Sweatin’ to the Oldies

by Eliezer Segal

Our contemporary propensity to equate beauty and good health with slimness seems to be of recent vintage. To judge from Talmudic sources, earlier generations held diametrically different positions on these questions.

The ancient rabbis more often took pride in their corpulence. Thus, it was related of two famous sages (apparently with some satisfaction) that when they stood opposite one another, a team of oxen could pass under their bellies without touching them.

Conversely, the Talmud often regarded thinness not as a mark of physical beauty, but as a symptom of diseases like consumption, dehydration or dysentery.

There are a handful of traditions that allude to efforts at weight-loss, whether through exercise or other means. However it is clear from those passages that they do not reflect an attitude that “thin is beautiful.”

Efforts at weight-reduction are mentioned only in connection with unusual circumstances and occupations.

For example–wrestlers:

The Mishnah (Shabbat 22:6) refers to a type of physical exertion that it calls “mit’ammelin” as being forbidden on the day of rest. The Hebrew word was generally understood as a reference to a calisthenic-like regimen, as described by the tenth-century North African commentator Rabbenu Hananel: “They flex and unflex their arms in front and behind, and similarly bend their legs from their hips, leading them to work up heat and perspiration. This is considered medically beneficial.” Based on the above interpretation, the term was adopted as the modern Hebrew word for exercise.

However, as recent scholarship has demonstrated, a careful reading of the passage in light of its context and manuscript variants reveals that it is speaking of a very specific form of physical activity. For the same Mishnah includes references to anointing the body, massaging the belly, inducing vomiting and “going down to the peloma.” This last-mentioned word is apparently a Greek designation for a mud-filled arena used by wrestlers. An alternative textual tradition reads keroma, another well-known Greek term for a wrestling arena. All these activities, including those intended to evacuate the combatants’ bowels and stomach to control their weight, were part of the athlete’s normal training.

It is evident that such procedures would not require rabbinic regulation unless Jews were actually involved in them–and after all, are we not descended from no less a wrestling champion than the patriarch Jacob!

It is unlikely that the chief purpose of the exercise was esthetic, so much as to enhance the individual’s athletic prowess.

Similarly, concern for beauty was clearly not the main motivation behind the following remarkable episode from the Talmud:

The third-century sage Rabbi Eleazar ben Simeon had been hired as a detective by the Roman government who had recognized (long before Harry Kemmelman!) that Talmudic deductive reasoning and can make valuable contributions to police investigations. Though he took care to limit his arrests to those who were unquestionably guilty of felonies, Rabbi Eleazar–whose father Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai was notorious for his opposition the Roman regime–continued to be plagued by doubts that he might nonetheless have inadvertently been responsible for handing over innocent Jews to the despised occupation authorities.

In order to put his mind at ease, Rabbi Eleazar contrived a way to test the purity of his actions: He declared that if his deeds had been consistently sinless then his innards should be impervious to natural decomposition. 

The rabbi then swallowed an anesthetic, and had himself carried into a marble chambre, where his belly was surgically opened and the fat removed. Baskets full of fat were removed from his body and placed in the sun on a hot summer day; but miraculously they proved immune to putrefaction.

The results of the experiment satisfied Rabbi Eleazar that he had not compromised his righteousness even unknowingly. He saw in this sign a fulfillment of the words of the Psalmist (16:9): “My flesh too shall rest and confidently dwell in safety.”

When I mentioned this early report of a liposuction operation to various physicians, they assured me that there must be some mistake, and that the procedure had only come into use in recent decades. The fact is that the first-century naturalist Pliny described an almost identical operation that was performed on the son of the Roman consul Lucius Apronius Caesianus, though in that case the surgery was for purely cosmetic purposes.

At any rate, most Jews in Talmudic times were neither wrestlers nor detectives. Nor, for that matter, were they subject to the temptations of “fast foods” or remote-controlled televisions, so that undernourishment was probably more of a threat to them than obesity.

And who knows? Maybe there is some hope that society will eventually revert to those fleshier models of beauty that prevailed in earlier times!

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, May 15 1997, pp. 18, 20.
• For further reading:
  • S. Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine, New York 1965 
  • J. Preuss, Julius Preuss’ Biblical and Talmudic Medicine, New York 1978.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Gone Fishin’

by Eliezer Segal

For those of you who may not be keeping count, my previous column was my one-hundredth in the Jewish Free Press. I think that should entitle me to a brief vacation. Unfortunately, even if my editor did not keep me shackled to my desk, I could still not afford to miss an issue, lest my poor children be forced to go another two weeks without food or Nikes.

By way of compromise, I would like to fulfill a long-standing dream of mine, by submitting a column that I do not actually have to write. No, I am not going to offer summer re-runs by reprinting old and dated material. Rather, I wish to fill up a page with selections from letters that I have received from my loyal readers.

I do indeed get many letters, mostly via email, in response to the archive of my articles that is now posted on the World Wide Web of the Internet.

One peculiar consequence of this situation is that my correspondents do not necessarily deal with current material. Often they are reacting to some unguarded comment of mine that was originally published ten years ago and has since been forgotten. In many cases, the writers do not even bother to indicate which of the hundreds of items on my Web site they are referring to.

My favourites tend to be the most irate. And make no mistake about it, there are plenty of hostile souls lurking about the Internet. You would think that a column like mine, largely devoted to obscure quotations from old Hebrew books, would not have much potential for antagonizing anybody. But remember, I am dealing with religion, one of our foremost sources of strife and intolerance.

Thus, we find the following letter, from an obviously learned individual with an Arabic name, reacting to my 1991 article about the Jews of Baghdad:

it was shown yure jewish is not emportantat to say baghdad from old time its lland for jewish awant to say

1. all jewish are layer
2. all jewish book is rong
3. all jewish are murder

(English translation will be provided on request).

