The Show Must Go On

by Eliezer Segal

It took a full two decades before Jews began to formulate literary and theological responses to the murder of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. Whether this was because of the despondence of the survivors, the enormity of the tragedy, their fear of raising parochial concerns, or for any of the numerous other reasons that have been proposed to account for the delay– the fact is that until the mid-1960s, there existed few aesthetic frameworks for expressing and sharing their grief.

Remarkably, some of the earliest known artistic attempts to confront the Nazi horror, from the time when the implementation of Hitler’s Final Solution was still in its initial stages, took the form of a traditional genre of Ashkenazic Jewish folklore, the “Purim-shpiel,” a dramatic reenactment of the story of Esther. 

Neither of the plays that I will be describing here originated in traditional or religious circles. And yet in two very different settings, the respective authors and their audiences found something in this traditional genre that was strikingly relevant to the twentieth-century catastrophe.

The Yiddish play entitled “Homens Mapole” [Haman’s downfall] was staged frequently between 1945 and 1949 to audiences in Paris and other centres in Europe, South America and the United States. It was billed as an avant-garde modernist work, and its audiences were not always limited to Jewish survivors. Its author was a devoted communist from Bialystok named Haim Sloves who had been residing in Paris since 1927 and remained throughout his career an ardent advocate of Yiddish culture. The production in a tongue that had been all but obliterated was hailed by some as a veritable resurrection of the Jewish spirit.

A “biblical opera” entitled “Esther” was broadcast as an episode in the “Columbia Workshop” series for CBS radio in August 1941. It formed part of a trilogy of biblical dramatizations that also included episodes about Samson and Job, and featured original music by Lyn Murray. Its author was one of the most creative figures of the “golden age” of radio drama, Norman Corwin (who at the time of this writing is approaching his 101st birthday and is a lecturer at the University of Southern California). Many of the plays that he wrote or directed in the 1930s grappled with political or social issues. Corwin came from a temple-affiliated Jewish family and, though he was never religiously observant, some of his work is noticeably influenced by biblical and other Jewish values. A poetic passage from his acclaimed 1945 radio play “On a Note of Triumph”–celebrating the Allied victory in Europe–was incorporated into one of the prayer books issued by the American Reform movement.

While Corwin’s play stuck quite close to the plot of the biblical text, Sloves’ was deeply rooted in the Ashkenazic Jewish Purim-shpiel tradition. This entailed various humorous and anachronistic elements [such as when Haman boasts that he is greater than “Columbus who will one day, God willing, discover new islands”]; as well as occasional allusions to religious sentiments–such as Mordecai’s devotion to God and the hopes for supernatural salvation for the chosen people–that ran counter to the personal outlook of its communist author. As late as 1958, after the Stalinist purges of Yiddish culture in the USSR, Sloves was reproving the Kremlin for sending Jewish tourists to the Moscow synagogue and thereby promoting the Jews’ real enemies: the reactionary clergy. Corwin’s play, on the other hand, is earnest and relatively humorless [though it occasionally tosses in outrageous rhymes such as “You are a very wise fellow, Memucan / If you can’t advise me, who can?”], and it is more forthcoming than the biblical story in its readiness to invoke God’s name.

In both plays Ahasuerus is portrayed sympathetically as a noble and romantic figure in search of true love, and who is deeply enamored of Esther. In the American radio play, the monarch tenderly asks his prospective queen “Do you think you could love the king of 127 provinces?… But what do you know about love?” stirring Esther to break into a sentimental aria on the theme “love is…” In “Homens Mapole” Haman’s resentment of Mordecai is provoked chiefly by the Jew’s refusal to aid him in his own attempts to woo Esther.

In both of the plays it was implied that the villain Haman was an archetype of Hitler. This assumption might make sense for a play that was composed during the early years of the war, when it could still inspire hopes that the great dictator would be overthrown before achieving his nefarious goals. However, the continued stagings of Sloves’ play after the decimation of European Jewry must have created a stark cognitive dissonance after the latter-day Haman had all but succeeded in his scheme. Actually, the first drafts of “Homens Mapole” had been penned in 1939 and 1940 when the author could still entertain hopes that the fiend would be toppled by a popular uprising (a sub-plot that was included in early drafts of the play, but was downplayed in the post-war version). Even after the war, insofar as the audiences were now aware of the fully horrific extent of the Nazi murder campaign, it is likely that they interpreted the defeat of the Axis and their own survival, in however tiny remnants, as a victory that deserved to be celebrated.

Introducing a motif that would be taken up again by later cinematic versions of Esther (such as the 1960 “Esther and the King” with Joan Collins and the 2006 “One Night with the King”), Sloves included a sub-plot involving the campaigns of Ahasuerus/Xerxes against Greece, whose role is being transparently equated with that of the modern Soviet Union. This device allowed the author to portray Haman as an imperialist conqueror who brought suffering not only on the Jews but on other nations as well, including his own. In “Homens Mapole,” the hardships caused by his military adventurism provoked a domestic proletarian revolt.

Corwin’s radio play generally remained faithful to the plot, and even to the wording, of the scriptural narrative. And yet there are clear indications that the characterization also drew inspiration from contemporary models. Notably, his Haman exploited the persecution of the Jews as the first stage in his larger megalomaniac ambition:

I’ll be king by making a scapegoat race
and kill them off without a trace. 
I will seize the crown and conquer the world!

Haman’s musical leitmotif, sung to the plodding rhythm of a jackbooted march, goes: 

The best way to bolster authority 
is to bully a small minority. 

The despot and his henchmen refer to Mordecai sneeringly as “swine” or “dog of a dog.”

The radio play accepts the rabbinic interpretation that Mordecai’s refusal to humble himself before Haman was religiously motivated: “I will bow down only to the living God though death be the price I pay for it.” However, it adds some other elements that are absent from the biblical version. Mordecai’s hostility to the Grand Vizier is depicted as resistance to a tyrant:

I will not bow down to a man on a horse.
I will not bow down to a crown.
I will never yield to a tyrant’s curse
though I burn or hang or drown.

Both plays end by addressing their moral lessons to aspiring future Hamans. Corwin’s message is an unsubtle one:

Let this be a lesson to great men who rule and command and lead:
Never trust in men who hate men because of their race or creed.
Let this point a moral that the only truce
with a bully and a bigot is the gallows noose.

Sloves’ closing scene, on the other hand, is an absurd folk-dance in the spirit of an old-fashioned Purim-shpiel, as the cast sing out merrily: 

Brothers, listen– 
We have all the Hamans
all the Hamans deep in the earth
Trala-la and trala-la-la
all the Hamans deep in the earth.

This inane display of doggerel and dancing seems tastelessly frivolous when compared to Corwin’s solemn moralizing. On further reflection, however, it might actually be a more effective way of conveying our ultimate recognition that no conventional artistic response could ever be fully adequate for confronting such an unspeakable catastrophe.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 11, 2011, p. 15.
• For further reading:
  • Aronowicz, Annette. “Haim Sloves, the Jewish People, and a Jewish Communist’s Allegiences.” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 1. New Series (2003): 95-142.
  • —“Homens mapole: Hope in the Immediate Postwar Period.” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 3 (2008): 355-388.
  • — “The Downfall of Haman: Postwar Yiddish Theater between Secular and Sacred.” AJS Review 32, no. 2 (2008): 369-388.
  • Bannerman, R. LeRoy. Norman Corwin and Radio: The Golden Years. University, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1986.
  • Slovès, Henri. Homens Mapole: Folks Shpil in Fir Aktn. Paris: Oyfsnay, 1949.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Liberating Libya

by Eliezer Segal

Rebel forces in Benghazi have risen up against the oppressive and rapacious overlords of Libya, and have their former masters on the defensive in a violent and bloody campaign that may well alter the international balance of power.

Though the previous paragraph might well have been cited from a recent newspaper report, it actually describes events that were taking place nearly two thousand years ago. The present-day Benghazi was known at the time as Bernice, an important urban centre in the region of Cyrene in what is now eastern Libya, which was chafing under the yoke of tyrannical Roman colonial rule in the early years of the second century C.E

The rebellion that erupted in 115 was spearheaded by fierce Jewish warriors, and it had a traumatic impact that continued to affect the region for many generations. 

The Roman historian Dio Cassius (as recorded by a later writer) provided a lurid description of the carnage that was inflicted by the Jewish rebels. Greeks and Romans were targeted indiscriminately and subjected to barbaric treatment, and the sources estimated the death toll at more than two hundred thousand, with even greater numbers perishing in the ensuing campaigns in Cyprus and Egypt. A fourth-century historian observed that the whole region would have remained effectively depopulated had the Romans not instituted an active program of colonization by foreign settlers.

