinic tradition. When the Second Temple was destroyed and many religious observances that were tied to the locus of the Temple became impossible to observe, Jews developed a more portable, rabbinic Judaism that could be taken with them in dispersion. In the same way that Protestants attacked the centralizing institutions of the Church in Rome and developed local sacral communities, Jews fashioned their communities to exist in de-centralized and changeable environments. At the same time, the writings of Juspa and Bacharach reveal a growing stability in which the community of Worms, having survived a series of traumas and challenges, established itself as a 98 Later in the responsum, Bacharach refers to the fast imposed upon the holy community of Worms after the destruction of the city in 1689.

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central and long-lasting community in Ashkenaz. The customs of that community, not surprisingly were holy and binding, even when its members were in dispersion. But the community itself, beyond the individual members, had attained a certain level of holiness, such that it mirrored the typological biblical Jerusalem as a center of Jewish ritual and observance.

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CONCLUSIONS As we saw with the statutes of the hevra kadisha, the Jewish community in Worms was distinct from, even as it engaged and ruled over, surrounding Jewish settlements and communities. The customs books, as well as various Jewish ordinances, reveal the Worms Jewish community to be a central regional and German Jewish community. As such, the reach of the community extended far beyond the gates of the city. Yet, as the language of many documents indicates, these neighboring settlements and communities were not inherently part of the Worms community, although they were subject to its rabbinic authority.99 Early modern Jews developed, and at times were accorded, various notions of community in particular situations and for specific purposes. Their understandings of community could be quite robust. Communities could transcend actual geographical boundaries and they could continue to exist or practice shared customs even after their residents were expelled from or left a particular city, region, or even country. At the same time, communities could be shaped and molded to fit new realities, such as confinement in ghettos or confederations of 99 “Every community member must display great honor toward the rabbi, who also serves as Head of the community’s Rabbinic Council . . . His jurisdiction extends to the Jewish inhabitants of neighboring hamlets in either side of the Rhine, including Darmstadt, Speyer and its environs, Golden-Bach, Upper and Lower Alsace, the Swiss communities of the Neckar . . . All are subject to the jurisdiction of our master, our rabbi, no matter who they may be . . . The rabbi is obligated to visit periodically all the aforementioned communities under his jurisdiction” (from Juspa’s collection of customs as quoted in Eidelberg, “Minhagim of the Holy Community of Warmaisa,” 120).

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settlements and towns under common territorial organization. This flexibility and ability to understand community at different levels and for different purposes helped Jews to retain Jewish religious identity and communal cohesion in the midst of unstable and frequently hostile external conditions. To this extent, Jewish communities were self-consciously “sacred,” in that they connected to broader strands of Judaism and Jewish history, while localizing and domesticating the sacred through customs, rituals, memory, and various communal structures and functions. At the same time, external relations and conditions shaped Jewish communal identity and structure. Jews engaged and responded to civic politics and historical developments. Jews placed themselves, and were increasingly placed, within a civic discourse that made them residents of the city, who shared a common past and future. In part, such engagement was imposed upon the Jewish residents of Worms by civic authorities consciously grappling with their own sense of political and legal identity, and absorbing the sacred authority of an ecclesiastical hierarchy that they in many ways rejected. Despite anti-Jewish foment and legal marginalization, by the middle of the seventeenth century, one senses in various Jewish writings a degree of internal communal stability and feeling of common fate with non-Jews in Worms. Consider the various stories that Jews narrated about the founding and early history of a Jewish presence in Worms.100 Juspa’s descriptions of floods in the 1650s and 60s, to take another example, were hardly particularistic and the accounts of the French invasion in the late seventeenth century by Bacharach and others situated the Jewish community squarely in a broader civic context, even as they understood current events in particularly and essentially Jewish terms. As part of one of the largest and most important Jewish communities in early modern Germany, Jews in Worms defined community in terms of their membership and location, but also through an attachment with the past and a belief in a future. The sacred chain of tradition was one of the central ideas permeating Jewish writing in the 100 See Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany, 148–51.

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seventeenth century. To this extent, the Jewish notion of community extended far beyond the assembly of people resident in the city at that particular time. In part, its sense of holiness was revealed in the ongoing survival of the community despite various challenges—legal restrictions, anti-Jewish sentiment, expulsions, and the like. But the holiness of the Jewish community in early modern Worms was also derived in other ways: size; antiquity and longevity; regional influence; history of towering figures such as scholars and mystics; unique body of customs; and political and legal successes, including at times positive relations with civic, ecclesiastical, and imperial authorities. These factors all fashioned Worms as a successful and sacred community. Early modern Worms was not a sacred community simply because its residents applied to it the common, if vague term “holy community.” Worms was a sacred community because its history, authority, and sense of self allowed its members to see themselves as part of something much bigger and relevant, something that was rooted in both religious and civic values and experiences. The Jewish community in Worms was sacred in the sense of traditional medieval Jewish communities. At the same time it was sacred as part of and in the same way that late medieval and early modern German communes and cities, with their sense of localized or domestic sacrality that was both unique and informed by broader religious tradition, increasingly were. The history of the Jewish community in Worms, therefore, holds out the possibility to understand the broad range of communal notions in early modern Judaism and throughout the early modern German Empire.

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Criticism and Tradition: Leon Modena, Azariah de’ Rossi, and Elijah Levita Bahur on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Vowels Howard Tzvi Adelman

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Queen’s University

INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND APOLOGETICS Jews have embraced a collective memory of their tradition as divine, eternal, and perfect.1 On Mt. Sinai, Moses received written and oral teachings that he passed down to the next generation and then each generation to the next. Because of the divine origins of the tradition and the saintly qualities of its bearers, rabbinic and kabbalistic Jews believed it remained uncorrupted and unchanged over the generations. 1

For a statement of this view, see Maharal of Prague, “Tiferet Yisrael,” in Da-at, ed. Zahava Gerlitz (2004): chap. 65, 66. http://daat.ac.il/daat/mahshevt/tifeeret/66–2. htm.

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Yet, an awareness of anachronisms and contradictions had the potential to call into question the authenticity of the tradition and the legitimacy of those who transmitted it. To respond to this challenge, Jews have taken several approaches. Some, short of denying any problems at all, have created an apologetic mechanism in order to harmonize the perceived imperfections of tradition. Others, engaged by intellectual curiosity and academic inclinations, have embraced a critical study with the intention of defending the tradition. The realization of anachronisms and contradictions in Jewish tradition and the attempts to deal with them raise the question as to whether these critical activities threaten or enhance Jewish collective memory. During the past three decades, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,2 as well as his critics,3 examined the interactions between collective memory and the study of history among Jews. Yerushalmi observed that during the sixteenth century there was a sudden, but limited, efflorescence of Jewish historical writing. He asked whether these writings constituted a new historiographical direction or a continuation of medieval genres of midrashic, typological, and messianic themes. On the one hand, Yerushalmi presented the sixteenth-century historiographical works as going beyond responding to specific events in traditional terms and experimenting with the presentation of a broad expanse of Jewish history in a critical and systematic way. Yet, on the other hand, he tested sixteenth century Jewish historical writing against the general historical writing of the era and found it wanting because of its inability to present intrinsic, causal links. Yerushalmi, however, singled out Azariah 2 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 46–47 (1980): 607–638; Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 3 Yaakov Shavit, “Review: Zakhor, Jewish History and Memory, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,” Studies in Zionism 11 (1985): 143–148; Ivan Marcus, “Beyond the Sephardic Mystique,” Urim 1 (1985): 35–53; Robert Bonfil, “How Golden was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?,” History and Theory, Beihaft 27, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (1988): 78–102; Amos Funkenstein, “Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness,” History and Memory 1 (1989): 5–26; Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 1, 2; David Myers, “Remembering Zakhor: A Super-Commentary,” History and Memory 4 (1992): 129–148.

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de’ Rossi (1511–1578) of Mantua and Ferrara, author of Meor eynayim, for creating a work of historical criticism informed by non-Jewish historical approaches of the period rather than relying solely on traditional internal Jewish apologetic approaches.

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CRITICISM OR TRADITION: AZARIAH DE’ ROSSI According to Yerushalmi, Meor eynayim was a pioneering, “audacious” collection of critical antiquarian essays, dealing especially with anachronisms, contradictions, and problems of Jewish chronology in traditional texts. Moreover, Yerushalmi claimed “. . . the humanist spirit has penetrated the very vitals of the work.” Yerushalmi notes, however, that de’ Rossi was cautious because of the sensitivities of the Jews of his day. Despite this, de’ Rossi’s rabbinic contemporaries thought that Meor eynayim was so daring that they tried to censor it, thereby indicating the limits to open inquiry for sixteenth-century Italian Jews. Meor eynayim had serious repercussions, exhibiting deeply rooted humanistic learning and constituting the “real beginning of historical criticism.” Meor eynayim marked the end of serious attempts at Jewish historiography until the nineteenth century, attracting little interest.4 As Yerushalmi, others who have studied Meor eynayim have asked whether it constituted a critical innovation or whether it was an apologetic work. Yerushalmi’s teacher, Salo Baron, described how de’ Rossi’s work, while constituting a departure from traditional Jewish historiography, still remained an apologetic work. Baron noted that, although not a mystic, de’ Rossi accepted the collective memory that Kabbalah was the ultimate truth, that kabbalistic texts were authored by ancient rabbis, and that these texts contained divine truths transmitted by Moses from Mt. Sinai. De’ Rossi conceded that these were not free from later additions. Baron raised the question whether de’ Rossi was posturing by praising critical discussions with faint condemnation.5 4 Yerushalmi, “Clio,” 69–75; Zakhor, 57–58, 60, 69–75. 5 Salo W. Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi’s Historical Method,” in History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses, ed. Arthur Hertzberg and Leon A. Feldman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1964), 205–239.

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Robert Bonfil asserted that Meor eynayim was a conservative work based on a traditional Jewish medieval worldview, especially concerning Kabbalah’s rootedness in an oral tradition from Sinai. Bonfil nevertheless conceded that in this difficult and digressive text, concealed under the cloak of tradition and convention, de’ Rossi tactically offered independent and critical research into Jewish tradition using non-Jewish materials, as well as a novel mode of presenting history. Bonfil noted that when de’ Rossi rephrased critical statements to meet the demands of his rabbinic detractors, he sometimes actually made them stronger. The few critical, and ultimately apologetic, aspects of the work, however, appear as afterthoughts in a traditional presentation, or at least give lip service to it.6 Joanna Weinberg, who produced the English translation of Meor eynayim, accompanied by an extensive commentary, introduction, and apparatus, sees it as a path-breaking critical work in which radical insights were covered over with forced apologetics, which constituted token gestures.7 These scholars all recognized, to varying degrees, the ambiguities of Meor eynayim. To test their interpretations, I will look at how Leon Modena (1571–1648), a seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi, teacher, preacher, poet, letter writer, communal worker, legal authority, and, especially for our purposes, polemical writer, read Meor eynayim and balanced collective memory and critical history.

LEON MODENA READS AZARIAH DE’ ROSSI Modena was born around the time De’ Rossi died, but developed a personal and intellectual affinity for de’ Rossi through his works. Around 1618, Modena obtained his own first edition copy of Meor eynayim from 1573, and in 1622, at the age of 51,8 he signed the title 6 Robert Bonfil, “Mavo,” Kitvei azariah min ha-adumim, mivhaperakim mitokh sefer me-or eynayim (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1991), 11–129, especially 42–43, 58–60; Bonfil, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de’ Rossi’s Meor eynayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1983), 23–48. 7 Joanna Weinberg, “Introduction,” Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), xiii–xlv. 8 Parma, Ms. no. 983, fol. 4a; Kassel, 6.

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page. As he read it, he underlined many things and wrote about 140 marginal comments about its contents as well as about his own life.9 In them he highlighted a pivotal event in both their lives: the Ferrara earthquake of 1570, which caused both the Modena and de’ Rossi families to flee the city. As a result of this event, de’ Rossi met somebody who introduced him to the Letter of Aristeas, a text describing the Greek translation of the Bible. His Hebrew translation of this letter and his description of the earthquake became the starting point for Meor eynayim. As the earthquake had displaced his family, Modena was born in Venice, which created an association between the man and the city that continues to this day.10 Modena had access to another manuscript that contained at least a few of de’ Rossi’s poems. Modena demonstrated his connection with de’ Rossi by imitating a poem de’ Rossi wrote about a dream concerning his own death.11 Modena recognized his personal attachment to the work and its method when he described how de’ Rossi wrote about two of his uncles, paying particular attention to the critical accomplishments of his uncle Avtalion Modena in Ferrara.12 De’ Rossi wrote that at the Sephardic yeshivah in Ferrara, those present took turns to lead the study on a daily basis. When it was Avtalion Modena’s turn to discuss a particular talmudic passage, he delved deeply into the problem by taking several manuscripts of the talmudic compendium of Isaac Alfasi (1013–1103)—often studied in Italy when the Talmud was not available because of confiscations, censorship, and burnings—and comparing them with the published edition, he demonstrated that the published edition of the Talmud contained multiple additions to the text. In his autobiography, Modena expressed his affinity with de’ Rossi by saying that most of

  9 Parma, Ms. no. 983; G. B., Libri Stampati di letteratura sacra del dottore. G. Bernardo de Rossi divisi per classi e con note (Parma: dalla Stamperia imperial, 1812); I will also refer to the edition of David Kassel (Vilna: Bidfus Romm, 1866), reprinted (Jerusalem: Hamakor, 1970). 10 Leon Modena, The Life of Judah, in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth Century Venetian Rabbi, trans. and ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 78–81, 189–193; Kassel, 3–26. 11 Modena, Life of Judah, 10, 217–218. 12 Parma, Ms. no. 983, fols. 9a, 86b, 123a; Kassel, 21, 235, 323; introduction, chap. 19, 39.

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de’ Rossi’s book was “flour ground in the mill” of his uncle Avtalion.13 On the pages of Meor eynayim, Modena reacted to some of de’ Rossi’s critical thinking about Jewish history, and especially biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic literature. Beginning around 1618, Modena used Meor eynayim in several responses to current controversies involving rabbinic authority, Christianity, and the authenticity of the Kabbalah; it would also be a source for two of his larger works on these subjects, Magen veherev and Ari nohem.14 De’ Rossi’s discussions of anachronisms in Jewish biblical, rabbinic, and kabbalistic texts in his studies of history were central to Modena’s interests. The manner in which Modena adopted the critical arguments and the apologetic postures he found in Meor eynayim constitutes a significant indication of his historical and polemical sensitivities and his need to balance historical criticism and collective memory.

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CRITICISM OF JEWISH TRADITION: MODENA READS DE’ ROSSI In a treatment of biblical anachronism, de’ Rossi deals with biblical chronology according to which it seemed that the biblical leaders Ezra and Nehemiah lived an excessively long time. De’ Rossi suggests that a great man from a later generation altered these biblical verses with his own hand, presenting a significant challenge to the Jewish understandings of the nature of the biblical text. De’ Rossi also criticized Mosaic authorship of the Torah itself by invoking the commentary of Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) on Deuteronomy 1:2. There, ibn Ezra suggests that if one could understand the secret of the twelve, that is, the twelve verses of the last chapter in the Torah detailing Moses’ death, a circumstance that may have prevented Moses’ authorship, then one could understand the entire Torah. To drive his point home, ibn Ezra then lists a few more biblical verses whose anachronistic aspects also cast aspersions on Mosaic authorship of the Torah. De’ Rossi suggests to his 13 Modena, The Life of Judah, 78–80. 14 Leon Modena, Ari nohem, ed. Nehemiah Libowitz (Jerusalem: Eretz Yisrael, 1929), chap.17–23; Modena, Magen veherev, ed. S. Simonsohn (Jerusalem: Mekitzei nirdamim, 1960).

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readers that they should look at these verses themselves, and then, true to form, expresses regret that he mentioned this unacceptable idea. To make his critical point again, de’ Rossi quotes passages from Philo of Alexandria (25 BCE–50 CE) that similarly cast aspersions on the Mosaic authorship of the final chapter of the Torah. Modena joins the conversation by simply stating in the margin that, according to ibn Ezra, there are twelve verses in the Torah that Moses did not write. Drawing further attention to his comment, Modena significantly sketched a hand with a finger pointing to it—the only place in which he did so.15 Ibn Ezra’s critical ideas about anachronism, hardly compatible with Jewish collective memory of the Torah, would explicitly form the basis of Spinoza’s critical treatment of Mosaic authorship of the Torah in his Theological Political Treatise. Further study of Modena’s newly discovered biblical commentaries might bear out the extent to which ideas about anachronism influenced his writing about the Bible.16 De’ Rossi dealt with anachronism in rabbinic literature in many chapters, including several concerning Seder olam, a rabbinic work about Jewish chronology attributed to the early rabbinic sage, Rabbi Yose, from the second century.17 De’ Rossi engaged in an extensive critical analysis of event-dating provided by Seder olam and the contradictions found in different versions of the printed and manuscript work, especially the anachronistic appearance of later rabbis in it. De’ Rossi conceded that Seder olam was an ancient rabbinic text, but that it was corrupt, perhaps forged (mezuyefet). In the margin, Modena seemingly expressed shock over de’ Rossi’s public display of anachronisms and forgeries in rabbinic texts when he wrote: “This saying really surprised me—how was it printed except because of the sin of the generation.”18 15 Parma, Ms. no. 983, fol. 123a; Kassel, 324; chap. 39; on the use of marginalia for the writing of history, see Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, “I have always loved the Hebrew Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 16 Binyamin Richler, “Ketavim bilti yedu-im shel rabi yehudah aryeh mimodena,” Asufot 7 (1992–1993): 157–172. 17 Chaim Milikowsky, “Seder ‘olam and Jewish Chronography in the Hellenist and Roman Periods,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 56 (1988): 115–139. 18 Parma, Ms. no. 983, fol. 85b; Kassel, 230; chap. 19.

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CRITICISM OF KABBALAH AND JEWISH APOLOGETICS: LEON MODENA It was de’ Rossi’s discussion of anachronisms in kabbalistic texts that piqued Modena’s interest because of his own growing critical attitude towards Kabbalah. Until then, Modena regularly studied, taught, and preached aspects of Kabbalah, and used them in his rabbinic apologetics. For example—and one particularly relevant to the development of his views of Kabbalah and his expression of them—he corresponded with David Farar in Amsterdam. Farar called for a disputation with Hugh Broughton (1549–1612), an English dissenter, missionary to the Jews of Amsterdam, and Hebraist, who was capable of writing fluent Hebrew prose.19 The host of the disputation was Matthew Slade (1569–1628), one of the first elders of the dissenting English Brownist congregation and the principal of a Latin school, whose brother Samuel (1568–1612) had been a student of Modena’s in Venice. In their correspondence, Modena and Farar discussed controversial aspects of Jewish-Christian polemics, including rabbinic interpretations of the Bible, which Modena asserted was not monolithic or binding on all Jews. He discussed the identifications of the four kingdoms in Daniel and interpretations of scripture based on the Zohar, indicating that he saw the Zohar’s reading of texts to be suitable for representing Judaism in a polemical context.20 Modena paradoxically also showed a critical approach to Kabbalah, once again involving Farar. After the Amsterdam disputation, several Jewish communities excommunicated Farar because he mocked the homiletical teachings of the rabbis and spoke against the wisdom of Kabbalah. According to Joel Sirkes (1561–1640), a leading rabbi in Eastern Europe who participated in the excommunication, the Kabbalah “. . . is the source of the Torah and its essence and all of it is God fearing.” 19 Hugh Broughton, Works of the Great Albionean Divine, Renoun’d in many Nations for rare sill in Salems and Athens Tongues and familiar Acquaintance with all Rabbinic Learning, ed. John Lightfoot (London: Nath. Elkins, 1662), unnumbered pages. 20 Isaiah Sonne, “Leon Modena and the da Costa circle,” Hebrew Union College Annual 21 (1948): 20, 25, 27–28; Leon Modena, Ziknei yehuda, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn (Jerusalem: Mosad harav kook, 1956), nos. 33, 35.

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Sirkes decreed that, “He deserves to be banned because he has turned his back on the wisdom of the Kabbalah and the words of our sages of blessed memory, the kabbalists. It is appropriate to be extremely harsh with him and to excommunicate him with all the severities of the edict of excommunication.”21 The charges that Farar mocked the rabbis, and denied the oral Torah and the tradition of the sages (kabbalat hakhamim) reached Venice. Farar’s representative appeared before the rabbinical authorities, who had received written testimony regarding the case. Modena defended Farar by writing to the rabbis of Salonika in the spring of 1619 and proclaiming that the attack upon him was out of line and frivolous because he was an innocent, God-fearing, kosher (kasher) Jew who believed in the Torah.22 Modena’s letter stressed that Jews are not bound to accept all rabbinic interpretations of scripture because there is little agreement among those who interpret it. Nor do they have to believe that there are those who can perform miracles by using the divine name (baal shemot) or practical Kabbalah. Here Modena attempts to accept the range of rabbinic interpretations of the Bible and to render belief in aspects of Kabbalah voluntary, at least. Perhaps connected with Farar and certainly relevant, in a letter replying to Isaac Uziel, Hakham of Amsterdam (d. 1622), Modena dealt with the three reasons for which he questioned Uziel’s participation in the excommunication of an unspecified person.23 The relevance of his three points to Kabbalah appear in reverse order: In his third point about Kabbalah, Modena expressed reluctance to write about things that should only be spoken about. He explained that he wanted to deal with only one small aspect without going into the actual details, and preferred to limit any discussion so that he would not look as if he were mocking Kabbalah or as if he were a fool (sakhal). He explained how he sought to understand Kabbalah, and especially the matter of its oral transmission, including speculation that it had 21 Joel Sirkes, She-elot utshuvot bayit hadash, no. 4b; in Elijah Shochet, Bach: Rabbi Joel Sirkes (New York: Feldheim, 1971), 248–253. 22 Modena, Ziknei, no. 33. 23 Leon Modena, Kitvei yehudah arye mi-modena, ed. Yehudah Blau (Budapest: Bidfus A. Alkalai, 1907), nos. 154–155; Leon Modena, Iggerot, ed. Yaacob Boksenboim (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1984), nos. 146–147.

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been revealed and concealed over the centuries. He read kabbalistic books and spoke with kabbalists, but he did not succeed in learning anything from them. He turned to classic works in sixteenth-century Jewish historiography, Sefer yuhasin of Abraham Zacuto (1452–c. 1515) and Shalshelet haKabbalah of Gedaliah ibn Yahyah (c. 1515–c. 1587), a copy of which he owned.24 Following the chains of tradition reported in these works, Modena asked how secret oral teachings could have been transmitted from Moses to Uziel without having become known in greater detail to the sages of the Talmud and the medieval geonim. Modena questioned whether Jewish mysticism in his day could possibly have been the same that Moses had received or whether it was a later invention. Modena claimed that he nevertheless did not want to deny the wisdom of the Kabbalah, “God Forbid!”25 In his second point, Modena dealt with rabbinic interpretations of the Bible. Unlike in his previous letter to Farar, Modena made a distinction between legal (halakhic) and literary (aggadic or midrashic) interpretation. While even the most trivial rabbinic legal interpretation must not be challenged by Jews, he asserted that there was great latitude shown among the classic rabbinic interpreters in their approaches to challenging non-legal interpretations of scripture, especially considering that many of them were designed to meet the needs of children and women. To make his point, Modena used Meor eynayim, which he acknowledged that Uziel knew. He apologized for discussing the work in writing because in person one can convey its sense with more subtlety. Modena referred to the chapter of Meor eynayim dealing with non-literal and critical ways of understanding passages in rabbinic midrash and aggadah,26 especially those that seemed strange. From this passage and other letters, it is clear that Modena had studied Meor eynayim by 1619 and was ambivalently

24 Clemente Ancona, “L’inventario dei beni Leon di Modena,” Bolletino dell’istituto di storia della societa’ e dello stato veneziano 10 (1967): 256–267. 25 Modena, Ziknei, no. 35. 26 In the text of Ziknei yehudah, no. 35, Modena referred to Meor eynayim, chap. 15, section, Imrei binah, and the entire second article, which contains chapters 14–28; Kassel, 196–274.

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aware of its controversial implications, both mentioning them and avoiding them as the situation required.27 Finally, Modena dealt with the multiplicity of interpretations of the Torah, referring to the four traditional ways in which scripture could be interpreted (pardes), using the act of Creation (ma-aseh bereshit), a major theme in Jewish mysticism, as the focus of discussion. He noted that there were many Jewish Bible commentators who explained Creation as a mystical phenomenon while others explained it as a natural event. Modena was aware that his opinions on Kabbalah remained ambivalent, but seemed to accept a kabbalistic explanation, while recognizing that a natural explanation of Creation might conform better to the Torah. About this time, Modena acquired and studied several books that used Kabbalah to support Christianity. He read Bibliotheca sancta by Sixtus of Siena (1529–1569), a convert from Judaism. Siena believed that the Zohar confirmed the doctrines of Christianity, that “Christians can stab Jews with their own weapons,” and that Kabbalah was a secret exposition of divine laws. By May of 1627, Modena had formulated a response to this book, but Venetian authorities would not let him publish it.28 Modena read De arcanus catholicae veritatis by Pietro Galatino (1460–1540) soon after. This was one of the most popular Christian kabbalistic books of the period, and Modena made marginal notations in his copy of the book, but unfortunately its location today is not known.29 Additional conversations with Christians, such as Jean 27 In another case in Amsterdam, a sage was considering punishing somebody who preached that the world was eternal rather than having been created by God as described in Genesis. Modena wrote in a letter that the view of the eternality of the world could be supported in Jewish literature, mentioning Philo, Maimonides, and others, but that the traditional view was preferred and that it was wrong to raise the other view in public. Modena cited Azariah de’ Rossi who had devoted a chapter to this question, but also concluded that it was not wise to become involved in this issue and certainly not in public, Meor eynayim, chapter 44. 28 Leon Modena, “Diffesa da quello che scrive Fra’ Sisto Sanesenella sua Bibliotheca de precetti da Talmudisti a Hebrei contra Christiani,” in “Attacchi contro il Talmud di Fra Sisto da Siena e la riposta, finora inedita di Leon Modena, Rabbino in Venezia,” ed. Clemente Ancona, Bollettino dell’ istituto di storia della societa’ e della stato 5–6 (1963–1964): 297–323. 29 References to his annotations are found in Magen veherev, 5:1 and the introduction to it by his son-in-law Jacob min haleviim.

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de Plantavit de la Pause (1579–1651), Andreas Colvius of Dort (1594– 1671), and Jacques Gaffarel (1601–1681), further convinced Modena that Christian use of Kabbalah posed a danger to Jews, and his reactions against it became more critical.30 In 1611, Modena bought a fourteenth-century manuscript by Abner of Burgos or Alfonso of Valladolid (c. 1270–1340) with the intention of refuting its content. Burgos/ Valladolid was a Jewish apostate to Christianity who, perhaps influenced by Moses Nahmanides (1194–1270), made occasional references to Kabbalah along with all other branches of Jewish learning to justify his conversion. Modena turned to the manuscript in 1634. In his comments, Modena expressed concern that Jewish learning in general, not explicitly Kabbalah,31 could show apostates methods to prove that any teaching could be found in the Bible, which could legitimize Christian interpretations and do great harm to Judaism. Despite assertions to the contrary, Abner of Burgos seems to have had little impact on Modena’s polemic against Kabbalah.32 30 For further details of these conversations, see Howard Adelman, “Rabbi Leon Modena and the Christian Kabbalists,” in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, ed. Maryanne Cline Horowitz, Anne J. Cruz, and Wendy A. Furman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–286. 31 Parma, Ms. No. (533) 2440, fols.1a–b, 21–6a, 10b–12a, 15a–21b. 32 The conventional wisdom concerning the kabbalistic influences on the conversion of Abner of Burgos was put forth with great ambiguity by Yitzhak Baer, “Abner aus Burgos,” Korrespondenzblatt des Vereins zur Gruendung und Erhaltung einer Akademie fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums 10 (1929): 26; Toldothayehudimbisfaradhanotzrit 1 (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1945), 212–237; History of the Jews in Christian Spain 1, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961), 330–337; “Torat hakabbalah bemishnato hakristologit she lavner miburgos,” in Sefer hayovel likhvod gershom scholem (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1958), 152–163. In my “Christian Kabbalists,” 271–286, I embraced Baer’s position too enthusiastically when I read Modena’s comments on Abner of Burgos. Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 154–155 correctly highlighted the lack of impact of Abner of Burgos on Modena’s polemic against Kabbalah. Hence, there was too little about Kabbalah in Abner for Modena to use. Jonathan L. Hecht, “The Polemical Exchange between Isaac Pollegar and Abner of Burgos/Alfonso of Valladolid according to Parma MS 2440: Iggeret Teshuvat Apikoros and Teshuvot la-Meharef,” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University, 1993, 471–479, highlighted the lack of influence of Kabbalah on Abner, a position confirmed by a carefully rereading of Baer’s articles.

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CRITICISM OF KABBALAH: MODENA READS DE’ ROSSI As Modena read Meor eynayim, he saw that de’ Rossi cautiously discussed issues of anachronism and pseudepigraphy in kabbalistic literature. For example, de’ Rossi explained Creation according to Philo of Alexandria as a process by which God emanated from his mind to the tangible world. De’ Rossi noted in one of several passing casual references to kabbalistic works that he thinks that kabbalists, whom he referred as “scholars of the truth,” call it the world of emanations, atzilut, or the sephirot. In comparing writings attributed to the so-called Hermes Trismegistus, Philo, and Kabbalah, de’ Rossi hedged his attribution of works to kabbalists, saying “if it can be assumed that the kabbalists wrote the work [. . .].” At another point de’ Rossi wrote, “the enlightened one will understand them with good reason,” a locution used both by kabbalists like Nahmanides and critics of tradition like Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) to refer to radical ideas without articulating them. Hence, de’ Rossi tried to distance himself from kabbalists, yet affirmed their truths. At this point in the margin, Modena gives a sense of the reason for his increasing criticism of Kabbalah. When de’ Rossi cited ideas attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and used expressions like “son of God,” Modena wrote in the margin “concerning the Trinity” and “The Christians built on this, and the wall and its fall it will be explained further.” Modena was expressing his concern that if Kabbalah were considered the wisdom of truth, its views of emanation could be used to justify Christological beliefs. De’ Rossi had alluded to the connection between the son of God and the sephirot in his marginal notes; Modena spelled it out.33 De’ Rossi presented a mixed message concerning the anachronistic aspects of kabbalistic books. On the one hand, books of Kabbalah, like the Zohar, were attributed to the first century tana, Shimon bar Yohai, and de’ Rossi declared that “. . . anyone who has a palate will taste for 33 Parma, Ms. no. 983, fol. 35a; Kassel, 100; chap. 4; Baron, “Azariah de Rossi’s Attitude to Life,” in History and Jewish Historians, 44–45; Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi’s Historical Method,” 224–225.

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himself that in places the language is not of the flavor and style of the author.” De’ Rossi expressed his amazement that Midrash hane-elam in the Zohar contained quotations from not only Shimon bar Yohai but also Rava, Rav Joseph, and Rav Nahman, amoraim who lived in the third and fourth centuries. Hence de’ Rossi commented: “If so, therefore, in our opinion it [Kabbalah] is not as early as we think, similarly, our books of laws and decisions.” On the other hand, he concluded this radical statement with, “one must be careful in these matters.” De’ Rossi therefore indicts the authenticity of not only kabbalistic books but also halakhic literature. This is classic de’ Rossi: brash critical historical observations and a timid call for caution about circulating them, especially if such views would hamper the traditional fulfillment of religious commandments.34 De’ Rossi presented similar contentions of the sixteenth-century rabbi Abraham Halevi the elder, author of Sefer meshare kitrin,35 published in Turkey in 1510. De’ Rossi claimed that a certain statement in the Zohar about the coming of the messiah should confound nobody, even though it was not found in any early rabbinic texts and it was clear that it was made up recently. Yet again, after introducing this critical idea, de’ Rossi wrote that he hoped that God would forgive the author of it, because this was his way of speaking. When de’ Rossi presented the anachronisms in kabbalistic literature to his readers, he still advocated caution in such matters. His critics did not appreciate his nuanced, perhaps equivocal approach. After Meor eynayim was published in November, 1573, rabbis compelled de’ Rossi to revise several statements, which he did by publishing replacement pages in order to mollify his critics. In a later edition, in passages that did not appear in Modena’s edition, de’ Rossi actually added more information against the historical authenticity of Kabbalah.36 To explain why kabbalistic works, such as the Zohar, Midrash Ruth hane-elam, and Raya 34 Kassel, 232; chap. 19. 35 Kassel, 230; chap. 19; On Meshare kitrin, see Moti Benmelech, “History, Politics, and Messianism: David Ha-Reuveni’s Origin and Mission,” AJS Review 35, no. 1 (2011): 42; see also Ira Robinson, “Abraham ben Eliezer Halevi: Kabbalist and Messianic Visionary of the Early Sixteenth Century,” Doctoral dissertation (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1980). 36 Kassel, 232–233; chap. 19.

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mehemna, which were attributed to rabbis of the first century, contained statements attributed to later sages, he suggested that the statements had actually been written by earlier sages. This way he attempted to preserve the antiquity of the statements without undermining the text because of anachronisms. De’Rossi then added a discussion from the 1566 edition of Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer yuhasin, which Modena also had used in his earlier correspondence with Hakham Uziel in Amsterdam. Zacuto had cited reports from the fourteenth century that accused Moses de Leon (1250–1305) of inventing the Zohar for his own self-aggrandizement.37 Zacuto, however, did not draw any critical conclusions about the authenticity of the Zohar from this. Zacuto’s publisher did not feel that it was appropriate to publish this story, but he acquiesced and instead printed a disavowal of it in the margin. De’ Rossi praised the publisher’s disclaimer—possibly aware that manuscript versions of this story were harsher, but wrote that it would have been better had this insert not been published—and indeed later versions of Zacuto omitted it.38 Despite this, de’ Rossi himself republished it and called further attention to it for the benefit of those who might have missed it the first time.39

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THE CHAIN OF CRITICISM: MODENA, DE’ROSSI, AND LEVITA ON THE HEBREW VOWELS AND ACCENTS AND KABBALAH A major challenge to the antiquity and the authenticity of kabbalistic texts was the appearance of references to the Hebrew vowel and accent signs. In Meor eynayim, de’ Rossi presented the views of Elijah Levita Bahur (1469–1549), a prominent Hebrew grammarian, who, in the third introduction to his Masoret hamasoret in 1538, questioned whether the Hebrew vowel and accent signs went back to Mt. Sinai and whether they appeared in supposedly ancient kabbalistic texts such as the Zohar: 37 Gershom Scholem, “Ha-im hibber r. moshe di leon et sefer hazohar,” Mada-ei hayahadut 1 (1926): 16–29; Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), 190–192; Adolf Neubauer, “The Bahir and the Zohar,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (1892): 360–8; Abraham Zacuto, Sefer yuhasin hashalem, ed. Tzvi Filipowski (London: Filipowski, 1857), reprint (Jerusalem: Vardi, 1963), 88–89. 38 Kassel, 233; Baron, “Azariah de’ Rossi’s Historical Method,” 232. 39 On Zacuto, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 57–66; Zacuto, Sefer yuhasin, 88–90.

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I will fight against those who say that they [the vowels and accents] were given at Sinai; I will demonstrate who invented them, and when they were established and combined with the letters. Whoever can convince me with a clear proof that my view is against the understanding of the sages and against the true Kabbalah that is in the Book of the Zohar, my view will be replaced by his. But until then, I have not found, have not seen, and have not heard a word of proof or a viable support that the vowels and accents were given at Sinai.

Even though the Zohar had not yet been published, its first pages did contain references to the vowel and accent signs by name. Levita was going out on a limb by challenging the antiquity of the vowels based on the Zohar: If Kabbalists could prove him wrong, it would be proof of the antiquity of the vowels or of the lateness of the major Kabbalistic texts.40 He then assailed the antiquity of the Hebrew vowel and accent signs and asserted that tradition had transmitted pronunciation, but not the actual vowel and accent signs as they existed in his day, and that, in fact, tradition never mentioned them. Levita claimed that the vowel and accent signs were an arbitrary invention that appeared much later than Moses, Ezra the Scribe, and the rabbis of the Talmud, and that they were invented by the Masoretes in Tiberias in the fifth or sixth centuries. As proof, he gave examples of Talmudic passages in which words had been confused in such a way that there must not have been vowel signs at the time of their composition, and he cited supporting statements from medieval rabbis who said that the vowels were given with the Torah at Sinai, but then forgotten. Having seen three Chaldeans, supposedly from the mythical land of Prester John who read Aramaic correctly without vowel signs, Levita was convinced that actual vowel signs were not necessary for reading Hebrew either and that the

40 On issues involving Levita, de’ Rossi, Modena, and others concerning the antiquity or lateness of the vowels, see Yitzhak (Jordan) S. Penkower, “Iyun mehadash besefer masoret hamasoret le-eliyahu bahur: ihur hanikud uvikoret sefer hazohar,” Italia 8 (1989): 7–73; Penkower, “S. D. Luzzatto, Vowels and Accents, and the Date of the Zohar,” in Samuel David Luzzatto: The Bi-Centennial of His Birth, ed. Robert Bonfil, Isaac Gottlieb, and Hannah Kasher (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2004), 79–130. These two articles, which were brought to my attention after the conference, in Dweck’s Scandal greatly helped me to clarify aspects of my argument.

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proper pronunciation was transmitted as part of an oral tradition.41 Levita made a glancing reference to the absence of descriptions of the vowels and accents in kabbalistic texts. Several years earlier in 1531, Levita’s unpublished Meturgeman offered information from kabbalists that the ancient Zohar and Bahir contained no references to the vowels and accents, unlike recent kabbalistic texts. Levita must have known that his assertion in Meturgeman was misleading, since his travels and studies involved much contact with kabbalists and kabbalistic texts; it remains a puzzle why he kept the question open in Masoret hamasoret. De’ Rossi challenged Levita’s presentation by offering evidence from Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and pagan sources in order to demonstrate the antiquity of the vowel signs. He too made a reference to visitors from the legendary land of Prester John, but according to him their pronunciation without vowel signs was inadequate. Modena’s attention was caught by de’ Rossi’s argument based on two major kabbalistic works, the Zohar and the Bahir, both attributed to early rabbinic tanaim. They contained explicit references to names and shapes of vowel and accent signs. For de’ Rossi, the discussion surrounding vowel and accent signs in these texts proved that kabbalists knew secrets that had been passed down since the time of Moses.42 Based on his reading of Masoret hamasoret, De’ Rossi claimed that Levita did not know about references to vowels and accents because these kabbalistic books had not yet been published. If Levita had known these references, he would have affirmed the antiquity of the vowels. De’ Rossi declared: “If he [Levita] stood with us today, he would surely say that ‘I have been answered.’” Modena joined in the textual conversation by replying to this statement in the margin of his own copy of Meor eynayim: If he [Levita] stood with us today, I am sure that to one who would want to prove to him the antiquity of the vowels and accents from kabbalistic books that appeared in our times, he [Levita] too would reply to him and say, ‘It is easier for me to believe that all these books are fabrications from scratch, which subsequently appeared 41 Gerard Weil, Elie Levita, humaniste et massorete (Leiden: Brill, 1963), 118, 216–219, 297–300, 307–322; Elias Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth, ed. and trans. Christian D. Ginsberg (Liverpool: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 44–53, 121–134. 42 Kassel, 471–473; Weil, Levita, 321.

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after the vowels and the accents, than for me to believe that the vowels and the accents are earlier than these books, because there are other proofs in these books that demonstrate their newness.’ Forever it is obvious to me that he would speak accordingly, and I would go on my merry way.43

Hence, Modena took de’ Rossi’s discussion that kabbalistic texts supported the antiquity of the Hebrew vowels and accents, and he turned it against the antiquity of the kabbalistic texts. Because there were references to vowels and accents in these books, they were not as old as the kabbalists claimed and did not contain ancient truths but rather later inventions. De’ Rossi, however, had not drawn explicit critical conclusions from his historical presentation about the antiquity of kabbalistic texts. As usual, he left the question open to at least three possibilities: the vowels were from Sinai, from Ezra, or from after the Talmud. As a compromise position, he suggested that after God gave them at Sinai, the Israelites forgot them, and subsequently rediscovered them at several critical junctures, including in the time of the Masoretes of Tiberias. Modena, at least privately, reached the conclusion that kabbalistic texts and the vowels were late. As we shall see, there were, reasons why he might not use this potent argument against Kabbalah publicly.44

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CRITICISM OF JEWISH TRADITION: CHRISTIAN POLEMICS AND HEBREW VOWELS If Modena based an argument against Kabbalah on the anachronistic presence of references to Hebrew vowels, he might play into the hands of Christian critics of Jewish tradition, whether Catholic or Protestant; they had used arguments that opposed the antiquity of the vowels and accents in their polemics against Jewish approaches to the Bible. For centuries, Catholic polemicists, such as Raymond Martini (1220–1287), Nicholas de Lyra (1270–1340), Jacob Perez da Valencia (1420–1491), and Pietro Galatino (1460–1540), asserted that rabbis had corrupted the 43 Parma Ms. no. 983, fol. 179b; Kassel, 473; chap. 59; cf. Psalm 26:11. This quotation is discussed by Dweck, Scandal, 92–95. 44 Grafton and Weinberg, Casaubon, 307–328.

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text of the Bible in order to alter prophesies about Jesus. At the Council of Trent in 1546, the Church claimed that the definitive canon was the Latin Vulgate not the Hebrew Scriptures. Similarly, Protestants, such as Martin Luther (1483–1546), Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1537), and John Calvin (1509–1564), sought to liberate themselves from any textual restraints, whether Catholic or Jewish, in their return to scripture by using arguments against the antiquity of the vowel and accent signs. On several occasions, including a 1606 letter to Johannes Buxtorf the Elder (1564–1629), the Huguenot Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) expressed some doubts about the antiquity of the Zohar and the vowels.45 In 1624, Louis Cappellus (1585–1658), also a Huguenot, following Levita, argued against the antiquity of the vowels. Jean Morin (1591–1659), a Protestant convert to Catholicism, challenged the antiquity of the vowels, presenting them as a sign of the corruption of the Hebrew text and invoking the Catholic argument that freedom from the vowels would strengthen the traditions of the Church.46 Nevertheless, other Protestants in search of an authoritative and authentic source of scripture, especially against the Tridentine attempt to impose the Vulgate on Catholics, accepted the antiquity of the vowels and accents in Hebrew scripture.47 These included Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) in Tiberias, Sive Commentarius Masoreticus in 1620, who, based on his reading of de’ Rossi, marshaled proofs from the Zohar for the antiquity of the vowels in order to refute the claims of Levita and Cappellus that they were a late, arbitrary invention. Cappellus continued the controversy over the antiquity of the vowels with Buxtorf’s son, Johannes Buxtorf II (1599–1664).48 Among the Protestant defenses of the antiquity of the vowels and accents was Hugh Broughton’s 1608 report about his extensive disputation with David Farar contained in 45 Francois Secret, Le Zohar chez les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Libraire Durlacher, 1958), 100; see Grafton and Weinberg, Casaubon, 313–317, 324–325. 46 Modena, Kitvei, 108. 47 See Johannes Buxtorf, Tiberias, sive, Commentarius Masoreticus (Basel: Lodovici Koenig), 1620, chap. 9, non vidi: see Grafton and Weinberg, Casaubon, 321 and 324. 48 Ginsberg, Massoreth, 45–48; 121, note 75; Baron, “Attitude,” 44–5; Weil, Levita, 317; Francois Secret, Les Kabbalists Chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris: Dunot, 1964), 249, 334–335; Secret, Le Zohar, 99–103; Joseph Blau, The Christian Kabbalah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 108–109.

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Our Lordes Familie. Modena had remained in touch with David Farar, and through him he might have had access to Broughton’s writings in one of the languages in which they were published, including Hebrew, or at least heard of their existence. In any case, Broughton’s discussion on the antiquity of the vowels gives a sense of the contemporary concerns of Jewish-Christian discussions at the beginning of the seventeenth century, certainly in circles with which Modena was familiar. Overstating the more nuanced case made by Judah Loew ben Betzalel, the Maharal of Prague (1520–1609) in his Tiferet yisrael,49 Broughton asserted that the twenty-two Hebrew letters as well as the vowels and accents were not invented by Ezra, but rather came down on the tablets from God at Mt. Sinai. The variety of the fourteen vowels could not be a human creation, nor could any human authority impose them on a nation. He gave some examples in which the biblical text could not be understood without vowels. Contrary to Levita, Broughton claimed that no Hebrew grammarian had ever considered the vowels to be ancient, and he gave the example of David Kimhi’s (1160–1235) commentary on Hosea, in which he mentioned references to vowels in the Aramaic translation of the Torah by Jonathan, a contemporary of Gamliel (identified by Broughton as Saint Paul’s rabbi). Even if this were the case, it would place the vowels before the time of the Masoretes, rabbis, and kabbalists, but not in the time of Ezra the Scribe and certainly not that of Moses.50 Broughton reported that Azariah de’ Rossi responded to Levita with a claim that all nations had vowels, especially the Jews, since they had a great interest in accurate writing. Broughton indicated that his case in favor of the antiquity of the vowels was a reaction against the pope who accepted Levita’s denial that the vowels and accents came down from God to Moses at Mt. Sinai. It was also a reaction against the Septuagint, the Greek Bible used by early Christians, “The lxx used only an unvowelled; to hide with more facilitie, holy

49 http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/mahshevt/tifeeret/66-2.htm, chap. 66 [accessed September 17, 2014]. 50 Hugh Broughton, Our Lordes Famile and many other points depending on it opened against a Jew Rabbi David Farar who disputed many hours, with hope to overthrow the Gospel (Amsterdam: s.n., 1608). On Hosea, chap. 11.

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things from dogges, when danger was.”51 Broughton therefore offered an indictment of the reliability of the Greek version of the Bible and aspects of Christianity based on it. He asserted that the Hebrew text was more reliable since it followed the vowels given by God. Hence, if Modena were to have taken a position against the antiquity of the vowels to undermine the authenticity of major kabbalistic works, then he would have provided support for Christians who asserted that Jews had corrupted scripture to hide the truth about Christ and, no longer bound by the restraints of the vowels, Christians could present their reading of the Bible to convert Jews.

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CRITICISM OF JEWISH TRADITION: JEWISH DISSENTERS AND THE HEBREW VOWELS Had Modena used arguments against the antiquity of the vowels and accents against Kabbalah, he also might have provided fodder for Jews and former-crypto Jews who used questions about the antiquity of the vowel and accent signs to challenge rabbinic authority and the validity of an oral tradition that went back to the time of Moses. For example, sometime between 1615 and 1616, one Jewish dissenter in Hamburg, perhaps Uriel da Costa (1585–1640), prepared eleven theses against rabbinic Judaism. These reached the Sephardic leaders of Venice who turned to a rabbi, perhaps Modena and maybe in collaboration with Simone Luzzatto (1583–1663), for a response.52 This response, now referred to as Magen vetzinah, circulated in Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese manuscripts. Before responding to each of the specific theses, the author began with general proofs for the continuity of the oral tradition. He included a description of the controversies as to whether the vowel and 51 Broughton, Our Lordes Famile. The pages and chapters are unnumbered. Most of what I used was in what would be numbered chapter 11, “Of Gregorie Naianzen for Tartaros,” around fols. 32b–39b. 52 Samuel Aboab, Davar shmuel, no 152; Modena, Kitvei, no. 155–6; Modena, Iggerot, no. 209; L. L. Fuks and R. G. Fuks-Mansfield, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the EtsHaim/Livraria Montezinos (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pl. 84, no. 176; HS. EH 48 A11, 178r–196v, 355–391; Jean-Pierre Osier, Le Bouclier et la Targe (Paris: Centre d’Etudes Don Isaac Abravanel, 1980), 33–34; Uriel da Costa, Die Schriften des Uriel da Costa, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger, 1922), 3–32, 195–198, 250.

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accent signs were from the time of Moses or only from the time of Ezra. After raising the issue, but not wanting to discuss it, the Venetian rabbi, nevertheless, stated that a Torah from Moses’ day would not have had vowels, accents, or punctuation. From this, he concluded that since information about pronunciation was not in the Torah, it had to have been transmitted orally from the time of Moses. Hence, the absence of vowels in the Torah was proof of the antiquity of the oral tradition.53 In a similar vein, de’ Rossi wrote that Moses wanted people to contemplate the commandments according to oral tradition and as well as according to what was written, again bringing de’ Rossi’s presentation back to the centrality of proper fulfillment of traditional rabbinic law.

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CONCLUSION: CRITICISM AND ITS LIMITS In his subsequent writing against Kabbalah, which included many arguments against the authenticity of the Zohar, Modena did not elaborate on aspects of the debate over the antiquity of the vowel and accent signs in order to undermine the authenticity of kabbalistic texts. The closest he came to the subject was in Ari nohem, his magnum opus against Kabbalah, when he mentioned the possibility that vowels may not have been used before the time of Ezra, but the only conclusion he drew from this was that they could not be used for gematria.54 In other works, he stressed the importance of vowels and accents and the necessity of knowing the differences among them in order to understand the Bible and to maintain an accurate text. In 1639, the same year he finished Ari nohem, Modena wrote in the introduction to Jacob Lombroso’s Mikra gedolah, the rabbinic Bible, that each dot and each jot of a yod changed the meaning of a word and the placement of an accent in a word, its tense. “Great mountains are hanging on a strand of hair.” Ever the apologist, Modena noted that non-Jews scorned Jews because Jews had such little understanding of their own language. Maintaining his role as a polemicist against Christianity, in 53 Leon Modena, Ma-amar magen vetzinah, ed. Abraham Geiger (Breslau: Sulzbach, 1856), 4a; Ambrosiana Ms. Q 139 Sup.VIIa. 54 Modena, Arinohem, chap.10.

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his dedicatory poem to this Bible, Modena added: “Also with the accents nations have erred,” meaning that without the tradition of vowels and accents Christianity did not understand how to read the Bible correctly.55 In his marginal notes in Meor eynayim, Modena added his voice to a conversation that lasted a hundred years among three men whose lives barely overlapped. That is, from 1538, when Levita’s Masoret hamasoret appeared, until 1638, when Modena wrote Ari nohem. This was a small part of a larger discussion among Jewish scholars and Christian Hebraists as well as Jewish Kabbalists and anti-Kabbalists, and it would become a major issue in the nineteenth century among Jewish scholars and writers such as Moses Hayim Luzzatto (1707–1746) and Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865). The first round of the discussion, involving Levita, de’ Rossi, and Modena, according to the contemporary analysis by Yerushalmi, Baron, Bonfil, and Weinberg, offered a mixture of audacious historical criticism and cautious, apologetic lip service to tradition. Levita, who is held by the other two to be the instigator of the discussion, was in reality very cautious in presenting his views. He announced his openness to consider new information from kabbalistic texts about the vowels. He took a compromise position that the vowels were given at Sinai, transmitted as sounds but not as actual signs, but were lost and then reclaimed by the Masoretes at Tiberias. Levita himself downplayed doubts based on kabbalistic texts about the antiquity of the vowels. De’ Rossi, despite his case for the antiquity of the vowels, distanced himself from Kabbalah and cautiously discussed the anachronistic and pseudepigraphic aspects of kabbalistic texts and the origins of the Zohar, but he did not draw any explicitly critical implications concerning the antiquity of kabbalistic texts. He was cautious so that criticism of kabbalistic texts would not lead to the questioning of rabbinic legal texts, which might undermine Jewish religious practice. Despite his attempts to sustain tradition with his tendentious proofs concerning the antiquity of the vowels, he nevertheless raised doubts 55 Leon Modena, Leket ketavim, ed. Peninah Naveh (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1968), 287–288; Leon Modena, Divan, ed. Shimon Bernstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1932), no. 38.