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I should note that letters like the above are counterbalanced by others, like the following:

Hi. I am Muslim and believe that we have all one source and worship the same God, or Allah, or what ever you call him. Thanks for this information. It is really good to understand your point of view.

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Nor is my hate-mail restricted to members of other faiths. Today’s Jewish world has enough internal frictions to incite letters like the following one, from an Israeli Orthodox sage who is clearly irritated by something that was said in an old article of mine about Purim:

I read your Purim Torah on the “development” of Purim. You exhibit a profound ignorance of Talmudic method, Jewish history and just about every other topic you touch on. Or, to put it in words that even a nitwit like you would understand: you’re full of [four-letter word for fecal matter]

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An interesting recent trend is for extremely religious Jews to protest my inclusion of more moderate Orthodoxy (of the Orthodox Union or Yeshivah University varieties) as if they were really Orthodox.

And if mere scholarship can rile folks up, imagine what sensitive territory I am treading on when I venture into spoofs and satire! Several readers were offended by a fictitious letter I once composed arguing Pharaoh’s perspective on the Exodus story. Others objected to my story about a supposed Israeli sale of unused surplus vowels to Poland. They were expecting (without bothering to read the actual article) that it must be one of those tasteless ethnic put-downs, which of course it was not. Alternatively, some alert fans wrote to protest that a similar article is in circulation in the American military about Croatian, and that I ought to stamp out that plagiarism.

Of course there are those who turn for me for intellectual guidance and spiritual advice, as in the following:

I will like prices and shipping information on shabbat candles. or if you have a cadalog you can send me.

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A bit closer to my competencies is the following:

I have been with my boyfriend for a while and I really want to learn more about his religion… His parents are a little strict about my being a Christian. Please help me.

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And there are these frequent requests for assistance:

Hello. I am a student at the … and I have to write a report on … Please send me all the information by Thursday!

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The next item evokes some fascininating speculations about the writer’s motives:

What exactly goes on in a Jewish wedding? I need to know by Wed.

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I have a special weakness for appeals of the following type, which are surprisingly plentiful:

Can you direct me to a place where I can learn exactly what the Talmud is, and how would it benefit a born-again Christian to learn and/or study the Talmud?

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Or:

Any tips on teaching Passover to 4-years-old Catholic Hispanics?

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Well, I have done it. I have let you compose this week’s column for me. Just keep those letters flowing in, the angrier the better, and maybe I will be able to extend this vacation by a few more weeks.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, May 29 1997, pp. 8-9.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Akdamut, Aramaic, and Ashkenazic Origins

by Eliezer Segal

During the late seventeenth century, the Venice Jewish community was torn apart by a controversy. The issue that had the Venetian Jews raging at one another was a trivial-looking item of the Shavu’ot liturgy: When to recite the “Akdamut”?

The “Akdamut” is a rhymed poetic prologue to the festival Torah reading of the revelation at Mount Sinai. Composed by a cantor in Germany at the time of the Crusades, its ninety Aramaic stanzas speak in praise of the Torah and of the great rewards that await those who devote their lives to it.

Although the recitation of this inspiring poem had spread beyond the confines of the German and Polish rites, there emerged a slight discrepancy over where exactly it should be inserted. The established Ashkenazic custom was to chant it after the first reader, usually the Kohen, had read the first verse of his aliyyah.

The Sepharadic Jews of Venice were understandably perplexed by this strange practice. On no other occasion is it permissible to interrupt the sequence of the Torah reading for the sake of a prayer or liturgical poem, and there was no apparent justification for doing so now.

The Venetian Jews were so polarized on the issue that they eventually involved an outsider, Rabbi Ephraim Cohen of Vilna. In his responsum on the question, the Lithuanian sage came out solidly in favour of the Ashkenazic practice, appealing to its antiquity and to the sacred duty of following ancestral custom, even if it is not readily understandable.

Several of the elements in this controversy can be viewed as typical of the differing approaches of Ashkenazic and Sepharadic attitudes towards local custom.

The Sepharadim, representatives of a culture that esteemed rationalism and systematic thinking, insisted that practice must conform to the theoretical demands of the halakhah. Where conflicts arise it is the custom that must yield to the law.

By contrast, the Jews of central Europe had been distinguished from their earliest days by a profound reverence their local customs. Lacking the Sepharadic inclination for systematic codification, early Ashkenazic Jewry channeled their literary energies to meticulously recording the customs of individual communities and rabbis. Where their customs seemed to conflict with the requirements of the Talmud, then it was the Talmud had to be reinterpreted so as to uphold the customs. 

It is likely that this veneration of ancestral ritual was inspired by the consciousness that their forebears had subjected themselves to heroic martyrdom at the sword of the Crusaders, the very same setting that had produced the Akdamut. 

Through their unyielding adherence to custom, Ashkenazic Jewry succeeded in preserving vestiges of ancient traditions, even though the historical roots were unknown to them.

This is certainly true in the instance of the “Akdamut” controversy. Although the defenders of the Ashkenazic rite were usually at a loss to explain it, we are now able to trace its origins back to ancient synagogue procedure.

According to the procedures described in the Talmud, the reading of each verse from the Scriptures must be followed by the recitation of its Aramaic translation, known as a “Targum.” The purpose was to make the Hebrew text accessible to worshippers who were not well-versed in the holy tongue. With the decline of Aramaic as a Jewish vernacular the practice has fallen into disuse in most communities, but it remains on the books.

The recitation of the Targum would thus begin after the reading of the first verse of the Torah reading. With this fact in mind, it makes perfect sense that the Akdamut, which is composed in Aramaic, should be inserted at that point in the reading if it was actually the beginning of the Targum, and not of the Torah reading itself.

Although the “Akdamut” is not a translation of the opening verse of the Torah reading, but a poem in its own right, the phenomenon can still be accounted for by our knowledge of the history of the Targum literature.