Several different names, otherwise unknown, are mentioned as the commanders of the Jewish rebellion. Dio speaks of a certain Andreas who led the insurrection in Cyrene, and Artemio in Cyprus. The church historian Eusebius identified the leader in Cyrene as Lukuas, and historians are unsure whether or not this is a different person from Dio’s Andreas.

Such wild-sounding tales from unsympathetic sources might otherwise have been dismissed as unreliable Roman or Christian propaganda. There is, however, independent corroboration to prove that the Cyrene rebellion did indeed occur, and that its proportions were even more remarkable than would appear from the texts described so far.

A faint echo of the uprising survives in rabbinic literature where it is referred to cryptically as the “rebellion of Quietus” after the Roman general Lusius Quietus who was charged with the suppression of the Jewish rebels including the ones who were active in Judea. More decisively, the archaeological record from Cyrene and the surrounding region tells a story of widespread destruction, especially of pagan religious shrines, during the years in question; as well as preserving several dedicatory inscriptions testifying to the fact that structures had to be rebuilt after their recent demolition.

In the opinion of some historians, the Jewish military campaign was one of epic boldness, designed to bring about nothing less than the complete collapse of the mighty Roman empire. Although the ultimate failure of the uprising can be interpreted as proof of its basic foolhardiness, the evidence indicates that it came amazingly close to succeeding.

Of course, it is impossible to appreciate the vehemence of the rebellion without referring to the religious motivations that fuelled it. Most Jews of the time were convinced that the heathen Roman empire was the quintessential embodiment of blasphemous wickedness, and that God’s patience with Rome’s continuing success was about to snap. To varying degrees, this mindset was shared by Jews of nearly all religious outlooks, and it generated an immense literature devoted to apocalyptic visions of the imminent collapse of the evil empire. The most extreme proponents of this position were consolidated into the faction of “Zealots” who refused stubbornly to tolerate Israel’s subjugation by any foreign power.

Indeed, it appears that the groundwork for the Libyan operation was laid long before the actual outbreak of hostilities. Shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70, Josephus Flavius reports that Jonathan the weaver, a member of the extremist Zealot sect of Sicarii (“dagger-wielders”) fled to Cyrene. Josephus, who was bitterly opposed to the Zealots as a group and to Jonathan in particular, paints him as a delusional and unprincipled fanatic with messianic pretensions. However, the subsequent unfolding of events suggests to some historians that Jonathan was part of a concerted Jewish military strategy that was eminently rational in its conception.

Looked at in light of this background, it would appear that the Zealots had devised a master-plan to attack Rome from its vulnerable flanks. The overextended empire was constantly subject to incursions or rebellions on its far-flung frontiers, forcing the army to frequently relocate forces from one region to another. A situation of this kind occurred in 114 when Trajan transferred soldiers from the Cyrene garrison in order to pursue his objectives on the Parthian border, leaving the north African colonies vulnerable to local uprisings and attacks. The Jews took advantage of this weakness (and of the economic havoc that Roman imperialism had wreaked upon the Cyrenean Jewish peasantry) to launch a sudden and merciless “scorched earth” assault that targeted not only military objectives, but also the physical embodiments of idolatrous religions. Evidently, the plan called for a rapid incursion into Egypt where, with expected help from the large Alexandrian Jewish community, they would be able to cripple or sever the vital economic lifeline through which bread was supplied to the imperial capital.

Even after we have made allowances for the faith in divine assistance that must surely have inspired such a scheme, there is nothing in it that strikes us as necessarily preposterous or irrational–and in fact, the strategy came quite close to succeeding. By all indications, the Cyrenian Jews were a hardy breed with a long tradition of military service under the Greek regimes. Even if they could not succeed in bringing the whole empire to its knees, they might well have managed to achieve the more limited objective of liberating the holy land from the Roman yoke. After the destruction of Jerusalem, it is likely that many proud Jews felt that they had nothing to lose in pursuing this risky new campaign.

We are naturally inclined to cheer for the Jewish freedom-fighters battling Roman despotism, and to trust them to establish a humane and enlightened new society. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to suspect that if those Zealots had succeeded in their struggle, they would have established a fanatical theocracy that could cause more bloodshed and hardships than those occasioned by the Pax Romana. 

Unfortunately, these are the dangers that we often face when we seek to replace an existing tyranny with an unproven new regime.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 1, 2011, p. 14.
• For further reading:
  • Applebaum, Shimon. Jews and Greeks in Ancient Cyrene . Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity v. 28. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979. 
  • Fuks, Alexander. “Aspects of the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 115-117.” The Journal of Roman Studies 51 (January 1, 1961): 98-104.
  • Hengel, Martin. The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I Until 70 A.D. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989.
  • Hirschberg, H. Z. A History of the Jews in North Africa. 2nd ed. Leiden: Brill, 1974.
  • Horbury, William. “The Beginnings of the Jewish Revolt under Trajan.” In Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion. Festschrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Peter Schäfer, 283-304. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996.
  • Pucci Ben Zeev, Miriam. Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights. Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 6. Leuven: Peeters, 2005.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Lazy Ladies?

by Eliezer Segal

For traditional Jews, the weeks leading up to Passover are defined by the Torah’s command to remove all leaven and leavened products–ḥametz–from our households. Our sages insisted that the process culminate in a formal inspection of the premises on the evening before the holiday, in order to verify that no crumb has been inadvertently overlooked. All sorts of customs and rituals have evolved with regard to how best to conduct the inspection.

Family traditions may vary as to who actually carries out that last hunt for stray ḥametz. When our children were younger, we usually assigned most of the task to them, in the hope that their youthful enthusiasm and sharp eyes would do a more efficient job. Now that our nest has been emptied, I usually tackle it myself through the blur of my bifocals.

As far as I know, the ancient rabbis did not express any obvious preferences regarding this matter. The Babylonian Talmud states without political correctness that when it comes to the examination for leaven, we may rely even on a woman or a child. After all, it notes, this search is not an actual commandment of the Torah, but merely a precautionary procedure instituted by the rabbis.

To be sure, “relying” on somebody is not necessarily the same as having them do the actual job. And indeed, the traditional commentators and halakhic authorities had differing understandings about what exactly the Talmud had in mind in its ruling. Thus, Maimonides insisted that women were qualified to conduct the inspection itself; whereas Rashi argued that we may trust the ladies only when they were testifying that a proper search was carried out by somebody else, but they do not have the authority to perform the search themselves.

The matter would have been perplexing enough had it been confined to the interpretation of the passage in the Babylonian Talmud. However, the problem was complicated by an even more puzzling statement that appears in the Jerusalem Talmud. In that compendium, after citing the tradition about trusting “even women,” Rabbi Jeremiah stated in the name of Rabbi Ze’irah that we should delete the word “even” from the text on the grounds that “women are themselves to be trusted since they are ‘aṣelot‘ and they check even the tiniest specks.”

The general drift of Rabbi Ze’irah’s observation seems unmistakably clear. In his opinion, it is not just that women can be reluctantly relied upon in a pinch, but quite the opposite (as is evident to anyone who has ever ventured into a bachelor apartment)–they are the most diligent and uncompromising hunters of minute crumbs.

The main obstacle to understanding the text in the Jerusalem Talmud lies in the odd Hebrew word that Rabbi Ze’irah used to designate the female qualification for leaven-searching: “aṣelot.” It is a word that normally translates as “lazy” or “indolent”–hardly a trait that we would expect to assure a conscientious inspection. Quite the contrary, it seems to cast aspersions on the aptitudes of the female ḥametz detectives for such a momentous religious task.

Several medieval authorities ruled in accordance with this disparaging interpretation of the word. The Tosafot commentary, for example, noted that women might be considered eminently dependable with respect to other important realms of Jewish religious law including kosher slaughter, food preparation, tithing and much more. However, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to practices that demand intense physical effort or exertion. In support of that contention they cited Rabbi Ze’irah’s statement about women’s alleged laziness.

In a similar vein, Rabbi Jacob Moelin of Mainz (the Maharil) conceded that women should be trusted when it comes to ritual prohibitions that are well known and widely observed, and if they are reporting that a man carried out the search for leaven–but we should still suspect them of falsification if they claim that they themselves performed a thorough Passover house-cleaning.

Not all the commentators were so disdainful of women’s meticulousness. For example, Rabbi Menahem Hame’iri of Perpignan and other scholars from medieval Provence cited the Jerusalem Talmud in support of the claim that women are, if anything, more dependable than men in the matter of ḥametz inspection. They argued that the context of that discussion demonstrates that the word aṣelotshould not be translated in its usual derogatory sense of “lazy,” but rather as “plodding” or “thorough.” “They do their work methodically and are not distracted by other matters.” Rabbi Hame’iri acknowledged that other commentators interpreted the passage in the opposite sense, but he dismissed their explanations entirely.

