Higher Education

by Eliezer Segal

Up here in the sublime halls of Academia, my colleagues and I are becoming increasingly apprehensive about the state of advanced education. The authorities who control the purse strings seem determined to transform universities into professional training institutions and technical schools, and university degrees are treated as marketable commodities to be mass-produced as if on assembly-lines. Most disturbingly, the liberal arts and sciences, that once formed the core of the traditional curriculum, are being pushed to the periphery.

Amid all this malaise, I find it instructive to read how earlier generations defined the ideals of their academic institutions. A fascinating testimony has been preserved in the form of a proposal that was published on 19 Nisan 5324 (April 1 1564) and circulated by Rabbi David Provençal, a prominent scholar and preacher in Mantua, Italy. Rabbi Procençal was soliciting support for the creation of a new Jewish college. In this project he would be assisted by his son Abraham who was billed as a qualified teacher in the areas of Torah, philosophy and medicine.

The prospectus justified the need for such an institution in light of the predicament facing the Italian Jewish communities at that time. The Talmud had recently been banned and burned, leaving glaring gaps in the education of Jewish youth, who were left to choose between a life of indolence or attending Christian schools where they risked being subverted by alien values.

As a solution to this dilemma Rabbi Provençal proposed his new institution in which young students might acquire wisdom and vocational skills in a Jewish setting. The program would last five years, with a more limited three-year option available to less gifted students. To out-of-town students they would provide dormitory facilities consisting of basic furnishings and housekeeping services, and the collegial meals would be enlivened by words of Torah and edifying discourses. Rabbi Provençal alluded to similar institutions in the land of Israel that would serve as his models. More tangibly, his institution was clearly intended to be a Hebrew version of one of the preeminent European universities of the time. Mantua’s first short-lived Christian college was not  established until 1625.

The Hebrew document refers to the proposed Jewish institution as an “academy.” It is probable that the use of this Greek term, though it was enjoying considerable prestige in Renaissance Italy, provoked objections from Jews who preferred an authentic Hebrew word. This would be analogous to the fierce opposition voiced by David Ben-Gurion and others when Israel’s official bastion of linguistic purism decided to call itself the “Akademia” of the Hebrew Language. It is therefore noteworthy that Rabbi Provençal was also the author of a treatise (no longer extant) titled Dor HaPelagah (The Generation of Separation) in which he endeavoured to prove that some two thousand lexical items in Greek, Latin and Italian were in reality loan-words from the Hebrew. Included among these was the word “academia” that had evolved (so he claimed) from the biblical expression “‘eḳed adam,” which he understood as “a gathering of people.”

Like the eminent medieval and Renaissance universities, the Jewish college would be built upon a foundation of theology. Students would be instructed in the Torah and rabbinic lore, which would hopefully reinforce orthodox beliefs, diligent observance and upright moral behaviour. The intensity of the religious curriculum would be contingent on the future repeal of the interdiction of Talmud texts, and on the success of the program: if it should attract large enrolments (leading to a corresponding increase in tuition income), then additional faculty could be recruited— “even from the Ashkenazic community, and even for salaries.”

Courses in sacred scripture would span the entire Hebrew Bible (as distinct from some religious schools that limited themselves to learning the five books of the Torah) according to a broad spectrum of classic and more recent commentators. The academy’s founders believed that the study of “divine philosophy” should lie at the heart of Bible study. And the program would not be confined to academic textual studies—students would also be encouraged to compose their own original homiletic expositions, and thereby to participate in the ongoing tradition of Judaic scriptural creativity.

The new institution would strike a balance between academic and practical components. The curriculum was to include a full range of the same Liberal Arts subjects as were offered in the finest Christian universities, and these would be taught by qualified specialists. The prospectus mentions scribal arts, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography and astrology. The students would also be trained in the arts of rhetoric, public speaking and debating—applied to halakhic questions as well as academic topics—as an effective means for honing their intellects.

The school’s founders also insisted on a solid grounding in Hebrew grammar, without which they believed it is impossible to arrive at a sound comprehension of a text. In the spirit of Renaissance humanism, the students were expected to master the crafts of rhetoric and prosody, including the ability to compose scanned poetry. Penmanship and Hebrew calligraphy were also counted among the essential skills to be instilled at the Mantua academy, thereby enabling the graduates to serve as copyists of manuscripts and documents. Their elegant scribal skills would also be applied to Latin and Italian, in acknowledgment of the fact that they would likely be involved in written correspondence with non-Jewish authorities.