The Targums that were employed in the Land of Israel were elaborate literary creations that wove together elements from midrash and traditional teaching. The “Turgeman,” official responsible for reciting the Targum during the service, was expected to improvise his text. Indeed, this preference for creative improvisation over uniformity and standardization was another characteristic difference between the Palestinian and Babylonian liturgies.

As a natural extension to their artistic Targums, the Turgemans of the Land of Israel were accustomed to composing dramatic introductory passages for “special” occasions. Several of these have survived in manuscripts.

Thus, in one text, the story of the parting of the Red Sea is introduced by a long alphabetical poem in which Moses debates with the sea over the Israelites’ right to pass through. The sea refuses to relent until Moses appeals to divine authority. The same manuscript contains a prelude to the giving of the Torah, in which hosts of angels and supernatural beings celebrate the mystical wedding of God and his people.

Of course, the Shavu’ot reading of the Sinai revelation is a very special one and so the theme attracted a number of poetic creations.

Thus we can recognize that in fashioning this “Targumic prelude”, the eleventh-century author of the Akdamut was continuing a tradition whose roots lay deep in the Holy Land. Removed from its original setting of a full Aramaic translation, the placement of the Akdamut seemed an incomprehensible deviation from normative practice.

This instance provides additional confirmation for a pattern that has often been discerned by historians of Ashkenazic Jewry: that the community originated in the Land of Israel, having reached Germany via Italy and France. This route can be traced through the strata of the Yiddish language as well as through many of their rituals and customs. Sepharadic Jews, on the other hand, can be linked to Babylonia.

Thanks to their fervent devotion to local customs, the Ashkenazic Jews of Venice and elsewhere have allowed us access to precious treasures from our past.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, June 12 1997, p. 6.
• For further reading:
  • A. Grossman, The Early Sages of Ashkenaz, Jerusalem, 1981.
  • J. Heinemann, “Remnants from the Poetic Creation of the Ancient Meturgemans,” Ha-Sifrut 4 (1973), pp. 362-375.
  • I. Jacobson, Netiv Binah, Tel-Aviv 1978.
  • R. Kasher, “Two Targum-Tosephtas on the Death of Moses,” Tarbiz 54 (1985), pp. 217-224.
  • S. Y. Zevin, The Festivals in Halachah, New York and Jerusalem, 1983.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Striking Similarities

by Eliezer Segal

News Item: June 1997–Labor unrest in Calgary. Workers at the Safeway supermarket chain have been on a prolonged strike, and the teachers in the local public school system have also threatened to go to the picket lines at the beginning of the school year.

As I write these lines, a prolonged strike of supermarket employees is just concluding, and the teachers union has declared a labour dispute of its own. Developments of this kind are of course a natural part of modern economic life.

The right of workers or craftsmen to organize themselves into guilds or unions has roots in a Talmud law that asserts the authority of citizens to determine such matters as measures, exchange rates and salaries. The medieval commentators extended these prerogatives to professional organizations as well, granting them the privilege of enforcing their collective decisions upon individual members.

In modern times, the concept was further applied to trade unions by authorities of the stature of Rabbis Ben-Zion Ouziel and Moshe Feinstein.

Nevertheless, in Jewish law the definition of permissible grounds for a strike has generally been more limited than what is accepted in our society, reflecting the ideal of a community whose constituent segments must subordinate themselves to the common good. Most authorities are clearly more comfortable about allowing strikes in cases where the employee has reneged on an existing contract or violated accepted conventions. Presumably the wage-cuts and reassignment of tasks that occur so frequently in our economy could fall into that category. And at least one authority has explicitly extended it to encompass situations where the objective circumstances, such as inflation or market conditions, have altered so significantly that they effectively undermine the purposes of a existing contract.

More problematic from the perspective of Jewish law is the question of whether a decision by a union or guild has the status of an “accepted convention” for purposes of enforcing it upon an unwilling employer. In general Talmudic law has looked askance at unilateral strikes under such circumstances where the grievances of the workers were not formulated in consultation with the broader community leadership, preferably its rabbis, whose position in the process bears some resemblance to those of labour courts in our society.

On these grounds, one Eastern European rabbi ruled against the local slaughterers when they walked out unilaterally in support of wage demands. In his responsum, the rabbi declared that those slaughterers had consulted no rabbinic authority about their demands, and hence their employers were within their rights to hire outside workers to keep their businesses in operation.

In a similar spirit, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook stated that a strike may be declared only as a means to enforce an existing decision by an authorized Jewish court, and only after the employees had exhausted other means of legal recourse.

Assuming that the sanctions themselves are deemed to lie within the permissible parameters, does Jewish law permit them to keep out “scab” labour?

This question is subsumed under the more general one of whether a guild or union has the right to prevent outside workers from setting up shop within their domain, an issue that arose frequently in Jewish history.

Although the Talmud appears to deny them such a right, several authorities have understood the extent of that decision somewhat differently. In particular, Rabbi Joseph Colon, writing in 15th-century Italy, argued that the Talmud meant only to say that the guild could not rely on the court to enforce their monopoly, however if they possessed the power or pressure to enforce it by themselves, then the law would not stand in their way.

Rabbi Colon’s position was vehemently opposed by Rabbi Joseph Caro, the author of the Shulhan `Arukh, but accepted nonetheless in Rabbi Moshe Isserles’ Ashkenazic glosses to that law code. In the responsa of subsequent authorities we encounter a continuing controversy on this question.

Responding to an inquiry concerning the legality of a strike by teachers at an American yeshivah, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was most generous in defining the powers and rights that he conceded to striking unions. Not only did he assert that workers could go on strike to defend their interests without consulting a rabbi or community leader, and that the vote of the majority was binding upon the whole union; but he went on to rule, albeit with considerable hesitation, that the union could impose its will on non-members as well. All this, he emphasized, was on the condition that the strike itself was a legal and non-violent one.