Although it is unreasonable to expect full consistency among such a diverse assortment of medieval scholars, I think that it is possible to discern a general line of differentiation that runs between the northern and southern European Jewish communities. That is to say, authorities from northern France and Germany were more likely to cast aspersions on the ability of women to perform demanding assignments, while those from Provence and Spain were favorably impressed by the rigorous efforts that the ladies invested in completing difficult tasks.

Most of these discussions were of a decidedly academic nature, based on the scholars’ readings and interpretations of the talmudic texts. Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the impression that the rabbis’ assessments of women’s strengths and shortcomings were also influenced by their personal observations. And indeed, historians of Jewish law and society have tried to find some correlation between their halakhic rulings and the socio-economic factors that were at work in the respective communities.

One possibility that suggests itself is that the apparent disdain for female perseverance might have been a byproduct of the general improvement in economic and cultural conditions that took place during the twelfth century in Christian Europe, a development that had a far-reaching impact in enhancing the status of Jewish women, many of whom were actively involved in commerce and banking outside the home and were expected to manage the family businesses while their husbands was away on prolonged business trips. This meant that an increasing number of domestic chores were being delegated to servants.

It seems likely, therefore, that rabbis who lived among such women might entertain doubts about the steadfastness of their wives’ commitment to household drudgery, even when it was channelled toward important religious objectives like the pre-Passover search for leaven.

The situation was somewhat different in Spain and Provence. Under the social conditions that prevailed in those lands, Jewish wives were more likely to be performing their traditional domestic roles, and their husbands–including the rabbis and authors of rabbinic law codes and commentaries–had better opportunities to observe and be impressed by their spouses’ conscientious attention to the demands of household cleanliness.

I suppose that the best way to test the conflicting theories about women’s competence as leaven-inspectors is to hold a competition. I therefore challenge any female or male readers to try their hands at doing the Passover cleaning in our house; and after it is all sparkling and kosher I will declare who did the best job.

In the meantime, I will be dutifully relaxing in order to conserve my energy for the Seder.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 1, 2011, p. 19.
• For further reading:
  • Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. 1st ed. Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press, 2004. 
  • Lieberman, Saul. Hayerushalmi Kiphshuto: A Commentary. Vol. 1. 1 vols. Jerusalem: Darom Publishing Co., 1934.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Borderline Cases

by Eliezer Segal

For more than a generation, the most acerbic and persistent controversies in Israeli politics and religion have focused on the question of national borders. At the conclusion of the 1967 Six Day War, Israel found itself in possession of the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, so that territorial issues that had previously been of a purely theoretical nature were now resounding in the public arena as matters of national security and foreign policy.

At the height of this process of territorial reorientation, archaeologists excavating in the Jordan valley made a discovery that echoed the public concerns with the mapping of the boundaries of the land of Israel. In 1974, in the fields of a kibbutz near Beth-Shean, were discovered the remains of a synagogue from the village of Rehov dating from the Byzantine era. Its mosaic floor contained an extensive Hebrew inscription devoted largely to mapping out the borders of the holy land as defined by Jewish religious law. The inscription is compiled from passages known to us from talmudic literature, and it constitutes the oldest surviving instance of a “written” rabbinic text.

It was not a nationalist ideology or a messianic aspiration that impelled the synagogue’s designers to give this geographical text such prominence in their house of worship. There was an eminently practical purpose to it, in that the identification of whether or not a particular locality falls within the borders of Israel will determine the permissibility of produce with regards to the laws of sabbatical years, tithing and similar matters.

A basic premise of Jewish law maintained that agricultural regulations apply (at least by the authority of the Torah) only within the official borders of the land of Israel. Actual observance of the law was severely complicated by the fact that people did not always limit their consumption to locally grown produce. Consequently, even if you were living in a region that lay outside the halakhic borders, where the produce was exempt from halakhic restrictions, you still had to take into consideration the likelihood that it might have been imported.

Those of us whose acquaintance with the question of the “religious borders of the complete land of Israel” derives from Israeli political rhetoric might be in for a bit of a surprise when confronted by the talmudic interpretations of the question. The rabbis (at least when they were dealing with issues of practical halakhah) were not envisaging a territory that extended grandly from the Nile to the Euphrates–far from it. In their view, the holiness of the land had been redefined at the beginning of the Second Jewish Commonwealth to include only those areas that were actually inhabited by Jews when they returned to Zion from the Babylonian captivity. This policy served to exclude several regions that are now being politically contested, as well as some that lie securely within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, such as the Negev or the Mediterranean coast north of Acre. On the other hand, in some places the halakhic boundary line did poke out towards the north beyond the current Lebanese border. The Rehov synagogue inscription ignores the southern border, which was relatively straightforward, and was not of urgent relevance for the Jews of Beth-Shean.

More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that by defining the borders according to demographic criteria, it was possible to identify enclaves of “non-Israelite” settlement that lay in the midst of holy territory, and vice versa. Thus, certain regions with large pagan populations were treated as foreign soil; even though small zones within those regions were declared to have venerable Jewish presences dating from the beginning of the Second Temple era. The Rehov inscription covers all these permutations–listing the portions of the holy land that were settled by the returning exiles, the types of agricultural produce that are subject to sabbatical year and tithing restrictions even in permitted regions; as well as listing forbidden villages that were located in permitted regions.

The Rehov inscription pays special attention to a number of important towns and their outskirts that were considered as lying outside the domain of the land of Israel. These were pagan cities that lay on the borders of the predominantly Jewish settlements of the Galilee. Beth-Shean itself was classified as one of those exceptional towns.

As is the case in our own time, the ideologically questionable policy of excluding regions from the borders of the holy land could serve as a pragmatic means for strengthening the Jewish hold on those very regions. Just as Rabbi A. I. Kook in the early days of Zionist settlement eased the hardships posed by sabbatical restrictions by invoking of the dubious fiction of selling the land to gentiles, the ancient rabbinic leadership tried to achieve similar objectives by declaring that certain towns were not subject to the sabbatical or tithing requirements because they had not been occupied by Jews during the formative years of the Second Temple era. This argument could be applied plausibly to the regions of the northern Galilee whose Jewish population had experienced rapid expansion since the middle of the second century CE, when the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt and the ensuing repression led to a massive wave of migration northward from Judea.

Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, the great Torah scholar and national leader, played a central role in that process, and talmudic tradition credited him with the controversial enactment that “permitted” Caesarea, Beth-Guvrin, Kefar Zemah and Beth-Shean as “foreign” enclaves whose crops were therefore exempt from the strictures of tithing and sabbatical prohibitions. Other non-Jewish towns such as Sebaste in Samaria enjoyed a comparable status. In a similar spirit, the rabbis defined certain regions in Transjordan and along the Mediterranean coast as foreign territory and therefore not subject to the agricultural restrictions; while they extended those obligations to various Jewish farms that were situated in the midst of those regions.

Indeed, as we can learn from careful study of the Rehov mosaic and its talmudic sources, the drawing of borderlines between a homeland and foreign territory is a difficult and intricate enterprise that cannot always be conveniently reduced to patriotic slogans, topographic landmarks or strategic advantages. In some respects, our ancient sages demonstrate a greater sensitivity to the complexities of the process than can be found among present-day political leaders.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 6, 2011, p. 9.
• For further reading:
  • Sussman, Yaacov. “A Halakhic Inscription from the Beth-Shean Valley.” Tarbiz 43 (1973-1974): 88-158.
  • ________. “The Inscription in the Synagogue at Rehob.” In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, 146-151. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982
  • ________. “The Baraita of The “Boundaries of Eretz Israel”.” Tarbiz 45 (1976): 213-257.
  • Lieberman, Saul. “On the Halakhic Inscription from the Beit-Shean Valley.” Tarbiz 45 (1976): 74.
  • Newman, David. “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006): 171-186.
  • Vitto, Fanny. “The Synagogue at Rehob.” In Ancient Synagogues Revealed, edited by Lee I. Levine, 90-94. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Moses’s Big Day

by Eliezer Segal

The revelation of the Torah, according to Jewish tradition, took place on Shavuot. Somewhat less well-known is a tradition which states that the momentous event also coincided with the Sabbath; the relevant chronological calculations were discussed in meticulous detail by the sages of the Talmud.

In light of this fact, it should not surprise us that the standard Saturday morning service contains a poetic allusion to that revelation: “Let Moses rejoice in the portion that was bestowed on him, for you called him a faithful servant.” This short liturgical passage goes on to celebrate the great prophet’s receiving the two tablets upon which was etched the commandment to observe the Sabbath.