On the professional side, the Provençals’ academy would also include its own medical school. Though the aspiring physicians would still have to spend some time in non-Jewish “studios” in order to receive their certification, thereby exposing them to threatening theological influences (several Jewish medical students had actually abandoned their religion under those circumstances), most of their training could now be obtained in a more wholesome Jewish setting. While« competence in Latin was normally considered an essential precondition for full medical certification, the Mantua Hebrew academy would offer a more limited option based on Hebrew texts, which they justified on the premise that “wisdom lies chiefly in the content, not in the languages, and what is important is the proper intention.”

All in all, Rabbi Provençal’s ambitious venture into higher education compares quite favourably with our current trend toward impersonal degree-granting factories, as well as with the narrow parochialism that characterizes many yeshivas. 

If you should feel tempted to apply for admission to the Hebrew Academy of Mantua, I regret to inform you that we have no evidence that the project was ever implemented. Apparently the proposal remained purely academic.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, June 28, 2013, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Assaf, Simcha. Meḳorot le-toldot ha-ḥinukh be-Yiśraʼel. Edited by Shmuel Glick. Vol. 2. 6 vols. A new edition Edited and annotated. New York and Jerusalem: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2001
  • Bonfil, Robert. Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy. Translated by Jonathan Chipman. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
  • Halberstam, S. Z. Ḥ. “Iggeret MeRabbenu David Provençalo.” Ha-Levanon / Le Libanon. July 8, 1868.
  • Marcus, Jacob Rader. The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1990.
  • Roth, Cecil. The Jews in the Renaissance. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959.
  • ———. “The Medieval University and the Jew.” The Menorah Journal 19 (1931 1930): 128–141.
  • Shulvass, Moses A. The Jews in the World of the Renaissance. Translated by Elvin Kose. Leiden: Brill, 1973.
  • Simonsohn, Shlomo. History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua. Publications of the Diaspora Research Institute book 17. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1977.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Bravo, Signor de’ Sommi!

by Eliezer Segal

Josephus Flavius described an occasion when he was seeking access to the Roman imperial court in order to negotiate the freeing of some Jewish captives. It turned out that the convenient intermediary for this mission was an actor of Judean birth named Alytura who had influence with the empress Poppea. 

This function of Jewish theatrical performers serving as a bridge between commoners and the highest echelons of power had a long history, and it resurfaced in Renaissance Mantua. The local Jewish community was often called upon to provide theatrical entertainments, at their own expense, for the powerful Gonzaga dynasty. This was a demeaning obligation to which the Jews submitted in return for the privilege of residency in the duchy, where they also served as bankers, merchants and physicians. Nevertheless, their stage productions, which included participation by broad segments of the duchy’s tiny Jewish populace, was of value to the political leadership, helping to validate their pretensions to legitimate nobility and to demonstrate their aristocratic liberality before the local masses and foreign dignitaries.

Although their thespian activities might have been imposed on them, some of the Jewish participants took their assignments quite seriously. They assembled a semi-professional troupe that mounted works of artistic merit. Chief among them—as author, set designer, director and choreographer—was Leone de’ Sommi (1527-1592), scion of Italy’s illustrious Portaleone family, who was known in Hebrew as Yehudah ben Ya‘akov Sommo. De’ Sommi, in addition to his endeavours as a ritual scribe and poet, was a prolific playwright, though few of his works have survived, and most of his oeuvre (amounting to some sixteen volumes) perished in a conflagration at the Turin library in 1904.

It is generally agreed that de’ Sommi’s most substantial artistic legacy consisted of his Italian treatise on stagecraft titled Quattro Dialoghi in Materia di rappresentazioni sceniche [Four Dialogues on Scenic Representation] in which the author’s views were placed in the mouth of his literary persona “Veridico.” It is the earliest known monograph on the subject, approaching it from perspectives that are at times broadly theoretical, didactic or meticulously practical. 

Several of the ideas that de’ Sommi set down in his dialogues sound so familiar to our modern ears that it may require a special effort to appreciate how novel they were in their original historical setting. For example, because the principal venue of the Mantuan stage productions was in the aristocratic court, often as part of celebrations of family milestones or affairs of state, the distinctions between spectators and performers were not rigidly maintained. Members of the audience might wander on the stage, or even be drawn into crowd scenes or dances. 

De’ Sommi, on the contrary, proposed a very different paradigm in which the activities on the stage constituted a separate and autonomous universe. Thus, instead of keeping both the audience section and the stage illuminated equally as was customary in his time, he proposed that fewer lamps be placed in the audience section so as to focus people’s attention on the performance on the stage. He also described how lighting can be utilized effectively to project a mood—brightness for joy and gloomy darkness for sadness. He instructed the performers to interact with one another, and not with the audience. 