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about the reliability of tradition. For example, when he tried to prove that in reading the Bible the rabbis of the Talmud and the Masoretes of Tiberias did not always agree, De’ Rossi highlights contradictory aspects of tradition. De’ Rossi regularly presented critical ideas and then regretted that he had done so, circulating them and distancing himself from them at the same time. For Modena, the vowel and accent signs of the biblical text, whatever their exact historical origins, were an integral aspect of rabbinic Judaism and an important support against Christian interpretations of the Bible. Even after acknowledging in the privacy of the margins of his copy of Meor eynayim the historical anachronism involved and the usefulness of attacking the antiquity of the vowels to support his views against Kabbalah, Modena could not emphatically do so in a work that might be published or receive public circulation. The risk was too great that this argument might enable both Christian proselytizers and Jewish dissenters to further their polemics against the distortions of rabbinic Judaism. The major reason Modena opposed Kabbalah in the first place was to defend rabbinic Judaism. Now for those same reasons he chose to remain silent about his most convincing arguments against Kabbalah. Even though Modena had studied, taught, and defended Kabbalah, as he engaged in a defense of rabbinic Judaism against its detractors, whether Jews, Christians, or those in-between, he began to see the need to direct his polemical energies against Kabbalah. However, because Kabbalah was based on the same fundamentals as rabbinic Judaism, especially in its collective memory as a divinely inspired oral tradition, attacks on the legitimacy of one could cause the other to be questioned as well. As Modena drew on historical materials in order to refine his polemic against Kabbalah, he felt obliged to protect rabbinic authority. As with Elijah Levita Bahur and Azariah de’ Rossi, there were limits to Modena’s willingness to let historical criticism upset collective memory.

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MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY PERIODS

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American Jewish Immigrants and the Invention of Europe* Beth S.Wenger

University of Pennsylvania

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I

n 1845, Rabbi Max Lilienthal arrived in New York as a new immigrant. He had witnessed the currents of change in both Western and Eastern Europe, having been brought from Germany to Russia by Tsar Nicholas I to install a program of Enlightenment in the Jewish schools. Yet, like thousands of other Jews of his generation, he ultimately chose to make the journey to the United States where he staked his claim for a better life. Shortly after arriving in his adopted homeland, Lilienthal wrote back to the German press with a glowing report on America: “My greetings as a brother and friend from New York, from the God-blessed land of freedom, from the beautiful soil of civic equality. Old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a dream.”*1 Like millions of other immigrants who arrived in the United States over the course of the next century, Lilienthal measured his experience * Portions of this essay are taken from my History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 1 Steven M. Lowenstein, “The View from the Old World: German-Jewish Perspectives,” in The Americanization of the Jews, ed. Robert M. Seltzer and Norman J. Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 23.

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in America by reflecting back on his European past. It was precisely this comparative gaze that allowed Jews to make sense of their new identities as American Jews, but in the process, they also invented new interpretations of Europe. American Jewish immigrants frequently painted European experience as dismal and oppressive by comparison, even if they occasionally longed for the familiarity and rich Jewish culture of their former homelands. The flattened and often monolithic portrait of Europe that emerged in the rhetoric of American Jews served as both a backdrop and a foil for the new Jewish culture they were creating in America. Historians have rightly debated the doctrine of American exceptionalism and questioned its unqualified application within Jewish history.2 Yet, most American Jews who wrote and reflected about their lives in the United States often claimed that America was indeed different. They sometimes lauded the nation for its superior principles of toleration and sometimes, as was often the case among Jewish socialists and in the Jewish labor movement, demanded that it live up to those principles when it fell short of expectations. Over and over, they reiterated that in America, for the first time, Jews stood on equal footing, enjoyed all rights and privileges, and contributed vitally to American culture. While historians ought to temper such hyperbolic assertions, it is worth noting that with very few exceptions, Jews repeatedly referred to their adopted homeland in terms that underscored its unprecedented freedoms. Even new immigrants, who often regarded themselves and were regarded by others as foreigners, nevertheless noted that the United States did not possess the history of Jewish exclusion and persecution that they had experienced in Europe. “I used to marvel how freely I could walk about,” recalled one East European Jewish immigrant, “No policeman or gendarme stops me and brusquely demands to see my passport . . . Jews speak whatever language they please in public, they wear whatever clothes they wish.”3

2 Tony Michels, “Is America Different?: A Critique of American Jewish Exceptionalism,” American Jewish History 96, no. 3 (2010): 201–24. 3 Cited in Elias Tcherikower, The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the United States (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1961), 124.

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To be sure, the nation’s history belies such simplistic paradigms, and indeed Jews did confront their share of inequality in the New World. Jews in the colonies and early Republic encountered a number of restrictions on their activity; they were sometimes denied the right to worship publicly or to hold public office. In 1654, Governor Peter Stuyvesant famously refused admission to the first Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam until he was overruled by Dutch authorities. Stuyvesant’s insistence that “the hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” and their usurious practices would corrupt the colony reflected prevailing European attitudes, but Dutch officials believed that Jewish economic contributions outweighed such concerns, even though they shared them.4 Nonetheless, admission to the New World came with considerable restrictions and ironically, for a brief time, Jewish residents of colonial New Amsterdam possessed fewer rights than they had once been granted in Dutch Brazil, though most of those barriers fell rather quickly. Thus while the complete “otherness” of Jewish legal status in America should not be overstated, there can be little doubt that the United States rapidly outpaced other nations in the freedoms afforded to its Jewish inhabitants.5 Equally as important as the legal distinctions, Jews in the United States were generally spared the demands for “improvement” that gripped much of Europe. When they crossed the ocean, generations of immigrants not only became instantly emancipated but they also left behind the protracted public debates about Jewish character and fitness to belong as part of the national culture. Certainly many American groups and even governmental officials expressed both private and public misgivings about Jews and there were constant efforts to “Americanize” new immigrants and rid them of their “foreign” traits. Moreover, Christian groups regularly attempted to convert Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, but despite all these challenges, Jewish status and 4 Peter Stuyvesant to the Directors of the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch West India Company, in Samuel Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654–1664,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 18 (1909): 4–5. 5 Arthur Kiron, “Mythologizing 1654,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 586.

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citizenship in the United States never rested on the condition that they alter the fundamental nature of their beliefs or behaviors. Sociologist Marshall Sklare has noted that this crucial distinction shaped the ways that Jews adapted within American society. “[T]he acculturation of the Jews,” Sklare observed, “could proceed without their feeling that such acculturation was a price exacted if the Jews were to have the same rights as others.”6 Rabbi Israel Friedlaender, a turn-of-the century immigrant, articulated that sentiment in more forceful terms: “The freedom enjoyed by the Jews [in the United States] is not the outcome of emancipation, purchased at the cost of national suicide, but the natural product of American civilization.”7 To be sure, European antagonisms reverberated throughout America, embedded in the collective experiences and attitudes of European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic and of those already settled in the nation, but they never impinged on Jewish rights and citizenship. Negative portrayals of Jewish economic activity, religious beliefs, and political behavior endured as a constant undercurrent in American society, just as they had in every other country where Jews resided, and often flared up at particular moments of real or perceived crisis. But lingering notions of Jewish “otherness” never received official sanction in the United States and failed to take hold as a dominant cultural motif. As Ira Katznelson has cogently argued, in the United States, being a Jew was “one way to be an American, whereas in Europe to be a Jew frequently meant not to be a European.” Still, as he rightly observes, “to be a Jew in America also meant to be an unusual, and rather vulnerable, kind of American.”8

6 Marshall Sklare, Observing America’s Jews (Hanover: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 1993), 24. On Jewish responses to conversion efforts, see Jonathan D. Sarna, “The American Jewish Response to NineteenthCentury Christian Missions,” Journal of American History 68 (June 1981): 35–51. 7 Israel Friedlaender, “The Problem of Judaism in America,” in Past and Present: A Collection of Jewish Essays (Cincinnati, OH: Ark Publishing Company, 1919), 274. 8 Ira Katznelson, “Between Separation and Disappearance: Jews on the Margins of American Liberalism,” in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship, ed. Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 168–69.

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Such nuanced historical assessments seldom appeared when American Jews narrated their own history or contrasted their experiences in the United States with what Jews had known in Europe. Painting the whole of European Jewish history with a broad, gloomy brush, one author described the “monotonous sameness about the history of the Jews in Europe.”9 At the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States, celebrated in grand fashion at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 1905, prominent communal leader Louis Marshall underscored the conditions facing Jews throughout Europe at the time when the first Jews arrived on American shores in 1654. Recalling that America was founded “at the lowest ebb” in Jewish history, Marshall offered a dismal synopsis of European Jewish experience:

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Driven from England in 1290, for 365 years no Jew had been permitted to live in the land which has become the mother of freedom. Driven from Spain in 1492, and shortly thereafter from Portugal, none of Jewish stock, save the Marranos, whose outward lives were the incarnation of falsehood, dwelt upon the Iberian Peninsula. In 1648, the Cossack uprising under Chmielnicki transformed the dream of peace and prosperity of the Russian and Polish Jews into the horrible reality which has ever since overwhelmed them with an avalanche of misery, wretchedness, and degradation. The Jews of Germany and Austria dwelt within Ghetto walls, and suffered from every species of insult, contumely, and discrimination. In France and Italy the Jew was a Pariah and an outcast.10

In this reading, the evolution of the American Jewish story contrasted vividly with the sweeping depiction of the miseries of Europe. Bringing his narrative into the present, Marshall offered his hope that “the consciousness of the rights of manhood might beat in the bosoms of the oppressed everywhere with the same force and virility that it did in the breasts of our Jewish pioneers!” If such a transformation could occur, Marshall reasoned, Russian Jews might escape the “unspeakable brutality”   9 Anita Libman Lebeson, Jewish Pioneers in America, 1492–1848 (New York: Brentano’s, 1931), 2. 10 Address by Louis Marshall, The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Jews in the United States: Addresses delivered at Carnegie Hall, New York, on Thanksgiving Day, 1905 (New York: New York Co-Operative Society, 1906), 95–96.

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that had turned the streets of the Pale of Settlement into “slaughter pens and reeking shambles.”11 In this historical reflection, as in so many others like it, American Jews used a selective reading of the European Jewish past to reinforce the freedoms offered to Jews in the United States, but in doing so, they also reimagined Europe as a flat canvas on which they projected an unending cycle of Jewish suffering. The most virulent portraits of a meek and vulnerable European Jewry emerged from the Zionist movement, which frequently characterized European Jews as weakened by centuries of oppression and misled by the false promise of equality and emancipation. A closer look at the rhetoric of Zionists and American Jews reveals that the two groups described European Jewish life in strikingly similar terms. Their situations differed dramatically, as Jews in the United States constructed their culture as a minority group in a pluralistic society while Zionists built a sovereign Jewish state as the majority culture. Yet, in both settings, Jews focused on building a culture in contradistinction to European Jewish experience. Zionist ideology demanded a repudiation of exile, rejecting the perceived shackles and degradation of Jewish life in Europe and calling for a physical and spiritual rebirth in the land of Israel.12 In the United States, the repudiation of European experience was not as ideologically potent, but nonetheless clearly present, as Jews believed that America offered an opportunity to overcome the hardships of Europe and begin new lives in a free society. The idea that life in America would rejuvenate Jews both spiritually and physically suffused the narratives produced by American Jews. The author Nahum Mayer Shaikevich, who wrote under the pseudonym Shomer, migrated to the United States from Eastern Europe in 1889 and described America as a place where Jews “discovered their abilities and vigor.”13 The Zionist typology of the “new Jew,” a highly gendered image that emphasized the reclamation of Jewish manhood, had an American corollary, expressed most clearly by 11 Ibid., 101–102. 12 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 13–33. 13 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 156.

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Louis Marshall. Marshall insisted that once in America, “the consciousness of manhood, recognized, coursed through [the Jew’s] veins as the sap flows through the forest in the spring-time.” Contrasting Jewish men’s behavior in Europe compared to America, he elaborated, “The eyes accustomed to the furtive look, the back bent in abject cowardice, the voice that dreaded its own echo, were transfigured by the miracle of liberty.”14 Israel Friedlaender, professor of biblical literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, went so far as to claim that the migration from Europe to America had brought about a new “species” of Jew—the “American Jew who is both modern and Jewish, who combines American energy and success with that manliness and self-assertion, which is imbibed with American freedom.”15 In his 1897 poem, “Statue of Liberty,” the socialist Yiddish immigrant poet Avrohom Liessin vividly portrayed the United States as a land of redemption, capable of transforming Jews in body and soul: From the dark, medieval night, from a world of plunder, a world of war, of the oppressive yoke, of rivers of blood, of the pious cross and the grievous knout, the free set forth courageously across the sea to a distant shore . . . Oh come, ye wanderers, ye persecuted: from crammed and stifled worlds, come here to endless tracts. Oh come, ye brave ones, ye free ones: Here you’ll gather newfound might. To you we extend a hearty welcome. In the New World, beyond the Atlantic, lies a wide-open miraculous land, where Man, freed from tyranny, 14 Louis Marshall, “The Influence of America on Judaism,” American Hebrew and Jewish Messenger 24 (November 1905): 749. 15 Israel Friedlaender, “The Problem of Judaism in America,” 275.

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grows free and proud with a spirit that knows no bound and a will forged of steel.16 Jewish immigrants often testified to the profound changes that they experienced in the American environment. George Price came to the United States from Russia in 1882, became a leading physician in this country, and regularly contributed reports to the Russian Jewish press about the conditions of American Jewish life. Price candidly chronicled the hardships experienced by immigrants, but he also couched his assessment with an eye toward America’s transformative power. Recalling “the poor, downtrodden, frightened inhabitants of the well-known Pale, over whose head hung the Damoclean sword of cruel injustice, who trembled like a leaf at the appearance of the sheriff or policeman,” he described how the immigrant Jew had become “a free independent and upright American Jew,” brimming with “self-respect” and “strength.” Price’s account contained unrelenting depictions of the harsh working environment, desperate poverty, and poor housing conditions encountered by Jewish immigrants, yet he could not ignore what he described as the “extraordinary metamorphosis” that occurred in the hearts and minds of Jews once they settled in America.17 Similarly, Mary Antin’s relentlessly idealistic autobiography chronicles the remaking of Jewish identity and the first stirrings of patriotic feelings for her new home. She rhetorically asks about her native Russia, “Where had been my country until now? What flag had I loved?” She recalled, “We knew what it was to be Jews in exile . . . As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk had no national expectations . . . So it came to pass that we did not know what my country could mean to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love.” Her autobiography, consciously 16 Avrohom Liessin (Valt), cited in Eli Lederhendler, Jewish Responses to Modernity: New Voices in America and Eastern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 112. 17 George M. Price, “The Russian Jews in America,” in The Jewish Experience in America: Selected Studies from the Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, ed. Abraham J. Karp, trans. Leo Shpall (New York: Ktav Publishing and American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 298.

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titled The Promised Land, goes on to describe her journey to embrace all that America had to offer, to become “an American among Americans . . . free to fashion my own life,” something that she indicated had been impossible in Europe.18 The writer Anzia Yezierska echoed those sentiments in her autobiographical fiction. “In America is a home for everybody,” she wrote optimistically about her hopes for a new life in the United States. “The land is your land, not as in Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you were born and reared—the village in which your father and grandfather lie buried.”19 The image of America as a land that Jews could possess as they never could in Europe ran as a constant theme in Jewish narratives, a theme that remained potent even alongside immigrant writings about disappointment in the poverty and harsh living conditions that they initially encountered. Although with a different tenor and purpose than the Zionists and with a decidedly more individualistic bent, American Jews endowed their adopted homeland with the power to help Jews overcome the European past, reclaim their authenticity, and begin anew as Jews, free men and women, and Americans. Even while still in Europe, many immigrants often imagined the United States in idyllic terms, wholly different from the life they knew in Europe. Abraham Cahan, editor of the socialist Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, recalled that before coming to the United States, “I could only conceive of America as a brand-new country, and everything in it . . . was to be spick and span.” Once in the United States, he admitted, “My idea of America had so little to do with what I now saw before me.”20 But despite such disappointments, Cahan, like most other socialists, never completely abandoned faith in America. Although he sharply denounced the capitalist system and the corruption of America’s business and political system, Cahan wrote enthusiastically about the empowerment and energy 18 Mary Antin, The Promised Land: The Autobiography of a Russian Immigrant [1912] repr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 197, 226–28. 19 Anzia Yezierska, “How I found America,” in Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (New York: Persea Books, 1985), 261, 263. 20 Moses Rischin, ed., Grandma Never Lived in America: The New Journalism of Abraham Cahan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 150.

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that he derived from American life, juxtaposing it, quite pointedly, to his former life in Eastern Europe:

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I felt America’s freedom every minute. I breathed freer than I had ever breathed before. . . . America was, in a literal sense, a new world, a strange world, a disagreeable world, but also a challenging world that strengthened me with a strong, healthy odor like that of a freshly plowed field. America intrigued me, puzzled me. It seemed to me that America lives more in one day than Russia does in ten.21

American Jewish references to life in Europe regularly stressed the sharp break with the past that had occurred on American soil. In the accounts of most immigrant Jews to America, the new chapter of Jewish history that began in the United States stood in stark contrast to everything Jews had previously experienced. From public proclamations to memoirs to institutional publications, comparisons between the freedom of America and the repression of Europe permeated the narratives of American Jews. The author of one of the first surveys of American Jewish history asserted confidently that the United States would never give rise to “a Jewish problem in the sense in which this term is understood in the overcrowded and illiberal countries of the Old World.”22 The vice president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), one of the most important agencies established by East European Jews to help fellow immigrants, attributed the success of the organization to the American environment, even claiming that Jews were able to fulfill Jewish precepts in the United States in ways that had been impossible in Europe: As a result of religious intolerance which European Christiandom [sic] inherited from its pagan predecessors, the European Jew was seldom more than an alien in his native land. As an exile or stranger he therefore became a wanderer, ever seeking a place of refuge from religious persecution, a house where he could worship God in security and live in peace. American tolerance has made it possible for 21 Abraham Cahan, The Education of Abraham Cahan, trans. Leon Stein, Abraham P. Conan, Lynn Davison from Bleter fun mein leben (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 228, 243–44. 22 Peter Wiernik, History of the Jews in America, 2nd edition (New York: Jewish History Publishing Company, 1931), 425.

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the American Jew to put into practice the Biblical injunction to extend the hand of friendship to the homeless and stranger, commonly known as Hachnosass Orchim (harboring strangers).23

The main character in Anzia Yezierska’s Breadgivers was less analytical in her embrace of the greater possibilities available to Jews, and particularly to Jewish women, in America. “Thank God, I’m not living in olden times,” she declared, clearly equating olden times with Europe. “Thank God, I’m living in America!”24 If Europe provided a yardstick to measure the potential for Jewish life in America, it also served as a recurring backdrop for the stories that Jews told about the new American chapter in Jewish history. “All beginnings contain an element of recollection,” explained sociologist Paul Connerton. “This is particularly so when a social group makes a concerted effort to begin with a wholly new start.” 25 The European past became a touchstone for evaluating the meaning of the American Jewish experience, often serving as a counter-example that illuminated the liberty of America but also providing a context for interpreting America in the longue durée of Jewish history. The events of 1492 emerged as a recurrent theme in American Jewish narratives, ideally suited to position Jews in the most pivotal moments of both the American and Jewish past. American Jews exhibited a particular interest in establishing a Jewish role in the voyage of Christopher Columbus. Their renditions of the Columbus story placed Jews at the dawn of American history, but equally important, they provided closure and continuity with a painful epoch in the Jewish past. “Where the history of the Jews in Spain ends, that of the Jews in America begins,” wrote Meyer Kayserling, a scholar hired by the fledgling American Jewish Historical Society in the 1890s to investigate the Jewish role in Columbus’s mission. “The Inquisition is the last chapter in the record of the confessors of Judaism on the Pyrenean peninsula 23 Albert Rosenblatt, “The Jewish Migration Problem—How It Has Been Met,” The Jewish Forum (August 1924): 492. 24 Anzia Yezierska, Breadgivers [1925] repr., (New York: Persea Books, 1975), 137–38. 25 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6.

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and its first chapter in the western hemisphere.”26 Eager to document their founding role in the nation, American Jews eagerly embraced Kayserling’s findings, but the coupling of the tragedy of the Expulsion and Inquisition with the discovery of America also endured as a way to explain the significance of the United States in Jewish history. Assessing the meaning of the discovery of the New World for Jews, one of the earliest American Jewish history textbooks concluded that, “It is our pride that Jews had much to do with that discovery which, without their foreseeing it, finally won for them a new refuge, a home for a far larger Jewish community than medieval Spain had ever boasted.”27 The construction of meaning surrounding Columbus’s journey linked the demise of a once great European Jewish civilization with the birth of the next great Jewish epoch that began in America. At the grand two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in the United States, a parade of speakers repeated the triumphant story of how Christopher Columbus, as he set sail to discover the New World, crossed paths with a ship carrying Jews who had been expelled from Spain a day earlier by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Adding greater power to the myth, several orators claimed that the brief encounter occurred of the Ninth Day of the month of Av, a Jewish day of mourning that marked the destruction of the First and Second Temples, and was traditionally regarded as the day the Messiah would be born.28 The myth that the Expulsion had occurred on the Ninth of Av, an assertion that the historian Yitzhak Baer dismissed as merely a “fable,” had been retold for centuries; the legend likely emerged in the immediate wake of the Expulsion.29 When American Jews repeated the tale and blended it with the story of Columbus, they created a myth of origin that wove 26 Meyer Kayserling, “The Colonization of America by the Jews,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 2 (1894): 73. 27 Lee J. Levinger, A History of the Jews in the United States (New York: Union of America Hebrew Congregations, 1930), 27. 28 Arthur A. Goren, The Politics and Public Culture of America Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 40. 29 Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 2 [1961] repr., (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1983), 439. Baer indicates that Rabbi Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the first to propagate the myth that the Expulsion took place on the Ninth of Av.

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together Jewish history and American history, providing a way for Jews to tell their own ethnic story, intimately tied to broader American cultural paradigms. At the same time, the Columbus myth rendered the downfall of Spanish Jewish culture a prelude to the creation of a flourishing Jewish culture in America. As late as the 1930s, one popular account of American Jewish history clearly spelled out the connection between this key moment of European Jewish cultural demise and the birth of a new Jewish society in the United States:

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In the shifting drama of the fortunes of people which is history, Columbus was the deus ex machina for the Jews. They had come in 1492 to their darkest hour. They were a homeless people mourning their past. Their eyes turned backward. The future held its empty cup before them, mocking, challenging. Life was a dirge at the grave of buried splendor. A people with its back to wall—and then America—a new world! For the Jew, shelter, new life, escape from persecution . . . America ransomed the Jew.30

In these retellings, the United States emerged to rescue European Jewry. The Jewish community that took shape so far from the centers of Jewish culture no longer represented a remote outpost or signified a rupture with the Jewish past, but rather heralded the dawn of a new, more glorious period in Jewish history. Even as these narratives helped to define the meaning of America in Jewish history, they also provided distance from the European Jewish past and painted it as stultified and hopeless by comparison. A host of plays, pageants, and short stories produced in the opening decades of the twentieth century for use in Jewish Sunday schools repeated the idealistic portrayal of the United States as the redeemer of Jewish civilization. Elma Levinger, who authored dozens of works for Jewish children, set her 1923 play At the Gates at Ellis Island where a Jewish family from Poland awaits admission to America. The father peers out the window and marvels to his children about the tall buildings that appear to him “like the peaks of mountains before our Holy Land.” 30 Lebeson, Jewish Pioneers in America, 16–17.

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He continues, “I dreamed of them so long that I feared I might never enter the land of promise. Yet our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem!” When his son retorts that America is not the Land of Israel and New York is not Jerusalem, the father immediately corrects him:

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America is a holy place for there a man may breathe the air of freedom. You do not understand, children—God grant you should never understand why my heart has turned to America so long—as my eyes turned to Jerusalem when I prayed. Years ago it became to me like the land that was promised of old to our fathers—a land flowing with milk and honey. And I dreamed of going out from my father’s house like Abraham and finding a far country where my children might dwell. The dream has come true at last and the waiting is over. You will never have a youth like mine; you will breathe freely—you will be Americans.31

The play has a bittersweet ending, as immigration officials refuse admission to the father after a medical exam reveals trachoma, a highly contagious eye disease that caused many immigrants to be turned back. The father insists that the rest of his family go forward without him and as the play closes, he knows that at least his descendents will reach the land of freedom, even if he must return to Europe. Painting Europe as the Jewish past while embracing America as the future, Levinger’s play encapsulated the standard trope about the Jewish immigrant as a modern-day Abraham, going forward to claim America as the new Promised Land. The same idea appeared in a different form in a Jewish school pageant staged by children at the Stone Avenue Talmud Torah in Brownsville, New York. On July 4, 1918, both American flags and the Zionist blue and white flags adorned the streets outside the local school. After a parade through the neighborhood streets, the schoolchildren performed a pageant in three acts: the first began with the Jews of Egypt being liberated by Moses; the next scene depicted the suffering of the Jews of Spain and Russia (conflating, quite egregiously, centuries of Jewish life into a single epoch of persecution); and the final act 31 Elma Ehrlich Levinger, At the Gates: A One Act Modern Play (Cincinnati, OH: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1923), 9–10.

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culminated with immigrant Jews being welcomed to the shores of America.32 This story, which begins with biblical history, goes on to portray European Jewish experience as an undifferentiated period characterized only by suffering, and concludes by bringing Jewish history to a new climax on American soil. While such idealistic and triumphant portrayals abounded in textbooks, speeches, and sermons, not all Jewish immigrants embraced life in the United States unequivocally or were quite so decisive about leaving behind their European past. In fact, many new immigrants found that the United States did not initially live up to its promise and often longed for the familiarity of their former homes. Like many other newcomers of his generation, Abraham Kohn, who came to the United States from Bavaria in 1842, struggled to make a living as a peddler in his early years in America. Writing in his diary he lamented, “O, that I had never seen this land, but had remained in Germany, apprenticed to a humble country craftsman! Though oppressed by taxes and discriminated against as a Jew, I should still be happier than in the great capital of America, free from royal taxes and every man’s religious equal though I am!”33 Jews recognized the greater freedoms that America offered, but liberty could not mitigate the vicissitudes of poverty and difficulties of adjusting to a new environment. Even if they did not harbor any nostalgia for their European past, many immigrants found that the realities of American life did not meet their lofty expectations. In one of her short stories, Anzia Yezierska outlined her hopes for America and then candidly chronicled her subsequent disillusionment: “I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty bedding oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the side-walks. A vague sadness pressed down my heart—the first doubt of America. . . . Where is the golden country of my dreams?”34 32 The Jewish Child, 12 July 1918, 1. 33 Abraham Kohn, “A Jewish Peddler’s Diary,” trans. Abram Vossen Goodman, American Jewish Archives 3 (1951): 98. 34 Anzia Yezierska, “How I Found America,” in Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (New York: Persea Books, 1985), 261, 263.

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The trope of expectation followed by disappointment emerged as a thread throughout Jewish accounts of their first encounters with America, punctuated by a particularly sharp critique from the Jewish left about the exploitative nature of the American capitalist system. The Yiddish songwriter Eliakum Zunser penned “The Golden Land,” a widely popular song among American Jewish immigrants that attacked the corruption of American industry and the cult of money while exposing the plight of impoverished workers:

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In the narrow streets, where the mass stands compressed, There are many poor and miserable, unhappiness is on every face; They stand from morning till night, Their lips parched and burned. One sacrifices his child for a cent, Another is thrown from his dwelling for not paying rent, Many immigrants in depressed mood, Fall from hunger on the street, Much poverty and sickness, too, Are all found in this golden land. The worker’s life flows away here In a river of his own sweat; He toils during the busy season and starves in the slack And is always in fear of losing his job. . . . The proletarian has as much worth here As the horses pulling the streetcars, Running, running until he falls . . .35 While en route to America, Zunser had written a very different, decidedly more hopeful description of an imagined Jewish life in the 35 Mordkhe Schaechter, Elyokum Tsunzers verk [The Works of Elyokum Zunser: A Critical Edition] vol. 1 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1964), 495–96; Ruth Rubin, Voices of a People: The Story of Yiddish Folksong [1979] repr., (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 354–55.

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United States. His poem, “Columbus and Washington,” canonized the discoverer and first president of America, two figures who would become ubiquitous in Jewish writings. Each stanza recounted a different Jewish character from Eastern Europe—an artisan, a young woman, a merchant, an actor, and others—who thanked the two American heroes for liberating them from Russia.36 For Zunser, like so many others, the vibrancy of their optimism in an imagined America was often matched by the ferocity of their disappointment in the actual America that they encountered. While socialists frequently leveled scathing critiques of the nation’s exploitative capitalist system, they usually maintained that America had strayed from its ideals but continued to retain faith in its potential. However, the Jewish communist movement offered a more virulent repudiation of American culture and in an exception to the prevailing pattern in American Jewish life, briefly championed the superiority of the Soviet system. For example, children’s textbooks published by the International Workers Order during the early to mid-1930s were filled with derisive attacks on America society coupled with unwavering adulation of Soviet culture. A 1933 Yiddish textbook written by Aaron Mayzel and Betsalel Friedman opens with an account of a young Jewish schoolboy who disdains America’s public schools because they teach nothing but lies; he looks forward to going to Yiddish school because there he learns the truth. In public school, where another schoolboy named Tommy Brown feels that he is fed nothing but platitudes about American life, his teacher, Miss Green, asks him to answer three questions: to name the greatest man in the world, describe how he feels about American life, and choose the country in which he would most like to live. Although he knows how he is supposed to reply to these questions, he chooses to answer defiantly: “Aha”—Tommy thought—“for the first question the teacher wants me to answer that the greatest man in the world is either George Washington or Lincoln. But Miss Green has made a huge mistake!” 36 Schaechter, Elyokum Tsunzers verk, 518–21; Sol Liptzin, Eliakum Zunser: Poet of His People (New York: Behrman House, 1950), 211–12.

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Therefore, for the first question he answered: “The greatest man is Lenin.” He took a little time to think and then proceeded to answer the second question: “I don’t like American life at all. If we think that we are living in a free land, we are making a huge mistake. This land is led by capitalists. They make all the laws, and all the laws are against the workers.”

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Tommy moved on to the third question: “I would like to live in the Soviet Union, because that is the only land where power lies in the hands of the workers.”37

By making Tommy the hero of the story, the authors work to subvert the idealistic portrait of America that their students absorbed in public schools and in the majority culture. The celebration of Soviet society remains boundless throughout the text. In another story included in the book, an American Jewish girl named Lily travels with her father to the USSR where she befriends many Bolshevik children. Deciding to become a Bolshevik herself, she tells her father, “When we get back to America, I’m going to tell everyone about the lovely parades and all the boys and girls I’ve met here. I’ll tell everyone to become a Bolshevik!”38 The communist critique remained a powerful minority sentiment within American Jewish culture for a brief period, particularly in the 1930s, but the movement represented an aberration from the dominant motifs in American Jewish life. Most immigrant Jews did not look to alternative solutions in Europe or even in Palestine, generally embracing the possibilities available to Jews in the United States, despite occasional doubts and disillusionment. In fact, for all of its potency during the years of mass migration, the trope of dashed expectations turned 37 Aaron Mayzel and Betsalel Friedman, The Workman’s School: A Textbook for the Second Year [Di Arbeter Shul: Lernbukh farn tseytn lernyor] (New York: The International Workers Order, 1933), 5, 9–10. The choice of the name Tommy Brown may be derived from the nineteenth-century British novel, Tom Brown’s School Days. Written by Thomas Hughes, the popular novel was also adapted for the screen several times. Thanks to Anita Norich for this reference. 38 Ibid., 45–46.

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out to be one of the least enduring characteristics of Jewish expressions about American life. Still, the comparative gaze toward Europe was not without its contradictory components. On the one hand, American Jews celebrated the greater freedoms that America offered, constantly juxtaposing the restrictions and limitations of Europe to the openness and opportunity of America. Their rhetoric often conveyed a sense of superiority, implying that once liberated from the hardships of Europe, Jews could become truly fulfilled both as Jews and as Americans. This ultimately emerged as a defining feature within American Jewish life, despite the fact that Jews, particularly new immigrants, often expressed doubts about their future in the United States as well as frustration and disappointment when their adopted homeland failed to meet their lofty expectations. At the same time, an undercurrent of inferiority consistently haunted characterizations of American Jewish life. Europe (often described as a single undifferentiated whole in many of these narratives) may have been associated with persecution and economic privation, but it also possessed the strength of centuries of flourishing Jewish culture. American Jews expressed some anxiety that their society did not measure up when compared to a European past “replete with incomparable scholarly distinction, a voracious, widespread intellectual hunger that was lost as Jews were transplanted across the Atlantic.”39 This assessment, though probably more common among intellectual and cultural elites, retained power among American Jews, even as they increasingly asserted confidence about the promise of Jewish life in the United States. Nevertheless, the desire to create a narrative about the superiority of American Jewry certainly derived, in part, from an attempt to fill the void created by leaving behind that long, rich European Jewish past. In the twentieth century, as the world’s Jewish population began to shift toward the United States, Jewish leaders more frequently described the United States as the country responsible for sustaining Jewish life. The Orthodox leader Bernard Revel made precisely this 39 Steven J. Zipperstein, “American Jews and the European Gaze,” American Jewish History 91, no. 3–4 (Sept. and Dec. 2003): 380.

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claim when campaigning for the newly created Yeshiva College in the 1920s. With the conditions of Jewish life in Europe steadily deteriorating, Revel explained, “to a great degree world Jewry is coming to look for its spiritual strength to America.” His assertion that “the mantle of responsibility is descending upon American Jewry,” became a familiar refrain. Through such rhetoric, whether in speeches or popular histories, American Jews transformed the country with such a brief Jewish past into the redeemer of a Jewish civilization that had been centered in Europe for centuries.40 Europe served as a counter-model that defined the potential for Jewish life in America by opposition. The contrast between Europe and America appeared dramatically before American Jewish theatergoers in the 1890s in a play penned by the renowned Yiddish playwright Joseph Lateiner. Exile from Russia, a tragic melodrama of the Yiddish theater, depicted in graphic terms the suffering of Jews in Eastern Europe. The play featured Jews being humiliated by Russians and numerous acts of anti-Jewish violence. The popular actor Boris Thomashefsky portrayed the main character, Ossip, who finally chooses to convert after experiencing the vicissitudes of Jewish life and falling in love with a non-Jewish woman. But his decision causes his family to spurn him when he returns to defend them during a pogrom and he fails to prevent Russian soldiers from carrying out their brutality. The play’s harsh portrayal of Jewish life in Eastern Europe concludes with a brief scene set in New York: immigrants dressed in red, white, and blue march behind a band playing “The Star Spangled Banner” in a hopeful finale that affirms the possibility for Jewish redemption in the United States.41 Once again, in this representation, America emerged to rescue Jews from the anguish of Europe. In this play, as on so many other occasions in American Jewish life, it was the New World that invented the Old, and by the designation rendered it sometimes a prelude to and sometimes the antithesis of American Jewish culture. 40 Bernard Revel, “The Yeshiva College,” 3, Bernard Revel Papers, Folder 12/2–40 (New York: Yeshiva University Archives). 41 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 465–66.

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North American Hasidim: Between Modernity and the Old World Steven Lapidus Concordia University

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espite the commonly held belief, memory is not an objective remembrance of things past. Not only is it limited by psychological and physiological constraints, memory is also influenced by one’s values and worldview. As the philosopher of history H. W. Walsh observes: [T]he conclusion we must draw is that history throws light not on “objective” events, but on the persons who write it; it illuminates not the past, but the present. And that is no doubt why each generation finds it necessary to write its histories afresh.1

Psychologists concur that memory is frequently reconstructed. Bo Hagberg concludes that the appearance of events in the mind is more important to the storyteller than the actual details of what happened,2 and Linda Viney adds that reminiscence is as much about the contem1 H. W. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 109. 2 Bo Hagberg, “The Individual’s Life History as a Formative Experience to Aging,” in The Art and Science of Reminiscing: Theory, Research, Methods, and Applications, ed. Barbara K. Haight and Jeffrey D. Webster (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 62, 70.

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poraneous situation and audience as it is the past.3 Memory and reminiscence, the subjective processes through which history is filtered in the mind, are subject to many influences and needs, one of which is pedagogical. When recalled, events, personalities, and mores of the past can be invoked as ideal examples. Recollecting focuses attention onto proper values. James Hunter argues that such is the case among conservative religious groups:

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History, then, is at the heart of fundamentalism. Though each fundamentalist community has its own particular vision of the nature and direction it should go, all have engaged in a quest either to put sacral history back on course or else to keep it on course.4

For Eastern European shtetl emigrants, memory is even further complicated by the destruction of the places that they memorialize. Dramatic historical ruptures often trigger commemorative writing.5 Frequently, the severity of the schism can influence the idealization of memory. With the homeland destroyed and inaccessible, the “remembered” past is malleable to idealization and projection, almost as a tabula rasa. Without a physical original, the past is colored by contemporary needs, both conscious and unconscious. Among the most significant reasons to intentionally idealize the past is to provide guidance for the future. Memories are transformed into sites of education and exemplary behavior, and hence the past must be remade to reflect current needs. Many Jews, both secular and Orthodox, choose to remember the shtetl as an ideal world where Jewish values and mores predominated. Even within late nineteenth-century Yiddish literature, the shtetl was 3 Linda L. Viney, “Reminiscence in Psychotherapy with the Elderly: Telling and Retelling their Stories,” in The Art and Science of Reminiscing: Theory, Research, Methods, and Applications, ed. Barbara K. Haight and Jeffrey D. Webster (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1995), 244. 4 James Davison Hunter, “Fundamentalism: An Introduction to a General Theory,” in Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York: NYU Press, 1993), 33. 5 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 60; Ira Robinson, “Hasidic Hagiography and Jewish Modernity,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elishava Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 405.

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inaccurately idealized as an all-Jewish town. Dan Miron observes that the typical image portrayed by the classical Yiddish writers “demanded an unhistorical Judaization of the shtetl and involved a strict selection of historical facts to enhance the author’s dark or bright vision.”6 In both traditionalist and secular works, the shtetl is typically pictured as independent and autonomous, self-empowered and almost oblivious to the world around it.7 Haredi depictions of the shtetl often emphasize the safety, holiness, and purity of der alter heym, juxtaposing it to the dangers and menaces of contemporary society. “Today’s streets are, due to sinfulness, worse than the theatres of yesteryear.”8 The idealized Hasidic shtetl is also bereft of modern influences, especially contemporary, libertine individualism. For contemporary Haredim, hagiography is often explicitly preferred over historiography, especially to serve didactic ends, as explained by Rabbi Schwab: There is a vast difference between history and storytelling. History must be truthful, otherwise it does not deserve its name. A book of history must report the bad with the good, the ugly with the beautiful, the difficulties and the victories, the guilt and the virtue. Since it is supposed to be truthful it cannot spare the righteous if he fails, and it cannot skip the virtues of the villain. For such is truth, all is told the way it happened. What ethical purpose is served by preserving a realistic historic picture? Nothing but the satisfaction of curiosity. We should tell ourselves and our children the good memories of the good people, their unshakeable faith, their staunch defense of tradition, their life of truth, their impeccable honesty, their boundless charity and their great reverence for Torah and Torah sages. What is gained by pointing out their inadequacies and their contradictions? We want to be inspired by their example and learn from their experience . . . Rather than write the history of our forebears, every generation has to put a veil over the human failings of its elders and glorify all the rest which is great 6 Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series 1, no. 3 (1995): 4. 7 David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 44. 8 Joel Teitelbaum as cited in Yehuda Aryeh Lefkovitsh, Sefer Retson Tsadik (New York: Kiryas Joel, 1998), 11.

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and beautiful. That means that we have to do without a real history book. We can do without it. We do not need realism, we need inspiration from our forefathers in order to pass it on to posterity.9

Haredi historian Berel Wein justifies the use of legends as history when he observes that, “Legends are not factually accurate, but they are very important, nonetheless, because they do accurately characterize and delineate the behavior and attitudes of the person who is the subject of the legend.”10 In other words, uncorroborated tales may be accepted as true, especially if they provide moral guidance and example. Hayim Soloveitchik argues that the traumas and ruptures of the twentieth-century European Orthodoxy have spurred the writing of new histories within the Haredi world: These works wear the guise of history, replete with names and dates and footnotes, but their purpose is that of memory, namely, to sustain and nurture, to inform in such a way as to ease the task of coping. As rupture is unsettling, especially to the traditional, these writings celebrate identity rather than difference. Postulating a national essence which is seen as immutable, this historiography weaves features and values of the present with the real and supposed events of the past. It is also hagiographic as sacred history often is. Doubly so now, as it must also provide the new text culture with its heroes and educators with their exemplars of conduct.”11

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HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Orthodox Judaism was born in the nineteenth century when reforms, secularism, and other non-traditional movements began to influence the Jewish community of Europe. When custom no longer reigned supreme over Jewish communities, and axiomatic traditionalism gave way to modern ideas, Orthodox leaders were forced—for the first time—to define their religious position in concrete and self-conscious   9 As cited in Jacob J. Schacter, “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Close of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892,” Torah U-Madda Journal 2 (1990): 111. 10 Berel Wein, Triumph of Survival: The Story of the Jews in the Modern Era 1650–1996 (Brooklyn, NY: Shaar Press, 1997), 67 n. 7. 11 Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28 (1994): 84–85.

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ways. Where “modern Orthodoxy” accepted and adapted certain elements of contemporary culture and ideologies, Haredi Orthodoxy rejected most modern philosophies as threatening or defiling. Jacob Katz explains the origins of Haredism:

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According to Sofer,12 Jewish tradition had to be preserved in its totality, not only as far as its contents were concerned, but also with respect to its form, its system of thought, and its linguistic expression. That this could only be done at the price of continued social and cultural isolation was clear to Rabbi Sofer and he was prepared to pay the price.13

Literally meaning to tremble, Haredim refers to those Orthodox Jews who reject the challenges of modernity by advocating a stringent and often maximalist interpretation of Jewish law based almost exclusively on texts rather than custom, within a separatist community protected by strong boundaries.14 Spurred by the charismatic and powerful Chasam Sofer, Haredism came to be further defined by its rejection of innovation. Committed to Sofer’s dogma, contemporary Hasidic groups claim that their values, behavior, and appearance have not changed over two and one-half centuries. Any changes or adaptations must, therefore, either conform to past ideals, or be justified by alleged allegiance to older ways. However, closer examination reveals that not all beliefs about the past are accurate. Indeed, contemporary Haredim benefit selectively from modernity, from which they have adapted and adopted many values and advantages. The purpose of this paper is to examine how North American Hasidim have manipulated history to create new forms of community believed to be entirely traditional, when in fact, they are 12 Rabbi Moses Sofer of Pressburg (Bratislava), 1762–1839, seen as the father of Haredism due to his rejection of modernity, idealization of the past, and insistence on social separateness. 13 Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870 (New York: Shocken, [1973] 1978), 158. Indeed, many attribute to Sofer the modern Haredi practice of retaining Jewish names, language (Yiddish), and dress. 14 Menachem Friedman, “Haredim Confront the Modern City,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, II, ed. Peter Y. Medding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 75–76.

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products of modernity. The current community is based on intentional identity rather than historical reality.

EMIGRATION

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Emigration, both out of the shtetlach to larger European cities and from Eastern Europe to North America, concerned Orthodox leaders. Despite recognition that physical life in Europe was challenging, one’s spiritual existence was in far greater danger in America, leaving many Orthodox leaders to rule against emigration to the treifene medina (the non-kosher land).15 Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan of Lithuania (aka Chofetz Chaim [1838–1933]) even suggested that religious survival depended on remaining in Europe.16 Among the Hasidic leadership of Eastern Europe, the dangers of America were perceived to be so great that most advised their flocks to remain in Europe. Leaving Vienna for New York in 1927, Israel Friedman, son of the then-Boyaner rebbe Mordechai Shlomo Friedman, recalls being fearful of the “wild reaches of America where Yiddishkayt17 was very poor.”18 The Satmar rebbe was so frightened of leaving Europe that while still in Hungary, after a dream in 15 Aaron Rothkoff, Bernard Revel: Builder of American Jewish Orthodoxy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 4. For a good overview of the positions and opinions among a variety of Jewish leaders on emigration in this era, see Arthur Hertzberg, “‘Treifene Medina’ Learned Opposition to Emigration to the United States,” in Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Jewish History (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1984), 1–30; Aviezer Ravitsky, Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism, trans. Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Others saw America as a “land in the throes of the plague of darkness.” See Kimmy Caplan, Ortodoksiya ba’olam hachadash: rabanim vedarshanim be-Amerika [Orthodoxy in the New World: Immigrant Rabbis and Preaching in America (1881–1924)] (Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2002), 226. 16 Israel Meir Hacohen, The Dispersed of Israel, trans. Aaron Kagan (New York: Torath Chofetz Chaim Publications, 1951), 316. 17 “Jewishness.” 18 Jerome R. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15. For further analysis of how the date of emigration may reflect ideological biases among European Orthodox émigrés, see Steven Lapidus, “The Forgotten Hasidim: Rabbis and Rebbes in Prewar Canada,” Canadian Jewish Studies 12 (2004): 13–20.

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which he appeared before a congregation in America, he declared a fast day to annul the portent of his dream.19 True enough, for many Hasidic leaders, America was “wild,” and survival in its cities would demand greater social controls than previously needed. In America, the freedom to organize outside of religious identity, coupled with libertine attitudes, proved challenging to the religiously conservative. To Hasidic and other Haredi leaders in America, social isolation seemed to be the only viable option to maintain a separate identity. Thus, the communal solidarity typical of prewar Europe gave way to more drastic sectarianism after the traumatic ruptures that brought Haredi life definitively out of Eastern Europe.20 In prewar Europe, although certain countries permitted officially separate Orthodox communal bodies, regular social segregation was not usually enforced. For example, Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg ruled that an entirely irreligious Jew remains a “full and complete” Jew. Only one who renounced his or her Judaism was to be shunned.21 In Hungary, Joseph Ben David notes that contact and even respect were maintained between the strictly religious and the assimilated Jew, and not infrequently, even with a Jew who had been baptized.22 In another example, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin of the Volozhin yeshiva, argued against formal communal schism except on purely halakhic grounds.23 Like the Hungarian separatists, the Netziv insisted on distinct and uniquely

19 Lefkovitsh, Sefer, 8. 20 Menachem Friedman, “The Lost Kiddush Cup: Changes in Ashkenazic Haredi Culture—A tradition in Crisis,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 177 21 Marc B. Shapiro, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg, 1884–1966 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 96. 22 Joseph Ben-David, “The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Society in Hungary in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Jewish History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 75–76. 23 Rather than seeing separatism as a prophylactic against assimilation as other Haredi leaders did, the Netziv understood the potential of schism to weaken Jewish communal solidarity, which would further erode traditionalism (Howard S. Joseph, “‘As Swords Thrust Through the Body’: The Neziv’s Rejection of Separatism,” Edah Journal 1, no. 1, Marcheshvan, 57–61 [2001]: 7).

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Orthodox committees for religious questions,24 but on issues of communal welfare or social unity, he included all Jews.25 Gershon Bacon notes that Polish Orthodoxy was characterized by its notion of a “unified kehillah” and that “it [Polish Orthodoxy] may have had its hesitations in its dealings with other parties; but it was not separatist in its orientation.”26 Things were different on the other side of the Atlantic, however. The Haredi response to individualistic North America was to close ranks. Solomon Poll notes that as early as the 1950s, “Even though they [Hasidim] have to come into contact with non-religious Jews and non-Jews in business situations, they are urged to maintain as much isolation as possible.”27 Poll writes of a “demarcation line between observant and non-observant Jews.”28 Stephen Sharot observes that, “In the post World War II period the Hasidim have had to become more consciously introversionist.”29 Egon Mayer attributes the revival of Jewish sectarianism to the Orthodox Holocaust survivors.30 Despite Agudath Israel’s communal engagement in prewar Europe, “in the United States, on the other hand, they have felt that communal participation with other Jewish groups would perforce involve a recognition of the legitimacy of the non-Orthodox religious 24 The Hungarian representatives to the Agudath Israel demanded that any delegate to the new organization be a member of one of the Orthodox (separatist) communities (Alan L. Mitelman, The Politics of Torah: The Jewish Political Tradition and the Founding of Agudat Israel [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996], 125–34). 25 Joseph, “Swords,” 15. In fact, when necessary, such as for example making public announcements on behalf of his yeshiva, the Netziv would advertise in HaMelitz, a moderate Haskala journal; see Schacter, “Haskalah,” 88–89. 26 Gershon C. Bacon, “Agudat Israel in interwar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, ed. Yisroel Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1989), 34. 27 Solomon Poll, The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg: A Study in the Sociology of Religion (Schocken, NY: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 49. 28 Solomon Poll, “The Persistence of Tradition: Orthodoxy in America,” in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays in Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York: Random House, 1969), 129. 29 Stephen Sharot, “Hasidism in Modern Society,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present, ed. Gershon D. Hundert (New York: NYU Press, 1991), 513. 30 Egon Mayer, “The Perpetuation and Growth of Sectarian Pluralism: The Case of the Jewish Communities of Boro Park, Brooklyn,” in Jewish Settlement and Community in the Modern Western World, ed. Ronald Dotterer, Deborah Dash Moore and Steven M. Cohen (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1991), 159.

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groups and institutions.”31 Jenna Weissman Joselit observes that “the postwar [Orthodox] element rejected New York Orthodoxy’s rapprochement with modernity . . . and the postwar Orthodox proved to be far more stringent in their ritual observance and unswerving in their opposition to social integration.”32 Among Hasidic leaders, too, there was great fear of America and its influences. In the early postwar years, the Krasna Rebbe, Rabbi Hillel Lichtenstein (d. 1978), encouraged the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum, to create a separate community to “differentiate from the liberals and destroyers of the faith.”33 Despite having once been truly pious Jews, after decades in America “even keepers of the Torah and the faith turned little by little from the tradition, and began to make compromises diluting the entire community.”34 Thus, distance from non-religious Jews and non-Orthodox Jews became of paramount concern.

HASIDIC TOWNSHIPS

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The initial battleground for postwar Hasidim was in the streets and neighborhoods of the large East Coast cities. However, within a short time, the idea of removing oneself from the threats of the American street developed.35 An extreme manifestation of such social segregation can be found in the establishment of several all-Hasidic townships 31 Charles S. Liebman, “Orthodoxy in American Jewish life,” American Jewish Yearbook 66 (1965): 67. Agudath Israel was founded in Poland in 1912 and in 1939 in the United States. Even in their own publication, Agudath Israel acknowledges that the vision of the founder of Agudath Israel, Jacob Rosenheim, was to unite Torah Jewry, including the “yeshiva-reared and the university-trained.” See Agudath Israel, The Struggle and the Splendor: A Pictorial Overview of Agudath Israel in America (New York: Agudath Israel of America, 1982), 14–15. 32 Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 148. 33 Alexander Sender Deutsch, Butzina kadisha: History of Rabbeinu Joel Teitelbaum (New York: Tiferes Publishing, 1998), 233. By the early 1950s, Joel Teitelbaum had a large and influential following in Montreal. 34 Ibid., 237. 35 For example, in 1943, soon after his arrival in the US, Rabbi Aharon Kotler of Beth Medrash Gevoha, chose to establish his yeshiva in an area removed from the big city, in Lakewood, New Jersey, to ensure a lack of distractions for his students.

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where the figurative walls of the enclave were replaced by actual municipal boundaries. The very first of these communities was the Nitra Yeshiva community created by Rabbi Michoel Ber Weissmandl and his brother-in-law, Rabbi Shalom Moshe Ungar, in 1946 in Somerville, NJ, soon relocated to Mount Kisco, NY, in 1948–49, where it was called the Yeshiva Farm Settlement. Weissmandl’s plan included a yeshiva and a self-sustaining farming community, based on Talmudic agrarian guidelines, a sort of live-and-learn plan, where graduates could settle, supporting the community and ensuring their continued seclusion.36 His brother-in-law cites him as saying that: Great praise is due to he who takes upon himself to help a house of study that is situated in seclusion in the desert or the forest, in order to distance himself from the big city with its multiple ideas and evils, with its instigators and agitators. All kinds of sin are turbulently calling to him who has left the city and his support system to take upon himself the great task of establishing, with God’s help, a place of Torah in this desert.

