Menachem Mendel » History

The Emigration of the Gr”a’s Students to the Land of Israel

Menachem Mendel — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:57:26 +0000

Yekum Tarbut is a new Israeli website dedicated to Tarbut Ivrit. They have published a few articles (all in Hebrew) that may be of interest to readers of this blog. Jeffrey Woolf wrote about the synagogue in Ashkenaz. Now Yaron Leibowitz has begun a multi-part series (here) on the disagreement between Aryeh Morgenstern and Yisrael Bartal on the significance of the emigration of the Gr”a’s students to the Land of Israel.

Lincoln’s Use of Biblical Imagery

Menachem Mendel — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:01:27 +0000

Huhn on Lincoln’s Use of Biblical Imagery:

Wilson Ray Huhn (University of Akron – School of Law) has posted A Higher Law: Abraham Lincolns Use of Biblical Imagery on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

(Via Legal Theory Blog.)

Asarah be-Tevet and Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Menachem Mendel — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:48:29 +0000

The fast of Asarah be-Tevet is this Friday. See here for a post about how to observe the fast when it falls on a Friday. For a more in-depth discussion of the origins of the fast and some of its halakhic issues, see this post from Mechon Hadar.

In this post, Uri Heitner describes the Asarah be-Tevet of his youth. They didn’t fast, nor speak about any reason for fasting, rather, it was an important day because it was Hayyim Naḥman Bialik’s birthday (b. January 9, 1873). See here and here for programs to mark this day.

What’s This Dispute About?

Menachem Mendel — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:30:31 +0000

For those who are interested in reading a defense of agenda-driven Artscroll-type history, read Gil Student’s post on modern historiography of the Barcelona Disputation of 1263 and the ensuing comments. The following quotation will suffice to get some idea of what history is for some.

I would have responded that this accusation is patently offensive. While I lack the historical tools to adequately answer the points raised, I know Ramban from his extensive writings as a pious man, one of the ba’alei ha-mesorah, bearers of our tradition. It is inappropriate to impugn his honesty based on speculation centuries later. Good questions do not give us the right to draw bad conclusions.

Reading a person’s “extensive writings,” especially if it consists of commentaries and philosophical works, will not necessarily give you much insight into who he/she was as a person. The writing of history isn’t perfect, but the post at Hirhurim seems to be supporting a writing of history that is more appropriate for My Uncle the Netziv than any serious historical writing. Agenda-driven history has its place and most historical writing is to some extent agenda-driven, but it comes in different shades and degrees, and this one would have difficulty making it into the serious history cart.

I did find the following discussion in Nina Caputo’s Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, and Messianism (102-103) interesting. She discusses some of the modern historiography on the disputation, and focuses on a theory proposed by Jaume Riera i Sans.

Inconsistencies between the Hebrew and Latin disputation narratives brought Riera i Sans to reexamine the manuscript traditions of the texts. Confronted with two contradictory depictions of the same event, Riera i Sans argues that neither of the extant sources is what it appears to be. Though the anonymous Latin document has been generally accepted as a summary of the proceedings written by an observer for the official royal record, Riera i Sans suggests that it was a summary of the disputation arguments written by Friar Paul for King James I, his royal sponsor. In the same vein, he sees the Hebrew text not as a first-hand account of the debate written by Nahmanides, but rather as a fictional representation composed some two to three hundred years following the event.

Fascinated by the disparity between the two accounts (as had been many of the scholars who analyzed the textual remains of this event before him), Riera i Sans took an inventory of the extant manuscripts of the Hebrew recension. The Latin version exists in only one manuscript copy that can be dated to the late thirteenth century; however, there is not a single manuscript copy of the Hebrew text that dates from the thirteenth, or even the fourteenth century. Based on this lack of physical evidence, he suggests the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century as a possible date of composition. This late date of authorship, Riera i Sans argues, also accounts for the unique dramatic and fictional flourishes used in this document. The author’s sense of showmanship, ironic sense of humor, and self-consciousness about pomp of court rituals are narrative techniques and themes typical of literary production during the Italian Renaissance, not, according to Riera i Sans, of Jewish authors in the late thirteenth century. Instead, he argues that the Hebrew account was written by an unknown scholar who could not believe widespread reports that the talented exegete and legal authority had faltered so badly and embarrassingly in the public debate with Friar Paul. Riera i Sans superimposes on this anonymous author the same concerns that motivate many scholars today. He thus redeems Nahmanides’ name from the charge that he dishonestly represented the disputation and restores his reputation as a great textual authority.