This prayer probably originated as part of a longer liturgical poem (piyyuṭ). Like many such works, it was presumably treated as an optional selection whose recitation was subject to the discretion of the cantor or the local custom.

Nevertheless, there is something quite astonishing about a report preserved in a prominent medieval collection of Jewish customs, that “our Rabbi Solomon would not recite the ‘Let Moses Rejoice’ section.”

The “Rabbi Solomon” in question was evidently the great commentator Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, Rashi–though this particular custom of his is not attested anywhere else in the voluminous literature produced by him and his school. Nevertheless, the misgivings raised by Rabbi Solomon were shared by several other distinguished medieval Jewish authorities.

Rashi’s objection, as reported by our source, was that “he could not fathom what Moses’s rejoicing had to do with the Sabbath!” Furthermore, in a work titled “Rabbi Solomon’s Commentary on the Liturgy,” which provides minutely detailed interpretations of the prayers in the Sabbath services, the “Let Moses Rejoice” lines are passed over with nary a word of commentary as if they did not exist.

Now, this objection is very puzzling, to say the least. After all, the point of the passage seems unmistakably clear when it links Moses to the Sabbath in his capacity as the conveyor of the fifth commandment of the Decalogue at Mount Sinai. Moreover, it is unimaginable that Rashi would have suffered from a temporary lapse of memory with respect to the talmudic tradition about the Torah’s being revealed on a Saturday. Evidently, we must assume that for some reason he was not satisfied with either of these associations.

A possible reason for Rashi’s objection was that he felt that the poet should not have singled out Moses for special credit in this context. After all, the Torah and the Sabbath were addressed to the entire people of Israel, and Moses’s role in the process was merely that of an intermediary. It might therefore be inappropriate to imply, as this prayer seems to do, that any individual human– even if it is the greatest of the prophets–has a closer relationship to the Sabbath that the rest of us. Perhaps, this was the same line of reasoning that impelled the compilers of the Passover Haggadah to avoid mentioning Moses in that service as well.

As we might expect, several subsequent rabbinic scholars took up the challenge of defending the “Let Moses Rejoice” prayer. Rashi’s own grandson, Rabbi Jacob Tam, justified its recitation it by referring to a passage in the Talmud in which the Almighty instructed Moses: “I have a precious gift in my treasure-house, and its name is ‘Sabbath’; and I wish to bestow it upon Israel. Now go and notify them.” The liturgical reference is accordingly to the unique privilege that was conferred on Moses to serve as God’s special agent for conveying that priceless divine blessing to Israel.

Some other commentators voiced a rather different objection, one that related to the fundamental functions of Jewish worship. Prayers, they argued, should be devoted either to praising the Creator or to submitting before him our needs and petitions. However, the “Let Moses Rejoice” passage, by focusing on the deeds or praises of a particular mortal rather than addressing the Almighty, fulfils neither of those functions, and for that reason it might  be deemed an inappropriate text for the occasion.

A rebuttal to this objection was provided by Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna (thirteenth century) in his Or Zarua compendium. While conceding that the text might not qualify in itself as a prayer in the narrowest sense of the concept, he argued that it nevertheless contains an implied understanding that we are entreating the Lord to invoke on our behalf the merits that must surely pertain to the day of the Torah’s revelation, and to the the illustrious prophet who facilitated that revelation.
Not everybody, however, was satisfied with these explanations, and some commentators sought to identify a more tangible and personal connection between Moses and the institution of the Sabbath. They found this connection in the guise of an expansion of the Exodus story that was making the rounds in the works of several medieval authors.

The legend described negotiations that took place between Moses and Pharaoh on the question of how to treat the Hebrew slaves most efficiently. In the end, Moses succeeded in persuading the tyrant that it made good business sense to allow his subjects a weekly day of rest from their toil, so that they could recharge their batteries and work even harder during the remaining six days. Moses was allowed to choose which day should be designated as the day of rest, and he chose Saturday. The selection is depicted as Moses’s personal choice, and one version of the legend ascribed it to astrological calculations. In one glaring leap of historical anachronism, Moses even chastised Pharaoh for treating his slaves worse than other workers, in that all other nations of the world had accepted the institution of the six-day work week. Later, when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai, Moses was delighted to discover that he had fortuitously anticipated the divine commandment of the Sabbath on the seventh day. 

This, then, was the true meaning of Moses’s rejoicing at Sinai as described in our liturgical text.

The basic narrative outline of this story circulated in a number of different versions. In some of them, it was Pharaoh who initiated the negotiations when he realized that the Hebrews were collapsing under their burden, or that their labour was producing shoddy results; whereas in other texts, Moses was warning Pharaoh of the potential consequences of overworking his slaves. One writer, evidently unable to stomach the idea that the obstinate despot would be amenable to such a civil arbitration process, transformed the whole negotiating process into one between Moses and God.
There remain many unanswered questions surrounding Rashi’s objections to the “Let Moses Rejoice” prayer. Perhaps some of them will be resolved by new discoveries of lost manuscripts. Nevertheless, underlying this intricate web of scholarly exegesis and legendary narratives we may discern a remarkable bond that joins together the central pillars of Jewish tradition: the revelation at Sinai, the Sabbath and the prophecy of Moses

As the wise Ecclesiastes assured us, “a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, May 20, 2011, p. 6.
• For further reading:
  • Jacobson, B. S. Netiv Binah. Tel-Aviv: Sinai, 1973.
  • Rothschild, Jacob. “Tefillot Sheva’ Shel Yom Ha-Shabbat.” Ma’ayanot 10 (1974): 147-167.
  • Wieder, Naftali. “The Controversy About the Liturgical Composition ‘Yismaḥ Moshe‘–Opposition and Defence.” In Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Liturgy in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, ed. E. Fleischer and Jakob Josef Petuchowski, 75-99. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Prescriptions or Prayers

by Eliezer Segal

Among the monarchs who reigned over our people in biblical times, Hezekiah king of Judah stood out as one of the most virtuous. To the scriptural accounts of his righteous exploits the rabbis of the Talmud added their own traditions about royal edicts that met with their approval (as well as a few that they found objectionable).

One of the items that figures in the Talmud’s list of Hezekiah’s praiseworthy decrees was that “he suppressed a book [or, according to the Jerusalem Talmud: a tablet] of remedies, and this earned him their [the rabbis’] approval.”

They deduced this detail from the wording of the prayer in which Hezekiah implored the Almighty to grant him a reprieve from an illness even after the prophet Isaiah had assured him that he would never recover. The king had asked the Almighty to give consideration to the fact that “I have done what is good in your sight.” Not content with this vague allusion to good deeds, Rabbi Levi identified it with a specific achievement, that of suppressing the book of remedies.

Most of the early commentators interpreted this obscure statement in accordance with standard values of Jewish piety. Thus, Rashi explained that Hezekiah wanted people who were afflicted with illnesses to rely on contrite prayer rather than on medical treatments. Rabbi Ḥananel of Kairowan spelled out the king’s motives more explicitly: “It was because people were placing their trust in that book instead of seeking divine compassion for the patient.” This approach finds confirmation in the Talmud’s juxtaposition of this episode to another of Hezekiah’s edicts, one that was recounted in the Bible: He shattered the brazen serpent that had been fashioned by Aaron to contain the plague of vipers and which had evidently been preserved until his time as an object of magical adoration.

This interpretation dovetails nicely with a tradition that credited the authorship of the Book of Remedies to the wise king Solomon, and claimed that its pages contained foolproof cures to all the ailments that might plague the human organism. We may well appreciate Hezekiah’s concern that, if health could be restored immediately and effortlessly by following the instructions in a medical tome, then people might well lose sight of their ultimate dependence on divine mercies.

Some authors went so far as to assert that the illnesses that befall Jews should never be ascribed to natural causes. Rabbi Moses Naḥmanides believed that God himself assumes the responsibility for removing sickness from our bodies, and that Israel has no need for conventional medical therapies. For this reason, in biblical times those who were afflicted by illnesses–which invariably beset them as on account of their sins–turned to prophets, not to physicians, for relief.

Not all Jewish thinkers were at ease with this tradition or with the values that underlie it. In his commentary to the Mishnah, Rabbi Dr. Moses Maimonides, himself a renowned physician and author of numerous medical monographs, inserted a lengthy excursus in which he analyzed the rabbinic tradition about Hezekiah.

At the root of Maimonides’ discussion was his unshakable conviction that there can be no religious justification for depriving a patient of an effective medical treatment.