An even stronger advocate of the power of the labour unions was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook whose words echo the prevailing socialist ideals of pre-state Israel: “The organization of workers for purposes of protection and defense of working conditions is a legitimate expression of justice and social reform… Unorganized labour causes harm to the workers. Non-unionized labourers work under inferior conditions to unionized ones, and thereby cause losses not only to themselves but also to the proletariat as a whole.”

Such talk makes a person want to rush out immediately and rally to the cause of the exploited Jewish newspaper columnists.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, June 26 1997, p. 8.
• For further reading:
  • S. Warhaftig, Jewish Labour Law, Jerusalem, 1982.
  • Z. Yaron, Mishnato shel ha-Rav Kuk, Jerusalem, 1974.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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School Days

by Eliezer Segal

My duties as an academic frequently involve the reading and evaluation of application forms, especially from students seeking admission to the various programmes offered by our department.

The art of composing applications and curricula vitae has become a business for professionals; and reading them has correspondingly come to demand subtle skills of critical analysis.

Earlier eras also knew of competition among students to be accepted into prestigious academic faculties or professional schools, and some letters of application have been preserved from earlier centuries.

As scholars of Jewish history have come to expect, the most promising source of such documents is the Cairo Genizah, that inexhaustible repository of books and documents that was maintained for centuries by the Egyptian Jewish community, whose contents have been scattered among libraries and museums throughout the world.

One such letter was composed in twelfth-century Cairo by the father of an aspiring medical student, addressed to a distinguished physician in hope that the latter will accept the petitioner’s son to be trained under his tutelage.

In keeping with the spirit of the times, the letter was far more elegant than the standardized applications that pass by my desk. It is introduced by carefully selected biblical verses extolling the virtues of humility and peace, and then proceeds to proclaim the glories of the recipient. The physician is addressed in very personal terms, as the hope is extended that he will live to see his only son married and continuing in Papa’s learned footsteps. The letter even includes holiday greetings for the upcoming Passover–which will hopefully be celebrated in the rebuilt Temple of Jerusalem!

The applicant then digresses into a philosophical discussion about the inherent striving of the human soul for self-improvement.

Only now that the groundwork has been carefully prepared, does the letter come to its main point. Having heard that a vacancy has recently been created, will the esteemed teacher consider accepting his brilliant and eager son for the position?

And just in case the student’s qualifications are not sufficient of themselves to guarantee his acceptance into the programme, the father assures the master that he will be willing to pay a considerably higher tuition than his previous student… 

We can better appreciate the eagerness that emerges from the letter letter if we keep in mind that the addressee was not just any Professor of Medicine. Although it is not stated explicitly, all the circumstantial evidence points clearly to the identity of that individual–“Rabbi Moses the prince and noble…the judge distinguished in all matters”–as being none other than the great Maimonides!

I do not know how Maimonides reacted to the application, though I strongly suspect that it would have been with liberal sprinklings of sodium chloride. For then, as today, the real student did not always live up to the images projected by their letters of reference.

This truism is aptly illustrated by another letter contained in the Genizah, written by a certain medical student to his chums. In it, Natanel Hallevi ben Moshe, a member of an affluent family, apologizes for the fact that he will be unable to socialize with his companions for the foreseeable future, because he has been severely “grounded” until his studies showed improvement.

The “grounding” in this instance had a positive side to it since it was reinforced by a sizable bribe from his father. At any rate, the unfortunate student does appear to have resigned himself with equanimity to his imprisonment, in spite of his tendency to fill his letters with quotations from Job. He reports that he is devoting himself to his studies–in medicine, grammar, Talmud and theology–and only occasionally sneaks out to an illicit rendezvous with his companions.

We do in fact hear from this student in later documents. He grew up to serve as the head of the Yeshivah of Eretz Israel (which at the time had relocated in Cairo) from 1160 to 1170. Concerned parents, take note!

Aspiring physicians in Cairo could not obtain employment in their profession without producing a police certificate of good conduct. Admittedly, this was probably not so much an indication of their unsavoury reputation as it was of the grave responsibilities that they bore. At any rate, the Genizah records suggest that those certificates were often obtained through bribes and connections. 

The high spirits that we now associate with the student life-style are not encountered as frequently among European Jews, perhaps because they did not indulge in secular studies; but some testimonies do exist.

What appears to be a Hebrew drinking song–a modest Jewish “Carmina Burana“–survived in some Ashkenazic prayer-book in the guise of a Hanukkah hymn. Its lyrics consist of lively exhortations to continue feasting and drinking day and night even if it requires the selling of house, field and cattle. 

Well, I must conclude this column now since I have to compose some imaginative letters of reference for my students.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, September 4, 1997, p. 8, as: “The elegant art of letters of reference.”
• For further reading:
  • L. Ginzberg, Students, Scholars and Saints, New York and Philadelphia, 1958.
  • S. D. Goitein, Jewish Education in Muslim Countries, Jerusalem, 1962.
  • S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1972.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Membership Drives

by Eliezer Segal

Even a relatively small Jewish community like that of Calgary offers potential worshippers a formidable variety of options, covering most of the main North American denominations. The ability to choose a synagogue that fits our religious or esthetic sensibilities is something that modern Jews have learned take for granted.

In fact, the coexistence of multiple synagogues in a single community has not always been an accepted norm. In the modern era it is symptomatic of a world-view that regards religious affiliation as a matter of personal choice. Scarcely a century ago, special legislation was needed to allow Samson Raphael Hirsch to withrdaw his Orthodox minority from the predominantly Reform community of Frankfurt am Main; even that decision was reached with great reluctance, and was not followed by most Orthodox Jews in Germany. 