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While it is true that every day we await the arrival of the Messiah, however, in the worst case scenario, if our Exile is, Heaven Forbid, extended, we will have to create a permanent foundation; a house closed and enclosed, like a protective shield against the influences, currents, and ideas that poison even fathers and mothers, all-themore-so tender seedlings, boys in their youth, vulnerable to being caught in the net [of the city].37

Ungar was no gentler on city-living, stating that, “A yeshiva in a big city is hateful. Every street and corner encourages one to remove their holy character and don hateful38 clothing.” The goal of the yeshiva settlement is to “Marry off the students in order to maximize their 36 Although farming ceased by 1958 because it was no longer financially feasible, the community continued to thrive (New York Times, June 20, 1982). In 2006, the yeshiva removed itself to Chester, NY, while the Nitra Farm Settlement remained in Mount Kisco. 37 Shalom Moshe Ungar, introduction to Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl’s Toras Chemed (Mount Kisco, NY: Yeshiva Press, 1958), unpaginated. 38 Literally: fecal.

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potential to earn a good, moral, and clean livelihood within the realm of the yeshiva.”39 Their vision was of a secluded enclave where Hasidic boys could be educated, married, and employed through adulthood within the protective walls of the community. Rabbi Yaacov Yosef Twersky of Skver was the next to establish a Hasidic township in New York State. Feeling that the city threatened the purity of his community, Twersky built New Square, outside of Monsey, NY, in 1954 with a handful of followers. “His goal was to provide a spiritual haven for his followers, free of the assorted decadences of the contemporary world.”40 The town’s rules and bylaws are conservative and restrictive.41 Purity in this shtetl is expressed overwhelmingly in careful gender segregation and women’s invisibility. For example, a reissue of the town’s bylaws in 200542 reiterated that men and women may not walk together in public, and that the sidewalks have been divided—according to colorful signage—for women on one side and men on the other. Women may not gather in public or speak loudly on the streets, block doorways for men, wear long robes outside the house, nor start new exercise groups—even private ones—without the permission of the rabbinical court. Women may not sit in the front of a 39 Chaim Michoel Dov Weissmandl, Toras Chemed (Mount Kisco, NY: Yeshiva Press, 1958), 17–18. 40 Yitzchok Frankfurter, “New York—A Visit to the Village of New Square by AMI Magazine.” Accessed August 9, 2011. http://www.vosizneias.com/85010/2011/06/05/ new-york-a-visit-to-the-village-of-new-square-by-ami-magazine. 41 So restrictive has life become under Twersky’s successor—his son David—that outward signs of discontent and even anger have become more visible. One technique to minimize revolt is to allow only new couples to remain in New Square if both partners were born and raised there, presuming that moving to New Square from the city has tainted even Hasidim, who find life in the controlled township too stifling. A recent violent outbreak against a man who prayed in a different synagogue outside of the township is evidence that social restrictions in New Square are being challenged (cf. Shulem Deen, “What is really happening in New Square,” The Forward, June 10, 2011; Peter Applebome, “In Hasidic village, attempted murder arrest is linked to schism,” New York Times, June 5, 2011). 42 According to the town’s unofficial spokesperson, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, “The rules ‘are nothing new, but there’s just a sense that for some of the young people they need to reinforce them.’ He added that in the village’s entire history, similar comprehensive lists of communal standards have been posted ‘maybe five or ten times, but probably no more than that’” (Steven I. Weiss, “Hasidic village keeps women out of the driver’s seat,” The Forward, Oct. 14, 2005).

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car, wear long-haired wigs, nor colorful stockings. Non-Jewish cleaning ladies, too, must be enjoined to dress modestly. Girls are not permitted to ride bicycles, use trampolines unless blocked from public view, nor wear “bobby” (ankle) socks. Children of both sexes are prohibited access to computers, cell phones, or palm-pilots. Such attention to law, it is hoped, “will speedily bring about the final messianic redemption.”43 In 1968, Rabbi Rafael Blum of the Kashauer community led his yeshiva out of Williamsburg and established an out-of-town settlement in Irvington, NY. In 1977, Kiryas Kasho moved to a 168-acre estate in Bedford Hills, NY, not far from Mount Kisco. The most populous Hasidic group in North America to build their own town is Satmar. Founded in sub-Carpathian Ruthenia from the scion of the Sigheter dynasty, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, Satmar originally built itself up after the war in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By the late 1950s, Teitelbaum sent out representatives to find a place for his growing dynasty, because “the isolated and remote location strengthened by the invisible barriers of culture and language would shield residents from outside forces.”44 Teitelbaum is also cited as wanting to leave Brooklyn to protect the yeshiva boys from the “prevalence of Zionism and other anti-Torah ideals in the mixed Jewish community of Brooklyn.”45 Explaining his dream of building a separate township, Teitelbaum said, “[I am] building a shtetl where I hope I will have a corner free of Zionism.”46 Initially, Teitelbaum—who spent an enjoyable summer with Weissmandl at Mount Kisco in the 1947—planned to build a secluded town in Mount Olive Township, NJ.47 Plans fell through for the 500-acre purchase, due, according to Satmar insiders to antisemitism. Unsuccessful attempts were made to purchase land in 43 Rabbi Yosef Yisroel Eisenberger, Beth Din Zedek [Rabbinical Court] of Shikun Square, July 7, 2005. Accessed September 22, 2005. http://img96.imageshack.us/ img96/7749/skver1xa.png. 44 Mintz, Hasidic People, 206. 45 Dovid Meisels, The Rebbe: The Extraordinary Life and Worldview of Rabbeinu Yoel Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, zy”a (Lakewood, NJ: Distributed by Israel Book Shop, 2011), 532. 46 Lefkovitsh, Sefer, 11–12. 47 New York Times, June 7, 1962.

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Staten Island in 1952 and again in 1957.48 Eventually, concealing their true plans, the Williamsburg community bought land in Orange County, NY, in 1974. Kiryas Joel, as it was named, was incorporated in 1976, permitting the village to control their own zoning laws, a frequent point of contention between Hasidim and their urban neighbours.49 Canada, too, is home to a Hasidic village. In 1963, Rabbi Meshulam Feish Lowy, the leader of the Tosher sect of Hasidim, recently settled in Montreal after surviving the Holocaust, moved with a number of followers to a rural area north of Montreal. There they established Canada’s first Hasidic township, Kiryas Tosh (Tosh Town), because, in the words of a resident:

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Unfortunately, the streets of today’s society are a negative influence . . . So it was only the foresight of the clever people that felt that the streets are getting worse and worse and if we don’t move now, it’ll be too late. We won’t even have what to move for.50

Kiryas Tosh is located within the administrative control of the city of Boisbriand, Quebec. In 1979, to underscore their distinction as well as to permit themselves greater flexibility in zoning regulations, the administration of Kiryas Tosh aimed, unsuccessfully, for municipal independence.51 Despite their defeat at administrative autonomy, the Tosher leadership continues to ensure the community’s institutional completeness.52 Besides schools, homes, and religious needs, a small shopping centre and several home businesses that bring income 48 Meisels, The Rebbe, 534. 49 New York Times, July 21 and September 16, 1974. Zoning rights, particularly for multiple-family homes and in-home businesses, are the bane of Hasidic townships. The locals, advocating suburban peacefulness, decry the many zoning changes that urban Hasidim wish to introduce into these exurban communities. It is for this reason that most Hasidic townships strive for incorporation. 50 William Shaffir, “Separation from the Mainstream in Canada: The Hassidic Community of Tash,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 29 (1987): 21. 51 Ibid. 52 Institutional completeness, offering full services within the community, ensures that members need not look outside the community for basic needs. See Raymond Breton, “Institutional Completeness of Ethnic Communities and the Personal Relations of Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (1964): 193–205.

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and products—such as textiles, printing, and shtreimels53—into the community have opened in recent years.54 In fact, with the exception of medical care—although Tosh does have its own emergency responders and ambulances—Tosher Hasidim have few needs that cannot be fulfilled within the community. Through the enactment of community bylaws, the Tosher administration has introduced halakha into a secular locale. For example, to live in Kiryas Tosh, one is obligated—under penalty of eviction from the community—to attend synagogue three times daily, dress modestly, and monitor one’s reading material to ensure that it is in line with Orthodox Judaism. Other rules prohibit an unmarried man under twenty or a woman of any age to drive a car.55 The enforcement of religious bylaws—the neglect of which can theoretically result in expulsion from the community—are incumbent upon every resident, resulting in a highly controlled, generally homogenous, and physically separate Jewish township, in homage to what Tosher Hasidim—and many others— believe European shtetl life was like.

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CONCLUSIONS One of the first observations to be made is how within these townships there is an obvious admixture of North American values and shtetl mores. These communities have used the North American political system to create religious enclaves whose values often stand in stark contrast to the larger society, and sometimes, even to the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. These townships are also innovative in their physical manifestation of a stricter level of social segregation within the Jewish community. Charles Liebman observes that: Whereas isolation from non-Jews is encouraged, distancing oneself from other Jews is a problem. It has only become halakhically 53 Fur-lined hat worn by Hasidim on Sabbaths and holidays. 54 William Shaffir, “Still separated from the mainstream: A Hassidic Community Revisited,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 39 (1997): 49. 55 Shaffir, “Separation from the Mainstream,” 28–33.

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normative in the modern era. In fact, I suspect that one difference between groups of modern and pre-modern Jewish extremists is that the latter had to develop a distinctive program and elaborate world view to legitimate their isolation from and/or hostility toward the Jewish community.56

Another recurring pattern is to juxtapose an idealized history with the tainted present, thereby underscoring the purity and holiness of the past. The leaders and memoirists depict an image of a pure, safe, and enveloping European world, where membership proffered protection, guidance, and support from the community. American individualism, as they portrayed it, would destroy these beautiful and necessary connections, thereby justifying the admiration and ultimately, implementation, of Old World values and comportment. The dayan (rabbinical judge) of New Square, Eisenberger, reflects popular impressions of the township when he compares its culture to that of the past: “We are all aware of the wonderful merit that we have in living in the holy shtetl . . . And all inhabitants exert great effort to live in modesty and nobility and holiness and purity, as befits a holy shtetl.”57 In order to venerate—and hence emulate—the ways of old, the Old World had to be elevated above the New World. Ignored are its problems, poverty, and injustices, in favor of the myth of the shtetl. The past is idealized and hagiography is accepted over historiography. Further, if and when innovations are introduced, they are justified by comparison to the idealized shtetl. Either the innovations are not novel in that they can be traced back to the shtetl, or they are original and are necessary because of the spiritual distance from der alter heim. In 1962, one of the first studies of a Hasidic township in upstate New York was conducted. Referred to as Rabbiville, the location, chronologies, and leader make it clear the author examined the Skverrer township of New Square. The author concludes that, “Rabbivillian culture is still essentially the same as that described for the shtetl of

56 Charles S. Liebman, Deceptive Images: Toward a Redefinition of American Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1998), 30. 57 Eisenberger, Beth Din Zedek, July 7, 2005.

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historic times.”58 The author credits the success of such communities to (1) minimal contact with American culture; (2) expulsion of deviants; (3) dualistic vision of the outside as hostile; and (4) linguistic differentiation in the use of Yiddish.59 While I agree with the factors that facilitate separateness, I question the author’s conclusion that shtetl life and its American Hasidic township version are the same. In some superficial ways the two communities are similar. However, their differences are even more important. For example, the geographical and cultural location of the Hasidim in twenty-first century North America has dramatically changed their freedom, power, and authority to create separatist communities. While shtetl culture and Hasidic township culture may share some sociocultural values, the legal and political environments in which these two communities came to be are so vastly different as to permit each to develop in its own way. The political opportunity to create separate townships is only possible in a place and time inconsistent with the original shtetl. In other words, separate Hasidic townships in nineteenth century Europe were neither politically nor realistically possible. Such new shtetlach could only exist once the original shtetl was dead. This irony, ignored or unknown to most, was not lost on the Satmar rebbe, who observed, “Our fathers in Europe were unable to leave the cities and found separate villages because of their circumstances, but here in America it is possible, and therefore we are obligated to do so.”60 The Satmar rebbe 58 Morris Freilich, “The Modern Shtetl: A Study of Cultural Persistence,” Anthropos 57 (1962), 47. 59 Ibid., 48–54. 60 As cited in Meisels, The Rebbe, 534. The original citation can be found in Lefkovitsh, 13. There is another powerful irony here. Many Hasidim never accepted the founding rebbe’s successor, the latter’s nephew Moshe, and retained allegiance to the former rebbe’s memory and widow. They were called the Bnei Yoel (Sons of Joel). When Satmar began to divide along fault lines drawn by Moshe’s warring sons, the Bnei Yoel supported Zalman Leib who ruled in Williamsburg while Aaron was named rabbi of Kiryas Joel. In attempting to wrest control from Aaron, Bnei Yoel living in Kiryas Joel have frequently fought with the municipal administration. They have also filed a federal lawsuit charging that the village discriminates against them due to religious differences and therefore in the name of separation of church and state, the village should be dissolved. The very power of the

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was candid in admitting that rabbinic power also spurred his vision, as described by one of his biographers:

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In Europe, there were single kehillah [community council] towns in which the rav [primary rabbi] was the leader of the town. Even after the schism of the kehillos in Hungary in 1869, at least within the Orthodox kehillah, everyone was under the authority of the rav. But in New York City, a Jew could belong to any kehillah or to no kehillah at all. This reality left rabbanim [rabbis] with no real power. The Rebbe wanted a small, unified town based on the European model, in which every Jew without exception belonged to the kehillah.61

Other factors also impinge on the differences between these two types of community. First, the Hasidic townships of North America are mainly residential. While there are some businesses, the nature of the community is suburban (or more accurately exurban). The shtetl, however, was a market town. Goods and produce were available for sale, bringing traders, merchants, farmers, and others into the shtetl. Research on the shtetl underscores that “the small town served as an economic centre for the immediate agricultural vicinity and engaged in providing services and commodities to the peasant population in the countryside.”62 The economic nature of rural Russian towns denied the possibility of closing the town to outsiders. Without visitors, the shtetl would not have survived. Thus, the isolation of contemporary Hasidic townships is only possible in today’s age of advanced communications and electronic transactions. To earn a livelihood in the shtetl demanded village—isolation and social coercion—in the eyes of its founder, the Satmar rebbe, is threatened by a group of people who claim allegiance to his memory. “Dissidents Sue Kiryas Joel: Suit wants Village Dissolved,” Times Herald-Record, June 14, 2011. Accessed August 10, 2011. http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110614/NEWS/106140315; “Federal Case Could Dissolve Kiryas Joel: Lawsuit Claims Village Violates Constitution,” Times Herald-Record, June 19, 2011. Accessed August 10, 2011. http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110619/NEWS/106190322. 61 Meisels, The Rebbe, 531. 62 Ben-Cion Pinchuk, “How Jewish Was the Shtetl?,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, the Shtetl: Myth and Reality, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford & Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 112.

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interaction with outsiders.63 Further, shtetl residents frequently had access to print media. In today’s Hasidic townships, newspapers that have not been vetted by the leadership may not enter, leaving most Hasidim dependent on Yiddish-language, Hasidic information sources.64 Indeed, the shtetl was the source of multiple, even warring opinions. For example, the Volozhin yeshiva, seen on the one hand as the home of the quintessential anti-modern Haredi yeshiva, was also a known site to find and read prohibited Haskalah literature.65 The original shtetl, therefore, was far more socially and intellectually variegated than any of the newly founded North American Haredi towns or neighbourhoods. The shtetl was too small, its inhabitants too interdependent, and the political climate too hostile for such dramatic segregation.66 Although modeled after the shtetls of Eastern Europe, these townships are the products of a romanticized, glorified, and misrepresented past. Rather than recreate reality, they reproduce “the idealized Heimat, the local old country homeland arrested in time; as paradise lost.”67 In their depiction of religious enclaves, Gabriel Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel Sivan highlight the attempt to recreate earlier social forms: “In turn, the community represents, as we have seen a deliberate effort to preserve the essence (or fundamentals) of the tradition in an alien, posttraditional setting.”68

63 David K. Roskies and Diane G. Roskies, “For Without a Market All the Jews Would Starve to Death and the Peasants Would Be Naked and Barefoot,” The Shtetl Book (New York: Ktav Publishing, 1975), 25. 64 Such control is not even limited to the isolated Hasidic communities. Observers note that even today, in Satmar’s fortress Williamsburg, no copies of the Gerer-dominated Homodia, the English-language non-anti-Zionist newspaper, can be found. Only on the outskirts of the neighbourhood can such “fringe” literature be found. 65 Schacter, “Haskalah,” 91–93. In fact, the availability and reputation for maskilic literature in many Lithuanian yeshivas is further evidence that the shtetl was more politically diverse than Haredim like to remember. 66 Friedman, “Haredim Confront the Modern City,” 91. 67 Roskies, The Jewish Search, 43. 68 Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby, and Emmanuel G. Sivan, Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 48.

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Not surprising, but nevertheless noteworthy, is that both secular and Orthodox depictions of the shtetl are often similar in some ways. Miron’s description of the idealized Yiddishist hometown as a transcendent community, tied to all of Jewish history, that is temporary, and awaiting a final rebuilding in its idyllic home, smacks of messianic longing, like the Haredi shtetl. “Thus, the aboriginal Polish shtetl was founded by a divine decree as the temporary home of the Jerusalem exiles.”69 Although Hasidic townships in America are not replicas of the shtetlach whose alleged spiritual purity inspired their creation, these shtetlach thrive and expand, because despite historical inaccuracy, they adhere to the myth of traditionalism. As Joseph Dan explains, “what contemporary Hasidism communicates to the diverse groups and communities within its orbit of influence is the message of unrelenting adherence to the behavioural patterns of the past two centuries.”70

69 Miron, “The Literary Image,” 36–37. 70 Joseph Dan, “Hasidism: The Third Century,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London & Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1997), 422.

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The Challenge of Memory for Yiddish Language Activists in Montreal Pierre Anctil

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I

t was not until 1904 that the influx of Eastern European Yiddish speaking immigrants to Montreal began in earnest. Before that date, the economic conditions and the political landscape of Canada precluded any large-scale immigration from Europe, and certainly not one that could have an impact on the demographic realities of the former British colony. Prior to the early twentieth century, the Jewish population of Canada was composed mostly of individuals who had their origins in Great Britain and who were occupied in trade and international commerce. Small in size during most of the nineteenth century, numbering no more than a few hundred persons, the Jewish communities of Montreal, Toronto, and Halifax were essentially invisible to the outside observer, as their members spoke English as a first language, behaved like all other citizens, and left few public traces of their presence.1 This situation was to change radically and abruptly with the beginning of a mass 1 Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews, a People’s Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

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Jewish migration from the Russian Empire and to a lesser extent from Rumania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The arrival of Yiddish speaking Jews in very large numbers, roughly an average of 8,000 individuals yearly between 1904 and 1917,2 signalled the beginning of a transformative process with important repercussions on Jewish Canadian history during the following half-century. As a consequence of this intensive migration, in a period of only thirty years, from 1901 to 1931, the number of Jews in Canada increased almost tenfold, from 16,000 to 156,000 persons. In Montreal alone, which is the main focus of this article, the Jewish population grew at an even higher rate, from 7,000 in 1901 to 60,000 in 1931. Considering that most of the persons of Jewish origins already established in Montreal in 1901 were a vanguard of this compact Eastern European displacement, which the city had attracted because of its geographical position and early industrial specialization in garment manufacturing, it leaves little doubt as to the ability of the newcomers to completely redefine the contours of Jewishness in the city. Most of these Eastern European immigrants came to Canada in the general context of the Russian insurrection of 1905, which disrupted tsarist rule for several months, leading to a number of liberal reforms within the political sphere, notably the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in the form of a duma or elected assembly of representatives. The intense and, at times, violent struggle that lead to these structural changes, and the repression that followed these spontaneous uprisings, mostly after 1907, left a deep mark on the Jewish immigrants who reached the Canadian shores in this period, profoundly influencing their worldview. As has been argued by Jonathan Frankel in his seminal study of 1981, Prophecy and Politics,3 following these events of immense proportions for Russian Jewry, large numbers of young Jewish men and women left Europe and brought to the various 2 Louis Rosenberg, Canada’s Jews: A Social and Economic Study of the Jews in Canada (Montreal: Bureau of Social and Economic Research, Canadian Jewish Congress, 1939), 150, table 101. 3 Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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diasporic communities already in existence the experiences that they had encountered during the 1905 movement. Revolutionary activity, union organization, active resistance to arbitrary authority, clandestine self-defense, and proletarian agitation in industrial cities that had been normative in the climax of the Russian insurrection suddenly became commonplace notions in the emerging Montreal Jewish milieu. The Yiddish language, which had played an essential role in the mobilization of the Jewish masses in Russia in 1905, and which served as a rallying focus for the new ideas of political liberation and modernity, came to represent the very essence of the revolutionary ideas. When Yiddish began to be used in the streets of Montreal, and especially in the new community structure that was taking form just before and during World War I, it immediately conveyed a sense of radicalism and social urgency that derived from the events of 1905. Mirroring Russia a few years before, Yiddish speaking Jews in Montreal began to organize unions in the garment industry and create various instruments of social solidarity, such as landsmanshaften, free libraries, intellectual circles, and self-help societies. In a context of relative political liberalism, these initiatives were tolerated by British parliamentary institutions. In this sense, the legacy of the Russian insurrection was reinvested by immigrants in their new Canadian surroundings and in their struggle for economic survival; they joined in large numbers the industrial proletariat in major Canadian cities. Yiddish likewise became a tool effecting a renewal of Jewish identity and culture as it had in Eastern Europe, at a time when masses of Jews were coming in contact with the imperatives of modernity. The intense readiness of the Montreal Yiddish speaking immigrants to mobilize for class struggle and create an institutional network able to convey the founding elements of a redefined Jewish identity on a new continent was a bold experiment without historical precedent.4 How often had it been possible to transpose, in a distant and unknown land such as Canada, the ideologies and hopes of Eastern European Jewry, 4 David Roskies, “Yiddish in Montreal: The Utopian Experiment,” in An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, ed. Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovsky (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990), 22–38.

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informed by the radical Russian political context, and achieve encouraging results within a short period of time? Not only was this conjuncture entirely novel, but it was taking place in a country, unlike the United States, where Jews were almost demographically absent until the beginning of the twentieth century, and amounted to very little direct political influence. This meant that in Canada, the heirs of the 1905 insurrection formed the vast majority of the burgeoning Jewish population by 1918, up to 85 percent in Montreal and Toronto. Such a situation challenged the imagination and minds of most Montreal Jews who embarked on even modest careers as writers or journalists for the local Yiddish press, or sought membership in the few intellectual circles that appeared in the city shortly after the beginning of mass migration. At the same time, there existed a cultural paradox in the situation of Montreal Jewry that cannot be discounted easily by contemporary historians; the intense revolutionary and utopian stance of the Eastern European immigrants stood in contrast to their traditional background. Despite their modernist fervor and genuine socialist or Marxist aspirations, the participants in the great migration of 1904–1914 nonetheless hailed from small cities in Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, or Ukraine, and were steeped in traditional Judaism. Most had received a religious upbringing typical of Eastern Europe before the advent of the Haskalah, and were immersed in classical Biblical and Talmudic studies, notably in institutions such as bate-medroshim and yeshivot.5 When these young men and women arrived in Montreal under the influence of broad revolutionary movements, they had already received serious training in classical Hebrew and had mastered, often without paying much attention to strict religious practice, the intricacies of Orthodox Judaism. This historical conjuncture, as described by Simon Belkin, brought a specific character to turn-of-the-century Montreal Jewry: As we have demonstrated, the upsurge in Jewish migration has profoundly altered the visible aspects of the Canadian Jewish community and has transformed its internal structure. In fact, it was an entirely new community that was taking shape in the country at 5 Ira Robinson, Rabbis and their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), 166.

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the beginning of the twentieth century, without much influence by the institutional leadership of individuals long established in Canada. Essentially linked with the popular masses (amkho) of the Jewish population, the migratory wave was on the one hand profoundly rooted in traditional Eastern European life and on the other very affected by the impact of religion in its Orthodox form. Despite this, these Jews had been marked by the new revolutionary ideas, both nationalist and socialist, which had appeared in the territories inhabited by Jews in Europe.6

Suddenly projected against their will and under uncontrollable circumstances in the disconcerting world of modernity, these young immigrants found in Montreal, as elsewhere in North America, a social environment mostly free from the ideological censorship that they had known in the Russian Empire. In Montreal, few constraints existed with regards to publishing, especially in Yiddish. Little stood in the way of public protests of work conditions or prevented Jews from demonstrating their communal solidarity. Yiddish speakers immediately found themselves free from physical violence and insecurity, from large-scale famine, and from the threat of pogroms, or state orchestrated antisemitism. More interestingly even, reasonable material means could be invested to solidify community projects and launch organizations that would channel the new ideals abetted by the events of 1905 in Russia. These funds often derived from income earned by workers in the garment industry, or from profits earned by small businesses within the Yiddish speaking population. Montreal also provided recent Jewish arrivals from the Eastern Europe a multilingual environment conducive to public expressions of yidishkayt, either in the form of public signs over store entrances situated in the immigrant neighbourhood, or in the shape of public events conducted mostly in Yiddish on certain occasions. In Montreal, completely independent linguistic communities and milieus already existed, divided by French and English, which rarely intersected, making the imposition of one single official language to newcomers almost 6 Simon Belkin, Di Poale-Zion bavegung in Kanade, 1904–1920 [the Labor-Zionist movement in Canada, 1904–1920; translation by the author of this article] (Montreal: Aktsyon Komitet fun der Tsyonistisher Arbeter bavegung in Kanade, 1956), 21.

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impossible. Canada itself was still a country within the British sphere of influence in the early twentieth century, and had no overarching national symbols or a unified sphere of governance. In this country Yiddish speakers could find ample space to express their own forms of adaptation, without having to surrender their Jewish identity in the short term. More than any other city or region in Canada, Montreal represented this sense of cultural and political laissez-faire that is characteristic of the period, which has its roots in the British colonial policies of the nineteenth century vis-à-vis French-Canadian aspirations to nationhood. In this sense, the city offered seemingly limitless possibilities to immigrants who could negotiate access to social mobility and economic advancement, without having to forego cultural values and practices brought from Europe. In Montreal, the period between 1905 and 1914 was one of limitless possibilities and intense creativity for the fledgling Yiddish speaking community. As is often the case in a context of mass migration triggered by unfavorable socio-political conditions in the country of origin, the Jewish population in the city during this decade was rather young in age, fired by ideological currents at their highest pitch, and sustained by hopes of economic betterment and true freedom of expression. Not only was the pace of demographic progression rapid and constant during these years, making it possible in a matter of a few short years to create a constellation of institutions in various domains—religious, cultural, and oriented to the improvement of working class conditions—but several political agendas propelled by the events in Russia were coming into direct competition within the internal boundaries of the community. As immigrants were entering Canada for the first time, or settling into a more stable life cycle within the city, they were being solicited by various ideologies circulated in Yiddish-language periodicals and pamphlets. Overall, a cacophony of divergent solutions to problems common to all Jews appeared, which offered alternate visions of the future. Influenced by ideas originating mostly in Great Britain, a specifically Jewish version of anarchism surfaced in Canada in the first decade of the twentieth century, which mostly rejected all manifestations of religious Judaism and proposed a

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diffuse and individualistic self-help approach often akin to assimilationism. The anarchist activists quickly found themselves in competition with radical socialists who sought, on the contrary, to promote a more organized and party-centered progressive movement, which divided itself into two schools of thought. The first of these followed an internationalist interpretation based on the universal nature of economic exploitation by capitalism, to which Jews were subjected as much as other “peoples,” while a second and more particularistic approach sought to preserve the “national” identity of Jews in the diaspora once the revolutionary stage had been achieved. Sometimes referred to as “Diaspora nationalism,” this ideology proposed territorial solutions to the dilemma of defending some form of Jewish identity in a radically altered world. It included the maintenance of Yiddish as a lingua franca and the creation of Yiddish speaking institutions outside of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire. Anarchists, diasporists, and internationalists competed for the attention of recent Jewish immigrants to Canada, while another political movement manifested itself in Montreal after 1905—Zionists. They came to supersede all other ideological currents among the Yiddish speaking population of the city within ten years. Born out of the Russian insurrection of 1905, the Poale Zion, or Labor Zionists,7 defended the notion that the Revolutionary impulse could only succeed among the Eastern European masses and become realized if the importance for the Jewish people to work toward the creation of a modern state in Palestine were recognized. Because of their dispersion over large territories in Europe, and the unique forms of discrimination that operated against them, specifically in tsarist Russia, Jews’ aspirations needed to be projected in a national frame of reference. Only in a state apparatus founded by Jews, and functioning within the boundaries of a secular Jewish culture, could the Jewish masses find sufficient physical security, social cohesion, and economic stability to fully embrace the ideals of socialist progress and begin their march toward complete equality 7 Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn, The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2008), 320; Jonathan Frankel, Crisis, Revolution and Russian Jews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 324.

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among other nations. All other political options, the poaletsyonistn thought, would lead either to an internationalist agenda likely to undermine the preservation of Jewish values and culture among the working class and impoverished masses, or would leave the Jewish minority vulnerable to discriminatory attacks and persecution by violent means. The Poale Zion had emerged in an insurrectional climate in Russia, which meant that it had to deflect very aggressive forms of censorship and political repression, but Montreal offered a liberal environment conducive to the advancement of its principles in the local Eastern European Jewish milieu. Within a few years after 1905, the Canadian Labor Zionists, using a very disciplined and methodical approach, had laid the organizational basis for many community institutions in Montreal or deeply influenced the outlook of those that already existed in the Yiddish speaking world. Once more, we have to turn to Belkin to get a sense of this movement of rapid institutional development brought about by the Poale Zion in the second decade of the twentieth century:

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The party associations (of the Poale-Zion) thus became venues where it was possible to promote and deepen Jewish cultural life, and where the education of the masses was encouraged. The second period in the life of the party in Montreal, which spread from 1910 to 1915, was characterized by the creation of cultural institutions, schools, popular reading rooms and trade unions. It is also true that even in their first year of emergence and existence, the party associations had become involved in a very wide ranging cultural activism and had worked in favour of worker’s unions.8

In Montreal in particular, the Poale Zion systematically worked to structure the emerging community network along progressive Zionist lines, always taking into consideration cooperating with like-minded individuals or groups that did not necessarily share their entire political credo. Within a short time span of ten years, the Labor Zionists created reading rooms for the immigrants, which also served as social gathering places; youth movements; and part-time schools for children already enrolled in the public educational system, where the Yiddish language 8 Simon Belkin, Di Poale-Zion, 35 [translation by the author of this article].

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and Zionist values were taught on a regular basis. The movement had also been a major force behind the emergence of radical unions within the garment trade, which functioned mostly in Yiddish, and a host of community organizations dedicated to health and social issues, or which performed philanthropic functions among the Jewish working classes. Thanks to the study published by Simon Belkin in Montreal in 1956, under the title Di Poale-Zion bavegung in Kanade, 1904–1920 [The PoaleZion Movement in Canada (1904–1920)], we have a detailed description of the vast array of initiatives taken by the poaletsyonistn in the city, including the names of most of the founders. The central element of this effort to position leftist Zionism at the heart of the Montreal community structure can be found in the creation of a secular afternoon school in January 1911 by left-leaning Zionists. This was the second such school in North America charged with the responsibility of educating the children of immigrants in the Yiddish language. It was called the Maylender Shule, after the Mile End neighbourhood where it was originally situated.9 The school proposed not only to instruct Jewish youth in the language of the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, but also to inculcate pupils with a worldview coherent with preserving the ideals of Labor Zionism. Founders of the shule reasoned that if a new generation of Canadian Jews was made aware of the purposes and goals of the Labor Zionist movement, then they would likely embrace them long-term. A well-prepared vanguard of activists could thus be counted on in the future, when a Jewish national home would finally appear in Palestine. On the other hand, the poaletsyonistn reasoned that if assimilation made deep inroads into the development process of Montreal Jewry, this moment would be lost and ultimately Zionism could potentially disappear from the community agenda. The Maylender Shule lasted only a few months, soon to be replaced in 1913 by a new institution called the Natsyonal-Radikale Shul or Peretz Shule in downtown Montreal. Within a few years, it was able to attract several hundred students and apply the most modern teaching methods available. A few months later, in September 1914, a group of dissident 9 The first school appeared in a neighborhood called Mile End, which was then a far suburb of the city, hence the name Maylender Shule.

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poaletsyonistn created a new educational institution called the Folks Shule, with the purpose of putting more emphasis on teaching the Hebrew language as a mode of daily communication, rather than concentrating almost entirely on Yiddish as a vehicle for revolutionary secularism. The foundation of these two schools in very short succession had far reaching consequences on the history of the Montreal Jewish community in the twentieth century. This is not only because they became very influential tools for the dissemination of leftist Zionist ideals in Canada and played a substantial role in the preservation of Yiddish culture in the long term, but also because they provided a stable basis of employment for Eastern European intellectuals, writers, and artists. They, in turn, could publish significant works and exert influence. As such, the Labor Zionist educational institutions founded in Montreal just before World War I quickly became places of cultural creativity and political activism. Their impact went well beyond the confines of pedagogy and child rearing, affecting even the emergence of a Yiddish literature in Montreal between the two World Wars and the development of intellectual circles. These schools also attracted the attention of major figures within the Yiddish world, in places as far as New York, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, and Vilnius, who came to visit Montreal and were invited to graduating ceremonies or other events: luminaries such as Shalom Aleikhem, Chaim Zhitlowsky, and Yehoash. A glimpse of the Poale Zion political and cultural activism can be culled from documents published at the time of the schools’ foundations, notably from curriculums for various students at different age levels and from newspaper publicity. In August 1913, the following text was published in the Montreal Yiddish daily, called the Keneder Odler, announcing the creation of the Peretz Shule and underlining its higher purposes: “In der natsyonal radikaler shul, vet gelernt vern di yidishe un hebreyshe shprakhn oun literature, yidishe geshikhte, gezangen un altz vos hot a natsyonal mentshlekhn vert far dem yidishen folk.”10 10 “The national radical school will teach the Yiddish and Hebrew languages and literatures, Jewish history, songs and everything which has a national value for the Jewish people,” Simon Belkin, Di Poale-Zion, 203 [translation by the author of this article].

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The main objective of the Peretz Shule was: “To prepare the Jewish youth in view of its incorporation into the Jewish people, to ready the youth to resist the assimilationist currents and to develop a superior notion of truth and justice, for the greater good of its people and of all humanity [translation by author].”11 In 1915, the Folks Shule, then in existence for only a year, advertised in the Keneder Odler that it would teach Yiddish and Modern Hebrew equally, instructing its students in the Jewish lore of all historical periods. The institution also intended to promote history “in a just perspective,” which meant that it would use a scientific and secular approach to the teaching of this discipline, including the biographies of great Jewish figures such as Abraham, Moses, King David, and Maimonides. Likewise, Jewish ethics, biblical literature, Talmudic hagada, muser-sforim, popular legends, and Hassidic lore would be used as elements of cultural Jewish history, and not as guidelines to achieve a higher sense of Judaism as a religious faith. Most of all though, in true radical fashion, the founders of the Folks Shule hoped that: “the child who will be educated in our schools will wish to be associated with all his strength and soul to the Jewish masses, that he will want to live among them and fight alongside them.”12 An even more detailed curriculum of the Peretz Shule for 1917 is available thanks to Belkin’s carefully documented work. That year, which was only the fourth in the history of the institution, first, second, and third grade students were to be instructed in the Yiddish language and to be given a basic knowledge of Hebrew. Jewish legends and texts by Shalom Aleichem were also proposed for children of this age. In the higher classes, up to grade six, Jewish history, Yiddish writing and grammar, and the cultural significance of Jewish holidays were mandatory subjects. At that level, students also read works by Shalom Aleichem and Sholem Asch, probably the most popular Yiddish writers of that period. Finally, the eleven students in grade seven were assigned, “Di hoypt limoudim in

11 Ibid., 204. 12 Ibid., 219 [translation by the author of this article].

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klas zaynen geven di yidishe geshikhte oun literature,”13 which meant the history of European Jews to 1880 and the reading of the three most significant Eastern European authors of the time: Mendele Mokher Sforim (Sholem Yankev Abramovich), Shalom Aleikhem, and I. L. Peretz. The Yidishe Folks Biblyotek, today the Jewish Public Library, ranks among the more significant institutions co-founded in Montreal by the Poale Zion in the period immediately preceding World War I. Created in May 1914, almost at the same time as the Peretz and Folks schools by essentially the same activists, the Biblyotek was conceived as a lending library for the Eastern European immigrant masses coming into the country, who were deprived of practical means to educate themselves in mainstream Canadian institutions. Initially endowed with 1,500 books, mostly in the Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew languages, the Biblyotek was the brainchild of Reuben Brainin, one of the leading intellectual lights of his day and an ardent Zionist. Having come to Montreal in 1912 specifically to take the editorial helm of the Keneder Odler, Brainin imagined the institution as a beacon of knowledge, literature, and science in a community too recently formed to benefit from the advantages of a structured and permanent cultural life. In the opening pages of the Biblyotek’s annual report for the year 1914–1915, Brainin personally outlined in a form of Germanized Yiddish the goals that he had in mind when he endeavored to create the institution in Montreal: “Darum betsvekt di folksbiblyotek tsu geben di fule meglikhkayt tsu yedem aynem tsu benutsen zikh tsu yeder tsayt mit di gaystike, mit di kulturele oytsres fun undzer folk vi oykh fun andere felker. Der shatz fun undzer folksbiblyotek beshtet in dem dos zi iz geshafn gevorn funem folks, farn folk, dos zi hot kayn andere tsvekn vi tsu farshprayten inem folks likht un visn.”14 Like the two schools founded in Montreal by activists of the 13 “The most important subjects in class are Jewish history and literature,” Simon Belkin, Di Poale-Zion, 215 [translation by the author of this article]. 14 “This is why the Jewish Public Library has as an objective to make it fully possible for each and everyone to have access to the cultural treasures of our people and other peoples. The pride of our popular library resides in that it has been created by the people and for the people, and that it has no other goal but to disseminate knowledge and science among the people,” Ershter yerlikher barikht fun der Yidisher

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Poale Zion, in the following decades the Biblyotek became a crucial locus for the dissemination of Yiddish culture in Montreal. It also became a haven for writers, artists, and intellectuals willing to share a secular and modern Jewish culture, including figures known in Jewish circles worldwide and who, like Brainin, passed through the city at various moments. For most of the twentieth century, the Biblyotek also welcomed immigrants and refugees with few material resources, who found a social milieu conducive to a gradual integration into the mainstream Jewish community inside its walls. In itself, the achievements of the Montreal Poale Zion in the first decades of the twentieth century could be considered a major contribution towards the maintenance of a vibrant and creative Yiddish culture, not to mention its success in spearheading a leftist Zionist consciousness in the city. Until the influx of French mother-tongue Sephardi immigrants from Morocco in the early sixties, hailing from a vastly different Jewish culture rooted in North Africa, the Poale Zion had almost single handedly established the ideological and material basis on which the entire Jewish community structure came to rest for a half-­ century. The only exceptions were the religious institutions, which maintained their Orthodoxy. Over the course of several years, the leftist Zionist activists, propelled by the Russian insurrection of 1905 and its aftermath in liberal Jewish circles, sought to orient and stabilize a process of institution building that culminated in the founding of the Canadian Jewish Congress in 1919. They could thus channel cultural and political energies that would otherwise have remained without specific focus or purpose. In this process, the Poale Zion put the Yiddish language at the center of the Montreal community structure and forcefully argued for a secular, progressive, and culturally conscious approach in the emergence of a Montreal Jewish identity. Yiddish remained communally central until well after World War II. The influence of the Poale Zion was further reinforced in the thirties and forties in Montreal, when the mobilization leading to the creation of the state of Israel was largely undertaken in the Middle East by political forces akin to those Folks Biblyotek un Folks Universitet [First annual report of the Jewish Public Library and Folks University; translation by the author], May 1914, 7.

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initially at work in Montreal in the early twentieth century. As long as the city harbored a large Jewish working class directly preoccupied by human rights legislation and social justice, the form of Zionism embodied by the Poale Zion remained central to the preoccupations of the community and benefited from a wide-ranging influence. The legacy of the initial activists, who were mostly young men and women entering into modernity at a crucial juncture in Eastern European history, projected their vision onto an entire community beyond the seas. Even under the new historical circumstances that saw the abandonment of Yiddish as a lingua franca in the Jewish community’s institutional network, this legacy survived the process of Canadianization that eventually anglicized the Montreal Jewish population at the beginning of the sixties. Not only were the poaletsyonistn intent on preserving Jewish history and identity in Montreal through the creation of cultural and educational institutions of a secular nature, but they also sought to highlight these initial efforts in Canadian Jewish history. This was achieved at a later date, often decades later, when memoirs and chronicles were written and published in Yiddish by the early activists for the benefit of future generations born in Canada. These texts can be understood today as the first systematic attempt to lay the basis for a general history of the Jews in Canada. Starting in the thirties, plans were made to establish archives and prepare the groundwork for a history of the Labor Zionist movement in the country, which often involved presenting the larger context of Jewish history in Montreal and in other Canadian cities with mass Jewish migration. A historical narrative thus appeared after World War II, which was the result of a concerted awareness-raising on the part of a few individuals recognizing the major importance of the contribution by leftist Zionists to the emergence of Canadian Jewry; they pushed this narrative as the dominant discourse. This historical interpretation is clearly spelled out by David Roskies in the biography of his mother, Masha Welczer, titled Yiddishlands: Davar aher: “Abaye said in the name of Rabbi Hamnuna: A case concerning Montreal, the Jerusalem of Canada, with its many schools for Jewish children. In two schools the children studied without

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covering their heads, Heaven preserve us! Boys and girls together, yet their teachers were very learned, having studied Torah across the seas.”15

In this short passage, we find expressed in two different angles the originality of Canadian Jewish history in the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the author underlines coming to terms with modernity and radical change, as experienced in the 1905 insurrection in Russia. At the same time he expresses the desire to maintain a strong but renewed link with the Eastern European tradition of high Judaic scholarship. Not covering your head in a leftist Zionist school meant that forced secularism had profoundly taken hold of the community, spurring both a distancing from the sources of Jewish learning and a critical examination of the religious impulse. Yet this journey into modernity was undertaken by men and women who understood perfectly the traditional way of life that they were leaving behind. As they had experienced it first hand in their youth they still valued—perhaps in a more abstract way—the heritage left by centuries of Jewish thinking and religious reflections. Doubtful about their need or ability to reproduce intact a world that had been swept away by the brutal forces of revolution, the Labor Zionists nonetheless found inspiration and meaning in the cultural accomplishments of great Jewish figures from earlier centuries or in the ethical commentaries born out of different circumstances altogether. Ultimately, these considerations found meaning not only in Montreal or in the diaspora, but in the expressed desire of the Jewish people to establish a national home in the Middle East. This would be a solution to the crushing realities of persecution in the context of European racism and antisemitism. From this perspective, the most complete and accomplished history of the leftist Zionist movement in Canada, which we have already alluded to in this paper, remains the study published by Simon Belkin in Montreal in 1956, titled Di Poale-Zion bavegung in Kanade (1904–1920). 15 David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands: A Memoir (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 119. The reference is clearly to the Peretz and Folk Schools, both founded in Montreal by leftist Zionists activists just before World War I.

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Published at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Labor Zionism in Canada, Belkin’s book goes well beyond describing the detailed achievements of its first activists and early members. A 280-page book, with a bibliography in English and Yiddish complemented by an index and more than 400 footnotes, Belkin’s oeuvre is a scholarly work in its own right, probably the most learned and significant essay ever published in Canada in Yiddish. Himself a young Labor Zionist, Belkin arrived in Montreal from his native Ukraine in 1911. He clearly sought to document the imprint of almost two decades of social and political activism on the part of the young immigrants modeled on the ideals of progressive Zionism. In fields as diverse as political militancy, mutual aid societies, union activism, Zionist fundraising, public reading rooms, youth movements, education, and advocacy in favor of Eretz-Israel, Di Poale-Zion bavegung in Kanade documents the strategies employed by party members to win broader support in all regions of Canada. It also depicts the growth of the institutions that they founded and their ultimate intended purpose. In writing his study, Belkin ultimately produced a history of the Canadian Jewish population in the first two decades of the twentieth century, based on documents of intrinsic value and numerous interviews with persons involved at the time in the Poale Zion. It is little wonder that in his preface, the president of the publishing committee wrote: “Dos bukh vet dinen vi a kval far yeden yid, vos vil dergayen geshikhtlekhe klorkayt un lernen dem grunt fun yener shtoys kraft, vos hot bavoygn mentshn undermidlekh, tsu boyen oun shafn.”16 We find the same impulse to preserve the leftist Zionist historical narrative, but in a more humorous and journalistic vein, in the two books published by Israel Medres in 1947 and 1964, respectively titled Montreal fun nekhtn [Montreal of yesterday] and Tsvishn tsvey velt milkhomes [between two world wars].17 A reporter for the Keneder Odler for most of

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16 “This book will inspire every Jew, who will find in it a source of truth and clarity in terms of historical narrative. It will also be possible for each Jew to find in it basic knowledge on the untiring effort that lead our members to build and create,” Belkin, Di Poale-Zion, 1 [translation by the author of this article]. 17 Israel Medres, Montreal fun nekhtn (Montreal: Keneder Adler Drukeray, 1947), 176; Tsvishn tvey velt milkhomes (Montreal: Keneder Adler Drukeray, 1964), 144.

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his active life, Medres had arrived in Montreal in 1910, at the time of the great migration, and became an eyewitness to the creation of the Labor Zionist organizational network. Although Medres writes from the point of view of “the common folk” and is prone to using anecdotes to amuse his readers, his chronicles nonetheless convey an almost anthropological sense of observation, complemented by an acute and innate understanding of social change. Read in retrospect, these two books provide several keys to a professional approach to Canadian Jewish history, notably regarding the cultural origins of the early Eastern European immigrants, the conflicting presence of several political ideologies among the Montreal Jewish residents, and the reality of class struggle within the garment industry. In his books, Medres clearly brings out the hopes and aspirations of the emerging Jewish community, and the conflicts that existed between certain religious traditions and the mainstream movements of social mobility. He adeptly describes the rising emotional stress of a community under duress: specific circumstances such as strikes, theatrical performances, and antisemitic incidents in Europe. Published more than a quarter of a century after the actual events, these chronicles uncovered forgotten memories among those who had been present in Montreal at the time. They were perceived as invaluable material for future generations who would need to find reliable sources to document the historical evolution of the Montreal Jewish community. In his preface to the 1946 Medres book, Jacob-Isaac Segal, already a celebrated Canadian Yiddish poet, insists on this perhaps unexpected outcome of a work first conceived as a series of journalistic contribution. Already one could read in these lines a clear preoccupation with transmitting the fundamental narrative of Jewish Montreal beyond the confines of the Jewish community: These memoirs of Jewish Montreal are a vital piece of the heritage of the reader and of the author, journalist and feuilletonist I. Medres, a man who stands at the frenzied wheel of the printing press spinning out, day after day, fresh damp pages of living history which fall like leaves, one atop the other into heaps of valuable raw material lying in wait for historians of tomorrow.18 18 Israel Medres, Montreal of Yesterday: Jewish Life in Montreal 1900–1929, trans. Vivian Felsen (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2000), 9.

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Belkin and Medres are not the only witnesses of the early immigration period to have written from the point of view of preserving precious historical testimonial. Anarchist activists of the early twentieth century had a similar impulse to organize the events of the past and describe social conditions that lasted no longer than a generation. In a series of articles published in 1927–28 in Undzer Vort [our word], Hirsch Hershman, the founder of the first “Jewish” newspaper stand and bookstore in Montreal in 1902, tries to convey to his readers a sense of how quickly the unionization of the garment industry progressed and under what ideological leadership. Titled “Finf un tsvantsik yor Yidish arbiter bavegung in Montreal [Twenty-five years of Jewish worker activism in Montreal],”19 Hershman’s five-part chronicle is a deliberate attempt to write a history of the working class movement in the city, in a period when leftist Zionism had not yet taken central stage and where there were no Jewish community archives able to record important events. Presuming their content would illuminate an historical epoch, the articles stress key moments in the development of the needle trade and attempt to retrace the origins of a Jewish working class consciousness, at least in a form that could not be found among Gentile laborers.20 The same impulse can be found in the personal memoirs of Hershl Novak, published posthumously in 1957 by the Arbeter Ring BildungsKomitet [Educational Committee of the Workmen’s Circle] in New York under the title, Fun mayn yunge yorn [from the years of my youth].21 Immigrating to Montreal in 1909, Novak was among the original founders of the first network of Yiddish language leftist Zionist schools that appeared in the city in 1913–1914 (which have already been mentioned). Although he had received a Hassidic education in Poland in the beys-medresh of the rabbi of Ger, Novak veered to the radical left on the eve of 19 Hirsch Hershman, in Unzer Vort, Montreal, 23 December 1927–2 March 1928, trans. in French by the author of this article and published under the title: “À l’occasion des vingt-cinq ans du mouvement ouvrier juif à Montréal,” in Bulletin du Regroupement des chercheurs en histoire des travailleurs du Québec 26, no. 1 (Printemps 2000): 42–60. 20 At the time this often meant workers of French Canadian origins. 21 Hershl Novak, Fun mayn yunge yorn (New York: Arbeter Ring Bildungs-Komitet, 1957), 227.

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his departure for Canada and reinvented himself as a “follower” of Diaspora nationalism, notably as expressed by Chaim Zhitlowsky. When the occasion arose to found a part-time school in Montreal, in answer to the call proclaimed at the fifth North American Poale Zion convention held in Montreal in October 1910, Novak immediately joined a group of young activists who saw the Yiddish language as a high vehicle for a universal Jewish cultural renaissance. Written forty years after these initial events by an individual with no formal scholarly training, save the Talmudic learning of his early years, Fun mayn yunge yorn nonetheless achieves a high degree of competence in transmitting the mood and original goals of the founders of the Maylender Shule in 1911 and the Peretz Shule in 1913. In essence, Novak’s chronicle remains today the single most compelling and historically reliable source available to understand the political and cultural process leading to the emergence of a left-oriented network of Yiddish schools in Montreal, which found few equivalents elsewhere in North America in similar medium sized cities. In all likelihood, in the last years of his life, Novak must have appreciated the importance of preserving some elements of this process of community building that he had witnessed firsthand, which were already fast disappearing by the late thirties as new generations of Canadian-born Jews came to the fore. His contribution as an early activist was so crucial that it was used by Belkin in his 1956 essay as an essential contribution to the establishment of a Canadian Jewish historical narrative.22 The same drive for historical preservation inspired Sholem Shtern to write his literary memoirs as late as 1982, under the title Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent. Memuarn un esayn [Writers that I have known. Memoirs and essays].23 Although Shtern hailed from the more radical Yiddish speaking communist movement connected with the Ykuf,24 his essay consists of a series of short descriptions centered on the frequent visits made to Montreal, in the thirties and forties, by leftist-leaning New 22 Simon Belkin, Di Poale-Zion, 196–197. 23 Sholem Shtern, Shrayber vos ikh hob gekent. Memuarn un esayn (Montreal: self-published, 1982), 347. 24 Der Yidisher Kultur Farband [the Jewish cultural association] was founded in Paris in 1937.

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York Yiddish writers. As they came to the city for various reasons— some personal, some institutional—these well-known figures often participated in the Yiddish artistic life of the city, producing culturally enriching works. Poets like Zishe Weinper, Mani Leib, Moshe-Leib Halpern, Fishl Bimko, and Joseph Rolnick thereby enhanced the scope and quality of Jewish life in Montreal, while at the same time delivering a political message. Shtern’s descriptions bring to the fore the scope of these contributions, the importance of Yiddish creativity, and the particular situation of Montreal in the Diaspora network of Yiddish speaking communities throughout the world. The author reiterates the paramount importance of preserving, albeit in a secular and at times revolutionary context, the Jewish heritage of past generations, including the ethical teachings of the biblical and Talmudic periods:

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As socialists we were convinced that the difficult struggle undertaken by the communist party would bring happiness to all mankind. At the same time, we belonged to a minority inside the Jewish progressive movement. We felt in communion with traditional Judaism and with the originality of its cultural productions . . . Certainly we were socialists, but Jewish Socialists.25

Shtern was more preoccupied with ideology and political activism in his memoirs, although his narrative remains possibly the most complete description of Montreal’s Yiddish speaking literary milieu in the interwar period, at a time when Jewish writers and artists were still immigrating to the city from Eastern Europe. Shtern was not the only author concerned with preserving traces of Yiddish literature, as it emerged after World War I, in the frozen wastes of the Canadian climate. At a much earlier date and in circumstances far more difficult, H. M. Caiserman, the then Secretary General of Canadian Jewish Congress, had already compiled an anthology of Jewish poetry in the country written in Yiddish and in English. Privately published in 1934, under the title Yidishe dikhter in Kanade [Jewish poets in Canada],26 Caiserman’s book contained the works of forty-three poets, fourteen of which had been written in English, and 25 Sholem Shtern, Shrayber. 26 Hannaniah Meir Caiserman, Yidishe dikhter in Kanade (Montreal: Farlag Nyuansn, 1934), 221.