Caputo disagrees with Riera i Sans’ argument.

This argument is intriguing. It makes sense of the discrepancy between two representations of the disputation, but without impugning Nahmanides’ authorial integrity. However, the suggestion that the Hebrew documentary evidence of the Barcelona disputation was fabricated post facto, literally to change the historical record by transforming a minor and embarrassing event in the life of one of the most important figures of medieval Jewry into a glorious fable, does not raise sufficient doubt about the authenticity of the text

Caputo finds support for the authenticity of the Hebrew account in archival findings.

[The] royal archive contains evidence that some two years following the debate Nahmanides circulated a document recouting his performance in this encounter. These documents indicate that the style and content of Nahmanides’ disputation narrative, combined with the fact that Nahmanides presented his account to the bishop of Girona, raised the ire of the Dominican friars and ultimately resulted in his banishment from the Crown of Aragon.

Caputo does not take Nahmanides’ account literally, emphasizing the rhetorical aspect of his account and the dialogue that he himself was in with both Jewish and non-Jewish readers.

How to Recognize a Good Source

Menachem Mendel — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 02:48:26 +0000

The Talmud Blog has posted a report by Jane Kanarek on a conference in Berlin, “‘A Woman in the Temple Court?’ Women in Seder Qodashim and in the Temple.” Jane wrote that

The most striking part of the conference has been the ways in which, by bringing new tools and questions to bear on the text, each presenter revealed the presence of women and gender in many unexpected locations.

This observation dovetails well with a column from the American Historical Association monthly, Perspectives in History, that was linked to at the Legal History Blog. The column is called The Ability to Recognize a Good Source. Here are the first two paragraphs.

One of the arts of history is the ability to recognize a good source. We know about the extraordinary influence of books such as Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.1 These talented historians were able to tell a compelling story and explain its meaning for us. But the initial success was their ability to recognize what could be learned from the trial transcripts they came upon during their work on the Inquisition. Indeed, Le Roy Ladurie’s principal source had been published a decade before his study. He was the first to realize its possibilities. Ginzburg had been struck by a reference in a document in the Udine archives to a defendant who held that the world had its origin in putrefaction. Because he was busily searching for material on a different topic, Ginzburg merely noted the number of the trial about the world’s beginnings for future reference. Luckily for us, the defendant’s curious belief stirred Ginzburg’s memory from time to time, prompting him years later to return to the trial document to see if he could understand what the man we now know as Menocchio had meant by his statement about the world’s origin.

My favorite example of a master of the art of recognizing a good source is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She was not the first person to encounter the diary of Martha Ballard, on which she based her book A Midwife’s Tale. Several historians had looked through the diary at the Maine Historical Society and set it aside because, as Ulrich recounted, they found that it contained much the same thing day after day. Most likely, they also rejected it because the daily life of a midwife did not qualify as history with a capital H. Laurel Ulrich, by contrast, was interested in learning about how women served their communities, and a knowledge of textiles suggested to her that the patterns of family obligation and professional work evident in the diary wove a revealing fabric of the social and economic contributions of women.

Jews and Healing in the Middle Ages

Menachem Mendel — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:12:18 +0000

This paper was presented at a conference a few years ago, but it hasn’t lost its relevance. (hat tip)

Jews and Healing in the Middle Ages: The Harmonisation of Jewish Beliefs with Theories and Practices of Different Western Medical Traditions. Available here.

By Carmen Caballero-Navas

Paper given at the Conference on Religion and Healing and The Second Meeting of the Asian Society for the History of Medicine (2004)

Abstract: In this paper I shall discuss how western medieval Jews integrated medical knowledge and healing practices alien to their own beliefs, trying to conciliate them with their own values and customs, and providing them with their religious ideas and identity. I will discuss these processes at two levels: intellectual ideas regarding natural philosophy and healthcare expressed and transmitted through written medical texts; actual practice and the interaction with people of other religious communities, as witnessed in written sources.