Although the Talmud contains occasional references to synagogues that were owned by private individuals, professional guilds or immigrants from other lands, in most cases they were owned and administered by the Jewish municipal councils.

In medieval times the policy was even more pronounced. The local communities were usually insistent that their synagogue be the exclusive place of worship for all residents of the town, a situation that frequently encouraged moderation and compromise from both the rabbinic leadership and their flocks.

Occasionally even during the middle ages there were historical and demographic factors that brought about the toleration of two or more congregations in one town. Such was the case in the cosmopolitan Jewish society of Egypt during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Though historical roots and political circumstances linked them to the Holy Land, the Egyptian communities were situated at the crossroads of a larger international Jewish populace, most of which accepted the authority of the Babylonian academies headed by the “Ge’onim.” The upshot was that most of the larger Egyptian cities and towns hosted two synagogues, worshipping respectively according to the Palestinian and Babylonian rites.

Over the years, a competitive spirit came to characterize the relations between the two congregations as each strove to attract worshippers from among the traders and immigrants who immigrated to their communities. Although the modern institution of dues-paying synagogue membership did not exist at the time, there were felt to be important advantages to large numbers, in the size of voluntary pledges that could be expected, and in the prestige that would cling to the synagogue’s leadership, that promoted a phenomenon analogous to a modern “membership campaign.” Looking back at such bygone rivalries can be both instructive and amusing.

The Babylonians seem to have fired the opening volley in the competition. Invoking the scholarly prestige of the learned “Gaons” who stood at their helm in Baghdad, they offered to bestow honorific titles, certified by the Ga’on himself, upon the new arrivals to their communities.

It did not take long for the Palestinian synagogues to follow suit, invoking the authority of the revered head of the academy of Jerusalem, with all its sacred associations.

The Palestinians had additional tricks up their sleeves. In their possession were some of the most ancient and pedigreed Torah scrolls and Biblical codices in existence, written by the foremost experts on the text of the Hebrew scriptures. Furthermore, they could offer an advantage that always holds an attraction to at least some synagogue-goers: Their services were shorter. This situation was a consequence of their practice of reading the Torah over a cycle that lasted 3 1/2 years rather than in a single year as in the Babylonian custom. The individual readings on each Shabbat were correspondingly much briefer.

To add to their appeal the Palestinian synagogue leaders permitted children to chant the Torah readings. We all know how effective that can be in drawing proud parents and grandparents into the synagogue.

The Babylonians, unable to challenge their rivals’ claim to a more compact service, packaged their own lengthier services as an advantage. They directed their appeal to those who preferred an intense, well-crafted worship experience. With this in mind, they advertised that those who attended their synagogues could expect to hear the Torah chanted not by inexperienced youths, but by their most accomplished adult vocalists.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, September 18 1997, pp. 10-11.
• For further reading:
  • J. Katz, Tradition and Crisis, New York, 1993.
  • S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Berkeley, 1967.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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What Year Is It Today?

by Eliezer Segal

A prosaic, though important, consequence of Rosh Hashanah’s status as a “new year” is the fact that it involves turning a page in the Hebrew calendar. For example, in the year when this article was first published we were advancing from the Jewish date 5757 to 5758 “from the creation of the world.”

The practice of reckoning dates from the creation was apparently not known or practiced by the rabbis of the Talmud. The Mishnah discusses several options for dating legal documents, and evidently permits only those that refer to the year in the term of the reigning king. Among the non-sanctioned dating systems, the sources mention reckonings “from to the building of the Temple,” “from the destruction of the Temple,” and some others.

From the combined testimony of the Talmud and archeological data it is evident that the Jews, like their gentile neighbours, followed the convention of identifying years by the name of the incumbent ruler. Usually this was the Roman Emperor, but it could also be the consul or the provincial eparch.

The Babylonian Talmud informs us that one dating system was in use there: “according to the kings of Greece.”

The reference here is to a practice that was in widespread use in antiquity, of indicating dates from a chronological point that is equivalent to the year 312 B.C.E. That was the year when the momentous battle at Gaza effectively divided up the Middle East between two of Alexander the Great’s generals, establishing the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires.

The political and military tensions between those two superpowers (with Judea situated precariously in the middle) defined the Middle-Eastern map for centuries afterwards, until both fell to the Romans. Modern historians designate this dating system as “the Seleucid era.”

In typical fashion, the Jews held tenaciously to this ancient calendric system long after those Hellenistic kingdoms had departed from the stage of history. Similar phenomena can be adduced in the realms of language, dress, etc., where Jewish customs preserve practices that can no longer be found among the gentiles from whom they were originally borrowed.

Throughout the medieval era, the Seleucid system remained the only officially sanctioned manner for recording dates in legal deeds among the communities that followed the Babylonian rite, and hence it was standardly designated as minyan ha-shetarot, the “documentary reckoning.” It was presupposed by the renowned Babylonian “Ga’on” Rabbi Sherira in his masterful chronology of Rabbinic literature, and continued to be employed by Yemenite Jews well into the present century.

What, then, is the origin of the practice of indicating dates from the Creation?

The literary source for this chronology is a midrashic compilation known as Seder `Olam (the Order of the World) composed by the second-century sage Rabbi Yosé ben Halafta of Sephoris. Seder `Olam is explicitly devoted to the problem of calculating the sequences of events in Jewish history, based largely on the information supplied by the Bible. Even though Seder `Olam studiously counts the days and years between the individual events of scriptural history, it does not actually provide the total number of years that elapsed since the creation. At any rate, it was the only work of its sort to be attempted by the ancient rabbis, and it was cited approvingly in the Talmud.