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reviewed the accomplishments of four Yiddish literary journals which had appeared in Montreal and Toronto. Caiserman’s anthology, conceived as a testimonial to the emergence of a Jewish literary movement in Canada, offered a historical perspective on a phenomenon barely twenty years old. It also sought to offer guidelines toward a future study of Jewish writing in the country by preserving texts which had been published in shortlived periodicals or buried in the pages of the Yiddish daily press of the period. Almost fifty years later, a similar motive guided Haim-Leib Fuks when he began to assemble the biographies and bibliographies of all the Yiddish writers, poets, journalists, translators, and pedagogues who had written either in Yiddish or in Hebrew in Canada during the twentieth century. Published in 1980 under the title Hundert yor Yidishe un Hebreyshe literatur in Kanade [One hundred years of Yiddish and Hebrew literature in Canada],27 Fuks’ biographical dictionary contains detailed information on 429 Canadian Jewish writers, often including critical evaluation of their oeuvre by well-known commentators in the Yiddish press. Altogether, more than a thousand books are cited in his biographical dictionary, published on several continents by Canadian authors over the course of their careers. For Fuks, who had migrated to Canada in the early 1970s, this was the crowning achievement of a long career in the domain of Jewish bibliography and his last major opus. Despite its omissions and errors, his dictionary remains the only available source of information regarding certain lesser-known authors, and contains rare reliable information about earlier historical periods. Many valuable elements can be obtained from a close study of Yiddish language sources in Canada. There is no doubt that deliberate attempts at establishing the historical record of the 1905–1914 migration movement, and its significant contribution to Jewish Canadian history, were already in place well before the memory of that decade had begun to fade. Clearly, as the contemporary historian can attest, the activists of the great migration had a major goal to transmit their worldview as a significant heritage for the following generations, especially in terms of what it would mean for future Zionist mobilization and the maintenance of a progressive 27 Haim Leib Fuks, Hundert yor Yidishe un Hebreyshe literatur in Kanade (Montreal: 1980), 326.

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social outlook within the community. In the eyes of those who had arrived in Canada in the aftermath of the 1905 Russian insurrection, theirs was a completely new experience, both culturally and politically, taking place in a part of the continent that had remained devoid of any large scale Jewish contributions. Not only were these notions of Jewish culture historically new, but they explained in large part how the Montreal institutional network evolved before 1945, and how it achieved such a wide stature. Quite clearly there was a manifest attempt to create for the first time a Montreal and Canadian Jewish identity. True, the Yiddish speaking modernists and secularists were not the only voice in those early years in the city. Their narrative had to compete in the first half of the twentieth century with traditional Eastern European Orthodox religious interpretations, and with a Liberal North American discourse couched in the English language. After World War II, new understandings of modern Jewish history emerged in Montreal that added multiple levels to the question of a Jewish identity in the city. North African Sefardim brought a French language narrative rooted in a different cultural stream, while recently established Hassidic Yiddish speaking groups were also coming to grips with the complex reality of Montreal. Finally, a post-Holocaust Yiddish speaking narrative, which developed after 1948, followed the arrival of survivors of the great Eastern European cultural centers. In many ways, the destruction in the Holocaust of the more important sources of the Yiddish language signified the end of the hopes raised during the insurrection of 1905. Never again would Yiddish speaking immigrants come in great numbers to the North American continent. The gradual abandonment of the language in Montreal by the post-war generations born to the members of the of the 1905–1914 migration, and the adaptation process experienced by secular Jews in an officially bilingual Canada, eventually brought new influences to bear on a Jewish identity coming to terms with twenty-first century realities. Still, it is undeniable that the secular and radically modern Labor Zionist narrative, as it appeared a century ago, is a necessary step in our historical understanding of the Montreal community, and one of the reasons why the city remains the locus of one of the most vibrant Jewish centers in North America.

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Identities, Communities, and the Infrastructures of History: Creating Canadian Jewish Archives in the 1930s and 1970s1 Richard Menkis

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t was a happy collusion. Historians from the time of Leopold Ranke and Jules Michelet could claim to write about the past “as it really was” because of their use of the archive. For them, the archive was a treasure trove of unassailable proofs necessary for objective history.2 Archivists, as partners to the historians, proudly asserted themselves as the guardians of the hallowed texts containing those truths of history. Various factors have led to the unraveling of the collusion. By the 1960s, scholars—especially in France—declared Rankean history narrow 1 My thanks to Professor Ira Robinson for his support on this project, and many others. 2 See Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–6, 25–9.

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and political, based on narrow and political state archival collections. Where were the social, economic, and cultural lives of the non-elites? Others, under the influence of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, suspect that archives have stories to tell about their origins. They are themselves products of the contingencies of history; sites, in the words of Terry Cook, “for negotiating power, memory, and identity.”3 Archivists are both shaped by their time, and in turn, are agents who shape historical memory by appraising, cataloguing, purging, and/or displaying documents. Both historians and archivists have called for a new partnership, one that recognizes the agency of historians and archivists, and the contingencies in the creation of archives. Some have examined the ways marginalized groups are further marginalized by exclusion from representation in the archives. In studying how North American scholars ignored the first slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere, the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot has poignantly tracked how historical silences are produced. His second moment—after the creation of sources—is the creation of the archives. As he succinctly states, “[they] convey authority and set the rules for credibility and interdependence; they help select the stories that matter.”4 The historical study of archives allows us to explore how a majority can exclude or include a minority into its collective memory, and how marginalized groups define themselves, at least partly in reaction to their place in the memory and narrative of the dominant society. This paper examines two moments in the creation of archives for Canadian Jewry. The first is in the 1930s when Jews took the initiative to create archives in response to perceived cultural and communal needs without expectation of support from a largely hostile majority society. The second moment takes place in the 1970s, when the state looked to recognize and incorporate ethnic groups into its political and cultural 3 Terry Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country: Historians, Archivists, and the Changing Archival Landscape,” Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 3 (September 2009): 517. 4 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 52.

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re-imagination of Canada. As part of this process, the federal and some provincial governments decided to support the development of collections on ethnic communities in government-controlled archives. The heterogeneous reactions from the Jewish community reflected the heterogeneity of the community. The differences between the two times are not just touchstones of changes in the place of ethnicity in Canadian society, but actually gesture toward some of the agents and circumstances behind those changes. The developments are an example of the movement, in scholar Dominique Daniel’s words, from an “ethniciziation” of the archives to the “archivization of ethnicity.”5 However, the issues for each ethnic group are distinctive, and each group—in our case, Canadian Jewry— merits consideration on its own terms.6

I

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The delegates who assembled in January 1934 for the Second General Session of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) certainly faced challenges. Antisemitism was on the rise in Canada. Adolf Hitler had come to power in the previous year, and set in motion the rapid marginalization of Jews in his racialized state.7 Given these grave concerns, how is it 5 Dominique Daniel, “Archival representations of immigration and ethnicity in North American History: from the ethnicization of archives to the archivization of ethnicity,” Archival Science 14 (2014): 169–203. 6 Elisabeth Kaplan, “We are what we collect, we collect what we are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,” American Archivist 63, no. 1 (Spring, Summer 2000): 126–151, examines the emergence of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) and attempts to link it to American Jewish identities; however, the author’s concern about the “reification” of identity is ahistorical and weakens a historical analysis of the motives for the creation and development of the AJHS. For other studies of Jewish communities and their archival holdings, see Tony Kushner, “A History of the Jewish Archives in the United Kingdom,” Archives 20, no. 87 (April 1992): 3–16, and Karen Robson, “The Anglo-Jewish Community and its Archives,” Jewish Culture and History 12, no. 1&2 (2010): 337–344. 7 For a recent discussion of the beginnings of the revitalized Canadian Jewish Congress, see Jack Lipinsky, Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History of Jewish Toronto, 1933–1948 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 35–58; on the rise of antisemitism in Canada, see Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews: A People’s Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 283–327.

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a resolution on the creation of a Canadian Jewish archives ever appeared on the agenda?8 Who were its supporters, and how did they justify giving any attention to this matter when other issues seemed to loom so large? The promotion and support of archives could only come about with interest in the Canadian Jewish past. Several amateur historians of the first decades of the twentieth century did try to tell the story of Canada’s Jews. In the early twentieth century, Clarence de Sola, a member of the Sephardic patrician class of Montreal, authored a short article about Canada’s Jews for the Jewish Encyclopedia. Strongly pro-British, and writing before the twentieth-century waves of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, his article focused on the elite Jews from Great Britain and Western Europe.9 Although Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe increased dramatically after 1905 and then after the First World War, Eastern European Jews did not fare much better in a survey by Martin Wolff for the American Jewish Year Book.10 However, two Yiddish journalists and editors of the major Yiddish newspapers in Canada, B. G. Sack of Montreal and Abraham Rhinewine of Toronto, offered a broader perspective on the Canadian Jewish experience. They had both arrived in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in their newspapers both had tried to serve as guides to Canada for their Eastern European Jewish readership. By the mid 1920s, they had spent two decades watching the Jewish community change, and were ready to offer more developed and unified versions of Jewish life in Canada than they could achieve in the press. Rhinewine came out with a Yiddish two-volume history in 1925–1927,11 and Sack published his first major survey of Canadian Jewish history, in English, in the 1926 reference volume The Jew in Canada.12   8 Canadian Jewish Congress, Constitution and Resolutions, Adopted at Second General Session, January 27, 28, and 29, 1934, Toronto, Ontario (Montreal, 1934), 10.   9 Clarence de Sola, “Canada,” Jewish Encyclopedia, 12 vols. (New York, 1901–1906), vol. 3, 524–528. 10 Martin Wolff, “The Jews of Canada,” American Jewish Year Book 27 (5686/1925–6): 154–229. 11 Abraham Rhinewine, Der yid in kanade, 2 vols. (Toronto: Farlag Kanade, 1925–1927). 12 Benjamin G. Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada,” in The Jew in Canada: A Complete Record of Canadian Jewry from the days of the French Régime to the Present

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Of these early historians, Sack was the most assiduous in tracking down primary sources. But travel to find the sources was out of the question. He suffered from serious physical limitations resulting from his muscular dystrophy, and his responsibilities at the Keneder Adler were onerous. Besides, where was he going to find a research travel budget?13 Instead, Sack corresponded with archivists, scholars, and anybody whom he found out had documents relating to the Canadian Jewish experience. His correspondents included, in Ottawa, Francis J. Audet, Chief of Information at the Public Archives of Canada and an active historian,14 and in Bordeaux, Jean de Maupassant the biographer of Abraham Gradis, a leading trader to New France, who held some private documents and put Sack in touch with family members with more documents.15 Closer to home, Sack received materials from A. D. Hart, the descendant of one of the most prominent families in the first hundred years of Canadian Jewish history and the publisher of Sack’s 1926 “History,”16 as well as from community leader Lyon Cohen.17 Sack demonstrated a commitment to archival research to the best of his ability. He was also aware how much material was in private hands and in danger of being lost. Sack knew very well that the Jewish

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13

14 15 16 17

Time, ed. Arthur Daniel Hart (Toronto and Montreal: Jewish Publications Limited, 1926), 1–80. On the life of Sack, see his autobiographical notes, “Sack, Benjamin Gutman, son of (Iseah [sic] Lipe) Journalist,” Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee, National Archives, Montreal (CJCNA), B. G. Sack fonds, MC 18 box 5, Saul Hayes, “Benjamin Gutl Sack,” preface to Canadian Jews-Early this Century by Benjamin G. Sack (Montreal, 1975), unpaginated; the entry by Yosef Galay on Sack in Chaim Leib Fuks, Hundert yor yidishe un hebreyishe literatur in kanade (Montreal: Kh. L. Fuks bukh-fund komitet, 1980), 118–121. Lucien Brault, Francis-J. Audet et son oeuvre: bio-bibliographie (Ottawa: L’Imprimerie Leclerc, 1940); for references to the material Audet provided, see Sack, “History of the Jews,” 18 n. 8; 23; 26; 31 and 63. Jean de Maupassant to BGS, January 22, 1924; Raoul Gradis to Sack, March 13, 1924, in response to Sack’s letter of February 18, 1924; Gradis to Sack, May 4, 1924, CJCNA, Sack fonds, MC 18 box 5. Hart to Sack, May 5, 1925, CJCNA, Sack fonds, MC 18 box 1, file 32 documents used in Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada,” 36–40. On Lyon Cohen’s help, see Sack to Herman Abramowitz, March 2, 1943, CJCNA, Sack fonds, MC 18 box 1, file 1; for use of the records from Lyon Cohen, see Sack, “History of the Jews in Canada,” 66–67; 72–73.

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community could, when needed, create a solid cultural infrastructure. An excellent Jewish Public Library was in existence since 1914, and the community was justly proud of its holdings, the popular use that was made as evidenced by circulation figures, and the wide range of intellectual activities that took place there.18 But those who cared about the craft of history would not see the same level of support for the preservation of historical materials. As Sack wrote in an article on the history of the library, some suggestions were made in 1926 that an archive be created in the Jewish Public Library, but the good intentions remained intentions.19 Further discussions apparently were held at the Jewish Public Library a number of years later,20 but real changes only took place at the second general session of CJC, when the aforementioned resolution to create an archive committee was passed. Although Sack was undoubtedly a driving force behind the resolution—and became the vice chairman of the Archives Committee once it was established—in fact the most explicit advocacy came from another man, Hersh (Harry) Hershman. It was his name on an eightpage Yiddish plea for the preservation of the sources of the Canadian Jewish past, and for a museum to house them. This pamphlet, although undated, called for an archive committee to be established and was clearly part of a campaign before the meeting.21 As a well-seasoned promoter of Jewish cultural institutions, Hershman was an ideal point person for the project. Historian Rebecca Margolis states that his 1902 arrival from New York City “marked the beginnings of the establishment of formal Yiddish literary institutions in Montreal.”22 Missing the 18 See the various articles collected in B. G. Sack, et al., eds., Biblyotek bukh 1914–1934 (Montreal: Jewish Public Library, 1934). On the Jewish Public Library, See Rebecca Margolis, Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905–1945 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011), 92–105, and the recent special issue of Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes juives canadiennes 22 (2014). 19 B. G. Sack, “Tsvantsik yor biblyotek,” in Biblyotek bukh, 10. 20 Ibid. 21 Hersh Hershman, Kanader yidn un zeyer geshikhte (a proyekt) (Montreal, 1934), 4, found in CJCNA DA 11A Box 1, Archives 1934. The provenance of the pamphlet in the earliest records of the Archives Committee also suggests that it was associated with the early history of the committee, as well as Hershman’s remarks in a later pamphlet reprinting an article from the Der Keneder Adler, May 31, 1936. 22 Margolis, Jewish Roots, 89.

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vibrant Yiddish life of New York, he decided to set up his own modest library and reading room. He was one of the founders of the Jewish Public Library (established in 1914) and of the Montreal Peretz School, and was the Yiddish press secretary for the first iteration of Canadian Jewish Congress, which was established in 1919. In addition to writing for the Yiddish press, Hershman had a hand in establishing a number of Yiddish literary journals in Montreal and was also one of the founders of the arbeter ring (Workmen’s Circle) in Canada.23 He believed, like his fellow left-wing Montreal Jews, that a progressive Jewish community required a strong secular Jewish culture to bring together community members and to push them to aspire for a better society.24 In the pamphlet, Hershman turned his attention to the sad state of the preservation of the Canadian Jewish past, and judiciously chose arguments that addressed the challenges of the Jewish community. He insisted that the community needed historical ammunition in order to protect Canadian Jewry and to further its political needs. He referred to the “narrow nationalists” who look to “make our lives hard.”25 Hershman did not say explicitly who these “narrow nationalists” were, but he didn’t have to. Antisemitism was on the rise from the extreme right, with the emergence of hate propagandists such as Adrien Arcand, and some more mainstream nationalist groups, such as Les Jeune Canada, were also expresssing antisemitic tropes at rallies.26 One powerful way to respond, Hershman counselled, was to establish the legitimacy of the 23 Fuks, Hundert yor yidishe un hebreyishe literatur, 98–99. 24 For a recent study of Yiddish cultural activism in the United States, see Tony Michels, A Fire in their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 179–216. For a seminal essay on Montreal Jewish cultural life, see David G. Roskies, “Yiddish in Montreal: The Utopian Experiment,” in An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, ed. Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil, and Mervin Butovksy (Montreal: Véhicule, 1990), 22–38; and, for the most complete treatment, Margolis, Jewish Roots. 25 Hershman, Kanader yidn, 1. 26 On right-wing antisemitism in Canada and Quebec, see Lita-Rose Betcherman, The Swastika and the Maple Leaf: Fascist Movements in Canada in the Thirties (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1974); Martin Robin, Shades of Right: Nativist and Fascist Politics in Canada, 1920–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); JeanFrançois Nadeau, Adrien Arcand: Führer canadien (Montreal: Lux, 2010). On more “mainstream” antisemitism, see Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews, 283–327.

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Jewish presence by pointing out the historical, economic, and social accomplishments of the Jews. And to make those arguments, one needs to preserve the documents of the past.27 In addition to serving as a bulwark against antisemitism, Hershman added that an archive was important “from a social-cultural standpoint.” Canada was a vast country, and what did the Jews of Halifax know about the Jews in British Columbia? This was an argument that would also have some resonance with a Canadian Jewish Congress trying to establish itself among Canadian Jews. Much of organized Jewish life connected the local (e.g., synagogues, local chapters of unions or workers’ groups, Zionist groups) with the transnational (e.g., denominations, international labour unions and fraternities, Zionist activities in Europe and Palestine). But to achieve its political goals in Canada, Canadian Jews needed to come together. Hershman suggested that fostering an awareness of the history of Jews across Canada could help create, at the national level, the ethnic solidarity that was necessary for effective political advocacy.28 In developing his case, Hershman called the lack of concern by Canadian Jews for its cultural heritage “a national [i.e., Jewish national] disgrace.”29 He decried the loss of important materials relating to the pioneer era, and warned about the loss of minute books and other documents of the more recent past. He reserved his greatest disdain for the fate of the second synagogue of Canada’s oldest congregation, Montreal’s Shearith Israel. The Chenneville Street building had served the congregation until 1883, and after they moved out another congregation used the building but, according to Hershman, did nothing to protect its character and eventually sold it to a “Christian firm” that turned it into a factory. He contrasted the Jewish lack of concern with its past to the committment of non-Jewish Montrealers to preserve the Château de Ramezay, a seventeenth-century building that the city of Montreal purchased in 1893. Two years later, the city leased it to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal that turned it into a museum and archive. 27 Hershman, Kanader yidn, 1. 28 Hershman, Kanader yidn, 1. 29 Hershman, Kanader yidn, 2.

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Four years before Hershman’s pamphlet, the Château was the the first building to be designated a historical monument by the provincial heritage ministry.30 For Hershman, the Chenneville synagogue was the Canadian Jewish equivalent of the Château, and should be treated as such. The synagogue, he argued, should be preserved in order to house the documents and artifacts of the Canadian Jewish past.31 Hershman, in short, was asserting that non-Jews legitimize their presence in the city by marking their history on the cityscape, and the Jews must do the same. Hershman’s commitment to an archive (and a museum) was a continuation of a longstanding dedication to Jewish cultural life, but he made it clear that creating a national Jewish memory was also a useful way to unify Canadian Jewry. The delegates at the Second General Session of Canadian Jewish Congress apparently agreed, and decided “for the general interest and well being of Canadian Jewry” that the historical material should be preserved and an archive committee be set up.32 The first chairman was Hershman, and the vice chairman was Benjamin Sack. The members of the committee were brimming with ideas. In order to develop their collection, they sent out letters to the Jewish press over the signatures of Hershman, Sack, and the president and general secretary of Canadian Jewish Congress (S. W. Jacobs and H. M. Caiserman, respectively), calling for the donation of manuscript and near-print materials.33 They searched for a location for their collection, and planned to find out from Jewish communal organizations if they had vaults to help protect the materials.34 In order to disseminate

30 Commission des biens culturels, Les chemins de la mémoire: monuments et sites historiques du Québec, t. 2 (Québec: Les publications du Québec, 1991), 38–40 and Hervé Gagnon, “Divertissement et patriotisme: la genèse des musées d’histoire à Montréal au XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amèrique française 48, no. 8 (1995): 343–344. 31 Hershman, Kanader yidn, 5–8. 32 Canadian Jewish Congress, Constitution and Resolutions, Adopted at Second General Session, January 27, 28, and 29, 1934, Toronto, Ontario (Montreal, 1934), 10. 33 See, for example, Vancouver’s Jewish Western Bulletin, February 14, 1935. 34 Minutes of Canadian Jewish Congress Archive Committee, 12 March 1935, CJCNA, CJC DA 11A Box 1, Archives 1935.

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and educate, they planned exhibitions,35 entertained possibilities of a creating a small museum,36 and more. But the aspirations of the members of the committee far exceeded their resources. In establishing the committee for the creation of an archive, Canadian Jewish Congress charged it with finding the “ways and means to finance such an enterprise.”37 In short, no money from Congress, and during the Depression, with CJC itself struggling, the archives were far from a priority. As of January 1, 1939, the physical space for the archives was an inhospitable room in the Congress offices in the old Baron de Hirsch building. No catalogue of the holdings existed so there was nothing to show the community of its activities.38 Fortunately, though, collections did find their way to the archives, and valuable materials were saved. The archives had received a large collection of manuscript and print materials from the influential Poale Zion (Labor Zionists). H. M. Caiserman, who was a one-person Congress for many of the interwar years, donated his extensive collection of correspondence and other manuscript and print items. In all, when a catalogue was done of the archives and its library in January of 1939, some 531 items were listed, and a number of these “items” represented collections.39 In this light, the establishment of the Archives Committee, even with a non-budget, was an important development. The Archives Committee found new energy and momentum in 1939. By then, the archives had become a busier place, in part because it maintained clippings files, which were used for research on communal matters. David Rome, a recent graduate of the library program at McGill, served as secretary of the Archives Committee and certainly 35 A. J. Livinson to H. M. Caiserman, October 17, 1935, CJCNA, CJC DA 11A Box 1, Archives 1935. 36 Minutes of the meeting of Archives Committee, March 12, 1935, CJCNA CJC D11A Box 1, Archives 1935. 37 Canadian Jewish Congress: Constitution and Resolutions adopted at Second General Session, 10. 38 David Rome, The Development of National Archives for Canadian Jews (Montreal: Archives Committee of Canadian Jewish Congress, 1939). 39 Canadian Jewish Archives: List of Documents and Material Collected by the Archives Committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, issued January 15, 1939 (Montreal: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1939).

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brought clarity to the committee. He understood and expressed the challenges and successes of the Archives Committee in a published lecture, which included a statement of the major holdings.40 The committee decided to print one thousand copies of his article, and distribute them to libraries, delegates of Canadian Jewish Congress and to the press. With the publication of this lecture, and the listing of its holdings, the committee turned a corner in the dissemination of information about the archives. 41 Although their aspirations far exceeded their budgetary reach, these passionate amateur historians took the first step in creating an infrastructure for research into Canadian Jewish history. They accomplished this by advocating for the necessity of archives for historical research and for a communal identity, and by arguing that preserving the records of the Canadian Jewish past could help to forge a Canadian Jewish community.

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II Four decades after Hershman and Sack made their pleas for the preservation of archival materials and could garner little more than moral support, archival agencies were competing over who should collect and preserve Jewish records. The most dramatic development was the commitment of both federal and provincial governments to implement “multicultural” programs, including the collection of archival materials belonging to ethnic groups. The pivotal public event was Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s address to the House of Commons on October 8, 1971 to announce “a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework.” The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had issued its fourth volume, on the “Contributions of the other ethnic groups,” the year before and now Trudeau was responding to its recommendations. The new policy included the government’s commitment to “multiculturalize” federal culture agencies, including the National Library, 40 Rome, Development of National Archives for Canadian Jews. 41 Minutes of Meeting of Archives Committee, November 20, 1939, CJCNA CJC D11A Box 1, Archives 1939.

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the National Museum of Man, and the Public Archives of Canada (PAC). At the time of the policy announcement, PAC was perceived to be especially weak in its holdings on the wide range of Canada’s ethnic groups. The government thus decided to to provide “funds to acquire the records and papers of all the various ethnic organizations and associations which are significant documents of Canadian history.”42 In response, PAC set up in April 1972 a program to collect from ethnic groups, and within a year it had four full-time staff members. Several years after the establishment of the National Ethnic Archives (NEA), Walter Neutel, the head of the section, drew on the ideology underpinning the Multiculturalism Program to explain the broader cultural reasons for the NEA. Most archives, he argued, were collecting records in English and French that reflected and promoted the majority history of the English and French Canadians. But this was a distortion because they did not reflect the experiences of all Canadians, and he bemoaned the fact that archivists only “very belatedly . . . recognized that this is an editorial decision with profound implications for the future perception of current and past events.”43 The archivists of the NEA believed that they were inaugurating a new era in Canadian archival history. They took upon themselves the tasks of informing the relevant individuals and groups about the significance of archival documents: to prevent their destruction “through neglect and ignorance” and to protect those records by “providing for their deposit in the Public Archives or another suitable organization.”44 Six years after opening its establishment, Neutel stated with pride that the NEA had acquired “records in thirty languages . . . hundreds of feet of manuscript records, several hundred thousand feet of motion film, thousands of booklets . . . many photographs and sound recordings as well as maps, medals, heraldic and other pictorial items.”45 In that same 42 Quoted in Robert F. Harney, “Ethnic Archival and Library Materials in Canada: Problems of Bibliographic Control and Preservation,” Ethnic Forum 2, no. 2 (Fall 1982): 15. 43 Walter Neutell [sic], “National Ethnic Archives,” Canadian Library Journal 33, no. 5 (October 1976): 435–436. 44 Public Archives of Canada. Report 1972/1973 (Ottawa, 1973): 32. 45 Walter Neutel, “Geschichte Wie Es Eigentlich Gewesen or the Necessity of Having Ethnic Archives Programmes,” Archivaria 7 (Winter 1978): 108.

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year, it also issued a thematic guide to the collections to aid in the study of Canadian Jewry, providing details at the fonds level for sixty-nine collections, and listing seventeen others.46 But the federal government was not alone in taking an interest in the minority cultures—and indirectly archives—that had long been ignored. In 1972, Manitoba’s Provincial Department of Cultural Affairs created a program of grants for multicultural activities, and was willing to support ethnic organizations that used the funds for their own archives.47 But the most dramatic news came out of Ontario. Using the earnings from the Wintario lottery, in 1976 the government of Ontario created the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) with three million dollars in trust. Its mandate was cultural and scholarly. Under the direction of historian Robert Harney, the organization focused much of the efforts on the collection of archival material. At its height, the MHSO had 350 field archivists who collected original manuscript and photographic materials, arranged for microfilms of other sources, and recorded and saved 4,800 tapes of oral history.48 These organizations, especially the NEA and the MHSO, became entangled in accusations and counter-accusations. PAC had long adhered to the concept of “total archives,” that a government repository should not only preserve government records, but also significant private records that tell the history of Canada. But, at least for a while, PAC faced stiff opposition. Writing in 1978, Neutel was astonished at the funding of the MHSO, which had “an annual budget that exceeds the total expenditure on ethnic archives by PAC and all other Canadian repositories combined, and larger than the total budget of most provincial archives.”49 Harney, for his part, was highly suspicious of the NEA. 46 Lawrence F. Tapper, A Guide to the Sources for the Study of Canadian Jewry (Ottawa: Public Archives Canada, 1978). 47 “Brief to be used in discussion of future relationship of Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada and the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Winnipeg Jewish Council,” Irma and Marvin Penn Archives of the Jewish Historical Centre of Western Canada (Winnipeg) (JHSWC), MG 6 D4 no. 27. 48 Dominique Daniel, “The Politics of Ethnic Heritage Preservation in Canada: The Case of the Multicultural History Society of Ontario,” Information and Culture: A Journal of History 47, no. 2 (2012): 210–211. 49 Walter Neutel, “Geschichte Wie Es Eigentlich Gewesen or the Necessity of Having Ethnic Archives Programmes,” Archivaria 7 (Winter 1978): 107.

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He thought Neutel’s awareness that more groups existed beyond Protestant Canadians and French Canadian Catholics, and the promise that he would help save those collections, minimized the work that ethnic groups had already done in collecting materials. And was PAC not a major offender in historically promoting a narrow view of Canadian life? Moreover, the NEA’s ostensible mandate to focus on collections of national importance was, in Harney’s view, sufficiently vague and self-serving to allow for the collection of any material the NEA wanted.50 Harney and the MHSO might have thought that they differed from the NEA, but ethnic groups frequently viewed them as one and the same—the competition.51 That was certainly the case for the National Archives of the Canadian Jewish Congress in Montreal and the Canadian Jewish Congress Central Region Archives in Toronto,52 which emerged as the two largest archives of Canadian Jewry in the 1970s. But what were their objections? Wasn’t an interest by the government in the history of Canada’s ethnic groups—including the Jews—exactly what marginalized communities had long desired? The answers are not so obvious. Even if some of the reasons may have had to do with careerism, the arguments for and against working with government archives reveal differing attitudes about Jewish communal self-definition, and the relationship between the Jewish community and the state during the process of “multiculturalization.”

III The multiculturalism policies of the federal and provincial governments clearly played a major role in the collection and preservation of Jewish archival materials. Independently, a number of Jewish organizations were setting up, or were revitalizing, archival projects. In the late 1960s, 50 Harney, “Ethnic Archival and Library Materials in Canada,” 24–26. 51 Daniel, “The Politics of Ethnic Heritage Preservation in Canada,” 219; Myron Momryk, “The Slavic Archival Collections at the Public Archives of Canada: The First Decade,” unpublished essay. My thanks to my colleague and friend Myron Momryk for providing me with a copy of his paper. 52 In the text, I will continue to use the name Central Region Archives, although there were several name changes in the 1970s and 1990s.

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as the national office of CJC in Montreal was preparing to move into a new building, various community officials and cultural activists entered into discussions about what to do with archival material in CJC’s possession.53 For some, it was an occasion to call on the community to remember the value of history in the creation and maintenance of Jewish identity. That, at least, was the sentiment of Joseph Kage. CJC first turned to Kage for recommendations on preserving the archives. He was well suited for the role because, as Ira Robinson has discussed, he inextricably linked his communal work with his scholarship.54 In preparing his response, Kage turned to the larger and more developed Jewish community in the United States. He travelled to New York City where he met with archivists at various Jewish organizations, including YIVO. Citing the American Historical Association, he warned that it was impossible to “master” one’s history without the relevant records. And as a Jew, Kage concurred on the centrality of history in framing identity, and thus the necessity of archives:

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In Jewish life, where history has always played a central role in living experience of our people, well organized archives constitute an indispensible and living link in Jewish continuity.

He was impressed by the rich resources at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society on the campus on Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and expected that Canadian Jews would want to do the same. Unfortunately, the state of the archives did not improve much with the move to new quarters. In the first years after the move, the archive was still in disarray,55 but discussions continued on how to improve the collection, storage, and preservation of records in the national headquarters of the Canadian Jewish community. 53 Minutes of Meeting, Research and Archives Committee, June 25, 1970, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa (LAC), Stephen Barber Fonds, MG 31 H113, vol. 14, file: CJC archives, Res., Hist. Soc., 1957–1970. 54 Ira Robinson, “Dr. Joseph Kage: Interpreter of Canada and its Jews,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes juives canadiennes 6 (1998): 81–87. 55 Stuart E. Rosenberg, “Looking ahead: Lack of Jewish Archives,” Canadian Jewish News, December 17, 1971, 6.

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While Kage insisted that history had “always” played an important role in the Jewish experience, others emphasized the need for archives for another reason—the growth of academic Jewish studies. By the late 1960s, many Jews had rejected the suburban Judaism of their parents, and discovered secular forms of Jewish identification as well as new ways to express their attachment to Jewish life. For some, their Jewish identity was bound up with support for Israel, especially after the Six-Day War with its electrifying impact on the diaspora in general and Canada in particular.56 For others, their identity drew from remembrance and commemoration of the Holocaust.57 Another development was the mounting pressure by Jewish students, as well as by concerned faculty, for Jewish studies at Canadian universities. They correctly perceived that the exclusion of the culture of Jews (and other minorities) from the curricula and research agenda of universities reflected and fostered their marginalization within Canadian society.58 Some of these students took an interest in the Canadian Jewish experience, but where could they find materials? Stephen Speisman, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, wanted to write about the history of Toronto’s Jews, but had to work hard to find the materials because there were no archival holdings, despite several initiatives. After the Second World War, the central region of Canadian Jewish Congress established an archives committee. A group of Toronto intellectuals had set up a Toronto Jewish Historical Society, which also had an archives committee. But neither group had any kind of systematic collection policy, and certainly had no place to house the records. In the early 1970s the two groups merged; in 1973 the Central Region Archives for Canadian Jewish Congress was established, and Speisman became 56 Harold Troper, The Defining Decade: Identity, Politics and the Canadian Jewish Community in the 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 163–203. 57 Franklin Bialystok, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 150–176. 58 Richard Menkis, “A Threefold Transformation: Jewish Studies, Canadian Universities and the Canadian Jewish Community, 1950–1975,” in A Guide to the Study of Jewish Civilization in Canadian Universities, ed. Michael Brown (Jerusalem and Toronto: International Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization of the Hebew University of Jerusalem and The Centre for Jewish Studies at York University, Toronto, 1998), 49–59.

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director. The first location was in the basement of a synagogue until it moved, several years later, into the older building of the Jewish communal offices in downtown Toronto.59 The partisans of these two major Jewish archival collections clashed with the new archival initiatives from the state. The very early work of the NEA and the Central Region Archives of CJC overlapped, and Speisman was not entirely happy. On October 5, 1973, the NEA ran a small advertisement in Canada’s largest circulating Jewish weekly, the Canadian Jewish News. The NEA proclaimed that the state was recognizing Canada’s diversity, and that its history “is drawn from many cultural and national backgrounds.” The NEA rather paternalistically challenged the readership: “We care about your history, do you care enough to help us save it? . . . Help us to help you . . .”60 After seeing the advertisement, Speisman wrote to Neutel that he was “gratified and disturbed” to see the advertisement. Gratified, because he claimed that he welcomed, as did CJC, the interest by PAC in Jewish matters. But he was disturbed because he had been working to “educate an historically rather indifferent public” and was planning an energetic publicity campaign. Speisman asked that Neutel stay in touch with information on what he found, and what further plans he had, and even offered that “. . . if I knew of these notices in advance I could advise as to the most effective methods of approach.”61 Even the restrained cordiality of this exchange did not continue in the relations between the major Jewish archives and the government-funded archival collections. For the rest of the 1970s and into the following decade, the CJC archives in Montreal and Toronto pushed hard against the NEA and the MHSO. The tactics of the supporters of these community-based archives included forming alliances with powerful figures inside CJC to advocate their cause. In September 1977, the partisans of Jewish archives even took to lobbying politicians when the 59 Stephen Speisman, “The Keeping of Jewish Records in Ontario: Toronto Jewish Congress/Canadian Jewish Congress Ontario Region Archives,” Archivaria 30 (Summer 1990), 160–162. 60 Canadian Jewish News, October 5, 1972, 8. 61 Speisman to Neutel, October 16, 1973, Ontario Jewish Archives, Toronto (OJA), Accession 2004-6-5, OJA files, 11-6.

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chairman of the Central Region of CJC wrote to the provincial minister of Culture and Recreation to complain that the MHSO was collecting materials in the Jewish community.62 Eventually, the MHSO and Speisman came to an agreement, but mutual suspicions and resentment continued. More interesting than the tactics, however, were the discussions about ownership of Jewish archival materials. The arguments were made behind closed doors in committee meetings and in private correspondence and internal memoranda between like-minded members of the Jewish archival community. On rare occasions, there were open debates, as in June 1979 when Neutel and Harney presented their positions, as did several others, at a session organized by the Canadian Jewish Historical Society, and described in the Canadian Jewish press.63 The proponents of archival collections in Jewish hands were believers in a strong Jewish community, a community—in Raymond Breton’s classical phrase—with institutional completeness.64 Historically, Jews and other minorities created parallel institutions because the state could not or would not offer support to its minorities. A classic example was the Jewish hospital, created because Jewish patients preferred the setting and because Jewish medical students could not find internships at major hospitals. It was thus simultaneously an outward response to the non-Jewish world and an inward-looking action that provided and promoted communal solidarity. The proponents of Jewish archives marshaled similar arguments, with one difference. With multiculturalism, the state offered an invitation to be incorporated into Canadian society. However, in this new iteration of relations with the state, some Jews had suspicions of the intentions of the state. What if multiculturalism was a passing phase, and government support for multicultural initiative dried up? In the words of Speisman: “Our interest in our heritage is an abiding one, not dependent on whether multiculturalism 62 Sam Filer to Hon. Robert Welch, OJA, CJC Archives, Jewish Historical Society, September 2, 1977. 63 Canadian Jewish News, 2 June 1979, 3; and Canadian Jewish News, July 26, 1979, 3. 64 Raymond Breton, “Institutional Completeness of Ethnic Communities and the Personal Relations of Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology 70 (1964): 193–205.

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or ethnic history is popular or expedient at a given moment.”65 On another occasion, Speisman argued that some of the collectors for the MHSO—who thus wore the cloak of multiculturalism—were somehow “for personal or ideological reasons . . . hostile to Congress and the legitimately organized Jewish community as a whole . . .”66 In other words, some members of CJC considered this aspect of multiculturalism intrusive. Other supporters of Jewish communal control saw another danger lurking. As a result of their experiences with the history of antisemitism, they argued that the Jewish community must control what becomes public for fear of losing control of its narrative. Although the MHSO also had a Jewish adviser, Speisman argued that “he [i.e., MHSO’s adviser] would not go out of his way to control their researchers in the manner we must have [sic].”67 In a public presentation, David Rome also warned of the dangers of archives outside the control of the Jewish community. He pointed to an antisemitic work based on public records, and insisted that “we have placed in non-Jewish hands, out of our control” records that could put the Jews in a bad light.68 Jews were not the only group concerned about materials outside their control. Other ethnic groups also had concerns about handing their materials to the government. Many had come to Canada from countries behind the Iron Curtain, distrusted all governments, and had developed the strategy of not supplying governments more information than was absolutely necessary.69 Canada’s Jews did not explicitly conflate the Canadian government’s behavior with their experiences of other regimes, but clearly some expressed uneasiness about Jewish public image and its impact on antisemitism. 65 Handwritten memo from Speisman to Jonathan Plaut, August 15, 1978, OJA, Acc. 2006-3-8, Canadian Jewish Historical Society Box 1. 66 Speisman to Victor Sefton, June 21, 1979, OJA, Acc. 2006-3-8, Canadian Jewish Historical Society Box 1. 67 Memo from Speisman to Sol Edell, March 2, 1978, OJA, Acc. 2006-3-8, Canadian Jewish Historical Society Box 1. 68 Canadian Jewish News, July 26, 1979, 3. 69 Discussed in both Daniel, “The Politics of Ethnic Heritage Preservation in Canada,” and Momryk, “The Slavic Archival Collections at the Public Archives of Canada.”

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Many of the supporters of Jewish communal control of the archives did not elaborate on why. They tried to promote their own working assumption that the organized Jewish community—more specifically CJC—should have under its wing as many aspects of Jewish life as possible, and that Jews should feel a sense of obligation toward it. The executive director of CJC-Central Region wrote to the Ontario government, to the MHSO, and to the Jewish community of Ontario in a circular letter that Jewish materials should, “as a matter of principle,” be in Jewish archival collections.70 Even after the MHSO agreed to give CJC great latitude in working in the Jewish community, Speisman was critical because the MHSO did not recognize CJC’s “prior right” to archival materials. In September 1978, Speisman gave full voice to his views in response to a survey of Canadian Jewish archival holdings. He saw the preservation of these material as “both the right and the duty of the Jewish community.” The turning over of Jewish materials to non-Jewish agencies was a foolish act of short-term selfishness, behaving like the crude Esau, and selling “our heritage for a mess of pottage.” He was not worried about offending people “who feel no primary loyalty to the Jewish community.”71 Saul Hayes was another advocate for a strong Jewish community, having served as executive director of CJC from 1940–1949, and from 1954–1974 as national executive vice president. He became a powerful ally in the promotion of community-based Jewish archives. As he informed one organization contemplating the donation of its material to an archive, he could not fault PAC for its professionalism, and the sad state of the CJC archives infuriated him, especially after he had worked hard to bring in some important collections.72 Nevertheless, he vigorously fought for community-based archives. He recognized the favorable tax benefits that PAC could offer, and labeled as “cupidity” the decision by some donors to gift their papers to PAC. His idea of community included pride in keeping its materials, a “pride in its own 70 Filer to MHSO, August 20, 1977; Sam Filer release to “Jewish community of Ontario,” Sept 15, 1978. 71 Handwritten memo from Speisman to Jonathan Plaut, August 15, 1978, OJA, Acc. 2006-3-8, Canadian Jewish Historical Society, Box 1. 72 Memorandum from Saul Hayes to David Rome, October 25, 1979, LAC, Jonathan Plaut Fonds, MG 31 vol. 10, file: Saul Hayes, 1979–1980.

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past and its intention to deal with it as its heritage and not dispose of its heritage.”73 Less than two weeks before he died, Hayes worked on the draft of a resolution to present to the CJC plenary in May 1980 in support of the CJC archives. He did not write a preamble, but he stated very clearly what should be stressed. He wanted to emphasize that an archives program is the “hallmark of a cultured, civilized, Jewish community which cannot allow its past to be forgotten . . .” With the benefit of hands-on experience of CJC activities, and perhaps mulling over his legacy, he even argued that archives have greater long-term importance than many of Congress’ activities:

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Such a preamble should . . . contrast the transitory nature of much of Congress Program with the lasting nature of the archives program and that we, at our peril, would be false to future generation if we allow the archives program to be subverted by the constant attention to daily programming of another nature.74

Hayes, the consummate CJC official, nevertheless felt strongly enough about the archives issue that he suggested going around the opposing lay officials of CJC and making the case for Jewish archives at CJC’s Plenary Session in May 1980.75 And if the budgeting branch of CJC did not give the necessary funds, he even advocated a campaign outside of Congress, as long as the records remained in Jewish hands.76 The supporters of the CJC archives either implied or stated that Jewish supporters of government archives were disloyal to their communities. But a number of Jewish individuals and groups countered with 73 Saul Hayes to Herbert Rosenfeld (National President of Jewish Immigrant Aid Services of Canada), August 14, 1979, LAC, Jonathan Plaut Fonds, MG 31 vol. 10, file: W. Gunther Plaut. 74 Memorandum of Saul Hayes to Rabbi Jonathan Plaut, Speisman and Rome, January 10, 1980, LAC, Jonathan Plaut Fonds, MG 31 vol. 10, file: W. Gunther Plaut, 1976–1983. 75 Hayes to Speisman, December 11, 1979, LAC, Jonathan Plaut fonds, MG 31 F13, vol. 10, file: Saul Hayes, 1979–1980, 76 Memorandum of Saul Hayes to Rabbi Jonathan Plaut, Speisman and Rome, January 10, 1980, LAC, Jonathan Plaut Fonds, MG 31 vol. 10, file: W. Gunther Plaut, 1976–1983.

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reasons to support the government initiatives. Some Jews looked with disdain at CJC’s claim to have the support of all Jews. The Jews of the far left, especially the members of the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO), wanted to have nothing to do with CJC, which had excluded the UJPO from the community in the 1950s.77 The agreement between the Central Region Archives and the MHSO explicitly stated, “our arrangements do not apply to those elements of the political left who do not view the Congress as representing them.”78 Some members of the Jewish community believed that Jews should be outward looking and appreciate the recognition that Jews—along with other ethnic groups—were receiving after so much neglect. That was certainly the position of Rabbi Gunther Plaut of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, who served as national president of Canadian Jewish Congress between 1977 and 1980. As was the case with other Reform rabbis, he was a social activist with a universalistic outlook, and was not afraid to express his views loudly and publicly. He advocated that Canada should treat its minorities with generosity and without prejudice, and that Jews should open themselves to the non-Jewish world.79 When Plaut attended a meeting of the National Archives Committee in 1980, in addition to pointing out that CJC funds were low and that CJC’s national archives were in disarray, he indicated that he had no problem working with government agencies: “We are part of this country . . . and we what we can do in co-operation with other institutions should be undertaken, and [we should not] not do it all by ourselves.”80 77 Faith Jones, “Between Suspicion and Censure: Attitudes towards the Jewish Left in Postwar Vancouver,” Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes juives canadiennes 6 (1998): 1–24; Gerald Tulchinsky, Joe Salsberg: A Life of Commitment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 116–117. 78 Harney to Speisman, October 17, 1977, OJA, CJC Archives, Jewish Historical Society. 79 For his outlook around this time, see W. Gunther Plaut, Unfinished Business: An Autobiography (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1981). See also Gerald Tulchinsky, “Justice and Only Justice Thou Shalt Pursue,” Marguerite Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 313–328. 80 Minutes of the National Archives Committee Meeting, Toronto, March 14, 1980, LAC, J. Plaut fonds, MG 31 F13, vol. 10, file: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1980.

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Other Jewish groups challenged CJC’s negative view of government archival projects. The Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada (JHSWC) had developed close working relations with both the provincial and federal initiatives and refused to agree that it was “selling our heritage for a mess of pottage.” The agreements, they argued, had saved the JHSWC time and resources and they were able to arrange in the case of the Manitoba Pubic Archives “close supervision and full control.”81 It is perhaps not surprising that the JHSWC and the Winnipeg-based Congress official and journalist, Abraham Arnold, did not share the wariness of their eastern Canadian counterparts. The Jews in Winnipeg had already experienced non-Jewish support for projects that recognized them in a pluralistic Manitoba, such as a chair of Jewish studies at the University of Manitoba, and inclusion in a series of volumes on the ethnic groups of Manitoba.82 In significant ways, the roots of Canadian multiculturalism were in the west, and a chasm seemed to separate the Jews from the east and the western communities. It certainly explains the permutations of the motion at the close of the meeting of the National Archives Committee of CJC where many of these positions were discussed. PAC had once again approached CJC to engage in a cooperative venture. David Rome of CJC Montreal put forward a four-point motion, which in its last point called on the committee to express an unalloyed opposition to Jewish organizations giving their materials to “non-Jewish depositories.” One of the westerners at the meeting, Harry Gutkin, refused to consider this heavy-handed rejection. His fellow westerner Abraham Arnold countered with a proposal that the committee “should undertake to negotiate a working agreement with the Public Archives of 81 Minutes of the National Archives Committee Meeting, Toronto, March 14, 1980, LAC, Jonathan Plaut fonds, MG 31 F13, vol. 10, file: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1980. 82 For the series of volumes on the history of Manitoba’s ethnic groups, see Mary Kinnear, “‘An Aboriginal Past and a Multicultural Future’: Margaret McWilliams and Manitoba History,” Manitoba History 24, no. 2 (Autumn 1992): 2–7, and Richard Menkis, “Negotiating Ethnicity, Regionalism and Historiography: Arthur A. Chiel and The Jews in Manitoba: A Social History,” Canadian Jewish Studies/ Etudes juives canadiennes 10 (2002): 1–31.

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Canada.” Speisman, of the Central Region Archives—who had earlier in the meeting called the donation of Jewish records to non-Jewish agencies a “bishah [sic], a shame”—was not willing to commit to working with non-Jewish agencies. He offered the diplomatic but evasive wording: “the National Archives Committee should explore the means of cooperation with other archival institutions and/or funding agencies.”83

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IV The development of Canadian Jewish archival collections should be a story of interest to historians, so that they can understand the contingencies and particularities of the collections they use. It is also a broader story. It shows how cultural activists thought that history—and hence archives—should play a role in Jewish identity. These activists were dismayed when they felt that the community did not see archives as a cultural treasure. In the 1930s, promoters of Jewish archives believed that the mobilization of history could help create a Canadian Jewish community as well as demonstrate roots in the country. In the 1970s, Jewish organizations discovered governments that were implementing cultural policies that would bring ethnic identities and histories into a new national narrative under the rubric of multiculturalism. But how close should ethnic groups move toward the government? Were there reasons for caution? The “ownership” of Jewish documents was only one site in which the Jewish community confronted multiculturalism, and certainly not the most important. Nevertheless, the discussions over the archives do reveal a heterogeneity of opinions within a heterogeneous community, suggesting that we should be careful to speak of the community’s negotiation—and not, as is often stated or implied, embrace—of Canadian multiculturalism.

83 Minutes of the National Archives Committee Meeting, Toronto, March 14, 1980, LAC, Jonathan Plaut fonds, MG 31 F13, vol. 10, file: Canadian Jewish Congress, 1980. All underlined sections in the original.

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The Shoah, the Sacred, and Jewish Victim Identity in Postwar Germany and North America: The Scar Without the Wound and the Wound That Did Not Close Benjamin M. Baader

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his essay has an autobiographical background.1 I left Germany—or more precisely, West Berlin—about twenty years ago for graduate school in New York City. As I adapted to the North American environment, 1 I thank my dear friends Paul Lerner and David Seidenberg for their comments on a very raw draft of this article and for their support and companionship throughout the years. I am also indebted to Richard Menkis and Dan Stone for their insight and advice. Nancy Sinkoff provided guidance in the jungle of literature on Hannah Arendt and provided extremely valuable feedback on a draft of this essay. I enjoyed, and greatly profited from, our e-mail conversation during the summer of 2012, when we worked on related projects. Finally, I am grateful to Ira Robinson for his encouragement and patience.

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I was struck by how differently Jews on the two sides of the Atlantic relate to the genocide of European Jewry in the Second World War. I was tremendously relieved, though somewhat disoriented, by the fact that the persecution and mass murder of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s did not permeate the everyday lives of Jewish North Americans; and I was surprised that most Jews I encountered had little understanding of the particulars of these events. The statement that somebody was killed “in the Holocaust” passed as meaningful information in the United States and Canada. However, which country; at which stage of the course of events; which ghetto, camp, or death march; by hunger, bullet, or gas all appeared to be of no significance. To my puzzlement, North American Jews treated “the Holocaust” as one monolithic site, though this undifferentiated entity was clearly central to their selfunderstanding.2 Even in New York, where Jews surely did not form a beleaguered, marginalized, or impoverished population—and most of them had not lived through carnage—Jewish men and women seemed to think of themselves as victims. I was also startled by the unfamiliar North American rituals of commemoration, and by American and Canadian Jews’ commitment to “remember” what they had not experienced and of which they had little knowledge. I arrived from a country where a full-fledged Jewish culture of commemoration had not yet been developed in the 1990s, and where Jews had very mixed feelings about their victim status. In the first part of this contribution, I discuss public culture and the routines of daily life in Germany that for decades after that war had ended still resounded with the echoes of slaughter. In an entanglement that undermined the sequential passage of historical time, the murderous past held the 2 On the terms “Holocaust” and “Shoah,” their meanings, implications, and history of their popularization, see Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckermann, “Why Do We Call the Holocaust ‘the Holocaust’?: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Labels,” in Double Takes: Thinking and Rethinking Issues of Modern Judaism in Ancient Contexts, ed. Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckermann (Toronto: University Press of America, 2004), 3–30; James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 83–98. Despite the problematic nature of the term, I occasionally use “Holocaust” in this paper as shorthand, exchangeable with the somewhat less loaded term “Shoah.”