Why, then, did the sages of the Talmud praise Hezekiah for suppressing the Book of Remedies? Maimonides’ initial suggestion is that the volume in question was not a work of true medical science, but merely a digest of popular medical quackery based on superstitious nonsense, and as such it was not approved by the Torah. Its remedies were probably akin to talismans that allegedly have the power of channelling astral energies to perform tasks like the curing of diseases.

As a scientist, Maimonides was evidently troubled by the thought that our ancestors could ever have tolerated such superstitious nonsense in the first place, in violation of the Torah’s strict admonitions against idolatrous practices. Perhaps (as suggested by Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret) he was also wondering why such a book was merely “suppressed” and not destroyed altogether. The best explanation he could come up with was that the book’s author had intended it purely for educational or anthropological reading, but not to be applied to actual medical treatment. However, later generations were not so sophisticated in their medical understanding and began to take the book seriously, impelling King Hezekiah to order its removal.

As an alternative hypothesis, Maimonides speculated that perhaps the book, though based on legitimate science, had contained a chapter that described antidotes for various poisons; and this chapter had in turn contained details about the poisons they were supposed to counteract. When aspiring assassins caught on to the fact that they could use the book as a manual for the mixing of lethal poisons, Hezekiah decided to take it out of circulation.

At this point in his commentary, Dr. Maimonides turned his attention to the problem that was really eating at him. After presenting the tradition about how Hezekiah supposedly suppressed the Book of Remedies in order to encourage people to turn to God in prayer, he launched into a vigorous tirade about how foolish and ill-conceived that interpretation was, and how it was downright silly to ascribe such misguided ravings to a leader of Hezekiah’s moral stature!

For Maimonides it was utterly inconceivable that any intelligent and decent human being would deprive patients of effective medical treatment in order to provoke them to spiritual contrition. If we were to accept such thinking, we would similarly deny bread and water to the hungry in order to impel them to pray for divine compassion.

In the Guide of the Perplexed Maimonides observed that the talmudic sages had gone so far as to permit the administering of treatments that smacked of magic and could not be explained scientifically, provided that they had been shown to be medically effective in the past. At any rate, he noted, a person who is healed by a medical procedure is no less likely to offer thanks to God for that benefit than are hungry people who are moved to bless God in gratitude for their bread.

In spite of Maimonides’ advocacy of unimpeded access to medical information, other rabbis remained sympathetic to the moralistic considerations that had been voiced by Rashi and his coterie. Several writers found fault with Maimonides’ analogy between food and medical treatment. Rabbi Jacob Ibn Ḥabib argued that a natural condition like hunger is in an altogether different category from an illness that is an exceptional occurrence. Rabbi Jacob Emden wrote that the sure-fire cures in the Book of Remedies posed an especially serious challenge to pious faith, and should not be compared to the more limited effectiveness of scientific medical procedures.

Maimonides’ position was subjected to a particularly scathing attack by Rabbi Abraham Karelitz, the Ḥazon Ish, who adduced a number of talmudic passages in order to demonstrate that Jewish tradition does not put any faith in the power of physicians to cure illnesses without divine assistance. Rabbis Emden, Karelitz and others were convinced that all illnesses should be interpreted as divine chastisements that are being inflicted in order to inspire people to repentance and prayer.

I personally would not pass judgment on the benefits or deficiencies of the Book of Remedies without having read it. While Hezekiah’s edict makes that an unlikely proposition, there is still a possibility that copies might show up for sale on eBay or on late-night infomercials. At this very moment, operators might be standing by to process your purchase.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 10, 2011, p. 11.
• For further reading:
  • Freudenthal, Gad. 2005. Maimonides’ Philosophy of Science. In The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, 134-166. Cambridge Companions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Ginzberg, Louis. 2003. Legends of the Jews. Ed. Paul Radin. Trans. Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.
  • Jakobovits, Immanuel. 1959. Jewish Medical Ethics: A Comparative and Historical Study of the Jewish Religious Attitude to Medicine and Its Practice. New York: Philosophical Library.
  • Lewin, B. 1928. Otzar ha-Gaonim. Vol. 1. Haifa.
  • Preuss, Julius. 1993. Biblical and Talmudic Medicine. Trans. Fred Rosner. Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson.
  • Rosner, Fred. 1995. Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud: Selections from Classical Jewish Sources. Augm. ed. The Library of Jewish Law and Ethics v. 5. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV.
  • Schwartz, Dov. 2004. Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought. Trans. David Louvish and Batya Stein. The Brill Reference Library of Judaism v. 20. Leiden: Brill-Styx.
  • Strousma, Sarah. 2001. ‘Ravings’: Maimonides’ Concept of Pseudo-Science (critical essay). Aleph: Historical Studies in Science & Judaism 1: 141.
  • Zimmels, H.J. 1997. Magicians, Theologians and Doctors: Studies in Folk Medicine and Folklore as Reflected in the Rabbinical Responsa. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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A Mitzvah Worth Fighting For

by Eliezer Segal

A campaign to outlaw infant circumcision in California and other parts of the United States (it has also been filling the letters pages of our local newspaper) is acquiring a momentum that is understandably quite alarming to most Jews–and the most militant advocates of the proposed law seem to bear Jewish names. The practice of circumcision continues to be one of the most widely observed rites even among Jews who in other respects are very removed from traditional religious practice. The current debate involves complex issues of religious freedom, individual rights and conflicting medical claims.

Anyone who is familiar with Jewish history will surely be overcome by a powerful sense of déjà vu. Similar confrontations between secular outlooks and the covenant of Abraham have been recurring for more than two millennia.

Attempts to abolish circumcision were a key factor in the religious persecutions that triggered the Hasmonean revolt in the second century BCE. As recounted in the Book of Maccabees, it was a faction within the Jewish community that first saught to remove the physiological differences that distinguished Jews from their heathen neighbours in the dominant global culture of Hellenism. Later, when the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV occupied Jerusalem, he ordered his Jewish subjects “to leave their sons uncircumcised” on pain of death. “Yet many in Israel preferred death to profaning the sacred covenant, and so they died.” 

As noted, the Hellenistic opposition to circumcision (at least as it was portrayed by the author of Maccabees) was inspired principally by a desire to obscure the differentiation between Jews and gentiles. It was likely also motivated by the Greek idealization of the human body in its natural state. 

Circumcision was also a central issue in the Bar-Kokhba revolt of 132-136 CE. There is an animated debate among historians as to whether a Roman ban on circumcision should be regarded as the immediate cause of the uprising, or as a punitive measure that was introduced in response to it. Advocates of the former thesis point to a report by a later Roman historian to the effect that the Jews took up arms after the emperor Hadrian had enacted legislation against genital mutilation that included a ban on circumcision. This would have been consistent with a previous decree by Domitian prohibiting forced castration and sterilization; and it helps explain why Antoninus Pius subsequently needed to exempt the Jews from that prohibition. Talmudic tradition also speaks of Jews who underwent surgical procedures (epispasm) to undo their circumcisions during the era of the Bar-Kokhba uprising.

For various reasons, recent scholarship has become more skeptical about the credibility of those Roman documents, and historians are now inclined to question the theory that the ban on circumcision preceded the revolt. The Jewish sources that speak of epispasms might well refer to elective procedures performed on Jewish hellenizers–as had been the case in the era of the Hasmoneans–and not necessarily to anti-Jewish edicts that were imposed on them by a hostile government. Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar, who lived in the aftermath of the Bar-Kohba revolt, stated that “all commandments for which Israel were prepared to risk their lives in the face of government decrees, such as idolatry or circumcision, are still upheld by them.” 

Jewish opposition to circumcision resurfaced in nineteenth century, though it was limited to a small and very extreme fringe of the Reform movement in Germany. The “Jewish Friends of Reform” [Verein der Reformfreunde] was an elite association of Jewish intellectuals that operated in Frankfurt am Main from 1842 to 1845. While their official membership peaked at about forty-five, their ideological struggles probably reflected more widespread grappling with the dissonances between traditional Judaism and contemporary European values.

The initial draft of the group’s proposed statement of principles included a repudiation of all archaic rituals, and singled out circumcision as a practice that is no longer binding as a religious act or symbol. For strategic reasons, they decided to omit that clause from their published manifesto, fearing that it would unnecessarily alienate potential sympathizers. They were also worried lest by calling into question the validity of a well-known biblical institution, they would be undermining their claims to legitimacy in the eyes of the Christian majority, as well as opening themselves up to charges of establishing a new sect. 

When the association tried to recruit Gabriel Riesser, the respected champion of Jewish civil rights, he took them to task for being too timid in their condemnation of circumcision. “This repugnant ceremony,” he insisted, “insofar as it is to be regarded as religious, must thoroughly disgust every cultured sensibility, as much as Talmud and messiah put together.” He was concerned, among other things, that many parents were so unnerved by the prospect of circumcising their infants that they chose instead to convert to Christianity. 