Of all the manifold components that make up a major stage production, it appears that the text of the script was given top billing prior to de’ Sommi’s time, and drama was treated as a branch of literature. De’ Sommi, however, saw the performance as an integrated process, and shifted much of the attention to the director and actors. Indeed, he observed that gifted actors are even capable of successfully carrying poorly written plays, whereas poor performers can murder a well-crafted script! Acting, he argued, is not merely a matter of eloquent recitation, but must extend to natural-looking gestures and appropriate body language, particularly in comedic roles. It is through the actor’s craft that the author’s purposes are imbued with life. De’ Sommi went so far as to compare the relationship between text and performance to that of body and soul. The spectators’ attention should be drawn to the characters rather than to the stars who are portraying them (who should ideally be unrecognizable).

De’ Sommi was reluctant to tread on the specialized crafts of the playwright or set designer, but wrote from the perspective of the person who brought all those skills together in a unified performance—thereby embodying the role that modern drama would learn to assign to the director.

In ways that anticipated several features of modern “method acting” he insisted that the actors—though cast because they fit their specific roles—must familiarize themselves with the entire play in order to obtain a full understanding of how their character functions in the broader context. The actors must not only be capable of expressing the personalities of their own characters, but also of understanding how they relate to the others on the stage and to the situations in which they are operating. In this vein, he urged that the costumes should be authentic to the characters even if that must be achieved at the cost of their visual splendour.

The ultimate purpose of a performance should be grasped from the perspective of the audience’s experience. Toward that end de’ Sommi was quite prepared to tolerate religiously questionable elements like pagan deities or risqué dialogue, on the grounds that the theatrical audiences (even in an era marked by growing prudery in the Catholic church) were not composed entirely of saints. 

In spite of his impressive achievements in the realm of the theatre, as well as his important contributions to the Jewish community (such as his endowing of a new synagogue), de’ Sommi provoked some hostility from religious traditionalists, including his own teacher. He inserted a few remarks into his Dialogues that served to justify his activities from a Jewish perspective. In one such passage he suggested a connection between the structures of the standard five-act play and the five books of the Torah. He also claimed that he was pursuing an authentically Hebrew tradition that could be traced back to the earliest Hebrew play—the biblical book of Job. 

In an inspired bit of pious symbolism, de’ Sommi (preempting Shakespeare by several decades) described how our mortal lifetimes are comparable to staged plays in which we function alternately as the spectators and as actors in diverse roles (both comic and tragic) concealed by metaphoric masks—until after that final curtain when, stripped of our artificial costumes, we must await our ultimate critical review.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, August 23, 2013, p. 11.

• For further reading:
  • Belkin, Ahuva, ed. Leone De’ Sommi and the Performing Arts. Assaph Book Series. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 1997.
  • David, Yonah. “L’ispirazione ebraica nei dialoghi di Leone De’ Sommi.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 60, no. 1–2 (1994): 119–128.
  • Guinsburg, J. “Leone de’ Sommi: A Precursor of Modern Theatricality.” In Leone De’ Sommi and the Performing Arts, edited by Ahuva Belkin, 221–229. Assaph Book Series. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 1997.
  • Hecker, Kristine. “The Concept of Theatre Production in Leone de’ Sommi’s Quattro Dialoghi in the Context of His Time.” In Leone De’ Sommi and the Performing Arts, edited by Ahuva Belkin, 189–209. Assaph Book Series. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 1997.
  • Kaufmann, David. “Leone de Sommi Portaleone (1527-92), Dramatist and Founder of a Synagogue at Mantua.” Jewish Quarterly Review 10, no. 3 (April 1, 1898): 445–461.
  • Lipshitz, Yair. “Performance as Profanation: Holy Tongue and Comic Stage in Tsahut Bedihuta Deqiddushin.” Edited by Albert Russell Ascoli and William N. West. Renaissance Drama: Special Issue: Italy in the Drama of Europe 36/37. New Series (2010): 127–157.
  • Nicoll, Allardyce. The Development of the Theatre; a Study of Theatrical Art from the Beginnings to the Present Day. 5th ed., rev. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
  • Ogden, Dunbar H. “De’ Sommi in ’88: Dynamics of Theatrical Space.” In Leone De’ Sommi and the Performing Arts, edited by Ahuva Belkin, 231–245. Assaph Book Series. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, Yolanda and David Katz Faculty of the Arts, 1997.
  • Roth, Cecil. The Jews in the Renaissance. 1st ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959.
  • Simonsohn, Shlomo. History of the Jews in the Duchy of Mantua. Publications of the Diaspora Research Institute book 17. Jerusalem: Kiryath Sepher, 1977.
  • Sommi, Leone de’. A Comedy of Betrothal (Tsahoth B’dihutha D’Kiddushin). Edited by Alfred Siemon Golding. Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions Canada, 1988.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Running on Empty

by Eliezer Segal

For many centuries, Jewish communities in the diaspora have been adding extra days to most of the festivals ordained in the Torah. This practice originated back in the days when the beginning of each month was determined by the sighting of the new moon, so that it might take a few weeks before messengers could arrive at outlying communities to inform the residents when the current month began and, by extension, what were the dates of any festivals that fell during that month. The policy of two-day holidays remained in force even after the Jewish world adopted a calculated calendar and there was no longer any real doubt about the correct dates.