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present hostage. This presence of genocide within post-genocidal society precluded the sacralization of the Shoah that characterized Jewish Holocaust culture in North America from its very beginnings. In a historical setting in which Jews were removed from the Shoah by geography and experience, North American Jewish engagement with the genocide of their European counterparts resulted in what might be called the Passoverization of the Holocaust. In the second section of this essay I outline how Jews mapped the remembering and retelling of selective narratives of Jewish martyrdom and heroism during the Second World War onto the recalling of the biblical story of the Exodus from ancient Egypt at the Passover holiday, which is a religious obligation. In the mode of the Passover Haggadah that asks all Jews to consider themselves as having been personally liberated from Egyptian slavery, North American Jews came to think of themselves as having personally experienced the Shoah. They transposed the genocidal campaign of the Nazis into mythical time and effected a deep identification with the victims of the genocide of European Jewry. Until very recently in Germany the Holocaust was not over; the persecution and the genocide were not past, as they had not retreated into history. They formed part of the present. The persecutions and killings had ended in 1945, and in postwar Germany Jews were probably safer than in most other parts of the world, particularly in—ironically— Israel. However, despite the political caesura, National Socialism and the attempted extinction of European Jewries continued for decades to permeate the political culture and daily lives of Jews and non-Jewish Germans in both East and West Germany on a variety of levels.3 In the postwar Federal Republic, which was the successor state of the Third Reich, the German question and the Jewish question intersected in 3 The description and examples that follow here relate primarily to the West German setting in the Federal Republic of Germany. Some of the dynamics also apply to the German Democratic Republic, but the East German context was also significantly different. For a comparative perspective, see for example Gabriele Rosenthal, The Holocaust in Three Generations: Families of Victims and Perpetrators of the Nazi Regime (London: Cassell, 1998). For a comparative non-Jewish perspective, see Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

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the realm of high politics.4 When in March 1951, two years after the founding of the new German states, the likewise young Israeli state asked the Allied powers for restitution payments, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer moved fast to declare that his government intended to “place the relationship of Jews to the German people on a new and healthy footing.”5 Yet only 11 percent of West Germans were in favor of the resulting payments, and Adenauer made it no secret that “foreign policy considerations” dictated this course of action.6 In fact, the unpopular philosemitic diplomacy of the Adenauer government played a decisive role in legitimating the sovereignty that was sought and eventually gained by the West-German Federal Republic.7 It was only in July 1951, for instance, that Western powers declared a termination to the state of war with Germany.8 The political culture of the 1950s in West Germany was thus characterized by a peculiar blend of, on the one hand, official philosemitism and the public fostering of pro-Jewish attitudes and, on the other hand, antisemitism and persisting stereotypes about Jews. Non-Jewish Germans idealized Jews and lauded the contributions that Jewish Germans had made to German culture and history, while referring to them revealingly as their Jewish Mitbürger (co-citizens), and even Adenauer himself talked in his memoirs about “the power held by Jews . . . especially in America.”9 In the following decades, this tension persisted. With massive assistance from the United States, the capitalist Federal Republic 4 Different from the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic understood itself as the state that represented the socialist leadership of the German working classes and the labor movement of the German communists who had been defeated in the 1930s in their struggle against fascism and who had suffered persecution in the Nazi regime. See Fulbrook, German National Identity, esp. 31, 35. 5 Frank Stern, The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 364, 366 (quotation). 6 Ibid., 366 (quotation), 382. 7 Ibid., 373. 8 Ibid., 364. 9 Ibid., 383 (quotation), 386–414. For example, for an article from 1946 that warns of antisemitism while reproducing an array of antisemitic stereotypes, see ibid., 296.

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experienced an astounding economic recovery and sought to style itself as an exemplar of civic virtue and Western parliamentary democracy. Yet the past kept erupting into this postwar idyll of aspired normalcy. After the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the mid 1960s brought not only the Nazi atrocities themselves but also the complicity of a generation of German jurists into the limelight.10 In the particularly vehement confrontations of the 1968 student revolts and in the ensuing political and cultural clashes of the 1970s, young non-Jewish Germans kept exposing the involvement of their parents, teachers, and a wide range of public figures in the terror of the Nazi regime, and the deportation and extermination of their Jewish neighbors. At the same time, the emerging counterculture movement came to cultivate its own myths about the nature of German fascism. In the 1980s and 1990s, German public culture was rocked by controversies and scandals such as the Bitburg affair, the Historikerstreit (historians’ debate), the bitter conflicts around the Wehrmacht exhibit that thematized the crimes of regular German soldiers in the Second World War, and the Walser-Bubis debate. In these and many other smaller affairs and heated public disputes, in which an unruly murderous past ripped the surface of a cultivated and good-mannered civic present, the German-Jewish encounter figured prominently. In this postwar German-Jewish entanglement, which Dan Diner has called the negative symbiosis of Germans and Jews, non-Jewish Germans worked out their national identity.11 10 Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Rebecca Wittmann, “Tainted Law: The West German Judiciary and the Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals,” in Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes, ed. Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 211–229. 11 Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon: Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart 1 (1986): 9; Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Sandra Lustig, “‘The Germans Will Never Forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.’ When Things Go Wrong in the Jewish Space: The Case of the Walser-Bubis Debate,” in Turning the Kaleidoscope: Perspectives on European Jewry, ed. Sandra Lustig and Ian Leveson (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), 205–222; Anson Rabinbach, “The Jewish Question in the German Question,”New

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National Socialism and the Judenverfolgung (persecution of the Jews) remained likewise omnipresent in everyday life: on the streets, in shops, work places, and pubs, in popular culture, and in common speech, when non-Jewish Germans talked to each other—or unknowingly to Jews—in their conversations, in side remarks, and in jokes. Flirtatiously, mischievously, and somewhat nostalgically, some Germans continued through the 1970s and 1980s to refer to the national sales tax by its Nazi name. Similar commentary continued in popular speech: on road trips, one could hear: “what terrible potholes are in the highway that the Führer [Hitler] built for us”; more explicitly: “things would be much better if we had not lost the war”; “if Hitler was still here, these foreigners would not loiter in our parks and leave all that garbage behind” (meaning Turkish immigrants); out of the blue, somebody could announce: “of course Hitler went too far with the Jews, but something needed to be done about them.” It was not uncommon for people to make statements along the lines of: “these young people who do not obey the traffic rules should be gassed.”12 In the patterns of daily language, the demarcation between the past and the present continued to be blurred. Moreover, when Jewish survivors interacted with doctors, landlords, employers, police officers, and other German officials, they faced individuals who had been educated and trained in National Socialist Germany, or had grown up under fascist rule and been members of the Nazi youth organizations, or had served in the German army. These men and women at times expressed this legacy in a variety of racist and antisemitic comments, and it almost always pervaded their outlook, comportment, body language, and tone of voice. Thus, through the 1970s and 1980s, the Nazi past was still very much alive in the German present. Jews in Germany not so much remembered the persecution and the genocide from a distance, but they lived in an environment

German Critique 44 (1988): 159–192. For more information on the Bitburg affair and the Walser-Bubis debate, see below. 12 Compare Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 223–257.

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that was still saturated with the language, habitus, and culture of a murderous society.13 I expect it is true for all survivors and victims of trauma that the boundary between the traumatic past and the present is fragile, and that the past continues to invade the present.14 Yet in Germany, this was not only an emotional dynamic, but the traumatic past had literally not yet ended. In Germany, Jews constantly re-encountered their victimization and were thus re-traumatized and re-victimized. This includes those born after 1945 who were profoundly affected and turned into victims by interaction with their environment and by the terror, fear, and sense of alienation that they absorbed from their parents.15 Jews in postwar Germany, however, were deeply ambivalent about their victim status, even though they had been fighting for recognition as victims from the very moment they were liberated from the camps or had surfaced from hiding. American army officials reported that the German population living in proximity of labor camps not only claimed that they had not known what transpired within, but when forced by occupation troops to view the liberated camps, locals “covered their faces and turned 13 Compare Lynn Rapaport, Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23–24. On the Jewish community in postwar Germany, see Michael Bodemann, ed., Jews, Germans, Memory: Reconstructions of Jewish Life in Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Michael Brenner, After the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Lives in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Ruth Gay, Safe among the Germans: Liberated Jews after World War II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Anthony Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat: Eine deutsch-jüdische Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2007). 14 See for example, Flora A. Keshgegian, “Finding a Place Past Night: Armenian Genocidal Memory in Diaspora,” in Religion, Violence, and Place, ed. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 100–112. 15 Lea Fleischmann and Henryk M. Broder, Dies ist nicht mein Land: Eine Jüdin verlässt die Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980); Jessica Jacoby, Claudia Schoppmann, and Wendy Zena-Henry, eds., Nach der Shoa geboren: Jüdische Frauen in Deutschland (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1994); Peter Sichrovsky, Strangers in Their Own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today (New York: Basic Books, 1986). For more discussion of these texts by the second generation, see below.

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their heads away.”16 At the same time, non-Jewish Germans declared that they had felt “terrorized themselves” in the Nazi regime, had suffered enormously in the war, and were still enduring great hardship.17 Yet American reports on the ill-treatment of foreign laborers and the mass murder of Jews were considered exaggerated by non-Jewish Germans.18 Accordingly, the first generations of West German school textbooks extensively discussed the suffering that the Allied bombings had inflicted on the German population while devoting only minimal attention to the persecution of the Jews.19 In the 1970s, when public culture changed, awareness and recognition of the genocide of European Jewry increased, and a growing segment of the German population accepted responsibility for the acts of their parents’ generation.20 In these years, it became less common for non-Jewish Germans to deny, or at least ignore, the immensity of the anti-Jewish carnage and instead to highlight German suffering. Today this approach, which dominated the political landscape in the postwar years, is no longer hegemonic. Yet through the last decades of the twentieth century to the present, the morally more responsive and self-critical position of primarily younger Germans has been consistently challenged. In one of the more noted incidents of an uninterrupted chain of provocations and confrontations, the Bitburg affair of 1985, US President Ronald Reagan joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in a commemoration that included a visit to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen as well as a ceremony at a military cemetery with graves of SS men. In the public Historikerstreit of the same decade, German historians attempted to rehabilitate the view that Hitler’s warfare was primarily defensive in character and that the Holocaust was but a younger sibling of greater

16 Stern, Whitewashing, 49–50, quotation 50. 17 Ibid., 49 (quotation), 88–92. 18 Ibid., 88. 19 Ibid., 202–203. 20 Elisabeth Domansky, “A Lost War: World War II in Postwar German Memory,” in Thinking About the Holocaust after Half a Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 233–274.

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Stalinist crimes.21 In the 1990s, the German preoccupation with its own wartime suffering reached a new climax, when conservatives claimed to break an alleged silence about German victimhood.22 Thus, since the end of the Second World War the German victimhood discourse has never been fully eclipsed, even though it is today far from being the only valid reading of German history. Throughout these decades, Jews in Germany and critical non-Jewish individuals and groups have been fighting a battle against the relativization and minimization of the Shoah.23 In this context, Jews have insisted on being acknowledged as victims of a genocidal campaign of unprecedented scope and thoroughness. Apart from their fighting for victim status in these political battles, Jewish men and women in Germany have, at times, also cultivated a victim identity in their more personal writings. In particular, the children of survivors created a literature in which they presented themselves to the German public and the Jewish community as severely damaged. In some of these narratives from the 1980s and 1990s, the authors describe how persecution and mass killings, which they themselves did not experience, taint and distort every 21 Robert Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1041–1046. 22 Stefan Berger, “On Taboos, Traumas and Other Myths: Why the Debate About German Victims of the Second World War Is Not a Historians’ Controversy,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 210–224; Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman, eds., Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010); Helmut Schmitz, ed., Nation of Victims?: Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (New York: Rodopi, 2007); Ruth Wittlinger, “Taboo or Tradition? The ‘Germans as Victims’ Theme in the Federal Republic until the Mid-1990s,” in Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany, ed. Bill Niven (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 62–75. 23 In addition to the other literature referred to in this paragraph, see also Atina Grossmann, “Feminist Debates About Women and National Socialism,” Gender and History 3 (1991): 350–358; Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 354–395; Robert Moeller, “Germans as Victims?: Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies,” History & Memory 17, no. 1/2 (2005): 147–194; Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001).

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aspect of their lives. However, this same body of publications also shows that the Jewish authors of these texts struggled to break out of what they perceived as a trap of victimhood. They rejected a matrix that only includes the binary positions of inhuman perpetrators on the one side and helpless, innocent victims on the other. They sought more complex and viable Jewish identities. In the very texts in which Jewish women and men expounded on how victimhood defined them at the core, they also militated against being primarily associated with concentration camps and gas chambers. They wished to have their relatives acknowledged as individuals with agency and dignity rather than as passive bodies that had been murdered. In fact, Jewish survivors and their children tended to be deeply uncomfortable with the victim identity that they inhabited—often despite themselves—and that they had to defend. They felt that they did not deserve to live, as so many other Jews had not deserved to die. Jews in postwar Germany held that their dead relatives were the victims of the genocide, rather than those who had survived. 24 Curiously indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the war the Jews in the DP camps in occupied Germany by no means held that all survivors were merely victims. On the contrary, as Isaiah Trunk documents in his magisterial study on the Jewish Councils in the Nazi ghettos of Eastern Europe, in the hour of their liberation survivors began to engage in heated discussions about other survivors’ wrongdoings and their culpability for some of the killings that had occurred. DP camp inmates demanded justice, and survivor communities throughout Europe established Honor Courts and tried a significant number of their fellow Jews, most of them members of Jewish Councils and Jewish police forces.25 Strikingly thus, survivors in the immediate postwar period who had witnessed the genocide operated under the assumption that Jewish leaders had had agency in and even responsibility for the 24 Fleischmann, Dies ist nicht mein Land; Jacoby, Nach der Shoa geboren; Sichrovsky, Strangers in Their Own Land. 25 Isaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 548–561. See also Zeev W. Mankowitz, Life between Memory and Hope: The Survivors of the Holocaust in Occupied Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 204–208.

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murderous course of events; contemporary scholars view this as a largely misguided assumption. Whether they found no other outlet for their rage and anguish; whether they could emotionally not abide the notion that their leaders had been utterly helpless; or because some of them had indeed been victimized by those Jews whom the Nazis had assigned positions of authority over their coreligionists: as a group, survivors did not subscribe to the concept that all Jews had been innocent victims with no room for agency.26 In the young Israeli state some survivors pressured the authorities to bring to justice members of ghetto police forces, kapos, camp block supervisors, and other Jews who in some way had held authority over fellow Jews or had sought advantages in the Nazi machinery of dehumanization and destruction. Under the “Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law” that was passed two years after the founding of the state, about forty survivors were in fact tried in the 1950s and early 1960s, most of them “marginal perpetrators.” While the courts commonly displayed leniency towards these defendants, who were evidently victims of the Nazi regime even if they had committed reprehensible or violent acts, these trials revealed a moral hell in which victims were not innocent or virtuous.27 Whatever the factual basis, survivors were under suspicion in Israel and in Canada in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Envoys from the Yishuv to the postwar DP camps in Germany had described the remnants of European Jewry as morally deficient “human debris.” According to these Zionist observers, a negative selection had allowed primarily egotists to survive, and in the following years some Israelis continued to accuse survivors of having prevailed at the expense of lost siblings or parents.28 Like the Israeli society, Canadian Jewry 26 Compare also Edgar Hilsenrath, Night: A Novel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966); Edgar Hilsenrath, The Nazi and the Barber (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971). 27 Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62–79, quotation 64. See also Trunk, Judenrat, 561–569. 28 Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 116–120, 160, quotation 117.

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struggled at that time to integrate and absorb a relatively large contingent of emotionally and physically scarred Holocaust survivors—proportionally a much larger group than that which reached the United States after the war. In Canada, the established Jewish population suspected recent immigrants from Europe of having acted badly or even committed crimes in the ghettos or camps, and they demanded that newcomers justify their survival.29 During the war, the Canadian UJPO (United Jewish People’s Order), a leftist organization with Communist leanings, had supported the Jewish Left and “the Jewish street” in the ghettos in their struggle against the rabbinical leadership and the Judenräte (Jewish Councils). Thus in a 1957 Warsaw Ghetto Memorial event, the UJPO still denounced the Warsaw Judenrat and other alleged Nazi collaborators.30 Just a few years later, Hannah Arendt took a similarly critical but much less radical position in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which had first appeared in an article series in the New Yorker as a report on the trial against Adolf Eichmann. In the publication, Arendt argued that Jewish leadership had contributed to the successful implementation of the German extermination project by maintaining a Nazi-supervised community administration, rather than abandoning all legal communal services and opening the door to chaos.31 Yet if Arendt assumed that the Jewish world still looked with contempt at survivors and harbored mistrust toward Jewish leaders in Nazi-occupied Europe, she was severely 29 Franklin Bialystok, Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 81–82; Paula J. Draper, “Canadian Holocaust Survivors: From Liberation to Rebirth,” Canadian Jewish Studies 4–5 (1994–95): 49–50. According to Bialystok, survivors comprised 13 to 15 percent of the Canadian Jewish population in the 1950s, and Gerald Tulchinsky reports that in 1990 survivors and their descendants comprised 30 to 40 percent of Canadian Jewry, as compared to 8 percent in the United States. Gerald Tulchinsky, Branching Out: The Transformation of the Canadian Jewish Community (Toronto: Stoddard, 1998), 283. 30 Barbara Schober, “Holocaust Commemoration in Vancouver, B.C., 1943–1975” (MA diss., University of British Columbia, 1998), 70–71. 31 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 124–125, 283–285; Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 343.

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disappointed. By the time Eichmann in Jerusalem was published, a sacralization of Holocaust victims along with a demonization of the perpetrators had gained ground among North American Jews. Indeed, the public reception of the Eichmann trial and the controversy surrounding Arendt’s work played an important role in consolidating this dichotomy. After three years of furious debate about Arendt’s reflections, the notion of an “archetypically pure distinction between victim and victimizer” had become dominant in the United States, Canada, and Israel.32 Thus, in the mid-1960s when the immediate postwar period had ended, world Jewry as a whole came to adamantly reject Arendt’s suggestion that Jews had not all been virtuous and powerless martyrs and saints, and that Adolf Eichmann was an unexceptional character rather than a monster. German Jewish leaders also vehemently opposed Arendt’s assertions and asked her to stop the publication of the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, yet for reasons of their own, the men of the Council of Jews from Germany felt personally attacked.33 They and their non-surviving comrades had acted to the best of their abilities in horrific situations. But they knew from painful and bitter experience that every decision about whether and how to comply with Nazi orders had led to death and destruction. No one understood better than they that no good and morally untainted course of action had existed under Nazi rule. In Germany, survivors at times also referred to murdered fellow Jews as martyrs, but for the most part the ghastly and deadly universe of moral ambiguity and heart-breaking tensions and contradictions was still too present to allow people to take refuge in neat dichotomies. Nevertheless, this state of affairs, along with the atmosphere of suspicion that reigned in survivor communities, did not soften their response to Arendt’s work. Rather, even 32 Steven E. Aschheim, “Archetypes and the German-Jewish Dialogue: Reflections Occasioned by the Goldhagen Affair,” German History 15 (1997): 248 (quotation); Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 339. See also Steven E. Aschheim, ed., Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 33 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 347–348. On the German Jewish response to Eichmann in Jerusalem, see also Richard I. Cohen, “A Generation’s Response to Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 259–261.

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survivors appear to have deeply resented that Arendt aired her reflections in front of an international non-Jewish public.34 In Israel, a Hebrew translation of Arendt’s book did not appear for decades, and the controversy about Eichmann in Jerusalem took place within a small circle of intellectuals.35 Yet, the Eichmann trial itself marked a sea change in the attitude toward Holocaust survivors in Israeli society, as part of a dramatically altered public engagement with the Shoah. The accusations against and the mistrust of survivors had reached their climax in Israel in the trial against Rudolf (Rezso) Kastner, who was accused of “having sold his soul to the devil” when he negotiated as a Zionist functionary with Adolf Eichmann in wartime Hungary.36 After months of extensive public attention on the court proceedings, Kastner was condemned for collaboration with Nazi authorities. Some years later, in 1958, he was acquitted by the Supreme Court—after having been assassinated on a street in Tel Aviv.37 The trial against Adolf Eichmann took place in 1961, against the backdrop of this juridical and human disaster. In fact, the attorney general in the trial, Gideon Hausner, reports in his memoirs that he designed the trial so that the genocide, that had hitherto overwhelmingly evoked repugnance among Israelis, would touch their hearts.38 And the trial succeeded in exorcizing the ghosts of the past and brought the culture of suspicion and contempt of survivors in Israel to an end. As scholars widely acknowledge, the Eichmann trial pioneered the Holocaust survivor as a witness of moral integrity, who gained status as time progressed.39 34 Compare the 1946 debate in the Yiddish-language survivor press about two Jewish leaders who had discussed their cooperation with the Nazis in public. Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 207–209. 35 Segev, Seventh Million, 465; Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, 131. Eichmann in Jerusalem was finally published in 2000 by Bavel in Tel Aviv. 36 Leora Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics: The Conception of Storytellers in the Eichmann Trial,” in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 232–252, esp. 250, quotation 233; Segev, Seventh Million, 257. 37 Segev, Seventh Million, 276, 305, 308. 38 Ibid., 338. See also Bilsky, “Between Justice and Politics,” 244. 39 Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory:

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In a development that had started in the late 1950s, Israeli society moved toward reconciliation with the recent catastrophe in Europe and defused the most disruptive emotional charges of unbearable memories and reflections, by containing the echoes of the Shoah within a commemorative civic religion. In a 1959 law and a 1961 amendment, the Israeli Knesset mandated an encompassing and nationwide solemn Holocaust commemoration on the national day of remembrance, Yom Hashoah, which it called Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day.40 In the following decade, the observance of Yom Hashoah became an important ritual for the performance of Israeli identity.41 As part of the same process, Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial site in Jerusalem (founded in 1953) cultivated and promoted the exaltation of the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide as martyrs. In Israeli society, consequently, the focus on the pitiful helplessness of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, on the excruciating dilemmas of the Jewish leadership, and on the miserable bargains Jews devised to increase wretchedly small chances of survival gave way to a sacralization of the Holocaust and a veneration of Holocaust victims in a quasi-religious framework. In this Israeli cult of the Holocaust, the martyred Diaspora Jew and the heroic Zionist ghetto fighter converged, and their complementary suffering and bravery was understood as having found fulfillment in the rise of the Israeli national state.42 As I will discuss shortly, an equally massive sacralization of the Shoah took place in North America. Conversely, creating rituals of commemoration was not of central concern to Jews in Germany, who still confronted and struggled with the impact of the Nazi genocide in their daily lives.43 This explains why the literature on the culture of Holocaust Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 213; Young, Writing and Rewriting, 157–171. See also Noah Shenker, “Embodied Memory: The Formation of Archived Holocaust Testimony in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2009). 40 Young, Texture of Memory, 271–272. For the history of and the debates surrounding the Israeli Yom Hashoah from the early 1950s on, see also 263–271. 41 Ibid., 272–280. 42 Ibid., 212–217, 247–260. 43 Bodemann, Jews, Germans, Memory. On the small, communal, or even familial character of the Jewish culture of commemoration see the chapter by Y. Michal

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commemoration in Germany almost exclusively discusses monuments and museums erected and built by non-Jewish authorities, and initiatives by and for non-Jewish Germans. Scholars likewise tend to examine the function of commemorative practices and museums for German (non-Jewish) identity, and always note the highly contested nature of Holocaust commemoration in German society.44 Sacralization is not an aspect that the literature on Holocaust commemoration in Germany highlights very much.45 In his exploration of the multiple meanings that have been assigned to the mass murder of European Jewry, historian Tim Cole notes that a “sense of closure and an ending” is necessary for myth building to take place.46 Thus, the Bodemann, “Reconstructions of History: From Jewish Memory to Nationalized Commemoration of Kristallnacht in Germany,” 190–193, 203–204; Brenner, After the Holocaust; Kauders, Unmögliche Heimat; Rapaport, Jews in Germany. 44 Bodemann, “Reconstructions of History,” 179–223, esp. 196, 211–212; Henryk Broder, “The Germanization of the Holocaust,” in A Jew in the New Germany, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Lilian Friedberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 102–12; James Edward Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 184–223; Young, Texture of Memory, 17–112. On the Berlin Jewish Museum, see Noah Isenberg, “Reading ‘between the Lines’: Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum and the Shattered Symbiosis,” in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, ed. Leslie Morris and Jack Zipes (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 155–179; Young, At Memory’s Edge, 152–183. The Museum was designed by a (in the meantime) renowned Jewish architect and developed with at least some involvement of the Berlin Jewish community, but nevertheless scholars almost exclusively examine it in regard to its commemorative function for the non-Jewish public. Historian Michael Meng discusses even synagogues and synagogue ruins in postwar Germany from a non-Jewish perspective. Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). For a listing of memorials and museums on the Holocaust and National Socialism, which are overwhelmingly created and administered by government institutions and by non-Jewish German organizations for a non-Jewish public, see “Gedenkstätten bundesweit,” www. ns‑gedenkstaetten.de/gedenkstaetten.de. Accessed September 12, 2012. 45 For an essay on practices of commemoration and sacralization at the site of a concentration camp within Germany, that had held primarily non-Jewish prisoners, see Insa Eschebach, “Ashes, Soil, Commemoration: Processes of Sacralization at the Former Ravensbrück Concentration Camp,” History & Memory 23, no. 1 (2011): 131–56. 46 Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History Is Bought, Packaged, and Sold (London: Routledge, 1999): 11, 153 (quotation).

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sacralization of a frightful event requires a distance—or is an e­ xpression of the distance—between the traumatizing occurrence and the (subsequent) life of a subject, which Jews in post-genocidal German societies could not experience in a sustained manner. In the German states during the 1970s and 1980s, the persecution and attempted extermination of German and European Jewry was still too raw and embattled a territory to be worked into a religious or quasi-religious framework. Until the late twentieth century, the Nazi era reached deep into the German present, and to this day it has not fully receded into the past. The situation has been different in North America, where Jews had experienced the Shoah from afar and early on marked the killings within a religious framework. Already in the spring of 1943, in direct response to the news about the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Synagogue Council of America (whose members included Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbis) declared a “day of prayer and intercession for the 2,000,000 Jews who have been martyred at the hands of the Nazis within the year.” The rabbis asked American Jewry “to remember” the millions of nameless dead, for whom no gravestones could be set, and one of America’s most prominent rabbis, Abba Hillel Silver, explained that therefore “our hearts must be their final resting place.”47 With these early statements, the program of what became North American Holocaust remembrance was sketched out. After the approximate number of victims had been established at the Nuremberg trials in the fall of 1945, North American Jews adopted the term “six million” to refer to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry,48 and likewise it became common in the months after the end of the war to perceive the destruction of European Jewry and the rise of a modern Jewish nation state as intimately connected.49 Thus, an astounding account by a non-Jewish Zionist in the 1945 Passover issue 47 Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 50–51. 48 See for instance Schober, “Holocaust Commemoration,” 23. The word “Holocaust” as a term for the genocide of European Jewry gained currency only in the 1960s. Diner, We Remember, 376; Garber, “Why Do We Call,” 9. 49 Schober, “Holocaust Commemoration,” 25–25, 31–32.

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of the Canadian Jewish Western Bulletin featured Warsaw Ghetto fighters dying heroically, while “wrapped in a flag of Zion—and, singing the Hatikvah.”50 Similarly, an American Haggadah from 1950 included a copy of Israel’s Declaration of Independence and stated that “six million Jews . . . with their saintly lives . . . paid the price for the emergence of the State of Israel.”51 In fact, historian Hasia Diner notes that American Jews consistently fused the memory of the six million and “the reality and need for Israel” into one idea.52 Moreover, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorials, which Jewish communities across the continent held yearly by the 1950s, had become the anchor and most important vehicle for Holocaust remembrance in North America. Anticipating elements of the Israeli Holocaust cult of the 1960s, Jews thereby combined the commemoration of death and sacrifice with the celebration of bravery and national rebirth.53 And they tied Holocaust remembrance to the Passover holiday. Already in 1953, an article on the front page of the Jewish Western Bulletin’s April issue, referred to the spring season as a well-established “time of special remembrance in the Jewish community,” when the Exodus from Egypt, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and the founding of the State of Israel are being remembered.54 The Warsaw Ghetto fighters had indeed launched their desperate uprising on the eve of Passover, and Israel declared her independence on May 14, 1948, less than two weeks after the celebration of Passover had ended that year.55 However, making this spring date and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising the focus of Holocaust commemoration was by no means self-evident, and it was not uncontested. As an obvious— though theologically problematic—choice, Jews could have bemoaned the recent tragedy and remembered the dead on the Ninth of Av, the traditional day of mourning in the Jewish calendar. To some extent, 50 Ibid., 31–32. 51 Diner, We Remember, 315. 52 Ibid., 311, 316. 53 Ibid., 75–76. 54 Schober, “Holocaust Commemoration,” 149. See also ibid., 26. 55 Diner, We Remember, 58. For the sequence of the dates in the Jewish calendar, see Young, Texture of Memory, 264–273.

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contemporary Jewries have in fact done so, and Haredi communities tend to exclusively commemorate the destruction of European Jewry on this day.56 In order to create an alternative to the Ninth of Av, the Synagogue Council of America in cooperation with rabbinical bodies in other parts of the world, including the Israeli rabbinate, in 1948 instituted a Holocaust Memorial Day on the Tenth of Tevet. American Jews thus held commemorative events on this day in midwinter, which in the Jewish calendar is a minor fast day, marking the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem. The Tenth of Tevet was eventually displaced by the Israeli Yom Hashoah, fell into disuse, and is today virtually forgotten.57 The strong Zionist orientation of North American Jewry in the postwar era certainly contributed to the demise and oblivion of the Tenth of Tevet. However, in the 1950s Israeli society did not yet take much interest in Holocaust remembrance and Yom Hashoah. And already at that time North American events commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising competed with the Tenth of Tevet and created the connection between the Holocaust and Passover.58 This connection of the commemoration of a historical disaster with Passover constituted an innovation. In Israel, the rabbinate had prevented the Knesset (national parliament) from declaring the first day of the Passover holiday Yom Hashoah, and as a compromise a date almost a week after Passover (Nisan 27 in the Hebrew calendar) was proclaimed national Memorial Day.59 As Diner remarked, Passover stands for the “polar opposite” of the unprecedented killings in Europe, as Jews traditionally celebrate the liberation from Egyptian slavery through divine intervention on Passover.60 God delivering his people from oppression and physical danger during the Exodus is the act that defines the Hebrew God, the Israelites’ peoplehood, and the religion of biblical monotheism; such deliverance was evidently absent in twentieth-century Europe. 56 Joel Sisenwine, “The Ritualization of Yom Hasho’ah: Confronting the Holocaust” (Rabbinical diss., Hebrew Union College, 1995), 49. 57 Diner, We Remember, 51, 53–56, 58–59. 58 Young, Texture of Memory, 270. 59 Ibid., 269. 60 Diner, We Remember, 62.

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Jewish communities throughout the centuries have not commemorated persecutions or communal tragedies on Passover. The weeks around the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter holidays have historically been a time of tension, when Jews faced accusations of Christ-killing, blood libels, anti-Jewish riots, and even massacres. Accordingly, the text that Jews read on Passover, the Haggadah, contains in its original version a passage that petitions God to take revenge on the Gentiles for killing Jews and for destroying their houses.61 Jewish communities, however, have not recorded post-biblical persecutions or massacres in the Haggadah and they have not commemorated martyrs on Passover. For commemorative purposes, Jews have rather created memorbuchs, composed liturgical texts such as slihot (penitential prayers or poems) and kinot (lamentations), instituted second Purims and fast days, and, at times, written historical or quasi-historical accounts. Passover was not a time for recalling tragedies and reflecting on acts of divine judgment or punishment.62 Thus, the one-page Seder Ritual of Remembrance that the American Jewish Congress issued in 1952, and that became hugely popular in North American Jewish communities, constituted a significant departure from established practices of Jewish commemoration.63 The sheet was designed as an insert into the traditional Haggadah, and its three paragraphs, both in Hebrew and English, were to be read in addition to the established text. By doing so, the Seder Ritual of 61 This passage is to be found immediately after the grace that concludes the communal meal. 62 For the classic text on Jewish memory and modes of commemoration, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1982). For a more recent engagement with these topics that builds on Yerushalmi’s work but also engages with it critically, see Dean Phillip Bell, Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (Aldershot, Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). See also David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 63 According to Jeffrey Shandler, progressive and secular Jewish groups, such as the Yiddishist Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order, had begun in the early postwar years to “incorporate references to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry into their communal Passover celebrations.” Jeffrey Shandler, “The Holocaust on Television: A New American ‘Rite of Spring,’” in Freedom and Responsibility: Exploring the Dilemmas of Jewish Continuity, ed. Rela Mintz Geffen and Marsha Bryan Edelman (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1998), 269 n. 15.

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Remembrance worked the genocide of European Jewry into a ritual and presented the killings as part of a meaningful, sacred history. “On this night of the Seder we remember with reverence and love the six million of our people of the European exile who perished at the hands of a tyrant more wicked than the Pharaoh,” the participants of the Seder were to recite, standing, after the third of the four ceremonial cups of wine, before the door is opened for the prophet Elijah in messianic anticipation. In fact, the text of the Seder Ritual of Remembrance then relates the heroic struggle of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters who were said to have “brought redemption to the name of Israel,” and it concludes with the song Ani Ma’amin (“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah”).64 Holocaust remembrance in North America was shaped by this type of ritualization and sacralization of the events, and scholars agree that Passover—more than any other day, holiday, or other occasion—became the framework for remembering the Shoah and for commemorating its victims.65 By folding Holocaust commemoration into the symbolic landscape of the Passover holiday, North American Jews anchored the genocide of European Jewry in their consciousness. This sacralization of the Shoah in the context of Passover did not require much concrete knowledge of the different phases and aspects of the Nazi mass murder in Europe and it did not demand any engagement with the historical specificity of particular events, yet it facilitated a deeply personal experience. Scholar of religion Jonathan Woocher describes the “Holocaust to rebirth” myth, which links the Nazi genocide to the rise of the Jewish nation state, as central to the fabric of postwar American Jewish identity, and he argues that this myth is modeled and expands on the narrative of ancient Israel’s delivery from Egyptian slavery that Jews enact yearly at the Passover Seder. As illustrated by a 1970 Haggadah that Woocher quotes, American Passover celebrations assimilate the Holocaust into a timeless archetype of Jewish persecution, perseverance, and national redemption. “We have buried many martyrs. We have 64 Diner, We Remember, 18–19, 62. 65 Ibid., 61–63. See also Schober, Holocaust Commemoration, 44–46, and see discussion below in this essay.

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stood before many oppressors demanding our freedom. We have learned in terrible places—Egypt, Spain, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt; and from dreaded persecutors—Pharaohs, Inquisitors, Hitlers—that Jews must be concerned for one another.”66 In these enumerations, biblical Egypt, historical Spain, and the Nazi concentration camps are linked in a chain of events that call for the same mode of ritualized remembering. Film scholar Eric A. Goldman spells this out in an article from the early 1980s: “Every year at the Passover Seder, we read in our Haggadah that it is the obligation of parents to tell their children of the affliction of our enslaved ancestors in Egypt. So, now, each generation be told of the Holocaust.”67 Diner has indeed documented that American Jews in the 1950s already conceived of Holocaust commemoration as fulfilling the, “sacred obligation to remember,”68 and likewise Moment, a popular American magazine, declared in 1978 that the watching of the TV miniseries Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss (NBC) had “the quality of a religious obligation.”69 Moment published these comments in its April issue, in time for the Passover holiday, which was also when Holocaust was originally screened.70 Accordingly, Jewish Studies scholar Jeffrey Shandler points to “the ritual nature of American television’s annual Holocaust commemoration” and has called the screening of both Holocaust and Passover related films at that time of year, which became common in the 1950s, “a new American ‘rite of spring.’”71 In these rituals of commemoration and remembrance on television screens, families’ Seder tables, and communal gatherings, the moral imperative of remembering the victims of the Nazi mass murder is thus mapped onto the Biblical command of remembering the Exodus from

66 Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), esp. 132–136, quotation 134. 67 Eric A. Goldman, “Film as Haggadah for the Holocaust,” Shoah 4, no. 1–2 (1983– 1984): 4. 68 Diner, We Remember, 84. 69 Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 102. 70 Shandler, “Holocaust on Television,” 264. 71 Ibid., 264–265, quotations 264 and title of article.

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Egypt.72 In the process, Egypt, Spain, and Nazi concentration camps become mythical, transhistorical sites. The North American sacralization of the Holocaust turns the Shoah into an event that—like the giving of Torah on Mount Sinai—did not happen in historical time, but in eternal, holy time, and is foundational for Jewish identity.73 I suggest that this sacralization of the carnage in Europe is a ­function of the distance that North American Jews had to the events in Europe, and it certainly also helped them to endure the pain and distress they felt as they absorbed the news from abroad. However, the Passoverization of the Holocaust also enables a closeness, immediacy, and deep identification with the genocide of European Jewry. Perhaps not very surprisingly, in the early 1950s, students at the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, NY, conflated biblical and recent European history into one Jewish meta-narrative and in their yearbook contributions made statements such as “from Pharaoh to Hitler, we have stood fast.”74 More remarkably, in a workshop that I led in a Jewish community setting in 2011 in Winnipeg, a sixty-year-old Canadian explained that the Holocaust played the same role in this person’s Jewish identity “that other events of Jewish history play. It is part of my historical memory but not more or less than the Crusades or Purim.”75 Hasia Diner reports that in their writings about the Nazi genocide, postwar American Jews almost universally used the terms “we” and “us” when they referred to the victims of the Holocaust and to themselves.76 In all of these cases, North American Jews apply a principle that is fundamental to Jewish culture and grounded in the ahistorical mode 72 On “the sin of not thinking about the Holocaust enough,” see Diner, We Remember, 357–364, quotation 358. 73 Ibid., 265. Compare also Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape, 123. Here, Shandler discusses how during the March of the Living, in Poland, “the Holocaust is configured as a formative, panhistoric event for all Jews.” See also Oren Baruch Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), esp. 153–154. 74 Diner, We Remember, 137–138, quotation 138. 75 “Jewish Life after the Holocaust: Europe and North America, Then and Now” (written contribution by participant in workshop, Limmud Winnipeg, Winnipeg, March 12, 2011). 76 Diner, We Remember, 328.

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of conceiving of reality that the Talmudic rabbis bequeathed to us. The rabbis have forged a mode of living in the world that obliterates the distinction between personal experience and a commanded group memory of events that, according to contemporary scholarly standards, might not be historical.77 A vehicle of Jewish identity formation and group cohesion, this principle is explicitly and prominently spelled out in the Haggadah: “In every generation each individual is bound to regard himself as if he had gone personally forth from Egypt.”78 It seems thus that the great majority of North American Jews have stepped into this consciousness trap that the rabbis have laid out, and by remembering events as if they happened to them, they do, as the scholar of Jewish memorial culture James Edward Young puts it, “mistake [their] common memorial experience for a common Holocaust experience.”79 The connection between Passover and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorials of the late 1940s and early 1950s certainly played a role in the process that led North American Jews to relate to the genocide of European Jewry in an intensely personal manner. This emotional involvement builds on the concern, solidarity, support, and at times great personal engagement that often distant Jewish communities have had for each other through Jewish history.80 Yet Jews in North America have also consistently cultivated an identification with the victims of the Nazi 77 Yerushalmi, Zakhor, esp. 10, 17, 34, 43, 50–51. 78 Deluxe Edition of the Maxwell House Haggadah (General Foods Corporation, 1986), 25. 79 Young, Texture of Memory, 281. See also Liora Gubkin, Shall Tell Your Children: Holocaust Memory in American Passover Ritual (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 161–162. 80 Inter-communal support is often understood as based on the rabbinic principle, “All Israel is responsible for each other” (Babylonian Talmud, Shavuot 39a). For examples of this principle in the modern era, see the European intervention in the Damascus blood libel, the creation of international Jewish philanthropic organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and Western Jewry’s efforts on behalf of Eastern European populations during the First World War in literature such as Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 169–186; Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: ‘Ritual Murder,’ Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

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carnage in Europe. Most famous are the identity cards devised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. When entering the museum, every visitor received a card with the identity of a person who had either survived or perished in the Holocaust, and when walking through the museum, the visitor was to be able to follow the fate of his or her “Holocaust double.” This practice and its “experiential mode” were designed to have the visitor experience degradation, deportation, starvation, and extermination in the manner of the Passover refrain “as if it happened to us,” and it deliberately disregards and even “obscures . . . the great distance between then and now, between there and here.”81 In a similar vein, North American Jewish educators in the 1970s embraced and have since cultivated a pedagogy that wants to make “Jewish youth . . . identify with the victims” of the Shoah.82 Historian Rona Sheramy reports that teachers in Jewish schools in the 1970s set up a “confinement scenario” for their students and engaged them in an exercise named “Gestapo.”83 In 2011, a professor at the University of Winnipeg “had her students list what items they would pack if they were given just 15 minutes to leave their homes.”84 This last example stems from a context that is not specifically Jewish, and to some degree the practices described here reflect general pedagogical trends that aim at involving learners on personal and emotional levels. Moreover, university instructors and museums, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, seek to address students and audiences across religious and

81 Young, Texture of Memory, 343–344. See also James E. Young, “America’s Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 72–80. The practice of having visitors “relive” a Holocaust experience while walking through the museum has been discontinued, since the updating of the identity cards at computer terminals at various stops in the museum proved technically impossible. Yet the cards seem still to be in use in a modified and less prominent form. Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape, 119; e-mail from Noah Shenker, June 18, 2012. 82 Rona Sheramy, “Defining Lessons: The Holocaust in American Jewish Education” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2001), 85. 83 Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 86. 84 Love, Myron, “University of Winnipeg Education Prof Introducing Innovative Approach to Teaching Holocaust Literature,” Jewish Post & News, November 2, 2011, 24.

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ethnic divides.85 Yet there is no doubt that what is known today under the term “Holocaust education” is also a distinctively and intensely Jewish project. For decades Jewish organizations have organized and sponsored events and activities that build a “‘shared’ experience of the Holocaust” and “create through simulation an understanding and sense of identification with the Holocaust,” as a project supported by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture phrased it in its program description.86 The pinnacle of this type of Holocaust pedagogy is the March of the Living, which scholars have discussed extensively and which in its character and goals goes beyond what I have described so far.87 Holocaust education in schools, universities, and museums is committed to transmitting information and intellectually engaging students and visitors. The “experiential mode” is to a significant degree a pedagogical tool to this end. The March of the Living, however, has reversed the priorities. Its organizers explicitly declare that more than aiming at conveying knowledge, they primarily seek to engineer in participants an “intense emotional experience in Poland and Israel that ‘makes history real’ and enters participants’ ‘memory consciousness’” in order “to promote Jewish affiliation and leadership.”88 The March of the Living leads Jewish youth groups, overwhelmingly from North America, in a week through Poland’s sites of destruction and extermination. The trip subjects participants to a demanding schedule with short nights; the young people are served meager and unappetizing food;89 and program material asks them consistently to imagine themselves in the ghettos and camps, and on the death marches.90 The March of the Living thus systematically stages a re-enactment of the Jewish Holo85 Young, Texture of Memory, 337. 86 Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 119. 87 David M. Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, Pilgrimage and the Jews (Westport, CT: Pareage Publishers, 2006), 172–179; Rona Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem: Re-Enacting Jewish History on the March of the Living,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 19 (2007): 307–325; Stier, Committed to Memory, 150–173. 88 Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem,” 314. 89 Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 135; Stier, Committed to Memory, 157. 90 Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem,” 314.

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caust experience, culminating in a dramatic, silent march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah. Thereafter it brings the physically and emotionally exhausted youngsters to Israel to celebrate the Israeli Independence Day and to relive Zionist redemption. The March of the Living thus provides a complete immersion experience according to the “as if you had gone personally forth from Egypt” principle, and in addition it has a fully developed religious dimension. It treats extermination facilities as sacred sites and leads the participants in activities of ritualized commemoration, such as the placing of individually prepared memorial plaques at the railroad tracks at Auschwitz.91 In 1994, a speech to the teenage pilgrims in Auschwitz compared the fire in the concentration camp crematorium to the fire in the “Holy of Holies in the Holy Temple” in ancient Jerusalem.92 At various occasions during the trip, the shofar is blown, the traditional memorial prayers of the Kaddish or the El Male Rachamim prayers are recited, and Oren Baruch Stier reports that in 1994 the melody of the Kol Nidre prayer was played by a survivor violinist in Auschwitz. 93 This is a powerful emotional trigger for synagogue-going Jews. However, one would be hard-pressed to find any theological meaning in this musical performance. What vows and oaths would the survivor or the young visitors ask God to preemptively annul in this context? Yet clearly, the organizers of the March of the Living are not engaging with theological questions, but they employ liturgical language and religio-mythic symbolism strategically. They lead young people in carefully orchestrated acts of worship in order to create a sense of community and to facilitate the teenagers’ identification with the victims of the genocide. The March of the Living program expresses and promotes a Shoah-focused Jewish identity that has been common among North American and Israeli Jews in the past decades. Already in 1982, an article on Holocaust education in a pedagogical journal declared that “for all eternity, the awareness of the Holocaust has become a significant 91 Stier, Committed to Memory, 161, 166–167. 92 Ibid., 157–158, quotation 158. 93 Gitlitz, Pilgrimage and the Jews, 174–177; Stier, Committed to Memory, 159–160, 168.

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factor in Jewish consciousness . . . like the Exodus.”94 As Avraham Hirschson, president and founder of the March of the Living, put it in a letter to March of the Living participants somewhat later, “We are all survivors.”95 This identification with victims of anti-Jewish violence and mass assault and the pedagogical project of promoting such identification is neither new nor particular to the post-Shoah era. Hostility and persecution have not been ubiquitous in Jewish history. Yet since antiquity, Jewish texts have declared anti-Jewish sentiments and violence inevitable and connected this animosity and even hatred to the claim of the Jews’ chosenness and their privileged relationship to God. Thus, the emphasis on disasters has constituted a defining element of Jewish self-perception since the early days of Jewish civilization.96 In mid nineteenth-century Germany, the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (scholarship of Judaism, today called Jewish Studies) turned to the Crusade massacres and adopted a pedagogical program that promoted Jewish identification with “the martyrs of 1096.”97 In the face of modern Jews abandoning Jewish practice and Jewish identities, engagement with “the spectacle of Jewish suffering” was meant—so the teacher Meir Wiener declared at the time—to “confirm [Jews] in their devotion to the faith, for which thousands of our forefathers willingly died.”98

94 Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 94. 95 Sheramy, “From Auschwitz to Jerusalem,” 308 (quotation); Stier, Committed to Memory, 243 n. 2. According to Tom Segev, a 1992 study found that almost 80 percent of Israeli teachers’ college students agreed with the statement “We are all Holocaust survivors.” Segev, Seventh Million, 516. 96 Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 201–206. For an interesting exception to this pattern among Jews in the medieval Muslim world, see Mark Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 180–189. 97 Nils Roemer, “Turning Defeat into Victory: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Martyrs of 1096,” Jewish History 13, no. 2 (1999): 71–72. 98 Roemer, “Turning Defeat into Victory,” 72. On Meir Wiener, see Cyrus Adler, et al., ed., The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times, vol. 12 (New York: Ktav, 1906), 516.

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Yet as common and well established as this Jewish romance and identification with suffering and martyrdom might be, it is neither self-evident nor universal. Young quotes the Boston professor of architecture and son of Holocaust survivors, Alex Krieger, who explains the reasons for his promoting the establishment of a Holocaust memorial in his city with the words: “It’s not for my parents that I pursue this endeavor . . . This memorial is for me. Because I was not there, and I did not suffer, I cannot remember. Therefore, I very much need to be reminded.”99 Different from the compounding of past and present that seems to be common in North American Jewish culture, Krieger does not confuse his parents’ experience of persecution with his own awareness of and knowledge about what they experienced. He remains cognizant of, to use Young’s words again, “the great distance between then and now, between there and here.”100 Likewise, when I was asked a few years ago to lead a workshop “on the Holocaust” for a group of young people who were being prepared for a secular Bnei Mitzvah ceremony, the adult who was my contact person made clear that the organizers of these weekend classes expected my workshop to result in the boys and girls identifying with the victims of the Shoah, or solidifying such an identification. I was puzzled by this approach; from my European perspective (and before I conducted the research for this essay), such identification with those who were murdered seemed close to unethical to me. In his study on religion and media in the United States, Shandler fittingly though somewhat mordantly referred to this state of affairs as “the scar without the wound,” a phrase that he borrowed from Arthur A. Cohen.101 North American Jews have been deeply affected by the genocide of European Jewry and often identify as victims of the carnage, even though—certainly south of the Canadian border—Holocaust survivors and their descendants constitute only a small minority of the Jewish population. Yet as part of an immigrant community, many   99 Young, Texture of Memory, 285. 100 Ibid., 344. 101 Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape, 95. For the full quotation from Arthur A. Cohen, see ibid., 110.

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Jewish men and women had left behind siblings, parents, grandparents, and much extended family in Europe, who then had vanished in the distant cauldron of death and destruction.102 Moreover, Diner describes how American Jewry had, until the Second World War, understood itself as an outpost of Jewish life that culturally, intellectually, and religiously relied heavily on its center in Eastern Europe. The eradication of the communities in the Old World left North American Jews feeling bereft and orphaned.103 In addition to this experience of loss in the 1940s, North American Jews themselves had faced significant discrimination, hostility, and street violence—though not persecution—in the interwar period. The resulting sense of vulnerability certainly encouraged their identification with the European Jewish population that was exposed to the Nazi extermination campaign. This is particularly true for Canadian Jewry, where antisemitism was more virulent and more persistent than in the United States.104 However, the geographical distance to the sites of the Nazi crimes also allowed North American Jews—including survivors— to contain their sorrow and despair by working their distress into ritual, in a manner that was not possible in the post-genocidal societies of Germany and Europe. In fact, even though in the DP camps of the immediate postwar period survivors certainly turned to ritual and created commemorative forms that influenced or anticipated later North American and Israeli cultures of commemoration, at the time this ritualization remained tentative and contested. Thus in the direct aftermath of the war, survivors not only formed spontaneous prayer circles to say Kaddish and attended Yizkor services in the DP camps in 102 Even Peter Novick, who argues that American Jews were not overly affected by the genocide of European Jewry until they embraced a victim identity in the 1960s, admits that, “in immigrant centers like the Lower East Side of Manhattan” families were in distress about the fate of their loved ones in Europe during the war. He likewise states that, “the Holocaust was a private, albeit widely shared, Jewish sorrow.” Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 35, 98. 103 Diner, We Remember, 321–323. 104 Henry L. Feingold, A Time for Searching: Entering the Mainstream 1920–1940 (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 1–34; Tulchinsky, Branching Out, 172–203, 264–276.

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great numbers, but they also founded secular mourning academies and instituted communal days of remembrance.105 As early as for the first post-liberation Passover celebration in 1946, survivors also created Haggadot that mapped the recent Nazi persecution on the Israelites’ enslavement in ancient Egypt.106 Historian Margarete Myers Feinstein reports that already in the DP camps “Passover . . . was connected . . . to the heroic resistance fighters of the Warsaw ghetto, and to the liberation from the Nazis in spring 1945.”107 Yet as a comment during a Warsaw Ghetto Revolt commemoration in 1946 illustrates, survivors could be acutely aware of the choices they made in their communal commemorative practices. At the event, the young journalist and inmate of the Dachau DP camp Levi Shalitan reflected that “a people cannot live off Treblinkas and Maidaneks— only thanks to Warsaw can this people live on.”108 Some survivors nevertheless expressed discomfort with the “heroic myth that had been built around the 6 million victims,” and many rejected the sacralization of their own experience.109 “We are not martyrs but cast-offs,” a survivor wrote in 1947, and many shared the sentiment, expressed in his question, “by what right do we continue to live . . . ?”110 This painful ambivalence about their victim status and about the sacralization of the genocide of European Jewry continued to be prevalent among Jews who remained in Germany. 105 Margarete Myers Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors in Postwar Germany, 1945–1957 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 68–70, 73–85; Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 192–203. 106 Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 211–212; Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 85–87; Yosef Dov Sheinson, A Survivors’ Haggadah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History: A Panorama in Facsimile of Five Centuries of the Printed Haggadah from the Collections of Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 83, plates 172–181. On Seders that were held in the Nazi camps, at least one of which informed a postwar family celebration, see Gubkin, You Shall Tell Your Children, 46–51. 107 Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 212. 108 Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 40, 209. 109 Ibid., 213. On support for and ambivalence about Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemorations among the inmates of DP camps, see also Feinstein, Holocaust Survivors, 78–81 and Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 209–214. 110 Mankowitz, Life between Memory, 224.