I stated above that Seder `Olam‘s calculations were based “largely” on the Bible. There were in fact several exceptions to this characterization, in which Rabbi Yosé made use of more imaginative midrashic interpretations that were not supported by a straightforward reading of Scripture. Some medieval chroniclers who attempted their own calculations of the “creation” date based on their reading of the Biblical evidence, such as Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud in his Sefer Ha-Qabbalah, reached conclusions that were at variance with those of Seder `Olam. 

Although Jews who were politically subject to the Baghdadi Caliphate (and hence, religiously, to the Babylonian Ga’on) continued to follow the Talmudic convention of dating according to the “Greek kings,” those communities that continued to accept the authority of the Palestinian leadership—primarily in Egypt and southern Italy, as well as the Holy Land itself—took the Seder Olam chronology as their norm in legal documents, which they dated from the alleged creation of the world. The founders of European Jewry seem to have inherited this practice from their ancestors in the Land of Israel. 

For most Jews in medieval Europe, whose knowledge of history was confined to Biblical and Talmudic sources, the creation dates proved adequate and served them well for centuries.

Eventually the system did face a challenge. By the sixteenth century, educated Italian Jews were participating in the thriving culture of Renaissance scholarship, which included the critical study of ancient documents. Prominent among the Jewish humanists was Rabbi Azariah de Rossi of Mantua who composed a special work, the Ma’or `Einayim (“Enlightenment of the Eyes”) devoted to the enrichment of Jewish historical understanding through the utilization of material preserved in Greek and Latin.

One of the many topics that was subjected to de Rossi’s historical critique was the traditional calendar reckoning. Remarking that it was in any case a relatively recent convention, he meticulously demonstrated that it was also factually inaccurate. In some cases, he argued, the Biblical evidence was simply not sufficient to fill in the entire chronological sequence.

The most conspicuous weaknesses of the Seder `Olam system related to those eras that were not directly covered in the Bible, especially the Persian era, for which the traditional rabbinic chronology had to rely mainly on the cryptic historical allusions contained in the Book of Daniel. De Rossi showed that, when checked against the extra-Biblical historical records, the resulting chronology was severely flawed, cutting the era short by some 165 years!

Although Rabbi Azariah’s conclusions were irrefutably correct, they became a topic of heated controversy. Conservative rabbis were convinced that by calling into question this relatively unimportant detail from the “received tradition,” the gates would be opened for a frontal assault on the foundations of Jewish faith. Some of the traditionalists tried to appeal to Rabbi Joseph Karo, author of the Shulhan `Arukh, urging him to ban the book. Karo did in fact compose an order for the burning of the Ma’or `Einayim, but died before it could be implemented. Nonetheless, several communities issued decrees setting strict limits on who could read the work.

Of course, matters have changed a lot since then. Now that the scientific estimates of the ages of the universe, of our planet, and of the human race, have taught us to translate these eras into mind-boggling billions of years, there are few Jews who would insist on treating those traditional numbers as anything but symbolic.

But then again, are not symbols precisely what a religious tradition is all about?

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, October 2 1997, pp. 20-21.
• For further reading:
  • E. Frank, Talmudic and Rabbinical Chronology, New York, 1956.
  • M. A. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine, Tel-Aviv and New York, 1980.
  • S. Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-fshutah, New York, 5733-1973.
  • Chaim Milikowsky, Seder Olam: A Rabbinic Chronography [Ph.D. dissertation: Yale University], New Haven, 1981.
  • Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance, New York, 1959.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Beadle-mania

by Eliezer Segal

For a longer time than I care to measure I have been serving my synagogue in the capacity of “gabbai.” As we shall see, the precise terms of reference for this position are not easy to define, but in general they involve making sure that the synagogue is properly set up for services, and assigning roles to the participants in those services.

As with several of the terms that we now use to designate communal functionaries, the current usage of the word gabbai bears little resemblance to its original significance. The term derives from the Hebrew root meaning “to collect money” and, indeed, in Talmudic literature that is how it is employed consistently, whether with reference to tax collectors in the employ of the government, or to administrators of the Jewish communal charities. 

In either capacity, the ancient gabbai was not the most welcome of visitors. Furthermore, suspicions naturally arose that they might be skimming off the top of their pushkas. Even though procedures were put in place to preclude such distrust (e.g., by having them work in teams), the Mishnah still advises against accepting personal donations from “gabbais and tax-collectors” for fear that their contributions were not theirs to give.

The gabbai’s duties as currently defined overlap those of several different functionaries in medieval Jewish society.

In Arabic-speaking communities, the distribution of tasks in the synagogue service, such as the leading of the prayers and the reading from scripture, was usually a prerogative of the “muqaddam,” the official head of the local Jewish community whose authority was acknowledged by the government.

In the hierarchical societies of yore, the privileges of leading prayers or reading from Scripture were taken very seriously as confirmations of one’s status in the congregation, and the rabbis of those communities were faced with frequent complaints about alleged slights by synagogue officials.

It was not merely a matter of who did or did not get an aliyah to the Torah. Respected individuals were acknowledged in special blessings, and the honourees were adamant that their names be recited along with a full and precise sequence of honorific titles. One prominent donor prepared written texts to insure that he would always be identified as “pride of the priests, delight of the nobles, trustee of the merchants, eye of the congregation, light of Israel and Judah”–in that exact order.

Even in our world or democratic and egalitarian ideals, the synagogue can often serve to highlight distinctions of communal status. A contemporary anthropological study of synagogue dynamics focuses on the gabbai’s role as a power-broker within the community: “The gabbai, as keeper and dispenser of kibbudim [honorific tasks], thus handles what is perhaps one of the group’s most essential properties. As such he shares in its power and importance.”

On the other hand, some of the gabbai’s more menial chores parallel those of the medieval “shammash,” a general factotum (similar to a church sexton) whose list of responsibilities reflects the centrality of synagogue to Jewish communal life. These responsibilities could extend to some unlikely areas, such as that of the town crier who stood atop the synagogue roof to announce items ranging from the decisions of the court to the approach of the Sabbath, punctuating his proclamations with a shofar blast or the bang of a mallet (by virtue of which he was known as the “schulklopfer”).