Indeed, practical texts often show the interaction between members of Jewish and Christian communities in actual practice. For example, Christian and Jewish women appear to have shared similar knowledge and have used the same techniques regarding childbirth. It has been shown by historians that despite the differences with regard the use of plants (used according local availability), the techniques found in Western Hebrew texts were not different to those included in Latin texts (and Arabic). The similitude in remedies and techniques might be explained if we consider that, while the theory and notions in physiology are in general textually transmitted, techniques and recipes are more likely part of actual experience and belong largely to the province of orallity. In fact, there is evidence – for example – that Jewish midwives attended Christian women in labour, and vice versa, despite the prohibitions of the Church. This kind of interaction was a sure source of exchange of healing knowledge, and it is in the origin of the common substratum that we often discover in magic formulae and other healing methods and procedures included in sources of different provenance. Jews integrated these common practices, but it seems that they maintained their religious and cultural identity through the resource to Hebrew and to their own cultural background, as show the continuous allusions to practical Kabbalah in magic healing.

During the Middle Ages, natural philosophy and medicine developed in close contact, since the former explained nature and elaborated theories on the body and its functioning that were the theoretical basis for learned medical practice, and had a considerable influence upon healing practices in general. Some of the notions and concepts developed by natural philosophers were easily assumed by Judaism, while other collided with basic Jewish beliefs. I am especially interested in understanding how Jewish authors adopted and adapted ideas and theories regarding questions that were deeply embedded in Jewish culture and were regulated by religious laws, such as, for example, sexuality, menstruation and abortion.

In short, this paper will discuss the “judaization” of medieval western medicine, as a process through which medical ideas and concepts, as well as healing practices, were received, and integrated or refused, by Jews. I shall pay especial attention to the role that their religious beliefs had in the shaping of their medical knowledge and practice.

Happy July 4th

Menachem Mendel — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 01:29:38 +0000

I spent most of today driving, so any celebration of July 4th has been a bit muted. A thought for the day from Thomas Paine’s introduction to Age of Reason.

I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.

Interview with Yoav Sorek-Part V

Menachem Mendel — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:37:29 +0000

Below is the final part of the interview with Yoav Sorek.

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.

The Holiness in the Seam Line Sector

Maybe redemption will come from what you call the boundary sector, people who occupy the area between the religious and the secular?

“Correct. Taking off the kippah is maybe a type of joining this diversified expanse. I am joining it as a datla”sh (dati le-she-avar/”a person who used to be religious”) who observes the commandments, or however you want to call it. It’s about people who have in common that they think that Jewish identity is essential, the root, that it needs to guide us and we have to connect to it in a serious manner. On the other hand, they understand that the religious Orthodox version is not that which will save us. These people don’t buy this package deal, for any number of reasons. Newly religious (hozrim be-teshuvah), those who are no longer religious (hozrim be-she’eilah), Biliakists who are the Last of the Mohicans, those who have been in mixed preparatory (i.e. pre-army) programs, and more. All of this group is in my eyes holy, since there is found the key. In this linking.

“But this group is amorphic. It deviates. Everyone and his own combination. What is lacking is a concrete world view that is able to bring about commitment, that is able to sprout a social process beyond the interesting things that are able to result from each one of these figures. And this is the mission that I see for myself, the movement that I am trying to build. I don’t have either the ability or the desire to establish a new denomination. Our aspiration needs to be to link up with established processes and to existing forces and to give them tools that they don’t have.”

And they are?

“When I meet people who are close to me ideologically, I feel that if it is possible for me to have a unique contribution, it is the absence of the feeling that I need to break something in order to go to where I want to go. I come from a long line of rabbis and I love dearly the give-and-take of the halakhic decisors (poskim) throughout the generations, who worked hard to clarify God’s word, and I feel that what is needed to be done today is to continue this enterprise. And this is possible to do in the context that I am talking, and not in the discussions that are totally blind to what is going on around them, which exist in the majority of the study halls (betei midrash). I feel that this is continuity, traditionalism, that here is the awe of God. I feel that many people are standing in a sort of fissure between their religiosity and other things, and I am not.”

There are other existing denominations who sit on the seam line: the traditional-Mizrahi and the traditional-Conservative.