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As already stated, American and Canadian Jewries, however, wholeheartedly embarked on the Passoverization of the Shoah, and with few reservations and exceptions they embraced and cultivated a victim identity.111 The North American cultural context certainly played a role in this development. During the era of the so-called “identity politics” of the 1970s and 1980s, women, gays, lesbians, African-Americans, and other groups organized and gained visibility by each claiming a shared history of discrimination and victimization.112 In 1992, author, policy research expert, and talk show host Charles J. Sykes suggested that the entire American nation had fallen prey to a cult of victimhood.113 Not quite as dismissively, scholar of philosophy and political science Laurence Mordekhai Thomas reminds us that suffering is considered a virtue in Christianity. Thus, for groups such as African-Americans and Jews, who were not considered “full moral creatures” in American society, claiming to have gained moral knowledge by enduring enormous evil was a useful strategy in the quest for social acceptance.114 All of these aspects might have contributed to North American Jews conceiving of themselves as victims of the cataclysm in Europe and of developing a deep identification with the Shoah, while at the same time sacralizing the events. As I have laid out in this essay, North American Jews have worked the commemoration of Jews murdered by Nazis, 111 Much more research on the influence of survivors’ cultures of commemoration on this development is needed, considering both the DP camps and the closely-knit North American survivor communities. Currently, see Beth Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 156–172; Diner, We Remember, 212–215; Lucia Meta Ruedenberg, “Remembering 6,000,000: Civic Commemoration of the Holocaust among Jewish Survivors in New York City” (PhD diss., New York University, 1994). 112 Sheramy, “Defining Lessons,” 108; Young, Texture of Memory, 347–348. 113 Charles J. Sykes, Nation of Victims?: The Decay of the American Character (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). 114 Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, “Suffering as a Moral Beacon: Blacks and Jew,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust, ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 198–210, esp. 202, 204, 208 (quotation). On American Jews embracing a victim identity, see also Novick, Holocaust in American Life.

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German soldiers, and various collaborators into the Passover holiday, and thereby have come to treat the genocide as a mythical event, which—like the Exodus—calls for a particular mode of remembrance. As Jews are commanded to think of themselves as having been present when God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, American and Canadian Jews tend to “remember” Auschwitz as if they had been there. They relive the Exodus during the Passover holiday, and they reenact their presence in Polish concentration camps in rituals associated with Passover and during pilgrimages such as the March of the Living. In the Exodus narrative, national liberation follows oppression and danger in Egypt; and in the common, popular understanding, the destruction of most of European Jewry resulted in the redemptive rise of the Jewish nation state in Israel. Theologically, this parallel is not very well-founded, and as I have discussed, commemorating a disaster on Passover constitutes an innovation. However, as both Diner and Shandler have noted, American Jews have not proven to be very concerned about issues of theology or theodicy, such as the problem of God’s justice and his presence or absence in a world that has experienced a campaign of industrial killing of his chosen people.115 Elie Wiesel’s literary and religiously framed interpretations of the genocide have shaped the world’s understanding of the Nazis’ murder of European Jewry, but intellectually more rigorous and complex works of theology and philosophy, engaging with the questions of the meaning and the consequences of the Shoah by rabbis, Jewish Studies scholars, and Jewish thinkers of various disciplines, have had a limited impact on American and Canadian Jewish culture.116 115 Diner, We Remember, 338–339; Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape, 142. 116 For an introduction to this literature, see Steven Katz, Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Roskies, Against the Apocalypse. We also possess a massive body of liturgical texts of various genres, composed by leaders of a large range of Jewish religious movements. For an excellent though somewhat outdated survey and introduction to the liturgical material, see Sisenwine, “Ritualization of Yom Hasho’ah,” esp. 48–64, 83–92. For liturgical texts in mainstream prayer books, see for the Conservative Movement, Rabbi Jules Harlow, ed., Siddur Sim Shalom: A Prayerbook for Shabbat, Festivals, and Weekdays (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 1989), 828–842, and for the Reform movement, Chaim Stern, ed.,

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Many of the American and Canadian Jews who relate to the Holocaust in an intensely personal manner know very little about the historical particulars of the mass slaughter of their coreligionists in Europe, which confounded and perplexed me, when I came to North America. As the social anthropologist Jonathan Webber points out, a myth by definition fulfills the function of being “selective and shrink[ing] the complex details of the past down to a manageable size” that then can be remembered in a ritualized fashion.117 The very term “Holocaust” operates in exactly this manner. As a retroactively applied historiographical category, it subsumes all Jewish deaths, irrespective of where, when, and how men, women, and children were murdered into one supposedly meaningful unit, flattens all detail, and empties historical occurrences of all complexity and ambiguity.118 The core narrative of “the six million martyrs” who died in “the Holocaust” thus imparts “a symbolic, quasi-liturgical knowledge.”119 In this rendering, survivors appear as priest-like figures and topics such as Jewish complicity are sacrilegious.120 Webber begins his essay on the Shoah in Jewish historical consciousness with a discussion of the Hebrew Bible as a selective and “mythologized presentation of the historical past” that conveys a sense of historicity.121 Sha’arey Tefillah: The New Union Prayerbook; Weekdays, Sabbaths, and Festivals; Services and Prayers for Synagogue and Home (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1975), 573–589, and Elyse D. Frishman, ed., Mishkan T’filah: A Reform Siddur; Weekdays, Shabbat, Festivals and Other Occasions of Public Worship (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2007), 521–533. For a fullscale Holocaust worship service, see David G. Roskies, ed., Nightwords: A Liturgy on the Holocaust (New York: CLAL, 2000), and Avidgor Shinan, Megillat HaShoah: The Shoah Scroll. A Holocaust Liturgy, trans. Jules Harlow (Jerusalem: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2004). Liora Gubkin has argued for a non-redemptive commemoration of the Holocaust in Passover haggadot. But she holds on to the notion that Passover is an appropriate vehicle for anchoring Holocaust consciousness in contemporary Jewish identity, and she expects American Jews to identify with the victims of the Shoah. Gubkin, You Shall Tell Your Children. 117 Jonathan Webber, “Lest We Forget! The Holocaust in Jewish Historical Consciousness and Modern Jewish Identities,” in Modern Jewish Mythologies, ed. Glenda Abramson (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press: 2000), 124–125, quotation 124. 118 Webber, “Lest We Forget,” 118. 119 Ibid., 125. 120 Ibid., 126. 121 Ibid., 111.

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However, the biblical text is not concerned with the past for its own sake or out of curiosity for events, but it narrates history to establish truths about God, his relationship to the Israelites, and their mission to be holy.122 In a religious setting, Jews do not study the text to learn about the cultures of the ancient Middle East, but in a yearly cycle, they read the same passages over and over to extract meaning and guidance for themselves and for their communities from what is considered an eternally valid revelation. When Jews at North American commemorative events or programs of Holocaust education claim to present history, they are not exploring the historically specific or interrogating the past on its own terms—even when their narratives about the past are to some degree historical accounts and refer to historical events. In these contexts, contemporary Jews are only very selectively interested in historical circumstances. Their yearly and seasonal cycle of recollection of certain historical events from Nazi-occupied Europe is closer to a religious, mythological use of the past than to historiography. At certain times in the year, North American Jews commemorate the dead, “remember” a well-defined set of mid twentieth-century events and occurrences, and investigate the past in search of universally valid moral lessons. The “sacred mystery of the Holocaust”—a wording with which Edward T. Linenthal describes Wiesel’s approach to the genocide of European Jewry—functions much like biblical history as a timeless, eternally relevant past that can be accessed when it is evoked.123 Jews in Canada and the United States remember “the Holocaust” as if they had been there and make it reach deep into their present.124 122 Ibid., 110–111. See also Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 10–11. 123 Edward Tabor Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 122. 124 I thus argue that what Jewish Studies scholar Yehuda Kurtzer proposes, namely, “that Auschwitz . . . should move out of historical time and become mythically significant,” so that it can inform the Jewish present, has long happened. The same is the case for his suggestion that Jews should, “start remembering the Holocaust in the ways that our tradition instructs.” Yehuda Kurtzer, Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012), 81–98, quotations 95, 98. This development is not very surprising, as scholars have refined Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s notion of a radical divide between on one hand, pre-modern Jewry’s exclusive dedication to memory and liturgical writings at the cost of historical consciousness and on the other hand, modern Jewry’s uncompromising commitment

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The Shoah, the Sacred and Jewish Victim Identity

Jews in postwar Germany labored for decades not to suffocate in the embrace of a genocidal past that continued to rupture and invade their present. Commemorative practices were of comparatively little concern to them. When they organized public memorial events, they did so on dates such as the anniversary of Kristallnacht on November 9, the beginning of the Second World War on September 1, or the Day of Liberation from Nazi rule on May 8, and for these gatherings they often joined forces with non-Jewish victims of German fascism. There was no reason for Jews in postwar Germany to single out the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as an occasion for commemoration and consequently, they did not make Passover a time of remembrance; they refrained from radical liturgical or theological innovations such as the inclusion of references to Auschwitz into the Haggadahs they used.125 For North American Jews on the other hand, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising became the symbol of the Shoah and the prism through which they viewed the terrifying events. It shaped their conception of the Nazis’ persecution and extermination campaign and the Jews’ heroic resistance that could not stop the genocide but that—according to the redemptive Zionist reading of the events—found fulfillment in the rise of the modern Israeli state. Thus the utter despair, intellectual and moral provocation, and essential challenge to the human capacity to comprehend and to absorb what the industrial-style extermination of an entire population entails was contained in martyrology and in a sacralization of the victims. The focus on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising also went hand in hand with a connection between Passover and the Shoah that North American Jews established in a highly innovative development. By mapping Holocaust commemoration onto the command to remember the Exodus as if each individual had personally been freed to historiography and rational scholarship. It seems that Jews have always possessed some awareness of the historicity of events while also never having fully let go of the timeless and mythical mode of conceiving of reality that Jewish textuality champions. See for instance Bell, Jewish Identity; Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History; David Myers, “Mehabevin Et Ha-Tsarot: Crusade Memories and Modern Jewish Martyrologies,” Jewish History 13, no. 2 (1999): 49–64. 125 Compare Bodemann, “Reconstructions of History,” 208.

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from Egypt, the genocide of European Jewry was made personally and lastingly relevant for every American and Canadian Jew, and Holocaust commemoration has come to be understood as a quasi-religious obligation. Sustained by a range of additional factors, American and Canadian Jews embraced a victim identity that did not require them to extensively engage with the historical details of the genocide. In fact, the mythologization of the Shoah has shielded North American Jews from the disturbing complexities and moral ambiguities of the events. The Holocaust has become an integral part of American and Canadian Jewish identity, consciousness, and culture, in a reading in which innocence and saintly virtue confronts absolute evil, and redemption follows destruction. North American Jews treat “the Holocaust” as an event that took place in sacred, mythical time and therefore encompasses all time, including their present. Conversely, Jews in postwar Germany were painfully aware of the fact that not all victims are innocent and pure, and that in Nazi Germany not only their non-Jewish neighbors and people with various combinations of partially Jewish heritage, but at times also their Jewish coreligionists and they themselves had been caught in webs of moral corruption and even complicity. The disorderliness of the historical realities did not lend itself to sacralization, and having been a victim and continuously reliving victimization in the interaction with the German environment was not an attractive feature of Jewish life in post-genocidal Germany. Thus, Jews in post-1945 German society and in late twentiethcentury North America related to the genocide of European Jewry in radically different ways. Yet in both places, in Germany as well as across the ocean in the United States and in Canada, the Shoah was not merely history. In both locations, though in a different fashion in each of them, Jews lived in a time warp. In Germany, the genocidal past did not cease to intrude into the present, and in North America, the sacralization of the Holocaust transported the events into a realm of timeless presence. In Germany and North America alike, the persecutions, unprecedented mass killings, and attempted extermination of European Jewry had effected a subversion of linear, historical time.

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Macro and Micro Insights into Contemporary Jewish Identities: Europe, Israel, and the United States Calvin Goldscheider Brown University American University

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INTRODUCTION It is clear from extensive historical and comparative studies and detailed country-wide community studies that the identities of Jews in Europe, Israel, and the United States (North America) are diverse. Not surprisingly, in each case the identity of Jews reflects the contexts of their lives. To the extent that these contexts vary (and they surely do), the Jewishness of their identities varies as well. Jewish identities have never been uniform over time or among significant social groups within Jewish communities (e.g., gender, ethnic, or social class). Hence, there is a fundamental complexity in drawing general conclusions about contemporary Jewish identities based on their variation among societies, their changes over time, and heterogeneity within

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communities. In reviewing comparative and historical research, can we isolate common processes (not necessarily cores) underlying Jewishness, Judaism, and Jewish identity? Can we identify what makes someone or a community “Jewish” and not something else? What distinguishes Jews from others so that their identities and identification as Jews are recognizable? In addressing these questions I first provide a framework or broad context for analysis that fits into what Jews and their communities have experienced over the last two centuries. It is a macro-perspective of comparative/historical changes. I present an additional and complementary micro-perspective asking whether we can flesh out meaning or depth of this macro context by using a qualitative framework that provides the human connection for understanding the comparative/ historical context. In important ways I argue that multiple methodological strategies and frameworks are necessary to enhance the value of each perspective and to begin to provide a grand overview of contemporary Jewish identities.

A MACRO-PERSPECTIVE

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The Arguments I begin by reviewing a framework, theory, or set of arguments for comparative/historical analysis at the macro-level. The Jewish community and social scientists have constructed three flawed but compelling arguments about the Jewish past and present that convey a conception about the changing nature of Judaism and Jewishness and its diversity.1 Oversimplified, these arguments are as follows: The first argument is that over the last century Jewish communities have moved away from communities based on religion and religious activities toward becoming secular “ethnic” communities. In modern, open, voluntary societies, Jews, like others, have become more secular, less attached to religious activities, religious institutions, and a religious 1 See the detailed review of these arguments in Calvin Goldscheider, Studying the Jewish Future (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).

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way of life. Whatever the religious orientations of previous generations of Jews, contemporary Jews have fewer of them and most importantly they are different orientations. Some argue that religion is simply less central in the lives of most twenty-first century American, European, and Israeli Jews. Indeed, the religion of the Jews (Judaism) and religious institutions have become more secular. Therefore, even those who are religiously committed are more secular today than in the past. This is the so-called secularization theme, and it has been applied to all communities of Jews in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Religion in the past was a distinguishing feature of Jewish communities, but it is no longer. If not the religion of Jews, what makes Jews Jewish? A second argument focuses on the ethnic or the “peoplehood” dimension of Jewish identity. Jews in the past, so this argument goes, had a distinctive sense of being a people apart from the Christian and Muslim societies where they lived (i.e., Jews were a social minority, not only a religious minority). Their minority status reduced access to social and economic opportunities, and involved political constraints and discrimination in everyday life, at times to extreme levels. However, with the increasing openness of society, expansion of political rights, citizenship, economic opportunities, and acceptance of Jews into society, the ethnic component of Jewishness diminished. Similar to other social minorities subject to decreasing discrimination, over the generations Jews have assimilated ethnically into Western societies. Jews have accepted their new situation and have been accepted by others. This second argument suggests that ethnic identity recedes and ethnic assimilation occurs over time when Jews are a social minority in an open society. A third argument follows directly from, and combines, the secularization and minority/ethnic assimilation arguments. It assumes that as religious identity weakens and ethnic (meaning national origin and peoplehood) identity fades, the cohesiveness of Jewish communities outside of the state of Israel weakens. To support their distinctiveness, external stimuli are needed to ignite the dying embers of Jewishness and Judaism. At times these sparks come from some ethnic cultural attachment and pride in a nation-state (Israel) or some recognition of Jewish vulnerability

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to external forces that threaten their group survival. In their antisemitic and anti-Israel guises, these external factors tend to be unstable and marginal to the daily lives of most Jews outside of Israel. They appear and reappear occasionally and almost always in reaction to events and conflicts in the State of Israel or in Jewish communities outside of their own. As the idealism of national identity fades or is institutionalized, identity with Israel weakens as well. Thus, as secularization diminishes Judaism and assimilation decreases Jewish ethnicity, few internally generated Jewish values or features of Jewish culture remain to sustain continuity of the community or identity. As Judaism and Jewishness fade, so the argument goes, nothing beyond externals (e.g., pride in Israel and antisemitic threats) forms the basis for viability of Jewish communities and assures the distinctiveness of Jews. Only with external stimuli does some vague Jewish identity become reinforced. These three arguments about secularization, assimilation, and external cultural distinctiveness have, in one form or another, informed discussions of and research about Jewish communities. Hence, some perspectives from social science and history postulate that the Jewish Diaspora (i.e., Jewish communities outside of the State of Israel) is in a downward spiral or “vanishing,” and Jewish communities are eroding. The conclusion presented by these arguments is that the “core” of Judaism has been assaulted and challenged by the processes that have fragmented and diversified the religion and ethnic identity of Jews.

The Challenge A systematic body of contemporary evidence, I submit, challenges the main implications of these arguments. The paths Jewish communities have taken in modern open, pluralistic societies are not adequately described by the assimilationist implications of these arguments. For, while Jews have clearly assimilated, their communities have not always proportionately weakened, and many have strengthened anew. While the Judaic religion has been transformed, it cannot be adequately described as becoming irrelevant. The resurgence of Orthodox Judaism and the development of other forms of Judaism—Conservative, Reform,

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Reconstructionist—including secular versions of Judaism, along with their institutions, directly challenge the linear secularization theme. Nor has Judaism become monolithic. If anything, the diversity of Judaism(s) that has characterized the past has been extended and elaborated in the twenty-first century. All the various denominations of Judaism and religious practices of Jews have multiplied, without any agreed upon “core” of what Judaism means. Indeed, there are many cores and multiple paths to Jewish religious and ethnic distinctiveness. In numerous cases, institutions and norms have developed within this “religious” and ethnic diversity; they constitute the bases for continued diversity. The new forms of Judaism and Jewishness have gained legitimacy in the perceptions of Jews and their communities, and are indicators of communal strengths not weaknesses. If there is any consensus, it is that the Jewish community is viable in modern Western societies and that there is strength in the diversity of Judaism(s). Changes in Judaism over time reveal the durability and adaptability of religious and ethnic commitments, and the distinctiveness of Jews. The diversity of Jewish life cannot be described as simply “ethnic” or “secular” Jewish identity, even as ethnicity and secularism are normative expressions of Jewish communal life. The fundamental dichotomy between religious and ethnic identity is not as useful among Jews as it may be among other groups. Because of their ethnic identity and culture, Jews are not simply a religious group like Protestants and Catholics, or Mormons and Muslims. Because of their religious culture, Jewish Americans are also not an ethnic group like Italian Americans or Hispanic Americans, or the so-called European Americans or Asian-African Jews in Israel. The distinctions between religious and secular identities are also not clear since Judaism and religious institutions readily incorporate the secular. At the individual level, there are multiple empirical links between religious and ethnic secular indicators of Jewishness, although Judaism and Jewish ethnicity are not identical. Moreover, the distinctions between religious and secular, or between ethnic and religious, do not neatly distinguish among institutions of the community. Synagogues and temples have diversified their activities to incorporate strong

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ethnic components, and secular Jewish institutions have often implied sacred themes. So the survival paradigms, the dichotomies of ethnicity versus religion and minority versus majority, are not very useful as guidelines for studying contemporary Jewish communities and the ethnic and religious dimensions of Jewishness, if they ever were in the past and however they may be for other groups. We can now ask: how does the religion of the Jews legitimate the diversity of expressions, multiplicity of institutions, heterogeneity of religious values, and behavior that characterize contemporary Jewish communities? In short, how have contemporary Judaisms developed without a core consensus in the context of the religious pluralism so conspicuous in the American (and increasingly in the Israeli) scene? How can we make sense of the historical changes in Judaism in the context of Jewish communities? Let me suggest a beginning outline for American Jews at the start of the twenty-first century. The first part of the issue of the diversity of Judaisms and Jewish identity is to address the fundamental question about changes over time. Instead of asking whether the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to America are assimilating or whether they are surviving as a community (they are doing both—perhaps they are surviving because they are assimilating), we should reformulate the central analytic questions: What factors sustain the ethnic and religious distinctiveness of American Jews in the absence of overt discrimination and disadvantage? What structural and cultural forces sustain continuity in the face of pressures toward the disintegration of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their communities? The short answer to these questions is that communal institutions and social and family networks are the core elements sustaining ethnic and religious communal continuity and distinctiveness. Institutions are able to construct new forms of Jewish cultural uniqueness that redefine the collective identity of Jews. Jewish values are the source of continuity and are anchored in the structural underpinnings of communities. Communities are made up of networks of interactions and relationships. It is the institutions and the networks, not the demographic size of the Jewish community, that are at the core of the changing and diverse expressions of Jewish identity.

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Hence, the contexts (e.g., networks and institutions) of Jewish communities should be emphasized as the themes of interpretation and analysis. In these contexts we need to examine the quality of Jewish communal life in its broadest meaning. Although individuals exit and enter the community, the institutions and the collectively shaped culture sustain ethnic continuity and commitments. A newer element needs to be seriously incorporated into our analysis: the role of globalization or transnational influences on the structure and institutions of the community, including religion.

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Analytic Themes Several analytic themes shape my social-science orientation. First, changes over time in the characteristics of Jews and their communities do not necessarily imply the decline of community or the total assimilation of Jews. There is no simple inference that can be extrapolated from change to communal continuity. Hence, the identification of changes over time may imply the transforming of community but not its disintegration. Second, my focus is on the cohesion of communities, based on the extent and contexts of intra- and inter-group interaction along with a shared constructed, and often changing, culture. These contexts of sharing and interaction may occur in specific institutional or religious contexts but are likely to occur in the daily round of activity associated with the multiple spheres of social activities—work, school, neighborhood, leisure, and family. Third, time can be viewed both in terms of generations and historical context, as well as in terms of the life course. Ethnic and religious identities, at both the individual and communal levels, vary over time as context changes. The life course perspective directs attention to a variety of emerging changes in the context of ethnic communities. Identities are connected to life course experiences; what defines the parameters of Jewishness at one point in the life course (e.g., among young adults) is unlikely to characterize families in middle age with children in school or individuals living alone in their older ages. These communal traits linking individual Jews to each other occur in macro-contexts of political and economic opportunities characteristic of Western societies. In the most recent period,

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they have been influenced by (and in reaction to) the increasing presence in these societies of Muslim minorities, who themselves are undergoing new forms of assimilation and integration. There are a wide variety of structural and institutional features that link Jews to one another in complex networks and mark Jews as a community that differs from other non-Jewish communities. These features include family and social connections, organizational, political, and residential patterns, and religious and ethnic activities that can reinforce the values and shape the attitudes of Jews. Institutions play a powerful role in ethnic and religious communities for two reasons. First, institutions continually construct the cultural basis of community. Second, they represent the conspicuous public symbols of community. And finally, institutions provide the legitimacy for change, for cultural definitions in the broad sense, and for religion in particular. Contemporary educational and occupational transformations clearly differentiate Jews from others and connect Jews to one another. The connections among persons who share history and experience, and their separation from others, are what social scientists refer to as community. When these stratification profiles are added to the residential concentration of American Jews, the community features become even sharper. The national data on residential concentration combined with educational and occupational concentration tell the story of new forms of community interaction. The occupational concentration of Jews, their attendance at selective schools and colleges away from home, and work in selected metropolitan areas have resulted in new and powerful forms of networks and institutions. These social structural concentrations of American Jews are astonishing for a voluntary ethnic white group several generations removed from foreignness and not facing the discrimination of other American minorities. Educational, residential, and occupational concentration implies not only cohesion and life style similarities among Jews, but also exposure to options for integration and assimilation. Education implies exposure to conditions and cultures that are more universalistic and away from ethnic-based education, even when most Jews are sharing this experience together and are heavily concentrated in a select number

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of colleges and universities. If high levels of educational attainment and occupational achievement enhance the choices that Jews make about their Jewishness, then Jewish identification, and the intensity of Jewish expression, are becoming increasingly voluntary in twenty-first century America. In that sense, the new forms of American Jewish stratification have beneficial implications for the quality of Jewish life. There is a balance between the forces that pull Jews toward each other, sharing what we call community—families, experiences, history, concerns, values, communal institutions, religious commitments and rituals, and life styles—and those that pull Jews away from each other, often referred to as “assimilation.” The evidence available suggests that the pulls and pushes of the changing stratification profile toward and away from the Jewish community are profound. They are positive in strengthening the Jewish community and represent a challenge for institutions to find ways to reinforce their communal and cultural benefits.

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The Content of Jewishness What is the content of Jewish institutions? What makes them Jewish and not something else? Institutions selectively construct Jewish history and cultural memory. They provide one basis for cultural and religious continuity. This pattern is similar to the families and generations of the past that constructed their own version of Jewish culture and religion even as the content of their culture changed. It is the community, networks, shared lifestyle, values, and concerns of American Jews that bind them together. The form and content are radically different today than in the past. The community itself and the institutions that shape its culture are critical in terms of ethnic and religious continuity. Institutions are the visible and conspicuous symbols of Jewish culture and the basis of Jewish communal activities. The evidence suggests that a critical part of Jewish continuity is connected to whether there are Jewish-based communal institutions: Jewish schools and Jewish libraries, Jewish homes for the aged, and Jewish community centers. Multiple and diverse temples and synagogues are important elements in the development of American communities. The Jewish institutions compete with one another for

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loyalty and commitments. Playing golf with other Jews in mostly Jewish country clubs, swimming and playing softball at Jewish Community Centers, or using day care facilities in Jewish institutional settings appear to be superficially rather un-Jewish; but they are part of that total round of activities that make for a community of intertwined networks. These “secular” activities within Jewish institutions can enhance the values of Jewish life, intensify shared commitments, and increase the social, family, and economic networks that sustain the continuity of the Jewish community. The connection between the family and these communal institutions therefore becomes a central feature of Jewish continuity. Religious changes among Jews have clearly resulted in the increasing changes of Judaism, even among the Orthodox. Viewed as a whole over generations, these changes have resulted in the transformation of Judaism but not the erosion of the Jewish community, except perhaps by the definition of one brand of Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, which accounts for about ten percent of the whole. The new forms of Judaism include new variants of orthodoxy as well as of non-orthodoxy. Neither of these can be defined as reflecting some historic “core” of Judaism. In a voluntary community, people define themselves in and out of the community at various points in their lives. Their ethnic and religious identities are often in flux and their communal commitments throughout life are difficult to monitor. Thus, it is not theoretically and empirically salient to argue for a “core” of Judaism historically since dimensions of behavioral and attitudinal indicators of religion and religiosity are variable over time and over the lives of individuals. Focusing studies of Judaism on families should remind us that the family is the unit where generational continuities are critical, and family continues to mean a context for the socialization of children and the development of networks for adults. There have been radical changes in the family so that divorce, remarriage, and singlehood all represent challenges to Judaism and Jewish community. Moreover, consider college students who in the twenty-first century are more likely than not to attend colleges away from home for long periods of time and before they marry. Think about widowhood, where women are more

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likely to spend a significant number of years living alone. Think of step-parenthood and reconstituted families. These require new ways to reconfigure the power of family relationships and the changing role of Judaism in the lives of Jews. We obviously cannot expect the family basis of Judaism to be understood with the ­century-old conception of the nuclear family. Two critical points need to be stressed. One is the diversity of Jewish communities. If my premise that contexts count is correct (social, political, cultural, and economic contexts plus institutional and historical contexts), then it follows that when context changes, Judaism changes; when contexts vary, Jewishness and Judaism vary as well. Our expectation is that religious variation among Jews is normal, not exceptional. So it has been for historical and contemporary Judaisms. Second, we are not likely to consider the extent of monthly mikvah (the ritual bath) use by women in the twenty-first century as an indicator of Jewish identity, nor would finding out about the wearing of clothing made of wool and linen (shatnez) be useful. We might have used these in nineteenth century Morocco or Slobodka, Poland. We would also not solely use the public celebrations of Hanukah and Rosh Hashanah as indicators of how communities in the past expressed their Judaism. Given these considerations, we need to reexamine how we identify the indicators of Judaism and Jewishness in the twenty-first century and how we view changes in the traditional indicators that have been used in the past. Continuity with the past is limited when the communities and their religious expressions have changed so drastically. We should certainly be focusing on community as we should be studying families. We should be less concerned when we observe the changing core of Judaism in the behavior and attitudes of Jews than with the multiple dimensions of Judaism in contemporary and historical communities.2

2 For a recent review and evaluation of Jewish identity studies, see Erik H. Cohen, “Jewish Identity Research: A State of the Art,” International Journal of Jewish Educational Research 1 (2010): 7–48.

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A MICRO-PERSPECTIVE

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Macro-level changes can only partly identify the Jewishness of communities and the Jewish identity of individuals because of the core of Jewish identity resting on how individuals are linked to institutions, the relative importance of diverse networks, and the values that people share. It has become increasingly difficult to trace historical changes at the micro-level. I turn, therefore, to an additional basis for understanding and clarifying some of the basic changes and processes that have characterized Jews and their communities over the last centuries by focusing on micro-level changes. A biography that I have prepared of an interesting, charming but ordinary Jew, Shmuel Braw, from Tarnow, Poland, sheds some light on various core themes that I have outlined in a macro context.3 It does not provide either confirming or disconfirming evidence but adds a fuller picture that is both human and meaningful. On the one hand, it sheds light on those elements that are extraordinarily difficult to capture with standard socio-historical evidence and can only be inferred from broad structural evidence. On the other hand, all biography is subjective and personal and the extent to which we can generalize is limited. In this case, Braw was the subject of rather intensive and sustained interviewing, where we directed questions and conversations around critical historical and comparative themes. A few tidbits from these conversations follow.

Biography as a Basis for Studying Values One methodological challenge is to examine Jewish values through life histories. I turn to ethnography to illustrate changes in Jewish values 3 The review of Braw’s life, with Jeffrey Green, was published as A Typical Extraordinary Jew: From Tarnow to Jerusalem (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, Roman and Littlefield, 2011). Together, we formally interviewed Shmuel Braw and transcribed and edited these interviews about his life. What follows are small selections and edited excerpts from that manuscript. In addition to the hours that we spent formally interviewing Braw, and being interviewed by him, in my home in Jerusalem, I spent hundreds of hours in the 1970s and 1980s informally talking to him and his family in the synagogue in Talpiot, Jerusalem, in their home in Jerusalem, in Kiryat Gat, and in Kibbutz Ein Tzurim.

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over the course of life and explore the changing images of Jewish life in various communal contexts. I use the following partial ethnography of Shmuel Braw to explore how different sources of information might be used to interpret how we understand Jews in specific contexts. The social and family contexts that people experience shape the conceptions that ordinary persons have of communities.

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Shmuel Braw He was a typical extraordinary Jew. Shmuel Braw regularly sat next to me in my synagogue in Talpiot, Jerusalem. From time to time during the various learned talks, at other intervals during the prayers, and on the walk home on Friday evenings, he told me tantalizing stories about his life, half in Yiddish and half in Australian-accented English, with a strong Polish twist. He went to bed quite late, he said, so that he would be certain of sleeping till the next morning. Sometimes nightmares woke him and then he knew he would not go to sleep again. He did not describe his nightmares. Knowing that he lost his wife, their only daughter, his mother, two sisters, their husbands and children, and countless other relatives and friends during the Second World War, and learning that he himself was a survivor of a Siberian labor camp, it was not hard to imagine his trauma-induced dream life. I began to interview Shmuel Braw to put a human face on the macro-European picture of Jewish transformation that I was studying.4 I wanted to know whether I could illustrate the themes of change among Jewish communities with qualitative insights from diverse persons of European origins living in Jerusalem. Braw was my first subject.

From Tarnow (Poland) to Italy by Way of Siberia Shmuel Braw was born around the turn of the twentieth century in Tarnow, a middle-size city about forty-five miles east of Krakow, in the Galician part of Poland. I was initially curious about why he and millions of others like him chose to remain in Poland rather than follow the large stream of migration to America, with its perceived opportunities and 4 This was published in Calvin Goldscheider and Alan Zuckerman, The Transformation of the Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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streets paved with gold. Had they immigrated to America, they would have been spared the horrors of the Second World War. The answer he gave was rather straightforward. Braw and his family remained in Tarnow in large part because they were doing well economically, with good prospects for continuing to live in prosperity. His clients in the lumber and coal business were local, his family and economic networks were powerful, and his family was financially comfortable in Poland. His friends were there, his language was Polish and Yiddish, and his family was important. There appeared no reason to live elsewhere. His description of life in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s parallels in many ways the stories that one reads about life among American Jews of Polish origins living in New York and in other places where poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled and became American. For him and many of his friends Tarnow was home: life was good, and the future seemed bright. To be sure, there was antisemitism and discrimination, and Tarnow’s Jews did not have all the rights and privileges that Christians had in Poland, but these attitudes and limitations were not new in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, social mobility and assimilation were the hallmarks of the day. The Jews of Tarnow experienced improvements in their life style. Theatre, good times, art and travel, attending lectures, and going out to schmooze with the boys characterized middle-class Jewish men in Poland as it did in America. Braw described these occasions with great enthusiasm not only to mark what he had lost but also to convey the richness of his past life. Life was improving for him and his family. Even in retrospect he spoke of the beautiful life in Tarnow before the Second World War. By the late 1930s Braw was married, a father, a prosperous middleclass businessman, self-confident, and increasingly active in the Jewish community. He expected his Jewish community and life to continue as it was. He certainly had no reason to expect that a Holocaust was coming from Germany that would engulf Tarnow and destroy almost every vestige of Jewish life there; every institution, Jewish building, and all the people who lived in and frequented them were destroyed. Despite the challenges of survival for some due to poverty, discrimination, and

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other hardships, Braw expected that the Jews of Tarnow would continue to live there for centuries, as they had in the past. One lesson emerges clearly—people, Jews and non-Jews, stay where they are and expect to remain where they are when they have family roots, networks, and connections. Even when circumstances become very difficult, they have no wanderlust. Tarnow was a heterogeneous community where religious and secular Jews lived, where Zionists and socialists argued, where most of the community took care of its own, and where Jews and non-Jews interacted in economic and other activities. Braw’s father was a Hasid, but his children were moving away from that traditional form of Judaism. Braw was certainly thoroughly Jewish, as were his siblings, but one had moved to Berlin for economic reasons and another to Palestine to join the Hashomer Hatzair, a group of young secular Zionists. They were assimilating but not losing their Jewishness (or Yiddishkeit). Braw remained in Tarnow. He was a capitalist businessman but supported socialist groups because the socialists were “doing things for the community.” Braw reported: “I gave money to the Zionists but I wouldn’t vote for them, because the only party that was doing something for the Jews in Tarnow was the socialists.” The Zionists “were doing a good job,” he added, “but they weren’t interested in local life. They only cared about the future. A thousand years from now, a dream. The real situation didn’t interest them. Socialists were trying to help the people.” Much of that receded into the background as the war and the Holocaust of World War II started in the late 1930s and 1940s. He last saw his daughter alive on a transport with her schoolmates being led away to the outskirts of Tarnow by the Nazis. The Nazis never had a chance to shoot them as their teachers gave them poison chocolates on the truck to avoid the certain death awaiting them. Braw and other Jews buried their children on the outskirts of Tarnow. Braw survived the war, though barely, through luck and his own ingenuity. Surviving the Holocaust appeared to be random in those cities and towns where most were killed. He has described in detail the camps in Siberia and how he was able to survive through fortune and

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chutzpah. His description of the camps in Siberia and the contrast between those in Siberia and in Poland are unique features of his memoir. I asked: “What made you want to live after what you had seen?” It is legitimate to wonder about such things, he told me. Half coyly and half arrogantly, Braw reverted to his self-definition of being a rebel and denied that he found a religious answer. For years he could not find God but he re-discovered the power of Jewish history and the value of Jewish community. He then said: “First thing you’ve got a feeling that they won’t destroy the Jewish people. [After the war] we wanted to build up a Jewish life to what it was in Poland. But that was impossible.” After the war, Braw and his second wife, Esther, made their way with thousands of others across the Czech border, then into Austria, and finally to Italy on their way to Palestine. His depiction of hundreds and thousands of Polish Jews walking to Italy was amazing. Braw, however, never arrived in Palestine, as there was too much conflict at the time. His brother, who had moved to Palestine in the 1920s as part of the young socialist-Zionist pioneer movements, dissuaded him from coming. It was too difficult, he wrote to Braw. Instead, Braw selected a place as far away from his Tarnow as he could find. He ended up in Melbourne, Australia, for twenty-five years.

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From Melbourne to Jerusalem The Jewish community in Melbourne sponsored a number of refugees. Braw left Italy when he was forty-three years old with an infant daughter and his pregnant second wife, Esther, knowing several languages but not a word of English. I asked him how was Melbourne was different than Tarnow. “In Melbourne life was normal but not in a Jewish way,” he said. As much as I pressed and probed I could learn little about his life in Melbourne. It simply was not his community. I wanted to learn about other Jewish communities in Australia, how he related to the beauty and scenery, the indigenous Australians and the long-term residents, how he may have enjoyed the great barrier reef or the vastness

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of the outback, the theatre, the opera, and the arts. But these were not part of Braw’s experiences. He was a great European traveler when he was a young man; he described in rich detail the features of Poland. But his experiences in Tarnow before and after the war did not result in his exploration of Australia. He never left Melbourne, never visited other places in Australia, never traveled or toured. He and Esther survived in Melbourne, raised their two daughters, and worked hard, but Melbourne was never considered home. He did not develop the networks that had made life in Tarnow so important and enriching. He also had important things to say about the positive and negative aspects of the Jewish community in Melbourne, such as the closed networks in the Jewish community and their conflict with newly arrived refugees. It was the Jewish and economic networks in Tarnow that sustained him; it was their absence in Melbourne that isolated and alienated him. After moving to Jerusalem to retire, joining one of his daughters who had moved there, Braw said he forgot about Melbourne. But he never forgot Tarnow. He was now a Jerusalemite, he told me with some pride and a little unease. When pressed he would not call himself a Zionist, although he did concede that in his view the future of most Jewish communities in the world was bound up with the future of Israel. Israel was a connection but not the entirety of his Jewishness. I asked: “So where am I supposed to get my Yiddishkeit, my Jewishness? If Tarnow and places like Tarnow contained the only authentic Judaism, and they are all destroyed, then what about the people born after the destruction? Where can they find ‘authentic’ Jewishness?” Braw was hard hit by the question. “I don’t have an answer,” he said. From his point of view, Judaism today is without foundations. I asked the question in a different way, “How can your daughter Rivka manage to live a full Jewish life? Where does she draw her Jewishness?” “She agrees with me,” Braw answered. “She got it from her parents.” “So won’t her children get it from her?” I asked. Braw was not sure. Living in Israel was not enough. He saw Judaism getting weaker and weaker as time went on. His perception

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was that Judaism and Jewishness were eroding and would disappear over time. Upon some probing it became clear that Judaism and Jewishness were changing in his life but remained a critical dimension of his everyday round of events. Braw’s stories and dreams about the future would live on in the children and grandchildren who he loved and the lives of others that he touched and to whom he revealed his stories. Shmuel Braw is one of thousands of stories that have been recorded about the lives of persons who lived through some of the major upheavals of the last century and the major events of Jewish history. As such, his life has been idiosyncratic as well as illustrative. His experiences in their specific contexts and in the communities that he lived in are particular to him. I suggest, however, that there are important insights into the nature of Jewish communities and the values that cement the lives of Jews exemplified by carefully reconstructed and analyzed oral histories. We can learn much about Jewish values and Jewish identities from Braw’s reconstruction of his past. His identity in Tarnow was Yiddishkeit (Jewishness), family, and community networks. After the war in Poland and in Italy, he had rejected God as part of his future when he felt abandoned, and in part he saw no future for Judaism. His future was infused with family and community, even though it was no longer clear to him where he would find a community. He remained a religious Jew in the sense of observing weekly and seasonal rituals and attending the synagogue daily. But he said he had lost his belief and would deny that he was as religious as his pious parents and grandparents were. He spoke Yiddish to his friends and family and sang beautiful Jewish tunes. His Jewishness was the Yiddishkeit part of his soul that he could not reject even if he wanted to. When he was in Australia he developed a commitment to his future and that of his family first in Melbourne and then in Israel. He left one daughter, a successful attorney in Melbourne, to join his other daughter in Jerusalem. He was divided by his family’s choices. When he was living in Israel in his last days, his future was connected to the lives of his grandchildren on a religious kibbutz. Melbourne and Australia were different places from Tarnow and Poland; Jerusalem and Israel were different from all his prior places of

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residence. Despite these radical geographical changes in his life, Braw knew that there were new forms of Jewish cultural continuity. He certainly did not express them this way, but his meaning was clear. Braw expressed enormous pride in his grandson’s recitation of the Morning Prayer that Braw had recited in various countries, and most likely that his ancestors recited when they were children.

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THE MICRO PERSPECTIVE: WHAT CAN WE LEARN ABOUT JEWISH IDENTITY? We use oral histories to shed light on the past and to understand the present. What is the role of oral history in studying Jewish identity? At first glance the answer is that oral history is a difficult methodological strategy for understanding how people deal with their identities over the course of their lives. On closer inspection, oral histories may be an underutilized strategy for understanding how conceptions of identity shape actions in the present and help us understand the basis of decision making. People decide among alternatives as they consider future possibilities and options for themselves and their children. More importantly, it may be one strategy for understanding the role of changing values in shaping our lives. Values are always anchored in contexts. Braw’s context was certainly not constant over his life. Structure provides possibilities; values are how we take advantage of these possibilities and opportunities. Shmuel Braw’s story is not simply a story of a survivor of particular horrors but of many persons in the Jewish community. Even within the lifetime of one person we can identify the changing perceptions of the future and learn important rules for disentangling the processes of social change at the individual level, and the points at which individuals and their communities interact. Since conceptions of the future are conditioned by the contexts of the present, futures that we perceive are always best conceptualized not as predictions but as values. We transmit values in ways that may have never been done before, but these values are real as Jewishness is strengthened in new ways. The kibbutz that Braw experienced in his last days was not

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Tarnow, and the relationship with his grandchildren in Israel was something he could never have imagined in the early postwar years. In the end, Braw saw his future as transmitting the core of Jewish values to his children and grandchildren. That core was in part symbolized by a familiar prayer recited by rote. The prayer resonated not from the meaning of its content, but from his experiences and his grandson’s recitation. That great golden chain of generational continuity in families, the transmission of cultural items, whatever they may be, represents one of the core Jewish values—values that are transformed in new contexts through new experiences. One conclusion that emerges in this biography is that a focus on the “assimilation” of Shmuel Braw, in various places and in several contexts, or a focus only on his Judaism would be misleading. A framework that emphasizes his relationship to family and economic networks and to the variety of institutions would provide powerful clues to the distinctiveness of Jews in the process of social change. The oral histories that reveal the perceptions of families and communities, rich in individual detail, are the living books where we can learn the depths of what Jewish values are and how they can be, and have been, transmitted generationally. They reveal stories about values in particular contexts. They reveal to us much about communities and institutions, as perceived and remembered by individuals. For structural contexts we have to turn elsewhere and use different strategies of discovery. Together, the macro and the micro-perspectives bring us closer to an understanding of the transformation of Jews and their communities.

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INTERFACES BETWEEN ERAS

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Rallying All of Israel: David Ben-Gurion and the Book of Joshua Rachel Havrelock

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One cannot hear the words for conquest (kibbush) and settlement (nahalah) in the book of Joshua without picking up the resonance of the modern Israeli occupation and settlement movement. The Israeli occupation, after all, derives its name from Joshua’s systematic wars against Canaanite peoples. Settlers imagine their “fortified cities” on the west bank of the Jordan River as avatars of the sanctified parcels of land divided among tribes following the annihilation of the Canaanites (Josh. 19:35). For these reasons, as well as the distaste of most contemporary readers for chronicles of holy war, post-colonial scholars decry Joshua as a primary figure fulfilled in the many violent arrivals of settlers to indigenous lands.1 The crusaders, the American pilgrims, and 1 See Naim S. Ateek, “A Palestinian Perspective,” in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, ed. R. S. Sigirtharajah (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006); Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77–79, 88–91. Robert Allen Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys and Indians,” in Voices from the Margin.

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the early Zionists, among others, all framed their enterprises as quests for the Promised Land.2 They read the book of Joshua as explaining their times and justifying their wars. God, from this perspective, fought on behalf of manifest Israel. Because of the inseparable valences of conquest/occupation (kibbush) and tribal allotments and militarized settlement (nahalah), I set out to read the book of Joshua together with its most literal interpreters—those who enacted a version of the war for the Promised Land. Joshua cannot be read otherwise—the use of the myth of conquest in history has transformed both history and the myth. My task here is, on the one hand, to show how early Zionist leaders—David Ben-Gurion foremost among them—modeled the modern Jewish experiences of war and settlement on Joshua and, on the other hand, to argue that the book of Joshua itself represents a similar projection of nationalist myth onto a varied and regional form of social organization. The Israeli occupation and the biblical conquest both utilize a myth of national unity in order to obscure the presence of non-nationals. The violent nature of the myth with its focus on battle results from the need to deny the presence of people actually there. The war narrative produces the collective by acknowledging its soldiers as representatives of a social and political unity and marking its enemies as those beyond the political and geographic limits that encase the nation. Yet the non-nationals, however excluded from the political unit, do not disappear from the national space. Their persistence motivates ritualized retellings of their military defeat as if the story of peoples’ disappearance could actually render them invisible. The intensity of the myth arises from the desire to dispel present enemies. That the narrative of unity never works as well during peace as in war and that disparate factions among the nationals prevail present parallel problems. Working double-duty to impose itself on a 2 On the pilgrims: Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: or, the ecclesiastical history of New-England, from its first planting in the year 1620. Unto the year of our Lord, 1698 (London: for Thomas Parkhurst, at the Bible and Three Crowns, Cheapside, 1702), Book VII, 55–56. On the Boers: Michael Prior, The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).

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social reality that doesn’t match, national myth in such cases becomes all the more fervent.3 Commentators have long recognized the bifurcated structure of the book of Joshua. The first twelve chapters recount the action-packed plot of Israel’s ritualized march from exile into homeland where they defeat the resident peoples and claim their patrimony. Joshua serves as the unwavering deuteronomic hero who remains “strong and bold” and “veers neither to the right nor to the left” as he crushes Israel’s enemies and enforces a ban on personal profit from the spoils of war (Josh. 1:6–7). In order for God to fight on behalf of Israel, what Israel appropriates must be dedicated to God who will then redistribute the booty—or at least the blessing—equally among the people.4 Joshua chapters one through twelve constitutes ancient Israel’s holy war, which concludes with the listing of defeated kings. The ensuing chapters, 13–24, literally stop the action in its tracks as they list the borders of each tribe’s territory.5 Although of dubious literary value and often boring for most readers, the border lists command a certain logic: instantiating the conquest in the most concrete of terms and attesting to the utter transformation of landscape. If the land is won in the first twelve chapters, then it is domesticated in the final twelve chapters. In this way, the distinct halves of the book of Joshua function as the stages of conquest and settlement. 3 I am not out to bash the book of Joshua—numbered as I am among its few devoted readers—or to issue a post-colonial condemnation of the State of Israel. Instead, I attend to the foundational place of war in national myth, then to the regional and local realities that the national myth works so hard to deny. 4 “Roland de Vaux (1961) does devote two chapters to describing war in the Hebrew Scriptures, contrasting the banning wars of annihilation in Joshua with the wars in which booty and prisoners are taken during the reigns of the kings described in 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings, and suggests that over time ‘war became, of necessity, the state’s concern; it was profaned,’” Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8. I would amend this with an acknowledgment that the Joshua material functions as the representation of a golden age when God goes into battle with the fledgling nation. 5 Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Biblical Account of the Conquest of Palestine, trans. M. Dagut (Jerusalem: The Magnus Press, 1953), 13–69. The 1985 edition was retitled The Biblical Account of the Conquest of Canaan.

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Such a neat explanation of the editorial logic behind Joshua, however, fails to account for some glaring contradictions. First of all, the boundaries of the tribal areas do not line up with the national borders specified at the opening of the book. Secondly, the text names different groups of people as the conquerors and the residents of the selfsame regions. Third, the subsequent book of Judges portrays a fluid process of tribal battle, entrenchment, and shifting alliances that implies the absence of both a resounding national victory and a centralized army. While these contradictions generate meaning in and of themselves, I argue that they also belong to a wider trend evident in the book of Joshua. Why does the first half of Joshua narrate a scorched earth conquest and the second half provide descriptions of regions wherein the tribes of Israel blend with the very people they were just said to have exterminated? The account of the conquest in the first half of Joshua is the founding military myth of the nation of Israel belonging to the deuteronomic source. The source, driving the continuous historiographical accounts of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, seems to have been initially penned by scribes working for the Judean monarchy. Their writing advocates for a centralized government in Jerusalem and polemicizes against a tribal system. The polemic most frequently takes the form of denouncing the sanctuaries and goddesses supported by the tribes.6 Tribal leaders, regional practices, and local land claims all pose problems for the deuteronomic writers and therefore assume an ambivalent position in their texts. Yet the writers face a problem of their own. They must forge a national narrative that incorporates various tribes and militias as it enlists them in the project of supporting a centralized state. Because the centralized state must emerge out of the alliance of tribes, tribal affiliation and tradition must be co-opted.

6 Saul Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 73. I suggest that the label of “idolatry” in deuteronomistic texts operates in the mode of heresy described by Daniel Boyarin as intended to produce an in-group by identifying deviance. Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

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So despite the fact that the writers would replace the tribes with a kingdom, they must build a kingdom out of the tribes. In order for the tribes to accept the national narrative and its attendant institutions of capital, taxation, and military, they must recognize themselves in the narrative. This recognition, in turn, depends upon the incorporation of their local traditions in the national narrative. The book of Joshua results from this bargain. The conquest serves as the founding myth of the centralized state and the tribal border lists indicate geographical traditions that the tribes brought with them into the alliance. Skillful editing then solves the problem of how to incorporate constitutive regional traditions while problematizing their political provenance and promoting centralization. A new political reality may require a new narrative, but this new narrative cannot be divorced from its constitutive traditions. A popular account argues that a tribal, resource-driven social order preceded the monarchy and perpetuated tensions during its duration.7 I neither read the materials in Joshua according to this social evolutionary model nor through the disintegration and revival scheme presented in the deuter7 To a certain degree, I modify Norman Gottwald’s proposal that three social contexts can be recognized in Joshua: tribal, monarchical, and colonial. Gottwald understands the tribal layer as advocating “coalition building among various highlanders who were more or less a part of an emerging alliance of peoples who formed a precarious peace group,” Gottwald, 109. The tribal stage precedes the monarchy invested in Joshua as “the embryonic king, prototype of Josiah,” 110. The colonial layer speaks to Judahites returning from exile and seeking to purify the community through restoration to the homeland. In this context, Joshua operates as a “narrative charter of the right of the restored Judahite community to determine who is a member on the basis of descent from the original Israelites faithful to Joshua . . . Paradoxically, the mandated violence of Joshua grows more intensely religious as its political effectuality diminishes,” Gottwald, “Theological education as a theorypraxis loop: Situating the book of Joshua in a cultural, social, ethical, and theological matrix,” in The Bible in Ethics: The Second Sheffield Colloquium, ed. John W. Rogerson, Mark Daniel Carroll and Margaret Davies (London: T & T Clark, 1995), 112. While accepting that these institutions motivate various parts of the book of Joshua, I maintain the simultaneity of the tribal and the monarchical institutions. I further suggest that the exilic layer, although intensified during Babylonian exile and Persian return, has roots in the tribal system. See Rachel Havrelock, River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 106–135.