For all that the shammash occupied one of the more humble rungs in the synagogue hierarchy, the occupants of that office had a reputation for acting like royalty, and in some places, such as the kloyz of Vilna, individuals would actually pay for the privilege. An Egyptian contract from 1099 had to stipulate that disrespect for the muqaddam or members of the congregation would be considered grounds for dismissal from the office. The frequency with which similar warnings were repeatedly issued by the Jewish councils in Poland and Lithuania demonstrate clearly how difficult they were to enforce.

Astute readers of this column may have noted that all my recent articles have contained references to practices and records from medieval Egypt. Our intimate knowledge of that community, including the behaviour of its shammashim, is of course based on the thousands of records preserved in the Cairo “Genizah,” which is presently celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its discovery.

It is therefore timely to observe that if the modern successors of those synagogue functionaries had had their way, those precious records might not have survived at all. For when Prof. Solomon Schechter arrived in Cairo to collect the Genizah’s manuscripts and ship them to England, he noted that the documents had a tendency to disappear. In an 1887 letter written from Cairo to the librarian at Cambridge he summarized the lamentable situation:

The beadel & other infernal scoundrels are helping me to clear away the rubbish and the printed matter. I have constantly to bakeshish them, but still they are stealing many good things and sell them to the dealers in antiquities.

As a practicing “beadel,” I find it humbling to trace my craft back to such enterprising and colourful scoundrels.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, October 23 1997, p. 8.
• For further reading:
  • I. Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages, New York, 1958.
  • S. W. Baron, The Jewish Community, Philadelphia, 1942.
  • S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971.
  • S. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction, Chicago and London, 1976.
  • S. Schechter, “Schechter shares Cairo secrets,” Genizah Fragments 32 (1996).

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Cantor-Culture

Eliezer Segal

As I observed in my previous column, the titles that we customarily assign to synagogue and communal functionaries have undergone some curious transformations over the years. This claim applies as well to the term “hazzan” which we use to designate a cantor. The word actually means “supervisor” and originally denoted the lay leader of a community or synagogue, an office approximating that of a modern synagogue president.

At any rate, the current usage has roots that probably hearken back to the days of the Palestinian Talmud, an era when the functions of synagogue administration and leading prayers were carried out by the same individuals.

There were of course other titles that were borne by the ancient cantors, such as sheliah tzibbur (“representative of the community”); payyat or payyetan (“poet”); or karova (“the one who brings people close to God”). The latter two expressions, employed primarily in the Land of Israel, refer not only to their bearers’ ability to recite the prayers, but also to their talent for composing poetic renditions of the liturgy that interwove themes from the day’s Biblical readings. The immense bodies of literary work that have come down to us from the great payyetanim of yore attest to their astounding erudition in all facets of Jewish religious lore.

This favourable reputation was not always inherited by their successors in medieval and modern times. As the Babylonian preference for a fixed liturgical texts prevailed over the Palestinian tradition of poetic improvisation, scholarship and erudition ceased to be viewed as indispensable to the cantor’s job description. Emphasis was placed on beauty of voice and on musical proficiency.

Ultimately, the cantor came to be an artist, sharing many of the virtues and shortcomings that are typical of the artistic personality.

Documents from medieval Cairo testify that, like operatic virtuosi of later generations, some cantors were plagued by a weakness for the bottle. Maimonides had to deal more than once with the problem of inebriated cantors. In one responsum he was asked what do to about a hazzan who was in the habit of staggering into the synagogue, insulting the presiding cantor, taking hold of the Torah scroll and dropping it. A second query addressed to him dealt with a group of intoxicated cantors who would obstruct the services with rowdy behaviour, which persisted even while a distressed child was struggling to recite his haftarah.

The inability of some cantors to understand the words of the prayers they were intoning became proverbial. A younger contemporary of Maimonides, the Spanish Hebrew poet Judah Al-Harizi, composed a satirical poem about the bloopers committed by a hazzan whose pomposity was matched only by his ignorance. Al-Harizi provides a lengthy catalogue of passages in the prayer book and Bible that were mangled by the cantor’s sloppiness and inability to understand what he was reciting, though he was adorned with all the external signs of wisdom and piety, gyrating emotionally with beard and fringes dragging on the ground. The congregation, bored and confused by the drawn-out renderings of cryptic liturgical poems, eventually gave up and went home to sleep without having fulfilled the essential obligations of prayer. 

The same disparagement of the cantor’s craft resurfaces centuries later in Poland, in earnest pronouncements by leading rabbinical authorities. Rabbi Solomon Luria lamented the fact that in their quest for esthetically pleasing hazzanim, the lay congregational leadership frequently ignored the rabbis’ strictures about the learnedness and piety that ought to be indispensable to the position. In a similar vein, Rabbi Ephraim Luntschitz caustically protested the cantors’ tendency to devote more energy to artistic pyrotechnics than to conveying the actual meaning of the words that they were reciting.

In 1623 a Lithuanian rabbinical council was impelled to set strict limitations on the number of tunes that could be included in the services. Rabbi Benjamin Solnik described the situation as follows:

They cannot read even a single verse from the Torah with its correct cantillation and punctuation, since the communities prefer to appoint hazzanim on the basis of their abilities in chanting the prayers and kedushahs beautifully and at length…. The longer the cantor sings, the more they enjoy it, even if he does not know any of the regulations governing the prayers or scriptural chanting. For this reason, the cantors pay no attention to those laws and do not prepare themselves adequately for an expert public reading in accordance with the requirements of the law.