Some of the more extreme opponents went so far as to lobby actively for the abolition of the practice and recommend its replacement by a more “spiritual” and egalitarian ceremony to celebrate births. They were instrumental in calling for legislation that required governmental supervision of the mohels. And yet it is remarkable to note that most Reform leaders of the time, though they were quite willing to embrace far-reaching innovations in other areas of theology and liturgy, upheld the rite and recognized its importance as a fundamental expression of Jewish identity.

A curious sidelight to today’s controversy is the recruitment of Moses Maimonides as an ostensible opponent of circumcision (it is even possible to purchase t-shirts inscribed with the relevant quote from the Guide of the Perplexed). Of course, Maimonides himself was offering a justification for the biblical command that he accepted enthusiastically, but his unconventional medical rationale for the mitzvah can be turned into an argument for the opposing side. Negating a favourite theme of rabbinic expositions, Maimonides insisted that circumcision should not be perceived as an improvement on nature. In reality, he wrote, it may well weaken the body by decreasing sexual functionality and pleasure. For the Torah, however, this should be seen as a legitimate price to pay in order to achieve the moral advantage of of subduing the temptations that would otherwise lure us away from our proper spiritual and moral vocations. As far as I know, more recent medical research has not provided clear corroboration for Maimonides’ claims. At any rate, the notion that moral values must sometimes override nature, or even physical gratification, is a hard one to sell in our culture.

As so often happens when we compare contemporary situations with those that confronted earlier Jewish generations, we are amazed at the uncanny correspondences between past and present. Then as now, attempts to ban circumcision were inspired by a variety of motives. While sometimes it appears to boil down to an irrational antipathy to Jews or Judaism–attitudes from which Jews themselves are by no means immune–the controversy has touched on substantive questions about the authority and nature of religion, the integrity of the body, or the particularity of the Jewish nation. 

Even more than the obsessive zeal and self-hatred that have often typified opponents of circumcision, history teaches us about the stubborn commitment with which Jews have consistently rallied to fight and sacrifice for its sake. This observation gives us good reasons to hope that that the Jewish spirit will again prove capable of overcoming this threat.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 24, 2011, p. 12.
• For further reading:
  • Abusch, Ra‘anan. “Negotiating Difference: Genital Mutilation in Roman Slave Law and the History of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.” In The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome, edited by Peter Schäfer, 71-91. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 100. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003.
  • Alon, Gedaliah. The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70-640 C.E.). Translated by Gershon Levi. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989.
  • Bickerman, E. J. The God of the Maccabees: Studies on the Meaning and Origin of the Maccabean Revolt. Studies in Judaism in late antiquity v. 32. Leiden: Brill, 1979.
  • Bleich, J. David. “Circumcision : The Current Controversy.” Tradition 33, no. 4 (1999): 45-69.
  • Bleich, Judith. “The Circumcision Controversy in Classical Reform in Historical Context.” In Turim: Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Dr. Bernard Lander, edited by Michael A. Shmidman, 1:1-28. New York: Touro College Press, 2007.
  • Cohen, Shaye J. D. The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Hellenistic Culture and Society 31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
  • Lieberman, Saul. “Religious Persecution of the Jews.” In Salo Wittemayer Baron Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday, 213-245. Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1974.
  • Meyer, Michael A. “Alienated intellectuals in the camp of religious reform: the Frankfort Reformfreunde, 1842-1845.” AJS Review 6 (1981): 61-86.
  • Oppenheimer, Aharon. “The Ban on Circumcision as a Cause of the Revolt: A Reconsideration.” In The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome, edited by Peter Schäfer, 55-69. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 100. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003.
  • Philipson, David. The Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: KTAV, 1967.
  • Rabello, Alfredo M. “The Edict on Circumcision as a Factor in the Bar-Kokhba Revolt.” In The Bar-Kokhba Revolt: New Aproaches, edited by Aharon Oppenheimer and U. Rappaport, 37-41. Jerusalem: JerusalemYad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1984.
  • Schäfer, Peter. Der Bar Kokhba-Aufstand: Studien Zum Zweiten Jüdischen Krieg Gegen Rom. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 1. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981.
  • Smallwood, E. Mary. “The Legislation of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius against Circumcision.” Latomus 18 (1959): 334-347.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Going for the Gold

by Eliezer Segal

The value of the official currency has been severely undermined by inflation and depreciation brought on by concerns about the economy’s health. This situation impelled many people to forsake the official legal tender and place their trust in a more stable standard, that of gold.<

Such indeed was the mood in the Roman empire during the third and fourth centuries C. E., a situation that is reflected in the important works of rabbinic law that were produced at that time. The volatility of the economy and the questionable status of various currencies had a palpable impact on the teachings of the Jewish sages as they related to several practical questions of civil  and ritual law.

In order to properly understand the ancient sources, we must recall that paper money did not exist in those days, and that all currency was in the form of coins–usually silver (the denarius), and occasionally copper, or gold (the aureus). Furthermore, the relationships between the different denominations were not constant or uniform. Though talmudic texts speak of a silver-gold ratio of 25:1 or 24:1, a coin’s actual value was based on the amount of metal that it contained, and this value was subject to broad fluctuations. Therefore, notwithstanding the attempts at fiscal reform by several emperors, the relative values of gold, silver or copper coins could not be reduced to a fixed ratio.

The Talmuds relate that the Babylonian sage Rav submitted an inquiry about how he should pay back a loan that he had taken in gold coins and the market value of gold (calculated in terms of silver denarii) had risen in the meantime. The answer involved a ruling on whether gold was to be regarded as the “coin” that defined the fixed value, or as a commodity whose price was measured in units of silver denars. The answer to this question would determine whether or not the repayment involved the taking of interest which is forbidden by the Torah. 

According to the conventions of rabbinic law, purchases of movables do not become fully binding  when the seller receives the payment, but only when the merchandise is physically transferred to the buyer. Questions therefore arose as to how to define “merchandise” and “money” in certain types of transactions. This kind of question arose, for example, where two different types of coins were being exchanged. When gold coins are traded for silver, which of them is considered the merchandise (whose conveyance effects the sale) and which is the currency?

The talmudic sources record that there existed two opposing textual traditions for the passage from the Mishnah that deals with exchanges of silver for gold. One version stated that “silver acquires gold” and the other that “gold acquires silver.” As noted, the metal that does the acquiring (whose conveyance finalizes the sale) is considered the commodity, whereas the one that is acquired is the currency. The Talmud explains that Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi, the Mishnah’s compiler, changed his mind about this matter over the course of his lifetime: in his younger years he had ruled that silver acquires gold, but later he reversed his position. Other authorities from that generation and the following one seemed to concur that “silver acquires gold,” such that Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s later espousing of the contrary view emerges as an isolated and temporary exception.

Scholars have sought historical explanations for this shift in the rabbinic attitudes toward gold and silver. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi’s later position was formulated during the closing years of the first century. Indeed, this period was marked by a temporary decrease in the weights of the principal denomination of imperial gold coinage, the aureus, that began during the reign of Caracella and was not restored until the time of Elagalabus (around 219).

During the period in question, the value of silver coins was not usually calculated according to their metallic content, but rather as a fixed fraction of the reigning gold coin. It is therefore understandable how the perception arose that the economy was based on a kind of gold standard, as the aureus was the de facto currency of the empire. To be sure, by the second half of the third century unspecified references to denars in the Talmud were assumed to referr to gold coins rather than silver.

At the time that the older Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi was insisting that silver was the primary currency, his view was consistent with what we know from the numismatic evidence—as some 529 different silver coins were minted over the four-year period between 193 and 196, while gold coins were being issued only infrequently.

All this coincided with the process that historians refer to as “the crisis of the third century,” characterized by widespread inflation as the public lost confidence in the real value of the abundant silver currency. The crisis has been imputed to a various causes including costly military adventures and fiscal mismanagement. It is possible that this state of affairs was the reason why Rabbi Judah’s own son Simeon opposed his father and insisted that silver not be treated as currency, but as a commodity subject to price variations. The denarius, fixed by Augustus at 95% real silver, was redefined by Caracella at 50%—and the fiction of its silver content would eventually be abandoned. Consumer prices rose at that time by almost a thousand percent; and Diocletian’s comprehensive fiscal reforms were able to slow the inflationary process down to a mere 100%. 