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onomistic history. Instead, I suggest the coexistence of tribal regionalism and a movement of centralized nationalism as the context of the book of Joshua and the explanation for its bifurcated form. The national movement would really like to overpower the regional system—this, I argue, explains the violent nature of the conquest account—but it must claim and reimagine them in order to achieve its own aims. As a national myth, the conquest not only seeks to eradicate Canaanite claims, but also a network of intersecting, local claims to land, resources, and power. In dislodging the traditions from the chronology of the Tanakh, I do not propose to establish an alternate timeline. I also resist the deconstructionist impulse to argue that the local traditions contest, undo, or defang the myth of conquest. Rather, I propose that nationalism and regionalism were coextensive institutions whose charter stories merged during periods of political alliance. The contradictions in the texts and the repeated motif of civil war attest to the tenuous nature of the tribal, regional, and national alliances. The myth of the conquest becomes the collective memory that sustains national cohesion or puts it into practice at times of battle. Yet, in order to be collective, the memory of the conquest must satisfy multiple constitutive archetypes. Everyone wants to locate his ideas at the moment of national beginning. Further, because the book of Joshua must satisfy many parties, its border systems proliferate and contradict. Joshua 1–12, the myth of conquest, enacts unification; every group counted at some point in Israel numbers in its army and recognizes itself in its victory. Joshua, chapters 13–21—the so-called tribal allotments—depict a fluid regional environment in which clans and tribes included in Israel overlap with clans and tribes excluded from Israel. The texts bemoan the slippage as either civil war or apostasy, but these regional maps betray the absence of any event of ethnic cleansing. The rather dry boundary lists of Joshua 13–21 portray a tribal, regional, resource-driven socio-political configuration. National myth appeals to world-making moments of beginning. More than a coincidence of historical contingencies, the rise of a nation represents a fulfillment of destiny that purifies and renews the world. Creation itself undergoes

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realignment in the process. As holy war blends with cosmogony in Joshua 10, Yahweh recreates His people as a nation of heroes and battles the forces of chaos in the form of desert kings. The stakes of this battle are no less than those at the cosmic battle at the onset of time. The battle begins when the king of Jerusalem contemplates with terror the implications of Joshua’s capture and proscription of Jericho and Ai. The recent alliance between Gibeon, “the great city filled with warriors,” and Israel extends the implications to a point intolerable to the king of Jerusalem (10:2). The King of Jerusalem first speaks of the Gibeonites, rather than Israel, as heroes. When five kings of Canaan (named by the text as “Amorites”)8 attack and Joshua defends Gibeon, the inviolable nature of Israelite alliance comes to the fore. Although the Gibeonites tricked Israel into this alliance and bear the mark of unbelonging and subservience, they have a treaty with Israel. The battle at hand substantiates that such a treaty can be neither dissolved nor disregarded. The urgency of this point, pressed in reference to the Gibeonites, speaks to the nature of Israel as a conglomeration of clans, tribes, migrants, and local signatories to a treaty. Israel serves as the umbrella term for these groups. Each act of joining Israel in turn requires reinforcement of the idea of Israel and the treaties that constitute it. The staging of the battle between the heroes of Gibeon and other Canaanites thematizes the power of Israel’s treaty to transform regional geopolitics. The story attests to the protection offered to any group that has a treaty with Israel. That Gibeonites, not ethnic Israelites, are protected dramatizes the strength of the treaty. “Making peace with Israel” is no light matter (10:1).9 When five kings beset Gibeon, its leaders leverage the terms of the treaty. “Do not fail your servants, come to us quickly, deliver us, help us, for all the Amorite kings of the hill country have gathered against 8 On the fictional ascription of the term “Amorites” on present enemies, see Havrelock, River Jordan, 120–123. 9 The peace between Gibeon and Israel represented here, I suggest, reflects a “political form” in which regions, groups, and tribes formed treaties of non-aggression and mutual defense. This “was referred to eventually by its adherents with the name Israel.” Robert B. Coote and Keith W. Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987), 131.

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us” (10:6). As direct as it is, the Gibeonite plea also contains a pun on Joshua’s name. In asking Joshua “to deliver” them, the Gibeonites, in effect, ask Joshua to fulfill the very nature of his role as “deliverer.” The leader and his army go to Gibeon to prove themselves. The summary of Joshua’s actions points to the fulfillment of his role. As they request, Joshua goes to Gibeon bringing “all” the nation and “all the heroes of war” (10:7). Where the King of Jerusalem spoke of Gibeonite warriors, Joshua manifests the warriors of Israel. In going out from the camp at Gilgal to protect an ally, the warriors of Israel become a “whole nation.” The battle for Gibeon is the crucible of national heroism. The emergence of a unified Israel is nothing less than a cosmic event: “neither before nor since has there been such a day” (10:14). Giant stones fall from the sky as the sun and moon halt their circuits in order to witness the war. The victory is decisive: Israel “crushes the necks of the kings beneath their feet” and Joshua becomes the paradigmatic war hero (10:24). A mound of stones geographically marks the shift of regimes. Israel’s victory belongs to God, who stops the very cycles of creation as He dispenses with Israel’s enemies. In the only poetic interruption of the narrative, Joshua engages in divine speech to describe the cosmic import of the day on which Israel slays the five kings of the south (10:12–13). As a result, Joshua becomes canonized as the only man to call God into war (10:14). The military ritual is as elaborate as the divine orchestration in establishing the new era of Israel’s supremacy. The five kings flee God’s hailstorm, as did Lot, to a cave. Joshua orders terrestrial stones as big as those that fell from the sky to be set at the entrance to the cave where he stations his men. Meanwhile, the army pursues the fugitives to prevent them from returning to their cities. By the time Joshua and his troops have finished cutting down men in the open field, only a few survivors make their way into other fortified cities. As they return to camp triumphant, not a soul dares to taunt the soldiers of Israel. The stones in front of the cave are removed, the kings are taken out from within the cave to parade before Joshua, and his officers break their necks with their feet. As he commemorated God’s role in the battle,

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Joshua marks this moment with formulaic language characteristic of the deuteronomistic source: “do not be afraid and do not be discouraged, be strong and be bold for thus will God do to all the enemies you engage” (10:25). With that, Joshua impales the kings and leaves them hanging until evening, after which he has their corpses thrown back in the cave and piles up the stones as a sign of his victory. From there, Joshua marches to the south clearing the way for God’s army. A summary of conquered territories concludes the list of battles:

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Joshua conquered all of the land, the mountains, the Negev, the Shepelah, and the watersheds. Not a survivor remained from all the kings and every soul was proscribed as the Lord, God of Israel had commanded. Joshua conquered them from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza and from all the land of Goshen to Gibeon. Joshua captured all these kings and all their land in one fell swoop because the Lord, God of Israel, fought on Israel’s behalf. Joshua and all Israel returned to the camp in Gilgal (Josh. 10:40–43).

In the Anchor Bible Commentary on Joshua, Robert Boling explains that this summary of the conquest “uses a formula which probably originated in another tradition.”10 Boling finds it even stranger that a purported summary “covers both more and less than is reported.”11 To a certain degree, the book of Joshua exemplifies the relationship between structure and dynamism. The deuteronomic writers fashion the structure while the regional traditions present the fluidity, mixture, and change of social life. However, the regional traditions are no less invested in their boundary systems. This characterizes the double voice of the second half of Joshua—traditions that contest the national paradigm appear constitutive. Even the proud assurance that Joshua destroyed everything “from Kadesh Barnea to Gaza” introduces instability to the myth of the land. Kadesh Barnea in Numbers and Deuteronomy serves as the People of Israel’s primary desert home. There, the spies contest God’s story of the Promised Land and persuade their cohort to resist a life of endless 10 Robert Boling and G. Ernest Wright, Joshua: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 297. 11 Ibid., 297.

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war and there, in retaliation, God dooms a generation to death in exile. Historical-geographical scholars of the Bible explain that Kadesh Barnea hosted a sizable oasis of much potential benefit to the southern desert lands, but we can be more certain of the textual resonance than the assumed location of Kadesh Barnea. The mention of Gaza causes more trouble. One text explains that Joshua’s heroic slaying of giants stopped short “only in Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod” where Anakites remain (Josh. 11:22). Toward the end of his military life, God reminds Joshua of the shortcoming: “you are old, past your prime and much of the land remains to be seized . . . Namely, that of the five Philistine lords of Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Gath, and Ekron” (Josh. 13:3). If Kadesh Barnea recalls the failings of his fellow spies, then Gaza points to Joshua’s most egregious failure. The book of Judges ascribes victory over Gaza to the tribe of Judah: “Judah captured Gaza and its borderlands, Ashkelon and its borderlands, and Ekron and its borderlands” ( Judg. 1:18), but the Septuagint amends the verse to “But Judah did not capture Gaza.” Judges 1 grants Judah victory over Gaza and presents the tribe as subjecting Jerusalem to annihilation: “the People of Judah fought and captured Jerusalem; they subdued it with the sword and set the city aflame” (Judg. 1:8). A juxtaposed Benjaminite tradition sounds less sanguine: “The People of Benjamin did not dispossess the Jebusite residents of Jerusalem, so the Jebusites dwell with the People of Benjamin in Jerusalem until today” (Judg. 1:21). Joshua 15:63 maintains the Jebusite presence in Jerusalem, but substitutes Judah for Benjamin.12 Another Benjaminite map in Joshua 18 places Jerusalem in Benjamin’s domain, but refers to it gentilically as ha-yevusi (‫)היבוסי‬, “the Jebusite city we call Jerusalem” (18:28).13 With Gaza the land of unconquered giants and Jerusalem the divided city, can one view regionalism as anything more than a state of 12 Joshua 12:10 lists the king of Jerusalem among the kings slain by Joshua. 13 Kaufmann reads the overlapping Judahite and Benjaminite claims as “an act of national policy, an agreed covenant between all the tribes of Israel, a covenant of the tribes which conquered the Land.” However utopian as an early aspiration, he argues, the national dream is realized when David conquers Jerusalem. Kaufmann, Biblical Account of the Conquest of Palestine, 24–5.

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permanent dispute in which elastic boundaries necessitate charismatic military leaders? Yes, when it comes to the need for water. In pressing for water, one of the two female voices in Joshua speaks out. Achsah, married off to her kinsman Othniel, the conqueror of Kiriyat-Sefer (Debir),14 returns to her father Caleb to renegotiate the borders of her patrimony. She complains, “You have given me away as Negev land, now give me springs of water” (Josh. 15:19). Understanding what it takes to survive in the desert, Caleb redistributes a water system with upper and lower springs (Josh. 15:16–19, Judg. 1:12–15). Where Mieke Bal has read a troubled father-daughter relationship, I notice a nonmilitary discourse.15 The text introduces a female speaker, I suggest, in order to show that water acquisition is not a military procedure. Beyond the battles, a young woman faces the necessary fact of settlement: everyone has to draw from existing sources of water. This need is stronger than the national narrative and tribal loyalties. Since no soldier dare admit this, it is left to the daughter of the Kenizzite insider. Resource distribution that ensures everyone’s survival constitutes the basis of the regional order suggested in the second half of the book of Joshua. Water, war, and national myth were all on the mind of David Ben-Gurion when he convened his study group on Joshua in 1958. Held on Friday mornings at the prime minister’s residence, the Joshua study group included President Itzhaq Ben-Tzvi, Supreme Court Justice Shneur Zalman Heshin, and the leading Israeli Biblicists and archeologists. Ben-Gurion’s other grand conceptual project at the time was the 14 Othniel leads Israel during a period in which “the Israelites settled among the Canaanites, Hitties, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivities, and Jebusites; they took their daughters to wife and gave their own daughters to their sons, and they worshiped their gods” (Judg. 3:5–6). Marc Zvi Brettler appraises Judges 3:7–11 as an invented deuteronomic tradition intended to rectify the absence of Judean judges in the book of Judges. The traditions in Joshua 15, Brettler maintains, form the basis of Othniel’s portrait in Judges 3 as a Joshua-like deliverer (3:9). Present in the book of Joshua, Othniel ideally effects “the transition between the conquest and the period of the judges.” Marc Zvi Brettler, The Book of Judges (London: Routledge, 2002), 26. 15 Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

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National Water Carrier, the conveyance of water from the Kinneret and subterranean wells to burgeoning Jewish areas. The absorption of local water sources and claims combined with the connection of Jewish communities through nationalized waters motivated his signature infrastructure project. As the Joshua study group met, construction of the National Water Carrier was underway. Tinged by recent memory, the exegesis expressed in the study sessions at the prime minister’s home brings a decidedly military framework to bear on the biblical book.16 Such a framework had by design and necessity been absent from the history of Jewish biblical interpretation, so a fairly straight line of identification could be drawn between Joshua and the young State of Israel. These soldiers and their civilian counterparts were living the myth of Joshua. Each meeting of the Joshua study group focused on a theme or episode in the biblical book and featured the address of a particular speaker. A lively discussion followed the formal presentation, after which the speaker could address the others and reiterate his arguments. In the session on the Gibeonites, Supreme Court Justice Shneur Zalman Heshin introduces Menahem Haran by way of his own analogy. Joshua’s treaty with the Gibeonites, from Heshin’s perspective, is “one of the first, if not the first, instances that we see a non-aggression pact between two nations.” It differs from more familiar armistice agreements in that “the sanction against the nation that violates the treaty was not determined by a human being, the League of Nations, or the U.N., but by God” and by the asymmetrical case of “a one-sided 16 The war on the commentators’ minds was not the more recent war over the Suez Canal, but Israel’s founding War of Independence in 1948. The very name of Joshua recalled the battle to lift the blockade of Jerusalem and conquer the villages surrounding the severed road: “Though not optimistic, the Haganah commanders believed that surprise and the fact that the main assault would take place at night, when the (Arab) Legion’s artillery would be less effective, would offset the Jordanians’ obvious advantages. The operation was codenamed Bin-Nun, after Joshua Bin-Nun, who had commanded the Israelite forces battling the Canaanites at the same spot, the Ayalon Valley, some thirty-two hundred years before. In command was OC Seventh Brigade Shamir. The soldiers were told that they were tasked ‘to save Jerusalem.’” Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 221.

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non-aggression pact.”17 Joshua pledges non-belligerence and protection to the Gibeonites, but exacts no reciprocal promise. One gets the feeling that Heshin respects Joshua as a general, but finds him lacking as a diplomat. Haran resists the bait—only in passing does he point out to Heshin that “making peace” conveys the sense of mutual non-aggression (Josh. 9:15)—but he does draw attention to Joshua’s nonviolent mode of dealing with present enemies.18 Joshua’s strategy off the battlefield, so Haran implies, shows that diplomacy can erase the existence of a people as definitively as annihilation. As he sketches the 800 years in which the Gibeonites move from a recognized national group to an unmarked segment of Judean society, Haran presents the idea that peace treaties can facilitate the disbanding of internal others and promote their ultimate absorption. That is, negotiating with the undefeated does not necessarily confer national recognition. Despite its legendary features, Haran sees a historical kernel of truth in the Gibeonite episode. Joshua chose to establish a peace treaty with the Gibeonites in the land rather than battle against them. In exchange for his non-aggression, Joshua imposed servitude on the Gibeonites yet allowed them to remain in their territory (‫)נחלתם‬. The liveliest moment of Haran’s Gibeonite history and the one that most speaks to Ben-Gurion’s hermeneutic of “the free Hebrew nation in its land” investigating “the creations of the free Hebrew nation in its land in days of old”19 comes when Haran accounts for the Gibeonites through a modern map. Gibeon is El-Jib; its satellite Chephirah is “northwest of Jerusalem and contiguous with our border with Jordanian holdings”; Kiryiat-Yearim is Abu-Ghosh (“or, to be more precise, 17 Shneur Zalman Heshin, “Introduction to The Gibeonites—Their Place in the Campaign of Conquering the Land and in Israel’s History,” in Iyyumin bsefer Yehoshua: Diyuni Ha-Hoog Lemikrah beveyt David Ben-Gurion [Studies in the Book of Joshua: The Proceedings of the Tanakh Study Group in the Home of David BenGurion], ed. Hayim Rabin, Yehuda Elitsur, Hayim Gevaryahu, and Ben-Tzion Luria (Jersusalem: Kiryat Sepher, 1971), 101. 18 Menahem Haran, “The Gibeonites,” in Iyyumin bsefer Yehoshua, 102. 19 David Ben-Gurion, “The Blessing of the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, to the Participants in the Study Group,” Studies in the Book of Joshua, 7.

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Tel-El-Azhar next to Abu Ghosh”); and Beearot is, it seems, El-Bireh to the north.20 Joshua’s treaty springs to life in light of the divided Jerusalem of the commentators’ own time. The Gibeonite cities merge with Palestinian places, and a perceived affinity between the residents of Abu-Ghosh and Joshua’s Canaanite allies suggests to Haran that Joshua was a clever strategist indeed. Abu-Ghosh, as made clear in Rebecca Luna Stein’s anthropological study, is Israel’s allied Palestinian city par excellence. The city remained neutral during the war of 1948 and never posed a military threat or staged a rebellion against Israel. Stein’s ethnography presents the ways in which the residents of Abu Ghosh have referred to this alliance through the display of Israeli national symbols and, as a result, capitalized on it as a destination for Jewish Israelis to enjoy Arabic food.21 Menahem Haran’s analogy is strengthened through the example of present ethnic others absorbed into the national collective through alliance. Referring to the map, Haran points out that “the Gibeonites were not concentrated in one territorial zone, but part of a confederation of scattered cities.”22 Considering the strategic importance of the region, Joshua did well to neutralize them as hard laborers in Israel. In Haran’s estimation, Joshua never believed that the Gibeonites came from a distant land. This is simply an etiological explanation intended to legitimize Joshua’s clever strategy. Their hard work later won the Gibeonites a service position in the Temple.23 Before achieving this honor, however, the Gibeonites were scattered from their cities in the days of Saul (2 Sam. 21:2), “ceased to exist as an ethno-territorial collective,” and became “absorbed into the new class of Canaanite slaves” in the days

20 Haran, “The Gibeonites,” 105. 21 Rebecca Luna Stein, “Culinary Patriotism: Ethnic Restaurants and Melancholic Citizenship,” Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political Lives of Tourism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 97–127. 22 Haran, “The Gibeonites,” 105. 23 “The great privilege of dynastic servants at the temple (we see this at the Mosque of Omar and Al-Aqsa, maintained by Samaritans) was a widespread phenomenon in those days.” Haran, “The Gibeonites,” 120.

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of Solomon.24 As much as one might not like to say such things out loud, Haran insists, “We must look at historical facts nakedly, even if they are not pleasant for us.”25 A treaty, by Haran’s standards, is not a sign of weakness but the first step in a process of subjugation. In conclusion, we can distinguish three stages in the history of this collective. The stage at which they were distinctly Gibeonites was the first in their history. The Gibeonites dwelled in their territory, partially enslaved and laboring as hewers of wood and carriers of water in several locations. At a later stage they functioned more as servants in the temple and in service to the king without a unifying origin— “nitinim, and servants of Solomon” as we read in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The third stage took place at the beginning of the Second Temple period. In essence, they did not exist as a collective in and of themselves in this period. In fact, they had already disappeared in this period, as no other witness on the workings of the Temple speaks of the existence of “nitinim” in the Second Temple period. We see then that the period of their history lasts for at least 800 years— from the time of the conquest until the early days of the Second Temple. The history of these Canaanites is concurrent then with the history of the ancient nation of Israel as recorded in scripture.26 Haran’s Gibeonite history unfolds in three stages. First, the Gibeonites remain a subordinate group in their ancestral territory; next they lose definition as a landless class of temple servants; finally they blend, without ethnic name or class designation, into the larger collective. The identification of the Gibeonites with “the nitinim”— something of a standard in biblical studies—helps to reconcile the record of the Gibeonites in Solomon’s time with later mentions of non-Israelite temple servants.27 The particular mileage that Haran gets from the association is that the removal of the Gibeonites from their land begins to effect a disappearance anticipated in Joshua’s treaty. 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 106–07. Ibid., 109. Ibid., 109. On the nitinim as Gibeonites, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, Gibeon and Israel: The Role of Gibeon and the Gibeonites in the Political and Religious History of Early Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 106–08.

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The reference to the modern map implies that Haran imagines the Gibeonites as analogous to the Arabs in Israel’s midst in the 1950s. The biblical example proves that conquered cities and regions can be recognized without jeopardizing national security or cohesion. Since they have been conquered, the recognition already involves subordination that can later intensify and lead to the dissolution of their national and ethnic difference. Absorption, Haran seems to think, is an effective means to cope with present non-nationals. Although hardly a picture of happy coexistence, Haran’s history of the Gibeonites does admit that non-nationals and ethnic others share a parallel fate with Israel. After Israel falls as a nation with the destruction of the Second Temple, the Gibeonites likewise “cease to exist as a living entity.”28 Despite their precarious status, the Gibeonites rise and fall with Israel, and Israel only fully becomes a nation when it is able to enter into a treaty with Gibeon and establish a collective into which they can disappear. Haran’s theory of absorption as conquest falls somewhere between the position of Yigal Yadin that the archeological record proves that “Lachish, Debir, Beit-El, Hazor—all of these cities were destroyed at once, in an absolute range of time during the twenty years of 1230–1250 BCE”29 and the position of Yohanan Aharoni “that the Canaanite presence continues to exist through the phenomenon of treaties with preexisting socio-territorial powers.”30 Aharoni argues that the tribes of Israel participated in semi-regular migrations mirroring those of other regional groups in the period. The maps of Joshua 12–22, from his perspective, record these migrations. The contesting claims—such as we saw in the cases of Gaza and Jerusalem—result from a dynamic process of tribal comings and goings. Aharoni goes on to say that a grand military conquest never occurred. Instead, Israelite tribes sedentarized into woodlands, wilderness, and the interstitial zones of Canaan. The investment in borders, from Aharoni’s point of view, derives from the experience of living in border zones and a protracted settlement 28 Haran, “The Gibeonites,” 110. 29 Yigal Yadin, “Military and Archaeological Aspects in the Description of the Conquest of the Land in the Book of Joshua,” Studies in the Book of Joshua, 79. 30 Yohanan Aharoni, “The Gibeonites,” 113.

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process of slow habituation and absorption. The borders shift, he maintains, in situations of greater and lesser security. In describing the arrival of ancient Israelite tribes, Aharoni seems to have the founders of kibbutzim in mind:

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On the one hand, they learned from the Canaanite inhabitants as true and diligent students, and, on the other hand, they were not swallowed up by the seemingly superior surrounding culture . . . Through time, they realized an original, independent culture despite the fact that they borrowed so much from the Canaanites in the land.31

Canaanite neighbors instruct the Israelites on how to survive in the wilds of Canaan—here one thinks of the taboun, bread making, and dairy technologies that the kibbutz founders picked up from their neighboring fellaheen—and eventually the Israelites expand from the wilderness to the borders of Canaanite cities. This patient yet persistent project, for Aharoni, meant that Canaanite cities with long standing cultural traditions of their own went unincorporated. Aharoni’s myth of the empty land sounds particularly reasonable after Yigal Yadin blasts the very premise as ahistorical accommodation. On the basis of his excavations at Hazor, Yadin insists on the destruction of all the major Canaanite centers by a unified and victorious army led by Joshua. He derides Aharoni’s argument as the notion of “quiet settlement.”32 Unity does not result from slow and individualized processes, Yadin contends, but is the necessary precondition for a successful army. The local battles of Judges, neither primary nor coextensive, represent the breakdown of a disciplined military society, one that, Yadin implies, should form the permanent basis for a modern Israeli society. David Ben-Gurion, ever the politician, reconciles Aharoni and Yadin’s positions in his own innovative thesis that stands as the last word in the study sessions on Joshua. In Ben-Gurion’s account, only the family of Joseph migrated to Egypt, endured slavery, and returned to Canaan under the leadership of Joshua. Joshua and his army cleared 31 Aharoni, “The Settlement of the Tribes of Israel in the Land,” Studies in the Book of Joshua, 232. 32 Yadin, “The Settlement of the Tribes of Israel in the Land,” 234.

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the nettlesome others from Israel’s midst and reinvigorated the monotheism of the tribes who had remained in the land. Ben-Gurion’s position enables him to solve the exegetical crux of the double covenant scene with which Joshua ends without recourse to source criticism. In his reading, the covenant scene of Joshua 23 encourages the community of believers who came from Egypt to uphold their Torah, and Joshua 24, the story of the covenant at Shechem, chastises the bulk of the Hebrew tribes who had degenerated into Canaanite idol worship.33 The conquest is certainly significant to Ben-Gurion, but he interprets it not primarily as an attack on outsiders, but rather the occasion of an internal revival. Ben-Gurion, perhaps emulating the deuteronomistic writers with whom he so strongly identified, shows less concern with claiming borders than with proving that Israel maintained a constant presence in its homeland. Israel in a proto-monotheistic form even preceded Abraham in the land; in fact, Abraham chose Canaan for no reason other than the presence of these “Hebrews.” Israel, an indigenous group surrounded by Canaanite neighbors, underwent a great rebirth and revival after Joshua crossed the Jordan. Ben-Gurion subjects the concept “indigenous” to a very particular redefinition. On the one hand, the fact that most tribes never left proves the indelible link between Israel—which Ben-Gurion easily glosses as “Jews”—and the land; on the other hand, the local tribes “were closer in spirit to their Canaanite neighbors,” a backward bunch who required redemption though “the return of the elite among the

33 “It is the veteran residents of the land that were divided into tribes according to their place of settlement . . . The history of the Hebrew people was not known to the veterans in the land, and as a result Joshua began his words with the story of the early history up until the exodus from Egypt. Though a belief in one God was their historical legacy, they also had ‘foreign gods’ in their midst, since they had lived for several generations among idol-worshippers.” Ben-Gurion, “Chapters 23–24 from the Book of Joshua,” Ben-Gurion Looks at the Bible, trans. Jonathan Kolatch (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1972), 200. This speech, delivered at the President’s House on February 24, 1963, expands on Ben-Gurion’s theory presented to the Joshua Study Group under the title, “The Antiquity of Israel in Its Land.”

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Hebrew people to the land.”34 Ben-Gurion never specifically equates the indigenous Hebrews with any specific group in his own time or the elite returnees with his own Ashkenazi, socialist, secular cohort, but he does figure himself as Joshua and the primary task before him as facilitating immigration and ameliorating the educational and spiritual state of non-European Jews. As under Joshua, Ben-Gurion believes that he can unify world Jewry through Jewish nationalism. While invested in a territorialized nationalism, Ben-Gurion never fixates on a particular set of borders. In 1918, Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote Eretz Yisrael, a book in Yiddish that insists upon the very physical nature of the liturgical Jewish utopia. They remain uncommitted to any particular boundary system, dissuading their readers from considering “the ideal boundaries that are promised to us according to tradition” or “historic borders that have changed many times and evolved by chance.”35 Although the connection to the land has a biblical basis, the borders will depend upon “the cultural, economic and ethnographic conditions of the population that lives there today.”36 For Ben-Gurion, the Bible served to foster Jewish unity, but it was the practice of immigration and settlement that would determine the contours of the nation. This theory comports with Ben-Gurion’s position on the Arab nationalisms developing simultaneously with Zionism. Although his positions often changed, Ben-Gurion never fetishized boundaries. In the 1920s and early 1930s, he advocated a federation encompassing Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine—the British holdings of the formerly Ottoman Middle East. The federation would be Arab with provisions for a Jewish state or autonomous Jewish regions should immigration be permitted throughout the federation. No Arab who wanted to remain in a Jewish region would be dispossessed and, if Iraq were part of the federation, then no Jew would be dispossessed from an Arab region. 34 Ben-Gurion, “The Antiquity of Israel in Its Land,” Studies in the Book of Joshua, 326. 35 See Gideon Biger, The Boundaries of Modern Palestine, 1840–1947 (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 58. 36 Ibid.

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In practical terms, the federation idea came to an end with the Palestinian General Strike of 1936–39. At this point, Ben-Gurion accommodated British partition schemes while resisting the attendant limitations on Jewish immigration. In his recent biography of BenGurion, Shimon Peres portrays him as an enthusiastic architect of the two-state solution.37 Prepared to accept British partition schemes, Ben-Gurion found the international recognition that accompanied the United Nations partition of Palestine all the more acceptable. However, when the opportunity to conquer more territory arose in the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion presided over Joshua-like evacuations and destruction of Palestinian towns. His flexibility regarding borders now served another purpose; indeterminate borders could always be expanded by war. And so they were. Ben-Gurion, it seems, did not object to a Jordanian West Bank, but rather identified two central problems with the post-1949 status quo: the separation of Jews from their spiritual capital in Jerusalem and the truncation of the water system. Ben-Gurion addressed the water problem—the exclusion of most of the Jordan River from Israeli territory—by commissioning the National Water Carrier. But Jewish alienation from Jerusalem could not be solved through public works projects. In order for the biblical political past to be present and to properly unify the reborn People of Israel, Jews simply had to have access to Jerusalem. This was achieved, not by Ben-Gurion, but by Moshe Dayan, the general who fashioned Ben-Gurion as “the Moses of our time” and himself as Joshua who finally made it to the Jordan.38 Ecstatic over what he perceived as the repatriation of an ancient capital, Ben-Gurion encouraged Jewish settlement in Jerusalem and Hebron. However, cognizant and even somewhat respectful of Palestinian nationalism as well as King Hussein’s political aspirations, he rejected the annexation of the West Bank. In the name of unifying Israel, Ben-Gurion advocated holding Jerusalem as a capital and the 37 Shimon Peres and David Landau, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2011). 38 Moshe Dayan, Living with the Bible (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1978), 77.

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Golan Heights as a vital water source but withdrawing from all other conquered territories. He saw separation from others as ultimately vital for Jewish nationalism; “The word Hebrew,” he glossed, “designates not only a certain identity, but a separation from others.”39 Yet no matter his investments in unity through a secular national biblical Jewish culture, collective solidarity eluded Ben-Gurion. Jabotinsky split from the World Zionist Organization over the Jordan as a border; Mapam split from Mapai; the religious parties were brought into government in the name of coalition building; the generals defied him; Gush Emunim marched into a kind of extra-Israeli space they named “Judea” and “Samaria”; Israeli Jews remembered where they came from and engaged in identity politics. The tribal order, so to speak, held and then intensified after Ben-Gurion’s death. In a sense, Ben-Gurion’s great fear of a fragmented period following the halutzim (‫—)חלוצים‬the Joshua generation—was realized. An interpretation of the book of Joshua not offered at his study sessions and an appraisal of the first decades of the State of Israel show that a system of more local allegiances had accompanied the Jewish national project from the beginning.

39 Ben-Gurion, “The Antiquity of Israel in Its Land,” 323.

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Who Is a Marrano?: Reflections on Modern Jewish Identity Ira Robinson

Concordia University

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INTRODUCTION Jews, Judaism, and Jewish history are highly controversial, to say the least. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that virtually everything Jews have ever asserted has also been categorically denied, from Abraham (he did not exist) to the Holocaust (it never happened), let alone literally everything related to the Israel-Arab conflict. Having said that, I think it is still true that the issue of the relationship between the Marranos and Jewish identity is one of the most interestingly controversial issues in the current field of Jewish studies, with numerous scholars—both Jewish and non-Jewish—addressing the subject across a span of a couple of centuries and coming to diametrically opposed conclusions based on the same bodies of evidence. This article will examine the range of scholarly opinion, pro and con, on the identity of the Marranos, from the fifteenth century to the present. We will notice that the varying attitudes toward the Marranos,

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who challenge conventional definitions of “Jewishness,” reflect both political agendas, as well as major trends in the development of contemporary conceptions of “Jewish identity.”1 In other words, we will see that, at least in part, these opposite conclusions result from vastly differing attitudes toward what “Jewish identity” is, or might be. Much of this debate, especially recently, relates to the issues grouped under the rubric “post-modernity,” one important feature of which is the notion “that cultural identities are no longer structures . . . regulated by the constraints of descent but are structured and transformed by the freedoms of consent.”2 With respect to post modernity and the Jews, Debra Kaufman has further written: Prior to a postmodern turn in intellectual inquiry, most discussions of Jewish identity assumed the existence of an “essential Jewish self.” More recently, feminist and postmodern critiques have forced us to make explicit the political uses of linear and essentialist constructs, especially when doing identity research.3

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The controversy surrounding the Marranos and their identity is also seen to reflect what David Graizbord and Claude B. Stuczynski have termed “a decades-long but still powerful fascination among the humanist disciplines with the fluidity of identity.”4 Dealing with a vastly different subject, ancient Jewish magic, but finding quite similar patterns of thought, Gideon Bohak insightfully observes that in the course of the twentieth century there has been “a tectonic shift in the

1 David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: the Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: JPS, 1996), 82–3. 2 Stephen Sharot, Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 167. 3 Debra Kaufman, Review of Boundaries of Jewish Identity, ed. Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff, H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews, July 2011, https://www.h-net.org/ reviews/showrev.php?id=32114. For some of the implications of postmodern thought for Jewish history, see Murray Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007). 4 David Graizbord and Claude Stuczinski, “Introduction,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 121.

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way scholars use many of their favorite terms.”5 We shall observe how the subject of “Marranos” has undergone just such a “tectonic shift.”

THE MARRANO PHENOMENON

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However it has been understood with respect to its conceptual framework, the phenomenon of the great masses of Jews who, under varying degrees of duress, converted to Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has captured the imagination and greatly puzzled generations of scholarly observers. The Marrano phenomenon is, as Israel Salvator Révah remarked in what is surely one of the great understatements in scholarly literature, “une histoire terriblement compliquée.”6 Who are these puzzling and complex people about whom Révah and others have so strongly disputed? Are they to be considered Jews? Christians? Jewish Christians? Radical skeptics? None of the above? As we will see, all of these possibilities have been tried and none of them has completely satisfied all critics. The Marranos span categories, such as “Judaism” and “Christianity” that, for most ordinary observers, are not “supposed” to coexist in one person at the same time.7 As Graizbord rightly remarks: The central predicament of early modern Judeoconversos . . . lay in the fact that they inhabited a cultural threshold . . . at once a boundary and a crossroads between the Christian and Jewish worlds . . . Because normative views of religion construed the boundaries of the Christian and Jewish camps as rigid and impermeable, the very

5 Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. 6 Israel Salvator Révah, Des Marranes à Spinoza (Pari: Vrin, 1995), 43. 7 Witness, in contemporary times, the anomalous position of “Messianic Jews” in the North American Jewish community. It has become a demographic commonplace to count as “Jews” those who report no religious beliefs, or even those who might combine Buddhist practice with their Jewish identity, but not those who count themselves as Christians. Also in play is a tendency on the part of Jews to suppress impact of Jewish conversion to Christianity. Cf. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: The Convert Critique and the Culture of Ashkenaz, 1750–1800 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 2003).

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Who Is a Marrano?

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existence of Judeoconversos confounded traditional meanings of religious community and religious identity.8

What can we call them? As the title of this study indicates, many scholars call them Marranos, though others are strongly opposed to this name. But what indeed does that word actually mean? In a general sense, the term “Marrano,” as Révah has stated, is taken as, “somme tout, malheureuse . . . une très grave insulte” (generally unfortunate . . . a very grave insult).9 Though most observers now assume that the word somehow denotes “swine,” there is nonetheless still no generally accepted and conclusive answer regarding its derivation.10 This is in and of itself an illustration of the nebulous and controverted state of research on the subject. It nonetheless remains a fact, as Alpert observes, that despite its probably pejorative nature, “Marrano . . . is a term used habitually by Jewish historians though it is not found in the Inquisition literature.”11 Even if scholars were to eschew the term “Marrano,” with all its ambiguities, could the people in question be better defined as Crypto-Jews? Conversos? New Christians? Men of the Nation (homens da nação)? Portuguese Merchants? New Jews? Fuzzy Jews?12 They have been referred to by all of these names, and more. As Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano remarks, numerous scholars who publish in this field “often make indiscriminating use of terms .  .  . semantically different from each other . . . as if the words meant the same thing.” It is obvious, therefore, as Pulido Serrano observes, that scholarship lacks a consensus regarding the definition of some key basic concepts.13   8 David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2–3.   9 Révah, Des Marranes, 14. 10 Ibid. 11 Michael Alpert, Secret-Judaism and the Spanish Inquisition (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves Publications, 2008), 218, note 4. 12 Norman Simms and Charles Meyers, Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto-Jews, and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Century (Hamilton, New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers, 2001), “Introduction,” 1. 13 Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities: the Portuguese New Christians,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 129.

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What about the descendants of these people whom we cannot adequately name, to the present day? Are they Jews, and, if so, in what way? If they are not Jews, why are contemporary Jews so interested in them?14 Why this intense, and in the words of David Graizbord, “somewhat sterile” debate on the “Jewishness” of these people?15 Miriam Bodian points the way toward an answer when she remarks:

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[S]cholars who have depicted judaizing martyrdom . . . have done so in a way that can only be regarded as an interesting metamorphosis of Jewish martyrology itself . . . they have tended to adopt a view that echoes rabbinic tradition, assuming a timeless affinity between converso martyrs and other Jewish martyrs, ancient and modern . . . They have also tended to confine the topic to Jewish history, isolating it from the wider context of early modern religious persecution and resistance, and minimizing or denying crypto-Jewish deviations from a monolithically imagined rabbinic Judaism.16

In sum, in a symposium on “History, Memory, and Jewish Identity,” I could hardly have found a more interesting and relevant subject—one that, as Bodian points out, has been “deeply ensnarled in polemical and apologetic battles.”17 Daniel Swetschinski further remarks that academic discussion in this area of research “reflects contemporary ideological realities and styles of scholarly and political argumentation.”18 Finally, Jaime Contreras warns us that “l’historien court l’énorme risque de forcer la documentation et de prendre ses désires pour des réalités” (The historian runs the enormous risk of forcing the documentation and taking his desires to be reality).19 14 On this contemporary interest, see Adam Sutcliffe, “Sephardic Amsterdam and the Myths of Jewish Modernity,” JQR 97 (2007): 417–437. 15 David L. Graizbord, “Religion and Ethnicity Among ‘Men of the Nation’: Toward a Realistic Interpretation,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 32. 16 Miriam Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses: Crypto-Jewish Martyrdom in the Iberian World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), xii–xiii. 17 Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), x. 18 Daniel Swetchinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: the Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam (London: Littman Library, 2000), 6. 19 Jaime Contreras, Pouvoir et inquisition en Espagne au XVIe siècle (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 13.

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Of course, while the interpretive pitfalls inherent in the subject matter are all too real, observing the scholarship on the Marrano phenomenon offers us the opportunity to seek a more profound understanding of the fundamental historical process of the construction of Jewish identity, and this can be of considerable significance.20 Moreover, the impact of the Marrano phenomenon on the shaping of Jewish history and memory in the past century or so has been of great importance. Thus Henry Kamen states,

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The terrible reality that most of the mortal victims of the Spanish Inquisition were of Jewish origin, left an ineffaceable memory of the tribunal in the minds of the Jewish people.21

I come to the writing of this article from several different directions. I count myself among the students of the late Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, much of whose fruitful career was devoted to the history of Iberian Jewry and its diaspora in early modern times.22 More recently, I was approached by someone who wants to produce a television documentary concerning the alleged presence in seventeenth and eighteenth century Quebec—a period in which professing Jews were not allowed to settle—of Marranos or their descendants. While I was initially skeptical of this premise, some research brought me to two conclusions. The first is that the presence of people of Jewish or Marrano descent among the first European colonists in New France is not as farfetched as it first seems for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this article.23 More importantly, however, the 20 Thus Thomas F. Glick states, “Coming to grips with marrano culture and society has produced a marvelous historical literature, the source of whose passion and dynamism is the social and psychological dilemma of the marranos themselves.” See “On Conversos and Marrano Ethnicity,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 75. 21 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: a Historical Revision (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1998), 311. 22 David N. Myers, “Of Marranos and Memory,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron and David N. Myers (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 1–21. 23 See Pierre Anctil, “Jews and New France,” in Canada’s Jews: in Time, Space, and Spirit, ed. Ira Robinson (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 13–19.

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interest in Quebec in possible Marrano origins as part of its “de souche”24 population corresponds to a much larger phenomenon of contemporary manifestations and revelations of hidden ancestral Marrano identities in New Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere.25 There is obviously much to say on this subject. To deal thoroughly with all of its many and complex implications requires much more elaboration than is possible in one article. I will, therefore, content myself at present with presenting a few major chapter headings that will readily demonstrate why this subject is of the utmost importance for any serious consideration of “History, Memory, and Jewish Identity.”

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MARRANOS: TRUTH IN FICTION? Clearly the Marranos and their story have been widely popularized by Jews from the nineteenth century to the present, and the romanticized Marrano image projected in the minds of the public at large is strong and memorable. Jane Jacobs, long before she confronted the Marranos as a scholarly issue, had thus absorbed as a child “the 1950s [ Jewish Sunday school] image of the medieval Marranos that framed my childhood reminiscences of the secret Spanish Jews.”26 Yirmiyahu Yovel testifies to a similar experience growing up in Israel.27 The image that Jacobs, Yovel, and many other Jews had absorbed was ultimately fed by scholarship on the subject, and that scholarship often appeared to be anything but “sober.” It must be said in its 24 Roughly translated as “of French origins.” 25 Stanley M. Hordes, To the End of the Earth: A History of the Crypto-Jews of New Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Bruno Feitler, “Four Chapters in the History of Crypto-Judaism in Brazil: The Case of the Northeastern New Christians (17th–21st centuries),” Jewish History 25 (2011): 207–227. More generally, see Barbara Kessel, Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2000). 26 Janet Liebman Jacobs, Hidden Heritage: The Legacy of the Crypto-Jews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2. Cf. Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: the Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 61–63. 27 Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), x.

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defense that the scholarship in question reflected the evidence it possessed, and the evidence concerning the Marrano phenomenon was and is easily sensationalized. Norman Roth gave expression to this when he said, in his discussion of one incident, that it is “stranger than any modern novel (or novels passing as history) could invent.”28 He is far from the only scholar to react in this way. In Cecil Roth’s (Norman and Cecil Roth are not related) classic History of the Marranos, the terms “romance” and “romantic” form a leitmotif, and Cecil Roth’s Marranos represent a story “unparalleled in history for sheer dramatic appeal.”29 In expressing himself in this way, Cecil Roth opened himself to criticism on the part of later scholars, which he certainly received.30 Frederic K. Lehman, for instance, characterized Roth’s work on the Marranos as “grounded in the romanticist tradition of associating a cultural inventory with something vaguely and mystically thought of as a unique historical experience, properly attached to racelike populations.”31 David Gitlitz, too, decried Roth’s depictions of “the romantic myth of crypto-Judaism,” and further stated that “the secrecy of the Spanish Inquisition . . . [has] appealed to the popular, sensationalist and sometimes prurient imaginations.”32 Carlos Carrete Parrondo concurs: “The notion that Jews and conversos constituted one spiritual body is purely a romantic one with little bearing to available data.”33 Finally, Jose Alberto Rodrigues Da Silva Tavim understands Cecil Roth’s History of the Marranos as

28 Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews From Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), xiii. 29 Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: JPS, 1941), vii, 28, 296. 30 Bodian speaks of Cecil Roth’s utilization of the “heroic narrative,” Dying, x. Cf. Norman Roth, Conversos, xii, and Révah, Des Marranes, 18. However, on page 22, Révah himself uses the word “drame.” Cf. Frederic Krome, “Creating ‘Jewish History for Our Own Need’: The Evolution of Cecil Roth’s Historical Vision, 1925–1935,” Modern Judaism 21 (2001): 216–237. 31 Cited in Glick, “On Conversos,” 74. 32 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, x. 33 Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “Jews, Castilian Conversos, and the Inquisition: 1482– 1492,” in The Jews of Spain and the Expulsion of 1492, ed. Moshe Lazar and Stephen Haliczer (Lancaster, CA: Labyrinthos, 1997), 147.

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“a book whose fundamental aim was to find a pattern of continual Jewish sacrifice in the Iberian past.”34 Though Cecil Roth’s work certainly bears the brunt of this criticism, his is not by far the only writing on this subject that could be characterized as romantic. Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s work, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, has been described by Charles Meyers and Norman Simms as “novelistic” in its rendering of Isaac Cardoso’s dramatic flight from the Iberian peninsula.35 Yerushalmi certainly has distinguished company in this proclivity among contemporary scholars. Yirmiyahu Yovel thus openly and explicitly turns to nothing less than epistolary fiction in an attempt to properly convey to the reader the reality he sees. In his study of the Marranos, he states: At this point I ask the reader’s permission to change the narrative voice. Suppose that around 1670, an adventurous young Marrano in Amsterdam . . . persuades his wealthy grandfather to send him on a touring mission of the Marrano Dispersion, and that some fragments have been found.36

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Explicitly fictional treatment is also practiced by Rebecca Goldstein in her book Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.37 As Sutcliffe summarizes her book: In her closing chapter Goldstein explicitly indulges her fantasy of identification, spinning a novelistic account of Spinoza’s final years. We join Spinoza in Amsterdam in 1675, imagining him anonymously watching the crowds gathering for the dedication of the city’s grand new Sephardic synagogue, his “reptilian detachment” perhaps severely tested as he spots relatives and former schoolmates, and their children whom he has never met.38 34 José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Jews in the Diaspora with Sephared in the Mirror—Ruptures, Relations, and Forms of Identity: A Theme Examined through Three Cases,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 175–205. 35 Simms and Myers, Troubled Souls, 4. 36 Yovel, Other Within, 301. 37 Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: the Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Schocken, 2006). 38 Sutcliffe, “Sephardic Amsterdam,” 430. It is noteworthy that Sutcliffe included in his excellent review essay David Liss’s historical novel The Coffee Trader (424).

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Perhaps nowhere else in the study of Jewish history is the line between history and historical fiction so clearly and consciously blurred.

THEORIES OF MARRANO INFLUENCE

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While the scholarly study of the Marranos tends toward the romantic and novelistic, it has also made claims for the central importance of the Marranos, which might appear at times to be hyperbolic. For some scholars, apparently, the Marrano phenomenon was literally epochmaking. Thus Jose Fauer claims that the Marranos constituted an important factor in the collapse of the Middle Ages and the emergence of secularism and modernity through their collective undermining of the certainty of the intellectual categories of the western Christian world.39 Yovel is only relatively more careful when he argues that the Marranos anticipated and possibly helped create many central features of modern Western and Jewish experience. In terms of the development of Spain in particular, Amerigo Castro expressed the opinion that the Conversos spurred creative thinking in Spanish science, literature, and humanities.40 They are supposed to have invented the novel,41 and played a major role if not the major role in the development of Spanish poetry and literature.42 Fauer extends this thesis to the development of modern European thought and literature as a whole.43 He also claims that Solomon Ibn Verga was a precursor to the thought of post-modernity.44

39 José Fauer, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1, 30. This is reminiscent of Harry A. Wolfson’s thesis that medieval thought began with a Jewish thinker, Philo, and ended with another, Spinoza. Cf. Jonathan ha-Cohen, Philosophers and Scholars: Wolfson, Guttman and Strauss on the History of Jewish Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 40 Fauer, In the Shadow of History, 2, 49; Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 313, is in agreement. 41 Cf. Stephen Gilman. Cited in Fauer, Shadow of History, 56. 42 Roth, Conversos, xiii. 43 Fauer, In the Shadow of History, 3. 44 Ibid., 204.

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The Marranos have been presented as innovators in the religious sphere as well. Because their spiritual life often engendered disbelief, skepticism, and religious relativism, Wachtel argued that they contributed considerably to the emergence of modernity in the Western hemisphere, not only in the economic arena, but also in that of religious and intellectual history.45 Gutwirth concurs that: [T]he conversos constitute one of the major topics of the history of religions in the early modern period . . . Claims may be made for their centrality to the course of Spanish history and also for their influence on the development of European early modern thought.46

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With respect to Judaism in particular, Scholem and others have stressed the importance of the Marrano element in Sabbatianism.47 In terms of early modern economic history, Ellis Rivkin strongly emphasized the importance of Portuguese Jews in unleashing “a process of modernization and westernization that transformed Europe’s destiny.”48 They were, as Jonathan Israel asserted, “the international ‘crosscultural brokers’ par excellence . . . possessing a cultural malleability and a geographical reach unmatched by any trading diaspora in this period.”49 Israel called attention in particular to their contribution to economic life in the early modern period, stating that that the preeminence of the Sephardic Jews in the world economy was one of the most remarkable 45 Nathan Wachtel, “Marrano Religiosity in Hispanic America in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 164. 46 Eleazar Gutwirth, “Conversions to Christianity amongst Fifteenth Century Spanish Jews: An Alternative Explanation,” Shlomo Simonsohn Jubilee Volume: Studies on the History of the Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Period (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 1993), 97. 47 Révah, Des Marranes, 57. Cf. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 546–547; Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 48 Anita Novinsky, “Marranos and the Inquisition: On the Gold Route in Minas Gerais, Brazil,” in The Jews and the Expansion, ed. Bernardini and Fiering, 216–217. 49 Adam Sutcliffe, “Jewish History in an Age of Atlanticism,” in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Phillip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 19.

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phenomena in history.50 Alfredo Margarido also expressed the opinion that, had the Jewish community not existed, European expansion would have been slower, and the Portuguese would not have achieved their worldwide presence.51 For his part, Adam Sutcliffe calls our attention to this widespread scholarly “pan- Marrano” hyperbole, arguing that it stems from a “modern mystique” founded on a presentist perspective. He contends that scholars tend to imagine the Jews of early modern Amsterdam as initial examples of a cultural dynamic best exemplified by present-day communities, in particular those of North America.52

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THE SPECTER OF PRESENTISM Sutcliffe’s observation that “presentism” is very much a factor in scholarship on the Marranos follows the insight of Gérard Nahon, who comments that “Il n’est pas possible de lier ces hommes du xv siècle aux problématiques du xix siècle” (It is not possible to link these men of the sixteenth century to the problems of the nineteenth century).53 It is not difficult to discern this in the work of numerous scholars. One prominent example of “presentism” at work is the issue of racism. As Kamen cogently states, the scholarship on the Marranos has been quite obviously deeply affected by the Jewish experience in twentieth-century Europe.54 Indeed, for nearly a century scholars have explicitly drawn parallels between the persecution of the Marranos and modern antisemitism. As early as the 1920s, for instance, David Bortin in his introduction to Moccata asserted that there was a “connection between the rise and fall of Jewish civilization in Spain and the prospects of Jewish life . . . even in free America.”55 Cecil 50 Novinsky, “Marranos and the Inquisition,” 216. 51 Ibid. 52 Sutcliffe, “Sephardic Amsterdam,” 419. 53 Gérard Nahon, Métropoles et peripheries sefarades d’occident: Kairouan, Amsterdam, Bayonne, Bordeaux, Jérusalem (Paris: Cerf, 1993), 248. 54 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 312. 55 David Bortin, introduction to Frederic David Mocatta, The Jews of Spain and Portugal and the Inquisition (New York: Cooper Square, 1973), xii. Cf. Meyer

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Roth, writing in the fateful year of 1940, also drew explicit parallels between Marrano history and the Nazi oppression of the Jews.56 Yosef Yerushalmi, in an influential essay, argued for “phenomenological affinities” between assimilation and the emergence of antisemitism in Spain in the fifteenth century and in nineteenth century Germany, asserting that with respect to the emergence of a racial conception of the Jews, “such affinities are too striking to be ignored.”57 Norman Roth is in agreement, stating that the Marranos in Spain had evoked the issue of “purity of blood,” the “first and only real manifestation of anti-Semitism in the medieval world, centuries before . . . modern Germany and France.”58 Benzion Netanyahu, when writing this about the situation of the Marranos, certainly had Nazi antisemitic propaganda and the Shoah in mind: We know that such beliefs may be generated by propaganda (in the modern sense of the word) . . . but what is perhaps of greater importance is the receptive mood of the audience involved . . . They create the condition in which every conceivable evil, however absurd, about the object of hate may be readily believed because it satisfies a deep psychological need—to justify the hatred and the desired end.59

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On a more popular level, this analogy becomes even stronger. Indeed, as Norman Roth puts it, “parallels between the Jewish experience in America and that in medieval Spain . . . is one of the common myths among contemporary American Jews.”60 Rabbi Joachim Prinz, for Kayserling, Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries (Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978), 30. 56 Cecil Roth, History, vii. Cf. Cecil Roth, “Marranos and Racial Anti-Semitism: a Study in Parallels,” Jewish Social Studies 2 (1940): 239–248; Trudi Alexy, The Mezuzah in the Madonna’s Foot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 14. 57 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, “Assimilation and Racial Anti-Semitism: the Iberian and the German Models,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture no. 26 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1982), 5. Cf. Fauer, Shadow of History, 41–42. 58 Roth, Conversos, 115, 230. 59 Benzion Netanyahu, Toward the Inquisition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 198. Cf. Jean-Pierre Dedieu and Rene Millar Carvacho, “Entre histoire et mémoire: l’inquisition à l’époque moderne: dix ans d’historiographie,” Annales HSS, no. 2 (March–April 2002): 363. Cf. also Alpert, Secret Judaism, 16. 60 Norman Roth in Lazar and Haliczer, The Jews of Spain, 1.