“What is correct about the traditional (masorati) model is that in popular belief there are two levels. There is something that is obligatory and there is another higher level of what you would do if you wanted to invest more in the religious side of your life. So it seems in the Mizrahi society, and this is a correct model for the future. In a certain sense this model exists within halakhah, just that it is fuzzy. The ‘Shulhan Arukh,’ and it is possible to prove this in a number of places, is written for scholars, for people who want a higher spiritual level, and it is clear that not everything in it is meant to be obligatory for everyone. For example, it is written there that a person needs to be one of the first ten people in the synagogue. How can everyone be one of the first ten? It is clear that this is intended for one who wants to behave in a pietistic manner.

“The one problem with the Mizrahi traditionalism is that it is very conservative. It demands to preserve religion as it was in exile. It says, I want that there should be an ideal religious model that is very Orthodox, and I want to observe it partially. From the perspective of the traditional person, let the messiah never come, don’t make innovations, don’t invent anything.”

And the Conservative model? The more halakhic wing of the movement would seem to be close to you, just that in your eyes the turning point is Zionism and not modernity.

“I call my approach post-Orthodox. A return to what Judaism was before Orthodoxy. From a halakhic standpoint, the legal decisions of Rabbi David Golinkin, the Israeli representative of the halakhists in this movement, are Orthodox legal decisions. For better and for worse. He also doesn’t think, so I think, that redemption has arrived.

“I have no problem to identify with many aspects of what is called the right-wing of the Conservative movement. I am deterred, on the other hand, from a halakhic approach that searches for a Judaism which doesn’t injure too much, that doesn’t infringe upon modern life too much, politically correct. I am averse to this. The problem with the Conservative movement is in the tune and not the content. It creates a not so good connotation, and in a number of cases deservedly so.

“But nevertheless, I think that in the religious crisis of today in which Orthodox Jews are a minority within the people of Israel and also responsible for some of the distortions of the way in which the Torah is implemented in reality, they don’t have the right to right anyone off.

Maybe their desire is not that the Torah won’t impinge upon modern life, but, rather, that it won’t contradict additional values that are accepted by us, humanistic values?

“I don’t automatically agree that the accepted morality is preferable to the morality of the Torah. In my opinion, until this day it has proven the opposite. I am not at all sure that there don’t have to be sacrifices in the Temple may it be speedily rebuilt, and I am sure that the majority of the Conservatives-and many Modern Orthodox-will fall off their chair is you will propose to them a Temple with sacrifices. I think that we need to work towards a renewal of the laws of purity and impurity, not to nullify them. Not to minimize the Torah as fast as possible, rather, sometimes also to increase it in areas in which it isn’t present today.”

Why should we renew the laws of impurity and purity?

“They are laws that organize the relationship to the inorganic world. They were one of the central religious occupations of the Second Temple Period. There is in this a type of deep religiosity that we don’t know today, that is lacking for us.”

The halakhah needs, according to his opinion, to return to the path of slow development which characterized it until it was frozen when Orthodoxy began-excluding that which is connected to the historical turning point of the establishment of Israel in its land, this needs to undergo a radical change.

“And this is not just with regard to the laws of the state (hilkhot medinah), rather, in connection to the body, the relationship to work, the relationship to a person’s time and many other things.”

But when we get down to details, Sorek is as stingy as a cheapskate. I propose to him as a classic example the commandment of taking tithes (terumot u-ma’asrot): Aren’t payments to the National Insurance Institute the sort of the proper sovereign, reasonable, and effective incarnation of the commandment of tithing-a social commandment in its source,which is observed today in a meaningless framework, the destruction of fruits, and incumbent only upon farmers? He is reluctant. It is preferable for a commandment be done out of love, he says, than through a tax which is perceived as a punishment.

But “there is something almost neurotic in the religious reality today,” he agrees. “The truth is that the younger generation in the religious community knows a little bit about how to free itself from this. It chooses more, it connects more. Along with this, to give up on halakhot on a whim would be irresponsible.”

Top Ten Historians

Menachem Mendel — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:41:00 +0000

Over at H-Law there is an interesting discussion about the “top ten historians.” Even with all of the limitations and biases involved in making such a list, whether they be geographical, disciplinary, etc., it is a lively and informative discussion. The most recent posts from this discussion thread can be found here, starting with this one.

5,000 Years of the Middle East

Menachem Mendel — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 17:33:08 +0000

I am a big fan of using maps to illustrate certain aspects of history and this one is highly recommended. Via Targuman.