Gold thus replaced the silver denarius as the real coin of the realm. However, the stability of gold was also impaired after 106 C. E. when Rome came into possession of new gold mines in Dacia. There was widespread awareness that the official exchange rates amounted to an artificial overvaluing of silver that was intended to retard the rampant depreciation of the silver denarius. In the popular view, it was gold that was functioning as the real monetary standard—and even the imperial government refused to accept taxes that were paid in its own silver coins. This skepticism toward the official silver currency underlay several legal rulings in the Talmud.

The erosion of silver’s value led several prominent Jewish authorities to adopt the view that gold’s relative stability entitled it to be perceived as the true monetary standard. In fact, rabbinic traditions from this time mention discoveries of troves of gold coins, indicating that people were hoarding gold and stashing it inside walls or burying it in fields.

The perceived advantages of gold over silver were vividly expressed in the mid-second century in a parable of Rabbi Meir. His point was to stress the crucial importance of mastering the underlying logic of Torah teachings. If a student does no more than memorize the lists of unconnected rules without appreciating the reasoning on which they are based, then the enterprise will prove unmanageable. 

Rabbi Meir illustrated his point by comparing the intellectual coherence of Torah study to gold denarii, and the individual laws to silver tetradrachms. Accordingly,

…a person who goes to Beit Ilanim [a well-known market town] and is in need of ten or twenty thousand denarii for expenses–if he carries the sum in single tetradrachms they will weigh him down and he will not know what to do with them all.

Instead, he should consolidate them into gold denarii, which he may then change into small denominations that he can spend at his convenience.

Now I am probably the last person you should approach for advice on investments—but I do claim to know a thing or two about educational values. If Rabbi Meir’s financial insights are as well founded as his astute pedagogic outlook, then you should probably give serious thought to acquiring some bullion.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 9, 2011, p. 18.
• For further reading:
  • Grossman, Avraham. The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981.
  • ________. Early Sages of France. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995.
  • Jacobson, B. S. Netiv Binah. Tel-Aviv: Sinai, 1973.
  • Ta-Shma, Israel M. Early Franco-German Ritual and Custom. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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New Year, New Moon

by Eliezer Segal

Rosh Hashanah is unique among the festivals of the biblical calendar in that it inevitably coincides with another holy day—because it falls on the first day of the Hebrew month, it also qualifies as a Rosh Ḥodesh, a New Moon. While the Jerusalem Temple was in existence, this New Moon was commemorated by the offering its own sacrifices, in addition to those of Rosh Hashanah.

The festival prayers were ordained so as to correspond to the sacrificial services. It is therefore understandable that the Talmud asks whether the Rosh Hashanah prayers should also include an acknowledgment of Rosh Ḥodesh. After all, when a festival coincides with Shabbat, it is the normal practice to mention both themes in the text of the liturgy.

By the time the rabbis in the Talmud reached the end of their discussion, they had not arrived at a definitive answer to their question. They did, however, give serious consideration to the argument that “a single ‘memorial'” can suffice for both the New Year and the New Moon. As explained by Rashi, this is an allusion to the fact that the Torah (Leviticus 23:24) speaks of Rosh Hashanah as “a memorial of blowing of trumpets,” whereas regarding the New Moon it states “in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets… that they may be to you for a memorial before your God” (Numbers 10:10). Hence, when the liturgy makes a reference to “the day of memorial“—yom ha-zikkaron—the expression could be understood as alluding to both aspects of the day. And in fact, the earliest known prayer books produced by the Babylonian Ge’onim did not contain any more explicit mention of the New Moon than this indirect verbal allusion to memorials.

Now all this is well and good as long as we are speaking of expressions in the prayers that were composed by the rabbis. There is, however, a widespread practice of including in the Additional (Musaf) Prayer verbatim recitations of the actual passages from the Torah that outline the sacrificial offerings for the respective holy days.  As several commentators observed, the requisite verses recounting the Rosh Hashanah and Rosh Ḥodesh sacrifices are quite distinct and cannot be combined. And yet, they argued, it would seem inappropriate to omit either of those texts from the festival prayer service. 

In the eleventh century a controversy erupted in the European Jewish communities in connection with this question. Toward the end of his life, Rabbi Isaac Hallevi or Worms instituted in his community the full recitation of the holiday sacrifices, and he stipulated that it should include a separate mention of the New Moon. Evidently, this constituted a departure from the community’s previous norm, and it provoked the ire of his more conservative contemporaries who, following Rabbi Isaac’s death, tried to overturn his innovation. Another prominent authority in Worms, Rabbi Jacob ben Yakar, following what was apparently the established local custom, chose to omit the full recitations of the Torah passages describing the sacrifices.

Indeed, aside from adding a few extra lines to an already lengthy service (a consideration that would hardly have troubled the medieval Jewish worshipers), it is not immediately obvious what objection anyone would have had to inserting a brief paragraph about the New Moon sacrifices.

There was, however, one particular issue that was repeatedly raised by those who opposed the mentioning of the New Moon in the prayers: they feared that by juxtaposing the two holy days in the same prayer, they would be promoting a misunderstanding that could lead to some dangerous consequences.

In order to understand their concerns, we must first examine some subtle differences between two models of Jewish sacred time.

Rosh Hashanah has been observed for many centuries as a two-day festival in spite of the fact that the Torah assigns it only one day. A Rosh Ḥodesh can have either one or two days, depending on whether the previous month is deemed to consist of twenty-nine or thirty days. In both instances, the reasons for the insertion of the second day are ostensibly similar, deriving from ancient uncertainties in determining the dates (this was originally done on the basis of visual observations of the lunar cycle) and then announcing those dates to Jews in far-flung localities.

Nevertheless, there are critical differences between the two occasions.

In the case of a normal two-day Rosh Ḥodesh, the first day is actually the thirtieth day of the previous month, while the second is the first day of the new one. Rosh Hashanah, on the other hand, is observed on the first and second days of the month of Tishri and according to the Talmud, it constitutes a unique instance of virtual “extended day.” 

Although these conceptual distinctions might appear very abstract, they have some decidedly practical consequences when it comes to holiday observances. In days of yore, Jews could not rely on receiving an attractively printed calendar from their local yeshivah or kosher bakery, so they had to do their own computations to determine the dates of festivals, usually by counting the number of days that had elapsed since the most recent New Moon. For this purpose, they knew to begin their count from the latest one-day Rosh Ḥodesh or from the second day of a two-day Rosh Ḥodesh.

The two days of Rosh Hashanah threatened to confuse the calculations, since it would be perfectly natural and understandable for people to treat them like normal months, and to start counting the days of Tishri from the second day of the festival rather than the first. This could ultimately lead people to observe Yom Kippur and Sukkot on the wrong dates, and to treat the actual holy days as profane weekdays–with all the dreadful religious repercussions that would ensue if their prohibitions were inadvertently violated!

The probability of such catastrophic confusion would be increased drastically if the New Moon were to be given prominent billing in the Rosh Hashanah prayers. Hence, argued Rabbi Isaac’s opponents, it was more prudent to stick as close as possible to the talmudic policy of concealing the Rosh Ḥodesh of Tishri under the obscure rubric of the “memorial.” 

An inquiry was eventually submitted to the leading authority of the next generation, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes—Rashi. Rashi was himself a disciple of both Rabbi Isaac Hallevi and Rabbi Jacob ben Yakar. Evidently, his questioners were hopeful of obtaining from him reliable versions of Rabbi Isaac Hallevi’s position on this question, and they also wanted Rashi to issue a definitive ruling in the dispute.

Rashi reported diplomatically that even though Rabbi Jacob did not institute the recitation of the New Moon texts in the service, this should not be interpreted as a fundamental disagreement with Rabbi Isaac or the Talmud. Rashi was reluctant to accept the prospect that his revered teachers were actually involved in an overt dispute. He recalled that Rabbi Jacob was a humble soul who treated himself as “a doormat to be trodden upon,” and hence it would have been out of character for him to take a confrontational stand on the matter. Therefore Rabbi Jacob’s silence on the matter should not be perceived as open opposition to Rabbi Isaac’s practice.

After all, the talmudic discussion had not been concerned with the recitation of biblical passages, but only with the wording of the blessings in the Musaf service. During his student days, Rashi himself had never thought to ask his teacher Rabbi Isaac about reciting the scriptural verses, since he was completely unfamiliar with the existence of such a practice on any festival.

Before holiday prayer books became easily available, worshipers would usually have to rely on their own memories when reciting their prayers; under those circumstances, Rashi explained, while it might be reasonable to expect people to memorize the appropriate texts for Sabbath and New Moon, which occur quite frequently, it would impose excessive demands on their memories to also learn the texts related to the once-a-year festivals. Hence those passages had never been incorporated into the original liturgy.