But not all cantors are of that unsavoury ilk, as we learn from the following anecdote in the Talmud:

In a time of drought, the saintly Rabbi Hiyya was invited to lead the congregational supplications for rain. As he recited the words “who causes the wind to blow,” a breeze was felt. When he got to the expression “who causes the rain to fall,” rain indeed began to fall. As he was about to conclude with the blessing “who revives the dead,” the earth began to quake, and it was only through direct supernatural intervention that the pious sage could be prevented from hastening the resurrection before its proper time.

Such, indeed, is the formidable power of a cantor who can utter the prayer with sincerity and understanding.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, November 6 1997, p. 8.
• For further reading:
  • S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1971.
  • H. Schirmann, Ha-Shirah Ha’ivrit Bi-S’farad uve-Frovans, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, 1960.
  • N. E. Shulman, Authority and Community, Hoboken and New York, 1986.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Seeing Stars

by Eliezer Segal

What pictorial symbol would you choose to represent Judaism?

If you were living in ancient times, it would probably be an image connected with Israel’s most revered religious shrine, the Jerusalem Temple. Thus, when we survey the ornamentation on coins and funeral memorials from the Second Commonwealth era, we encounter representations of the Temple gates, incense-burners or musical instruments, and an occasional lulav and etrog. It was the seven-branched candelabrum that would emerge as the most widely accepted image of Jewish faith and peoplehood.

Conspicuously absent from the above list is the six-pointed star that is now referred to as the Magen David, the “shield of David.” Indeed, our ubiquitous Magen David has only a dubious claim to authenticity as a Jewish symbol. It was not until well into the medieval era that anyone would have dreamed of associating it with Judaism–and the nature of that association was not necessarily a favourable or complimentary one.

The earliest known incarnations of the star of David are not found in Jewish sources, but in Christian and Muslim traditions, albeit in works that borrowed freely from Hebrew prototypes. In those sources, the shield is not associated with King David, but with his son Solomon. And the star in question has five points, not six.

According to a popular legend related by Josephus Flavius and in the Talmud, Solomon was able to exercise control over the demonic realms by means of a magical ring. The legends about King Solomon’s ring were elaborated in extensive detail in “the Testament of Solomon,” a Greek pseudepigraphic work of undetermined date. Several versions of this work contain precise descriptions of the ring, and in some of them it is described as a “pentalpha,” a star composed of five interlaced A’s. The pentalpha reappears in several Byzantine amulets.

Stories about the “seal of Solomon” were also mentioned by Arabic writers, and through them they became known to Jews. The twelfth-century Karaite scholar Judah Hadassi was apparently the first to allude to this magical sign by its alternative name, the “shield of David,” a usage that might have originated in the Qur’an’s depiction of David as a fashioner of armour.

For the most part, references to the shields of Solomon and David, and their use in occult practices, are found in non-Jewish sources, and they frequently reinforce the medieval stereotypes of a Jewish predilection for sorcery. This is not to say that Jews were totally removed from the practice of the magic. Like everyone else in those times, our medieval ancestors made ample use of protective amulets and mezuzahs, etc. Variations on the star shape–including the six-pointed kind–appeared with some frequency in those contexts. However there was nothing uniquely Jewish in such superstitions.

The earliest known appearance of the Magen David as a specifically Jewish icon was on the official emblem of the Prague Jewish community in the seventeenth century. By then the shield’s association with King David had became sufficiently established for it to serve as a symbol of national pride. In the eyes of many gentiles, it presumably confirmed their suspicions that Jews were generally involved in the dark arts.

In truth however, it was the Christian adepts of alchemy and the occult who were most likely to draw upon Hebrew images, real or imagined, in order to lend their work an aura of authoritative mystery. This tendency gave rise to a widespread impression among outsiders that the Kabbalah was primarily a system of magic.

Nonetheless, the popularity of the Magen David spread rapidly over the subsequent years. The Jews of Vienna adopted it in 1655 to symbolize their own community, and following their expulsion in 1755 they bore it to their new homes in other central European towns. It did not take long for it to achieve immense popularity as a motif of synagogue ornamentation.

Of course in the eyes of Jews, the figure of King David has a special significance as the paradigm of national glory and the ancestor of the Messiah. In the latter part of the seventeenth century this motif was cultivated by the devotees of the mystical messiah Shabbetai Zvi, and the Shield of David would appear as a secret sign on amulets produced by the faithful, particularly after it had gone underground.

Thus there is no small measure of irony in the fact that, when nineteenth-century Jews were looking for a recognizable trademark to serve as the equivalent of the cross or crescent, their choice was a symbol whose associations with Judaism owed more to anti-Jewish stereotyping than to any meaningful links with our national or religious values.

However such is the vigour of symbols that, whatever their original purpose, they can be infused with profound and inspiring meaning. For Jewish nationalists, this occurred when the Zionist movement positioned it at the centre of their new national flag. In the domain of the spirit, the imagery of the six-pointed star stimulated Franz Rosenzweig to formulate a brilliant religious philosophy in which the realms of God, Humanity and the World are linked together through the religious axes of Creation, Revelation and Redemption.

Notwithstanding these development, my overall feeling is that the Magen David makes a poor choice of symbol. It has no tangible roots in Jewish tradition, and even evokes some themes that are antithetical to healthy Jewish values.

Let me therefore take this opportunity to issue a call to my readers to forgo the Star of David in favour of more authentic Jewish images the next time you are in the market for an item of jewelry or a wedding invitation. Perhaps the change can be accomplished if enough of us rally behind its banner–a banner that will, of course, display a menorah and not a Magen David.

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• First Publication:
  • Jewish Free Press, November 20, 1997, pp. 6-7.
• For further reading:
  • J. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Garden City, 1985.
  • N. H. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, New York, 1961.
  • G. Scholem, Kabbalah, New York, 1974.
  • G. Sholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays, New York, 1971.
  • J. Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, New York, 1970.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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