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example, spoke of the fifteenth century Spaniards “develop[ing] a racial theory and practice similar to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws.”61 Dissenters from this point of view seem to be in the minority, and even those, like Alpert, who argue that “there is no valid analogy between the Spain of the Inquisition and Nazi Germany,” note “occasional evidence of ‘racist’ anti-Judaism in Spain.”62

CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THEN AND NOW

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Another way in which the concerns of the present make themselves felt in the scholarly pursuit of the Marranos concerns the issue of secularism. As we have seen, many scholars trace the origins of the modern, secular world to the Marrano phenomenon. Révah observed that a marginal, albeit important, result of marranism was the development of deniers of all orthodoxies—Jewish and Christian.63 This is true for numerous observers who find in men like Baruch Spinoza “the spiritual ancestor of many Jews who abandon their religion and people and think to find in philosophy or politics a universal principle of human unity.”64 Fauer basically agrees with this finding, though he gave the phenomenon a negative valence: Uriel da Costa’s critique of Jewish life and rabbinic authority became the banner of Christian anti-Semites and secular Jews who wanted to discredit Judaism and undermine Jewish authority. Secular Jews take the role of Paul in abrogation of Torah . . . By attacking and subverting Jewish authority they could now gain recognition and access to Western Society.65

Of all the perpetrators of “presentism” with respect to the Marranos, perhaps the most noticed and criticized have been members of the so-called “Jerusalem school” of Zionist-oriented historians, the 61 Joachim Prinz, The Secret Jews (New York: Random House, 1973), 61. 62 Alpert, Secret Judaism, 200. 63 Révah, Des Marranes, 72. 64 Ibid., 59. 65 Fauer sees this process at work all the way from Spinoza to Freud. Shadow of History, 138.

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most prominent among whom was Yitzhak Baer.66 As Bodian points out, “For Israeli historians . . . the history of the Jews and conversos of Spain struck many as an archetypical story of Jewish suffering and heroism in the diaspora.”67 Baer has been singled out for his thesis that “the conversos and the Jews were one people, united by destiny,” as well as, perhaps, for his regrets that the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal did not conceive of a national solution to their problem.68 He has further been accused of failing to present the facts and evidence completely and accurately.69 He has been taken to task by Yirmiyahu Yovel, among others, as sharing “the same conceptual attitude and fallacy as the Inquisition. Both tend to see a Jew in anyone whose mixed or dual mind manifests a few remaining Jewish habits and/or beliefs.”70 Graizbord likewise criticizes Baer “whose perspectives on the ‘true’ character of fifteenth century conversos may well speak of modern nationalist preoccupations as much as these narratives shed light on Ibero-Jewish history.”71 Benzion Netanyahu has also been criticized for his Zionist orientation. Thus Yovel criticizes both Baer and Netanyahu, stating that “both scholars had a tacit ideological (indeed Zionist) agenda. Baer providing the modern national Jewish consciousness with heroes and martyrs, Netanyahu explaining that Jewish life in the Diaspora is fragile and prone to assimilation.”72

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THE INQUISITION: GOOD OR BAD FOR THE JEWS? The centuries-long work of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, with respect to the suppression of the Judaizing heresy, has experienced radically different scholarly depictions. There are those scholars who have decried its nefarious activities against the Marranos and still 66 On the “Jerusalem School,” see Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past: Interpreters of Jewish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 171–183. 67 Bodian, Hebrews, x. 68 Cited in Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 37. 69 Roth, Conversos, xiv. 70 Yovel, Other Within, xv. 71 Graizbord, Contested Souls, 9. 72 Cited in ibid., 9.

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others who have put forward the thesis that the activities of the Inquisition actually encouraged Judaizing and the maintenance of Jewish loyalty on the part of the Marranos. The first observer to argue that persecution actually promoted Iberian Jewish identity was Spinoza in his Theological-Political Tractate:

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That they [the Jews] have been preserved in great measure by Gentile hatred, experience demonstrates. When the king of Spain formerly compelled the Jews to embrace the State religion or to go into exile, a large number of Jews accepted Catholicism. Now, as these renegades were admitted to all the native privileges of Spaniards, and deemed worthy of filling all honorable offices, it came to pass that they straightway became so intermingled with the Spaniards as to leave of themselves no relic or remembrance. But exactly the opposite happened to those whom the king of Portugal compelled to become Christians, for they always, though converted, lived apart, inasmuch as they were considered unworthy of any civic honours.73

Of course he was being tendentious, as Yerushalmi has shown,74 but he was hardly alone in this opinion. In the nineteenth century, Adolfo de Castro stated that the more autos-da-fe promoted by the Inquisitors the more were the persons who judaized.75 Alexandre Herculano echoed this stance, arguing that “tolerance would have been fatal to Judaism, whereas the fires of the Inquisition served only to strengthen it for a passive but energetic struggle for nearly three centuries.”76 Cecil Roth certainly agreed that “by the blood of the victim, the faith of the secret Jews was fertilized and strengthened.”77 Among more recent scholars, Norman Roth affirmed the basic correctness of Spinoza’s analysis.78 Brian S. Pullan also expresses this idea when he writes 73 Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (Project Gutenberg), 34, http://www.spinozacsack.net78.net/Theologico-Political%20Treatise,%20Benedict%20de%20Spinoza.pdf. 74 Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, “Divre Spinoza ‘al kiyyum ha-‘am ha-yehudi,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Science 6 (1983): 171–213. 75 Adolfo de Castro, History of the Jews in Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 238. 76 Alexandre Herculano, History of the Origin and Establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal (New York: KTAV, 1972), 34–35. 77 Roth, History, 151. 78 Roth, Conversos, 321.

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that Marranism existed largely in the heads of the authorities,79 and that the Inquisition had a part in the survival of a secret Judaism, though he is careful to emphasize as well that it was not merely a crude and cynical forger of evidence.80 A somewhat more moderate view is that of Gitlitz, who argues that “even the most assimilationist conversos had questions of religious identity thrown up constantly in their faces.”81 However, he asserts it “does not follow . . . that the Inquisition invented Marranism.”82

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THE NATURE OF INQUISITION DOCUMENTATION Obviously, the key to any nuanced evaluation of the role of the Inquisition in this issue entirely depends upon our understanding of the “enormous mass of documentary evidence” in the Inquisition’s archives, as was recognized well over a century ago by Kayserling.83 However, the manner in which the Inquisition’s files are read by scholars is probably the most contested of all aspects of this highly disputed subject. One major difficulty, as Gitlitz argues, was that “until very recently, most studies of the Inquisition were written by British Protestant, Spanish Catholic, or Jewish historians, many of whom had ideological or emotional axes to grind.”84 These ideological and emotional axes are expressed in scholarly readings of the vast documentation left behind by the Inquisition. How are these documents to be read? It becomes clear, even in the relatively early stages of investigation of these sources that, as Cecil Roth states, information found in contemporary sources may not be “relied on implicitly.”85 But can they be read at all literally? Norman Roth, for instance, decries those who understand the Inquisition documents as literal. As he states: 79 Cited in Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 92, note 19. 80 Cited in ibid., 81. 81 Ibid., 578. 82 Ibid., 81. 83 Kayserling, Christopher Columbus, xi. 84 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 91, note 15. 85 Roth, History, 169.

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Many . . . accept at face value every record and testimony in every Inquisition process. Accordingly, the myth of “crypto-Judaism” is the more extensively perpetrated. However common sense and careful consideration . . . reveal how absurdly false most, if not all, of them actually are.86

In this, he follows in the tradition of Rivkin’s radical denial of any sort of reality behind the Inquisition documents.87 Anita Novinsky has a somewhat more nuanced version of this argument, contending that Inquisition trial proceedings are unreliable because “confessions recur with identical bureaucratic formularies.”88 Renée Levine Melammed is one of the targets of those scholars who deny the possibility of obtaining historical data from these documents. She is seen as a “more extreme version of the unsuspicious approach to inquisitorial sources.”89 Moderates, like Bodian, critique this position of extreme disbelief. She characterizes Rivkin, for instance, as arguing “with more passion than evidence.”90 Furthermore, Bodian states, the deniers’ argument “has tended to rely on a dogmatic interpretation of the evidence, and their most sweeping conclusions have been widely discredited.”91 Like Gitlitz, moderates support “qualified confidence in the documents: most of what they report is mostly accurate . . . in the aggregate; the portrait of crypto-Jewish life that they reveal is reasonably truthful.”92 Scholars who argue that it is possible to read the documents and extract more or less objective information from them tend to follow the argument put forward by Révah, who posits that because these are secret documents, the Inquisitors had no reason to falsify them.93 Michael Alpert seconds Révah in this argument.94 As Alpert contends,

86 Roth, Conversos, 216–7. 87 Ellis Rivkin, “The Utilization of Non-Jewish Sources for the Reconstruction of Jewish History,” JQR 48 (1957/8): 183–203. 88 Cited in Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 91, note 12. 89 Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 35. 90 Bodian, Hebrews, 175, note 4. 91 Ibid., x. 92 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 77. 93 Révah, Des Marranes, 29. 94 Alpert, Secret Judaism, 16–17.

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“One cannot simply deny the religious evidence of judaizing so carefully collected by a scholar of the eminence of Haim Beinart.”95 In general, the scholarly situation is as Robert Rowland states: The nature of our sources is such that unless considerable care is exercised they will only confirm our presuppositions and appear to demonstrate, as the case may be, either that most of the New Christians . . . were Crypto-Jews . . . or that they were the innocent victims of anti-Judaic prejudice.96

THE NATURE OF MARRANO JUDAISM So how can we begin to understand the spiritual life of the Marranos? Did they, in Frederic Mocatta’s words, continue “to follow out in the depths of secrecy the observances of the old faith . . . generation after generation . . . still steadfast at heart to keep alive the remembrance of Judaism.”97 Jewish scholarship of the nineteenth century seems to share this conviction. Thus Kayserling states:

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At heart they adhered loyally to their ancestral religion . . . they secretly observed the tenets of their ancestral faith . . . they celebrated the Sabbath and Holidays . . . They thus remained Jews.98

Twentieth-century scholarship marks a retreat from this extreme position, though one still finds some authors, such as Kamen, affirming that “many, if not most of them [the Marranos] continued to practice the Jewish rites in secret.99 Even as late as the 1990s, Trudi Alexy affirms that the Marranos mounted a “stubborn effort to maintain their essential connection to their spiritual wholeness . . . kept alive their link

95 Alpert, Secret Judaism, 16; Cf. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 34. 96 Robert Rowland, “New Christian, Marrano, Jew,” in Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 to 1800, ed. Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 126. 97 Mocatta, Jews of Spain and Portugal, 88–89. 98 Kayserling, Christopher Columbus, 27, cf. x. 99 Cited in Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 94, note 33.

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with one another and with their heritage,”100 and maintained “secret synagogues . . . secret rites.”101 Cecil Roth, for his part, took care to moderate such extreme expectations, stating that the “popular conception of a subterranean Judaism . . . is obviously untrue,”102 while still insisting on the Jewishness of the Marranos, claiming that the “[Portuguese crypto-Jews’] religion in its essentials was unmistakably Jewish.”103 Thus he stated that the “Marranos preserve[d] their identity and the essentials [my emphasis] of their faith,”104 while also insisting on the difference between Marrano Judaism and what he termed the “integral Judaism” practiced by open Jewish communities outside the Iberian peninsula.105 Haim Beinart and Révah both agree on the essential Jewishness of the Marranos they investigated.106 Révah stands for the notion that there is such a thing as “normative marranism,” as opposed to either a personal biblical Judaism or traditional rabbinic Judaism.107 For him, this normative marranism constitutes an impoverishment of rabbinic Judaism, of which it conserves nonetheless, a number of essential aspects.108 It is certainly not an “orthodox” Judaism.109 As he states, “Les définitions normatives de la judéité ne sauraient s’appliquer à cette société ‘non orthodoxe’” (Normative definitions of Jewishness cannot be applied to this non-Orthodox society).110 On the other hand, it definitely constitutes a “potential Judaism,” and a “Judaism of the will.”111 On that basis, most of those accused as judaizers

100 Alexy, Mezuzah, 14, cf. 293. 101 Ibid., 273. 102 Roth, History, 168. 103 Ibid., 364. 104 Ibid., 374–375. 105 Ibid., 174. 106 Cited in Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 33. 107 Fauer, Shadow of History, 125. 108 Revah, Des Marranes, 106. 109 Rowland, “New Christian, Marrano, Jew,” 141. 110 Renee Levine Melammed, “Hommes et femmes: leur rôle respectif dans la perpétu�� ation de l’identité Juive au sein de la société conversa,” in Mémoires juives d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1996), 40. 111 Rowland, “New Christian, Marrano, Jew,” 142.

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by the Inquisition were actually judaizing.112 Following Révah’s thinking, Yerushalmi speaks of the “latent Jewishness” of the Marranos.113 So does Fauer, who states that the “potential” Judaism of the conversos becomes “actual” upon that person’s entering a rabbinic Jewish community.114 A somewhat more guarded stance on this issue is that of Gitlitz, who states: There can be no doubt that something clearly identified as cryptoJudaism, or Marranism, flourished in Iberia for at least the two and one-half centuries . . . Crypto-Jewish practices derived from those of normative Judaism.115

For, as he continues: Some thought of themselves as Christians, some as Jews, some as seekers of truth caught between the two religions, and some as skeptical dropouts for whom religion was as unimportant as the times allowed it to be.116

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There exists on this issue, as with others, a camp of extreme naysayers. They are led by Antonio Jose Saraiva who, in his Historia da Cultura em Portugal argued that the New Christians as secret Jews was essentially a myth created by the Inquisition, with neither ethnic nor religious meaning to the term.117 In this, Saraiva follows the thinking of the French intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influential book, Anti-Sémite et Juif, espouses a compatible position on Jewish identity.

112 Révah, Des Marranes, 40; Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, “The Re-education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century” (Cincinnati, OH: Judaic Studies Program of the University of Cincinnati, 1980), 2. 113 Cited in Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 34. 114 Fauer, Shadow of History, 47. 115 Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 80–81. 116 Ibid., 84. 117 Antonio José Saraiva, The Marrano Factory: the Portuguese Inquisition and Its New Christians, 1536–1765, translated, revised, and augmented by Herman P. Salomon and Isaac S. D. Sassoon (Leiden: Brill, 2001). The volume also includes a written exchange between Saraiva and Révah in the Portuguese press. Cf. Révah, Des Marranes, 31–32.

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Saraiva was strongly attacked for this by Révah, who speaks of his “dogmatic” Sartrean and Marxist views.118 Sharing much of Saraiva’s reading of the evidence is Norman Roth, who states of the Spanish conversos (though not the Portuguese) that they “had deliberately and of their own free will abandoned not merely their faith but their people . . . the rejection by the Jews certainly did not disturb the conversos for they considered themselves to be true Christians and totally separated from Jewish society, for the most part.”119 Although this “naysaying” view achieves some scholarly support, it is also criticized by Graizbord as based on a “rigid or even naïve positivism.”120 Less rigid than Saraiva’s position, and perhaps more promising because it allows for more complexity is Nathalie Oeltjen’s insight that “it is probable that many daily habits, especially surrounding food and domestic life, were seen as ritually ‘Jewish’ by outsiders, but were viewed by conversos themselves as more a matter of ‘what one did.’”121

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THE NATURE OF THE “NEW JUDAISM” No less paradoxical is the scholarly consideration of the nature of the Judaism assumed by those Marranos who, emigrating from the Iberian Peninsula, created major Jewish communities where none had existed before, as was the case in seventeenth century Amsterdam. As Swetschinski commented, “To everybody but themselves, it would seem, the Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam were living a contradiction.”122 118 Cited in Claude Stuczinski, “Harmonizing identities: the problem of the integration of the Portuguese conversos in early modern Iberian corporate polities,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 230. 119 Roth, Conversos, xii–xiii. 120 Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 35. 121 Nathalie Oeltgen, “A Converso Confraternity in Majorca: la Novella Confraria de Sant Miquel,” Jewish History 24 (2010): 56. 122 Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: the Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 315.

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Part of the paradoxical nature of their Judaism is the consideration of the importance of Catholic influence on Marrano Theology. This is surely a point well taken, since it is clear that the Inquisition had “created a new generation of Jews without Judaism, whose only knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew . . . tended to come from the Church itself.”123 The way the Marranos tended to express themselves was in terms of “salvation through the Law of Moses” with its immediate echoes of salvation through Christ, the very epitome of Catholic theology.124 It is no wonder, then, that there are scholars, like Carlos Baroja, who feel that “some of the conversos formed a distinct religious tendency neither Jewish nor Christian.”125 It would also serve to explain why many of the Marrano immigrants to France and elsewhere in Europe assimilated as Catholics or returned to Spain and Portugal and did not become a part of any Jewish community, a thesis put forward by Zosa Szajkowski126 that was strongly opposed by Révah.127 As Bodian points out, we are speaking of “an entire sub-society of conversos and ex-conversos—‘the Nation,’ with its friars and nuns, its skeptics, its oblivious violators of the Sabbath, and its technically non-Jewish members (those with gentiles in the female line) . . . an utterly unfamiliar and bizarre entity.”128 Despite the number of generations that separated the converted of 1392 and 1497 from the Amsterdam Jews, the Iberian origins of the community’s members made it impossible for those living openly as Jews to disavow those still living in exclusively Catholic countries. For them, as Bruno Feitler states, New Christians still living in the Iberian peninsula represented a living testimony to the history and aspirations

123 Simms and Meyers, “Introduction,” 1. 124 Roth, History, 170. Cf. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit, 99, 110; Fauer, Shadow of History, 111–112; Bodian, Hebrews, 101. 125 Stephen Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 211. 126 Zosa Szajkowski, “Population Problems of Marranos and Sephardim in France, from the 16th to the 20th Centuries,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 27 (1958): 83–105. 127 Révah, Des Marranes, 49; Nahon, Métropoles et périphéries, 242, 244–5. 128 Bodian, Hebrews, 134.

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of the Jewish people.129 This attitude is particularly illustrated in the institution of the “dotar,” a society for funding dowries of poor girls, in which families were assumed to be proper, and permitted to marry even before they openly returned to the Jewish religion as long as there was reliable evidence of their belief in the unity of God and in the truth of the Torah. No actual observance of commandments seems to have been required in this instance—only faith. Conversos therefore possessed social, though not religious legitimacy.130 Yerushalmi points out as well that genealogical traditions of Marrano families were generally respected and accepted as accurate. Thus if a man claimed that he was a kohen, he would be given the priestly prerogatives in the synagogue without further inquiry131—this even in the face of the “uniform insistence of the Sefardic rabbis . . . that such conversos were to be considered ‘complete gentiles,’” as Norman Roth observes.132 We must now consider the issues involved in the conversion of Marranos to rabbinic Judaism and their sometimes troubled integration into formally Jewish communities. As Bodian sees it, in communities like Amsterdam, the Marranos, “both in the habits they had assimilated from Spanish and Portuguese society and in their practice of Jewish law . . . suddenly became what they had never been before, a well-defined group.”133 The nineteenth century view, expressed by Moccatta, was “that, after two hundred years of disguise many Marranos openly resumed Judaism.”134 But what sort of Judaism did they “return” to? It has become something of a scholarly consensus to 129 Bruno Feitler, “Jews and Christians in Dutch Brazil, in Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Conversos and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800, ed. Richard L. Kagan and Phillip D. Morgan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 129. 130 Yosef Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century: The Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries of Self-Identity,” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 61. 131 Yerushalmi, “Re-education,” 5. 132 Roth, Conversos, 218. 133 Bodian, Hebrews, 18. 134 Mocatta, Jews of Spain and Portugal, 90.

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understand their Judaism as somewhat sui generis. They have become known as “New Jews,” a term coined by Yosef Kaplan.135 This understanding was expressed by Graizbord when he stated, “Their unique consciousness of their judeoconverso ethnicity . . . was a central factor in their decision to transform themselves into ‘New Jews’ and in their subsequent lives as normative Jews.”136 For many of these “New Jews,” according to Kaplan, Judaism was a matter solely of their inner identity,137 and in their collective consciousness, they included people who from a halakhic point of view could not be viewed as Jews.138 There were also among them some skeptic conversos who returned to Judaism not for theological but for practical reasons.139 Thus among the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, as Feitler points out, “despite the rabbinic laws . . . there were many cases in which a communal policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ was evident.”140 A further indication of their ambivalent identity is Swetschinski’s acute observation that,

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à Amsterdam, le petit nombre de références aux expériences personnelles du passé ibérique et la platitude qui caractérise le peu de remarques existantes. Évidement les juifs portugais d’Amsterdam ne voulaient presque rien avoir à faire avec leur passé marrane . . . amnésie collective. (in Amsterdam, the small number of references to personal experiences of the Iberian past and the flatness that characterizes the few existing remarks. Obviously the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam wanted to have almost nothing to do with their Marrano past. . . collective amnesia).141

135 Yosef Kaplan coined the term “New Jews,” Graizbord and Stuczinski, “Introduction,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 121. Swetschinski prefers to avoid terms like “New Jews,” Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 7. 136 Graizbord, Souls in Dispute, 45. 137 Cited in Thomas F. Glick, “On Converso and Marrano Ethnicity,” 73. 138 Kaplan, “Political Concepts,” 62. 139 Fauer, Shadow of History, 110. 140 Bruno Feitler, “Four Chapters in the History of Crypto-Judaism in Brazil: The case of the Northeastern New Christians (17th–21st centuries),” Jewish History 25 (2011): 209. 141 Daniel Swetschinski, “Un refus de mémoire. Les Juifs portugais d’Amsterdam et leur passé marrane,” in Benbassa, Mémoires juives, 69.

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Kaplan seconds this notion when he speaks of an invented tradition among the Sephardi Jews of the seventeenth century, with a traditional community emerging ex nihilo under new conditions.142 Indeed, Pulido Serrano goes even further than this in regarding the “New Jews” as “a cultural construction . . . an imagined cultural community” in accordance with the theories of Benedict Anderson.143 For Pullido Serrano, “the New Christians did not have the greatest power to construct this imagined community. Those who did were the proselyters of Judaism . . . and of anti-Judaism. For totally opposite reasons, both sides coincided in laboring to construct an imagined Jewish community . . . each side provided feedback to the other . . . Today not a few historians perpetuate this picture of things.”144

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CONCLUSION: MARRANOS AS SYMBOL Who are the Marranos? What is their religious identity? What is their relationship with contemporary Jews and Judaism? This article provides no concrete and concise answers to these questions. What it has done is to demonstrate, beyond the variety of scholarly opinion, the strength of the Marranos as symbols for various interpretations of the modern and postmodern Jewish condition. A couple of fairly random examples will serve to indicate the contemporary power of this symbolism, one from North America and the other from Turkey. In his seminal essay, “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,” “who are in habit, speech, and condition of life, typically Jewish-American, but who are presented as something else—generalAmerican say, as in Death of a Salesman.”145 In contemporary Turkey, 142 Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 16, cf. 27. 143 Cf. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 144 Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities,” 143, 146. 145 Cited in Leah Garrett, “Just One of the Goys: Salinger’s, Miller’s, and Malamud’s Hidden Jewish Heroes,” AJS Review 34, no. 2 (November 2010): 171.

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Matthias Lehmann points out that “popular imagination still spots ‘secret Jews’ . . . everywhere in Turkish society.”146 The lively debates over crypto-Jewish identities all over the world make us aware of the powerful symbolism the Marranos represent to Jews and non-Jews alike. Who is right about the Marranos? For one who has truly paid attention to the range of scholarly opinion on this subject, it is impossible to adequately synthesize a satisfactory answer to that simplesounding question in the space of one article. The best thing to say, when looking at the picture in its broadest scope, is that all observers turn out to be partially correct. Depending upon time and place, there was and was not an active Marrano Judaism. There was and was not a connection between Marranos and the kind of radical skepticism that brought on modern modes of thought. However, what cannot be denied is that the study of the Marrano phenomenon serves as an important barometer for understanding how Jewish identity is constructed in the present through writing and thinking about the Jewish past. Miriam Bodian rightly says that Jewish identity in modern times is “a changing cultural construction, evolving over many generations and answering a variety of needs.”147

146 Matthias Lehmann, Review of Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, in AJS Review 34, no. 2 (November 2010): 442. 147 Bodian, Hebrews, xi.

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The Authors

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Howard Adelman is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Queen’s University. His doctorate is from Brandeis University. He is the author of numerous articles and his forthcoming book will be titled The Lives of Jewish Women in Early Modern Italy: The Struggle for Ambiguity.

Pierre Anctil is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches contemporary Canadian history. In 2010, he published ‘Fais ce que dois,’ 60 éditoriaux pour comprendre Le Devoir sous Henri Bourassa, 1910–1932 (Septentrion, 2010), Trajectoires juives au Québec (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010), and, in collaboration with Ira Robinson, Les communautés juives de Montréal, histoire et enjeux contemporains (Septentrion, 2010). In 2011, together with Howard Adelman, he edited a book titled Religion, Culture and the State, Reflections on the BouchardTaylor Report (University of Toronto Press). He is the author of a book-length biography of Jacob-Isaac Segal, titled Jacob-Isaac Segal (1896–1954), un poète yiddish de Montréal et son milieu (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012) and of: ‘Soyons nos maîtres,’ 60 éditoriaux

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pour comprendre Le Devoir sous Georges Pelletier, 1932–1947 (Septentrion, 2013). He was a Killam fellow in 2008–2010 and has been awarded the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award (2013) and the J. I. Segal Literary Award of the Jewish Public Library of Montreal (2012).

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Benjamin M. Baader is Associate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He teaches, writes, and lectures on European history, Jewish history, historiography, gender studies, and feminist theory. Baader is author of Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Indiana University Press, 2006), and together with Sharon Gillerman and Paul Lerner is co-editor of Jewish Masculinities: German Jews, Gender, and History (Indiana University Press, 2012). The focus of much of his work is nineteenth-century German Jewry.

Dean Bell (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Provost/Vice President and Professor of Jewish History at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. His book publications include Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (2007) and Jews in the Early Modern World (2008). Most recently he edited The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies (2013). His current research focuses on Jewish and Christian responses to natural disasters in the early modern world.

Naftali S. Cohn is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University. In his research, he applies the culture-critical lenses of memory, ritual, narrative, and gender to the Mishnah and its rabbinic authors. His book The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis was recently published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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James A. Diamond is the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Chair of Jewish Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is an expert in medieval Jewish thought, philosophy, and exegesis and has published widely on all aspects of Jewish intellectual history. His books include Maimonides and the Hermeneutics of Concealment: Deciphering Scripture and Midrash in the Guide of the Perplexed (SUNY Press, 2002) and Converts, Heretics and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), both of which garnered the Canadian Jewish Book Award for best scholarly book in the field of Jewish studies. His most recent book, Maimonides and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014, surveys Jewish thought from the middle ages to the present via its engagements with Moses Maimonides, the most prominent of all Jewish thinkers.

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Lorenzo DiTommaso is Professor of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal. His next book, The Architecture of Apocalypticism, the first volume of a trilogy, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Calvin Goldscheider is Ungerleider Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies and Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Brown University. He is currently Scholar in Residence in the Department of History and the Center for Israel Studies, American University, Washington, DC. He has been Professor of Demography and Sociology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His most recent book is Israeli Society in the 21st Century (Brandeis University Press, 2015).

Rachel Havrelock is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rachel’s book River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line (University of Chicago Press, 2011) illustrates her distinct methodology of combining biblical studies, literary

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and political theory, and the politics of interpretation. River Jordan examines the long history of the Jordan as a border, as well as the moments when it was not a border. Rachel’s recent work on female political leadership in antiquity is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Biblical Interpretation and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies, for which she served as editor of the Early Judaism section. Her current book project, The Joshua Generation: Politics and the Promised Land, focuses on the structure, meaning, and interpretation of the book of Joshua.

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Steven Lapidus is a Montreal-based scholar of Jewish history with a particular focus on Hasidism and the history of North American Orthodox Judaism. He has taught courses in Jewish history and human sexuality at Concordia University, where he received his doctorate, as well as at SUNY Plattsburgh. A former co-curator at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, he has published articles and book chapters in both English and French on Canadian Jewish history and the Hasidic experience in North America, some of which have appeared in Canadian Jewish Studies, Jewish History, and Studies in Religion.

Jack N. Lightstone is Professor of History at Brock University, where since 2006 he has also served as Brock University’s President and Vice-Chancellor. He is also Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Religion at Concordia University, Montreal, where he held academic and administrative posts from 1976 to 2006. His research has adopted and adapted sociological and anthropological perspectives and applied them to social historical questions, specifically to Judaism in the Ancient and Late Antique eras. The emergence and early development of the rabbinic movement and its literature has been a particular focus of his scholarship.

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Richard Menkis teaches modern Jewish history at the University of British Columbia, with a research specialty in the history of the Jewish experience in Canada. He is the founding editor of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes, co-editor, with Norman Ravvin, of the Canadian Jewish Studies Reader, and is co-author, with Harold Troper, of More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics (University of Toronto Press, 2015). He is working on a study of the production and reception of narratives of Canadian Jewish history.

Ira Robinson is Chair in Quebec and Canadian Jewish Studies in the Department of Religion and Director of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University. Robinson has edited Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters (2 volumes, 1985), which won the Kenneth Smilen Award for Judaica non-fiction. He has also co-edited Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century (1995), which won a Toronto Jewish Book Award. He has published Moses Cordovero’s Introduction to Kabbala: An Annotated Translation of His Or Ne’erav (1994). Among his recent books are Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930 (2007) which won a J. I. Segal Prize, Translating a Tradition: Studies in American Jewish History (2008), and Les Communautés juives de Montréal: histoire et enjeux contemporains (Septentrion, 2010) (co-editor). His most recent publication is Canada’s Jews in Time, Space, and Spirit (Academic Studies Press, 2013) (editor). He is president of the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies, and was the 2013 winner of the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award, Association for Canadian Jewish Studies.

Lionel Sanders is Professor in the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics at Concordia University. His chief area of

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The Authors

research over the years has been in the history and historiography of fourth century BCE Greek Sicily. His publications include Dionysius I and Greek Tyranny (Routledge, 1988, reprint 2014), and The Legend of Dion (University of Toronto Press, 2008). He is currently bringing to completion his third book on the subject, titled Dion: A Deconstructive Biography.

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Beth S. Wenger is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she serves as Chair of the History Department. Wenger’s most recent book is History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton University Press, 2010). She is also the author of The Jewish Americans: Three Centuries of Jewish Voices in America (Doubleday, 2007), companion volume to the 2008 PBS series The Jewish Americans, which was named a National Jewish Book Award finalist. In addition to her articles and edited collections, Wenger also authored New York Jews and the Great Depression: Uncertain Promise (Yale University Press, 1996), which was awarded the Salo Baron Prize in Jewish History from the American Academy of Jewish Research.

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A Abner of Burgos 158 Abraham 98-104, 106-107, 110-114, 221, 337 Abramovich, Sholem Yankev—see Mendele Mokher Sforim Abu Ghosh (Israel) 329 Adam 110 Adelman, Howard Tzvi 147, 365 Adenauer, Konrad 260 Agrippa I 2-4, 6-22, 24, 27-30 Agrippa II 11, 18 Agrippina (mother of Caligula) 15 Agudath Israel 199 Aharoni, Yohanan 331-332 Alexander (brother of Philo) 13 Alexander the Great 24 Alexander Jannaeus 27 Alexandria (Egypt) 2, 4, 8: Greek community; 3, 20-1, 30; Egyptian community 20-2, 30; Jewish community 2-3, 10-11, 15-17, 27-28, 42; pogrom (anti-Jewish) 2, 5, 7, 25, 27, 29 Alexy, Trudi 355 Alfasi, Isaac 151 Almond, Gabriel 209

Alpert, Michael 340, 350, 354 ‘am ha’arets 41, 52 American Jewish Historical Society 182 Amsterdam: Jewish community 358-359, 361 Anarchism 217, 228 Anctil, Pierre 211, 365 Anderson, Benedict 362 Annanias 27 Antin, Mary 179 Antipater 27 Antisemitism 297, 349 Apion 21-5, 28 Appleby, R. Scott 209 Aquiva (Rabbi) 65, 67 Arcand, Adrien 239 Arendt, Hannah 268-270 Aristeas, Letter of 151 Arnold, Abraham 255 Asch, Sholem 221 Assyria 26 Athens 100 Audet, Francis J. 237 Auerbach, Eric 100 Augustus (Caesar) 2 Auschwitz 283, 288 Avot (tractate) 89

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372

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B Baader, Benjamin M. 257, 366 Babylon 26 Bacharach, Yair Hayim 134-135, 138-143 Bacon, Gershon 198 Baer, Yitzhak 183, 351 Bahir (Book) 163 Bahur, Elijah Levita 147, 161-163, 165-166, 168, 170 Bal Mieke 326 Baroja, Carlos 359 Baron, Salo W. 149, 169 Bassus 9 Beinart, Haim 355-356 Belkin, Simon 214, 218-219, 221, 225-226, 228 Bell, Dean Phillip 117, 366 Ben David, Joseph 198 Ben-Gurion, David 316-317, 326, 328, 332-336 Ben-Tzvi, Itzhaq 326, 334 Berenice (daughter of Agrippa I) 13 Bergen-Belsen 264 Berger, David 94-95 Berlin, Naftali Tzvi Yehuda 198 Bible: Hebrew 63, 78, 97, 108-9, 319: chronology 152, 321 Bimko, Fishl 230 Bloom, Harold ix Blum, Rafael 203 Bodian, Miriam 341, 351, 354, 359-360, 363 Boethusians 35 Bohak, Gideon 338 Boisbriand (Quebec) 204 Boling, Robert 324 Bonfil, Robert 150, 169 Bortin, David 348 Brainin, Reuben 222-223 Braw, Shmuel 305-313 Brazil 343: Dutch 174 Breton, Raymond 250 Broughton, Hugh 154, 165-167 Buxtorf, Johannes, the Elder 165 Buxtorf, Johannes II 165 C Cahan, Abraham 180

Caiserman, Hannaniah Mayer 230-231, 241-242 Caligula 2, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 21, 23, 25 Calvin, John 165 Canaanites 316, 332 Canada 211, 216, 235, 269: Hasidim 204; Holocaust survivors 268; Jews 211, 214, 224-225, 232, 234, 240, 248, 251, 256, 285, 289-290; migration to 212 Canadian Jewish Congress 223, 235, 238, 240-243, 246-248, 250-255 Capellus, Louis 165 Carabas 4-5, 7, 10, 17, 20 Castro, Amerigo 346 Charles V (Emperor) 126 Christianity 40-41, 98, 152, 156: Catholic 121, 143; Jewish polemics against 168; Protestant 121, 143 Circumcision 112-114 Claudius (Caesar) 19-20 Cleopatra III 27 Cohen, Arthur A. 285 Cohen, Lyon 237 Cohn, Naftali 31, 366 Cole, Tim 272 Columbus, Christopher 182-184 Colvius, Andreas 158 Communism: Jews 188-189 Concordia University viii Connerton, Paul 182 Contreras, Jaime 341 Conversos—see Marranos Cook, Terry 234 Cover, Robert 98 Crusades: massacre of Jews 131, 143 D Da Costa, Uriel 167 Da Valencia, Jacob Perez 164 Dan, Joseph 210 Danile, Dominique 235 David (King) 25, 221 Dayan, Moshe 335 Dead Sea Scrolls 37, 63-64 De Castro, Adolfo 352 De Lyra, Nocholas 164 De Maupassant, Jean 237

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Index De Plantavit de la Pause, Jean 158 de’ Rossi, Azariah 147, 149-154, 158-161, 163-166, 168-170 Derrida, Jacques 234 De Sola, Clarence 235 Diamond, James ix, 92, 367 Diaspora—see Jews: Diaspora Diaspora Nationalism 217 Dichaearchia (Puteoli) 3, 9 Didascalia Apostolorum 40 Diner, Dan 260 Diner, Hasia 274-275, 278-279, 285, 289 Dionysius 2, 12 DiTommaso, Lorenzo 367 E Eichmann, Adolf 261, 268-270 Egypt 2, 104: Exodus 107-108, 115, 284, 288, 292-293; Roman 86 Eliezer (Rabbi) 65 Europe: Jewish identity 294 Ezra 62, 65, 152, 162, 164, 166, 168

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F Farar, David 154-156, 165-166 Fauer, Jose 346, 350 Feinstein, Margarete Myers 287 Feitler, Bruno 359, 361 Ferdinand (King) 183 Ferrara (Italy) 151 Fiedler, Leslie 362 Flaccus (Roman Prefect) 2, 5, 8-10, 12, 14-16, 18 Fonrobert, Charlotte 41 Foucault, Michel 234 Frankel, Jonathan 212 Frankfurt 127 Friedberg 127 Friedlaender, Israel 174, 178 Friedman, Betsalel 188 Friedman, Israel 197 Friedman, Mordecai Shlomo 197 Fuks, Haim-Leib 231 Fulda 127 G Gabinius (Proconsul) 28 Gaffarel, Jacques 158

373 Gaius Caligula—see Caligula Galatino, Pietro 157, 164 Galilee 39, 142 Gamaliel I 65 Gamaliel II 65 Gambetti, Sandra 14 Gaza 325 Germany: Holocaust memorials 258, 272, 292-293; Jews 117-119, 143, 259-260, 263; Nazi regime 261-262, 264, 273 Gitlitz, David 344, 353-354, 357 Golan Heights 336 Goldman, Eric A. 278 Goldscheider, Calvin 294, 367 Goldstein, Rebecca 345 Goodman, Marcus 45 Gradis, Abraham 237 Graizbord, David 338-339, 341, 351, 358, 361 Great Assembly 87 Green, William S. 71 Günzburg 127 Gutkin, Harry 255 Gutwirth, Eleazar 347 H Hagberg, Bo 192 Halakha—see rabbis: Law Halbwachs, Maurice 33 Halevi, Abraham 160 Hanukah 304 Halpern, Moshe-Leib 230 Halifax 211 Haran, Menahem 327-331 Harney, Robert 245-246, 250 Hart, A.D. 237 Hasidism: North American 192, 196, 200 Haskala 209, 214 Hasmonean Dynasty 25-26, 86 Hausner, Gideon 270 Havrelock, Rachel 316, 367-368 Hayes, Saul 252-253 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (United States) 181 Hebrew Language 220: Vowels 147 Helicon 21-22 Herculano, Alexandre 352 Hermes Trismegistus 159

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Index

374 Herod: the Great 19; dynasty 19-20, 25 Hershman, Hirsch 228, 238-241, 243 Heshin, Shneur Zalman 326-327 Hillel 65 Hirschson, Avraham 284 History viii, 117: oral 312 Hitler, Adolf 235, 262, 264, 350 Holocaust 257-258, 264-266, 271, 290, 308, 337, 349 Hunter, James 193 Hussein (King) 335 I Ibn Ezra, Abraham 152-153, 159 Ibn Verga, Solomon 346 Ibn Yahyah, Gedaliah 156 Inquisition, Spanish 183, 351-354, 359 International Workers Order 188 Isabella (Queen) 183 Ishmael 112, 114 Isidorus 2, 12,19-20 Islam 112: Muslim minorities 301 Israel (State) 267, 269, 297, 316-317, 327, 336: Arab conflict 337; Arab minority 331; Holocaust Memorials 271, 274-275; Holocaust survivors 270; Jewish identity 294, 311 Israel, Jonathan 347 Italy: Jews 149

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J Jabotinsky, Zev 336 Jacobs, Jane 343 Jacobs, S.W. 241 Jericho 42, 49 Jerusalem 42, 51, 335: Temple 16, 31-34, 36-39, 41, 45, 48-49, 51-52, 62, 135, 143 Jesus 40, 165 Jesus Followers—see Christians Jewish Public Library (Montreal) 238-239 Jewishness—see Jews: identity Jews: Ashkenazic 130-131, 136, 141, 144; community 120, 122, 137, 143-145, 198; culture viii, 39; diaspora 7; history ix; identity ix, 3, 296, 305, 337-338, 342, 357; Sephardic 347, 362; society 52

Jewish studies 337 Jordan 335 Josephus (Flavius) 7, 11-12, 23-26, 28-29, 31, 38 Josel of Rosheim 137 Joselit, Jenna Weissman 200 Joshua (Book) 316-326, 328, 331-333, 336 Joshua (Rabbi) 65 Jotapata 7 Judah (Rabbi) 65, 68, 71-72 Judah the Prince (Rabbi) 65 Judah Loew ben Bezalel 166 Judaism 296, 298-300, 304: ancient 55; beliefs 92; Conservative 297; conversion 112; Orthodox 195-196, 297, 303; rabbinic 170; Reconstructionist 298; Reform 297 Judaea 16, 86 Judean—see Jews Judges (Book) 319 Juspa, Shammash of Worms 131-134, 136-139, 143, 145 K Kabbala 147, 149-150, 152, 155-157, 159-161, 163-164, 167-170: Christian 157-158; criticism 154, 169; sefirot 92 Kadesh Barnea 324-325 Kagan, Israel Meir 197 Kage, Joseph 247-248 Kamen, Henry 342, 348, 355 Kaplan, Yosef 361-362 Kastner, Rudolf 270 Katz, Jacob 196 Katznelson, Ira 175 Kaufman, Deborah 338 Kayserling, Meyer 182-183, 353, 355 Kehillah—see Jews: community Kimhi, David 166 Kirchheim, Levi 131, 135-141 Kohl, Helmut 264 Kohn, Abraham 186 Krieger, Alex 285 L Lampon 2, 12, 19 Lapidus, Steven 192, 368 Lateiner, Joseph 191

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Index Lehman, Frederic K. 344 Lehmann, Matthias 363 Leib, Mani 230 Levinger, Elma 184-185 Levita, Elijah—see Bahur, Elijah Levita Lichtenstein, Hillel 200 Liebman, Charles 205 Liessin, Avrohom 178 Lightstone, Jack N. 55, 368 Lilienthal, Max 172 Lincoln, Abraham 33 Linenthal, Edward T. 291 Lombroso, Jacob 168 Lot 98-99 Lowy, Meshulam Feish 204 Luther, Martin 165 Luzzatto, Moses Haim 169 Luzzatto, Samuel David 169 Luzzatto, Simone 167 Lydda 42

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M Maccabees 31, 65 Macro, Q. Naevius Cordu Sutorius 15 Maharal—see Judah Loew ben Bazalel Maimonides—see Moses ben Maimon Manitoba (Canada) 245 Manitoba Public Archives 255 March of the Living 282-284 Marcus (son of Alexander) 13 Margarido, Alfredo 348 Margolis, Rebecca 238 Marranos 337, 339-340, 342-350, 352-353, 355-360, 362-363 Marshall, Louis 176, 178 Martini, Raymond 164 Masoretes 162, 164, 166, 169-170 Mayer, Egon 199 Mayzel, Aaron 188 Medres, Israel 226-228 Meidaba 42 Meir (Rabbi) 65 Melammed, Renee Levine 354 Melbourne (Australia) 309-311 Mendele Moker Sforim 222 Menkis, Richard 233, 369 Meyers, Charles 345 Michelet, Jules 233

375 Miller, Stuart 42 Minhag 118 Miron, Dan 194 Mishnah 31-5, 37-45, 47, 49, 52, 54-56, 58-60, 62-6, 68-9, 71-73, 87-89: debate 78; memorization 85; stories 79, 82-84 Mocatta, Frederic David 348, 355, 360 Modena, Avtalion 151-152 Modena, Leon 147, 150-159, 161, 163-164, 166-170 Monotheism 92 Montreal 211, 215-216, 218: Jewish education 219-223; Jews 212-214, 220, 224, 232, 238; Sephardim 223, 232 Morin, Jean 165 Moses 62-63, 89, 107, 147, 156, 162-163, 167-168, 221: authorship of Torah 152-153 Moses ben Maimon 73, 92-95, 97-103, 105-115, 221 Moses ben Nahman 92-98, 100-105, 107-113, 115-116, 158-159 Moses de Leon 161 N Nahmanides—see Moses ben Nahman Nahon, Gerard 348 Nehemiah 65, 152 Netanyahu, Benzion 349, 351 Neusner, Jacob ix, 69, 71 Neutel, Walter 244-246, 249-250 New Amsterdam—see New York New Mexico 343 New Square (New York) 202, 206 New York 174 New Testament: Gospels 38 Nicholas I 172 North America—see United States, Canada Novak, Hershl 228-229 Novinsky, Anita 354 Nuremberg Trials 273 O Oberenheim 137 Octavian—see Augustus Oeltjen, Nathalie 358

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Index

376 Ontario (Canada) 245 Orwell, George 55, 89 Osiris 24 Ovadyah 114 P Palestine (British Mandate) 335 Palestinian Talmud—see Talmud: Yerushalmi Parrondo, Carlos Carrete 344 Passover 104-105, 115-116, 259, 274-278, 280, 287-289 Patriarch: Palestinian Jewish 56, 86-87 Pentateuch—see Bible: Hebrew Peres, Shimon 335 Peretz, Isaac Leibush 222 Philip (Tetrarch) 3 Philo (Judaeus) 2-3, 7-14, 16-18, 21-3, 25, 27-30, 153, 159 Plaut, Gunther 254 Poland: Jews 199, 307 Poll, Solomon 199 Post-modernity 338, 346 Prague 127 Prester John 162-163 Price, George 179 Prinz, Joachim 349 Ptolemy: dynasty 21, 24, 86-87 Public Archives of Canada 237, 244, 252, 256 Pullan, Brian S. 352

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Q Quebec 342-343 R Rabbinovitz, Shalom—see Shalom Aleichem Rabbis: ancient 31-32, 41, 46, 54-56, 58, 60, 64, 73, 85, 87-89; collective memory 33, 39, 44, 52; law 92, 118; responsa 130 Rameses 24-25 Ranke, Leopold 233 Raphia (Battle) 21 Reagan, Ronald 264 Reed, Annette 41 Revah, Israel Salvator 339-340, 350, 354, 356-359

Revel, Bernard 190-191 Rhinewine, Abraham 236 Rivkin, Ellis 347, 354 Robinson, Ira 247, 337, 369 Rolnick, Joseph 230 Rome 2, 7, 11, 20: administration 86-87; culture 39; law 45 Rome, David 242, 255 Rosh Hashanah 304 Roskies, David 224 Roth, Cecil 344-345, 349, 352-353, 356 Roth, Norman 344, 349, 352-353, 358 Rowland, Robert 355 Russia: Jews 177; 1905 Revolution 212 S Sack, B.G. 236-238, 241, 243 Sadducees 37 Salome 19 Salonika 155 Samaritans 40, 52 Sanders, Lionel Jehuda 2, 369-370 Sanhedrin 45 Sarah 113 Saraiva, Antonio Jose 357-358 Sartre, Jean-Paul 357 Satmar—see Teitelbaum, Joel Scaliger, Joseph Justus 165 Scholem, Gershom 347 Schwab, Shimon 194 Schwartz, Barry 33, 49 Scribner, Bob 121 Seder Olam 153 Segal, Jacob-Isaac 227 Seleucid Dynasty 26 Sepphoris 39, 42 Septuagint 166 Serrano, Juan Ignacio Pulido 340, 362 Sesostris 24-25 Sheramy, Rona 281 Shaikevich, Nahum Mayer 177 Shalitan, Levi 287 Shalom Aleichem 221-222 Shammai 65 Shandler, Jeffrey 278, 285, 289 Sharot, Stephen 199 Shearith Israel (Montreal) 240-241 Shoah—see Holocaust Shtern, Sholem 229-230

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Shtetl 193-194, 207, 209-210 Sifra 60 Silver, Abba Hillel 273 Simeon ben Gamaliel (Rabbi) 65 Simms, Norman 345 Simon bar Yohai (Rabbi) 65 Sinai, Revelation 88, 106-108, 115, 147, 149-150, 166, 279 Sirkes, Joel 154-155 Sivan, Emmanuel 209 Sixtus of Sienna 157 Sklare, Marshall 174 Slade, Matthew 154 Socrates 100, 103 Sofer, Moses 196 Solomon (King) 25, 330 Solovietchik, Hayim 195 Spain: Jews 182-4 Speisman, Stephen 248-252, 256 Spinoza, Baruch 153, 350, 352 Stalin, Joseph 265 Stein, Rebecca 329 Stern, Josef 112 Stone Avenue Talmud Torah (New York) 185 Stuczynski, Claude 338 Stuyvesant, Peter 174 Sutcliffe, Adam 345, 348 Swetschinski, Daniel 341, 358, 361 Sykes, Charles J. 288 Syria 17: Roman 86 Szajkowski, Zosa 359 T Tacitus 16 Talmud: Babylonian 60, 142, 164; censorship 151; Yerushalmi 54, 59 Targum Jonathan 166 Tarnow (Poland) 305-310 Tavim, Jose Alberto Rodrigues Da Silva 344 Teitelbaum, Joel 197, 200, 203, 207-208 Thirty Years War 127 Thomas, Lawrence Mordekhai 288 Tiberias 39, 42 Tiberius (Caesar) 7, 14-15 Tiberius Gemellus 14 Tomashevsky, Boris 191

377 Torah—see Bible: Hebrew Toronto 211: Jews 214 Tosefta 42, 47 Trent, Council of 165 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 234 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot 243 Trunk, Isaiah 266 Twersky, Yaakov Yosef 202 U Ungar, Shalom Moshe 201 United Jewish People’s Order 254, 268 United States 33, 172, 269: Holocaust memorials 259, 273-275, 279-281, 288, 291-293; Jews 173-177, 180-184, 186, 189-191, 285, 289-290, 301-302; Jewish identity 294; Orthodox Jews 198, 200, 208 Uziel, Isaac 155-156, 161 V Vespasian (Caesar) 7 Vienna 127 Viney, Linda 192 Volozhin (Yeshiva) 209 Vulgate 165 W Wachtel, Nathan 347 Walsh, H.W. 192 Webber, Jonathan 290 Wein, Berel 195 Wenger, Beth 172 Weinberg, Joanna 150, 169 Weinberg, Yechiel Yaakov 198 Weinper, Zishe 230 Weissmandl, Michoel Ber 201 Welczer, Masha 224 Wenger, Beth 172, 370 Wiener, Meir 284 Wiesel, Elie 289 Williamsburg (Brooklyn): Hasidism 203-204 Wissenschaft des Judentums 284 Wolff, Martin 236 Woocher, Jonathan 277 World War II 265 Worms (Germany): government 122-126; Jewish community 117-120,

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378 122, 124-125, 127-139, 141, 143-144-146 Y

Z Zacuto, Abraham 156, 161 Zhitlowsky, Chaim 229 Zionism 177, 334: Canada 217-220, 229 Zohar 154, 156, 159-163, 165, 168 Zorn, Friedrich 123 Zunser, Eliakum 187-188 Zwingli, Ulrich 165

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Yadin, Yigal 332 Yerushalmi, Yosef Haim viii, 133, 147, 149, 169, 342, 345, 349, 352, 357, 360 Yeshiva College (New York) 191 Yeshiva Farm Settlement (United States) 201 Yezierska, Anzia 180, 182, 186 Yiddish 211, 213, 217-218, 220, 223, 229-230 YIVO Institute (New York) 247

Yohanan ben Zakkai 53 Yose (Rabbi) 44, 65, 67-68, 71-72, 153 Yose the Galilean (Rabbi) 71 Young, James Edward 280, 285 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 343, 345-346, 351

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