It was only later, after he was persuaded by the venerable cantor Rabbi Meir bar Isaac of Worms that it was advisable to enumerate the relevant biblical passages as part of the Musaf prayers, that Rashi decided to adopt that practice himself, even with respect to the New Moon passages, in accordance with the custom of Rabbi Isaac Hallevi.

Rashi suggested that when post-talmudic communities first instituted the recitation of the festival verses, they mistakenly excluded the New Moon passage because they had misunderstood the context of the Talmud’s exchange on the topic.

He also dismissed the argument about the ruinous consequences that might result from miscalculating the dates of the festivals. If that was a real concern, then the sages of the Talmud would have raised it explicitly in their examination of the question.

At any rate, in spite of Rashi’s plausible and elegant arguments, his preferred solution did not take root in the French or German Jewish communities. What emerged as the characteristic Ashkenazic practice was precisely the hybrid position that Rashi had rejected: the biblical texts about the sacrifices are included in in the Musaf service, but the New Moon is excluded other than through indirect allusions.

This contrarian position was defended by Rashi’s grandson Rabbi Jacob Tam. Rabbenu Tam’s insistence on full recitation of the sacrifice texts stemmed from his conviction that the essence of the Musaf prayer service is as a verbal substitute for the sacrificial services. Nonetheless, he felt that there was no need to include the separate paragraph about the New Moon sacrifices, seeing that they are mentioned obliquely when the cited Torah text states that the Rosh Hashanah offerings should be brought “beside the burnt offering of the month” (Numbers 29:6). However, some authorities, including the “sages of Mainz,” objected that even this was too explicit a recognition of the New Moon on Rosh Hashanah.

Assorted reasons were adduced for this attitude. Several commentators cited the talmudic interpretation of Psalms 81:4 that stressed the character of Rosh Ḥodesh as a day of “hiddenness.” They explained that the expression referred not only to the obvious fact that the new moon is now reappearing from its celestial concealment, but it also implied that we should be striving as much as possible to “hide” the Rosh Ḥodesh from the words of the liturgy. Some writers grounded this peculiar attitude in the well-known talmudic legend about how the Almighty had punished the moon for trying to overextend its domain at the time of the creation. That association, they argued, was an inappropriate one to mention on the day of judgment when the world is begging for divine forgiveness.

Howsoever we might (or might not) choose to recall Rosh Ḥodesh in our prayers, the moon’s renewal is surely a fitting symbol for the spiritual renewal that we strive for at this momentous time of the year.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 23, 2011, pp. 21, 24.

• For further reading:
  • Grossman, Avraham. The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981.
  • ________. Early Sages of France. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995.
  • Jacobson, B. S. Netiv Binah. Tel-Aviv: Sinai, 1973.
  • Ta-Shma, Israel M. Early Franco-German Ritual and Custom. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1992.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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No Kidding

by Eliezer Segal

The traditional Jewish culinary practice of separating meat from dairy has its roots in the scriptural prohibition “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” which appears three times in the Torah, and hence was expounded by the ancient Jewish sages as referring not only to cooking, but also to eating or deriving any other benefit from the mixture. The reason for this law is not explained in the Bible, and commentators have suggested diverse ethical, hygienic and other rationales to account for it.

When faced with obscure precepts of this kind, Rabbi Moses Maimonides usually tried to explain them as responses to pagan practices that were current in the days of Moses. Thus, he proposed in his Guide of the Perplexed that the heathens of old were accustomed to partake of cheeseburgers in connection with their cultic celebrations. He confessed, however, that he was unable to find historical evidence for this thesis.

Don Isaac Abravanel took a similar approach, taking his cue from the context of the prohibition’s initial appearance in Exodus Chapter 23. The relevant passage begins with a survey of the three annual pilgrimage festivals, culminating with Sukkot: “the festival of the ingathering at the end of the year when you gather in from the field the fruit of your labour.” It continues with various regulations related to the consumption of meat on these occasions, and then to the complete forbidding of meat and milk.

Abravanel was of the opinion that this dietary prohibition was related specifically to the last of the three pilgrimage celebrations, the feast of Tabernacles. He reasoned (in the spirit of Maimonides) that it was a widespread custom among the the ancient idol-worshippers to convene festivities at the conclusion of the harvest season in order to propitiate their deities and thereby incur divine good will and bountiful crop yields for the coming year. At these gatherings the delicacy of choice was the cheese kid-burger. Indeed, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra claimed that kid-meat cooks more easily than any other kind.

According to Abravanel’s interpretation, scripture singled out seething kids in mother’s milk as the most common and familiar variation of the heathen practice, but the extension of the prohibition to other types of meat and preparation methods should be regarded a legitimate understanding of the Torah’s original intention

Abravanel did not have access to any specific information about the pagan harvest celebrations, but he claimed support for his explanation from an institution with which he was familiar from his native Spain. “Still today it is the widespread practice in the dominions of Spain for all the shepherds to assemble twice a year in order to take counsel and to enact ordinances on matters related to the shepherds and their flocks. In their language this assembly is called the ‘Mesta.'” Abravanel reports that he investigated the goings-on at Mesta conventions and discovered that indeed, milk and kid-meat were the preferred culinary offering at these affairs.

His description of the Mesta is fully accurate. It was an influential association of sheep breeders that continued to occupy a prominent role in the Castilian economy from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, serving as a liaison with the central governments and regulating all aspects of their industry. Among its chief responsibilities was the supervision of the semi-annual migrations of the flocks between the summer and winter pasturage, which were the occasions for the seasonal assemblies described by Abravanel. It is likely that he had to deal with them personally in connection with his activities as a financier serving the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Of course, the autumn Mesta migration coincided with the Hebrew feast of Tabernacles.

Abravanel’s research into heathen dietary practices extended to one other contemporary case: “I inquired and investigated, and established for certain that this is also true of the island at the world’s edge known as ‘Angleterre’–which has a greater profusion of sheep than in any other land–that they always follow this same usage.” It would appear that the mere association with English cuisine was enough to disqualify meat-and-dairy combinations in the eyes of an urbane European.

In his Ṣeidah la-Derekh, the eminent fourteenth-century scholar Rabbi Menahem ben Zerah reported hearing that it had once been customary to pour the milk used for seething kids and lambs onto the seeds of newly planted trees in order to accelerate the maturing of their first fruits. A similar explanation was proposed by Rabbi Naftali Zvi Berlin of Volozhin in the nineteenth century. He claimed that as part of their routine for fertilizing soil, the pagans in the land of Israel used to cook the flesh of kids in their mothers’ milk and then pour a tiny bit of it onto the fields. It was with a view to counteracting such practices that the Torah forbids any combining of meat and dairy, even for agricultural use. It is not clear where Rabbi Berlin learned about this custom. Did he reconstruct it based on the context of the scriptural passage; was he paraphrasing the Ṣeidah la-Derekh; or had he personally observed similar rites among the local peasantry?

The anti-idolatry interpretation of the biblical precept enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in 1933 with the first publication of a freshly excavated cuneiform tablet from Ugarit in Syria. Part of an immense royal archive, the tablet in question contained part of an epic mythological tale about the Canaanite deities, along with instructions for the proper rites to ensure fertility. A damaged sequence in the text was reconstructed by its first editor as “cook a kid in milk.” Understandably, biblical scholars were quick to point out the similarity to the Torah’s prohibition, and to declare that we now had solid evidence from an actual Canaanite text for Maimonides’ and Abravanel’s thesis that the biblical law was intended to distance Israel from an idolatrous ritual that originated in myths about the suckling of young gods. The correspondence was so precise that it seemed to good to be true.

And, in fact, it was.

As it turns out, after the passage was reexamined in light of our improved knowledge of the Ugaritic language and scribal practices, there was nothing left that would lend support to the initial reading—there is nothing in the text about cooking, kids or mothers (all that was left was the “milk”).

Although this supposed archaeological support has been discredited, the explanation itself need not be rejected entirely. If it is true, then it suggests a most intriguing thematic link between the pilgrimage festival of Tabernacles and a fundamental part of the Jewish dietary regimen.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 14, 2011, p. 9.

• For further reading:
  • Ginsberg, Harold Louis, ed. The Ugarit Texts. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1936.
  • Klein, Joel T. “A Comment on You Shall Not Boil a Kid in its Mother’s Milk.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2005): 196-197.
  • Klein, Julius. The Mesta; a Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273-1836. Port Washington, N.Y: Kennikat Press, 1964. 
  • Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. 1st ed. New York: Doubleday, 1991. 
  • Nachshoni, Yehudah. Studies in the Weekly Parashah: The Classical Interpretations of Major Topics and Themes in the Torah. Translated by Schmuel Himelstein. Vol. 2. 5 vols. 1st ed. ArtScroll Judaica Classics. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, 1988.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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