The exception to this practice was Yom Kippur. Presumably, the prospect of a forty-eight hour fast was deemed too burdensome to impose on the constitutions of Jews for the sake of an anachronistic custom.

The Talmud, however, relates that a number of prominent Babylonian rabbis did observe two-day fasts on Yom Kippur because of doubts as to whether their own calendrical calculations corresponded to those of the official authorities in the holy land. Rabbah did so routinely, and on one occasion it turned out that his fears were justified. In a similar vein, Rav Naḥman was once informed, after what he had thought was the conclusion of Yom Kippur, that the fast would actually be observed in Israel on the following day. He was not pleased to hear this news.

Now, the type of situations that were dealt with by those Babylonian sages should not have arisen if they had access to an agreed-upon system for calculating the Hebrew calendar. Indeed, while historians are uncertain when the calculated calendar was adopted—it was apparently a gradual process that lasted several centuries—it is reasonable to suppose that it was not yet in widespread use in the early fourth century, in the days of Rabbah and Rav Naḥman.

By the medieval era, after the calculated calendar had gained widespread acceptance, there were rabbis who were determined to project the institution back to much earlier times. No doubt, this attitude was motivated by contemporary concerns. The authority to issue ad hoc declarations about the new moon or leap years was an important indicator of the supremacy of the Jewish religious leadership in the land of Israel, and it therefore functioned as a powerful precedent in their ongoing rivalry with the rabbis of Babylonia. Furthermore, the Karaites were alleging that this newfangled rabbinic calendar was yet another example of how the so-called “oral tradition” was nothing more than a fabrication of the rabbis. It is not all that surprising, therefore, that some Babylonian rabbis made exaggerated claims about how the calculated calendar had been in use since time immemorial.

This background helps explain a responsum attributed to a Babylonian Ga’on who was asked to explain the Talmud’s account of Rabbah’s two-day fast: if Rabbah was relying on the same calendar that is in current use, then what possible doubts or discrepancies could have arisen about the date? 

The Ga’on commenced his response by reaffirming that the calculated calendar can be traced back to the era of the biblical prophets. Therefore it is inconceivable that Rabbah would have observed Yom Kippur on a different date; if so, the Talmud must be speaking of a different fast day—the fast of the Ninth of Av which is not from the Torah—and the additional day was nothing more than a personal stringency that Rabbah chose to impose upon himself. 

Another responsum by a Ga’on presented a similar argument, stressing that both Rabbah and Rav Naḥman were acting beyond the requirements of the normative law, certainly not with a view to establishing precedents that should be emulated by the community at large.

Nevertheless, the observance of a second Day of Atonement is attested in several other localities during medieval times. For example, an author from the school of Rashi in northern France reported, “I heard about the eminent scholars Rabbi Judah ben Rabbi Baruch and Rabbi Isaac ben Levi that they would fast on the day following Yom Kippur, and their children and disciples still observe that practice.” The author however issued a warning: It appeared that some of those who believed in a two-day fast were actually tasting some food on the intervening night. This, he insisted, is not proper. Once they have decided to treat the second day as a real biblical holy day, they must also accept all its stringencies; so the fast must continue without respite for more than forty-eight hours. Furthermore, at the conclusion of the second day, those people must even refrain from partaking of food that was prepared for them by Jews who were observing only the one day.

Some authorities insisted that after a person has demonstrated one time that he regards the second day as obligatory, he thereby becomes permanently committed to its observance, and must continue to keep it in all subsequent years. Violators will be subject to “karet,” a divinely imposed death penalty, for transgressing what has acquired for them the status of a commandment from the Torah.

One halakhic compendium explained that a second day of Yom Kippur was really the norm according to proper Jewish religious law, and was observed as such by many prominent persons in the diaspora; it was only out of consideration for the fact that so many people are physically incapable of withstanding the prolonged fast that a special dispensation was granted. 

Rashi instructed his son-in-law not to extend the fast beyond the one day. The twelfth-century talmudist Rabbi Eliezer ben Joel Ha-Levi (Raviah), after citing a passage from the Jerusalem Talmud about rabbis who fasted on both the ninth and tenth of Av, remarked that such severe mortifications were possible only for the ancient Jews of the holy land who were built of sturdier stuff. ”However in our days the tribulations of exile have rendered us feeble, so that we cannot even observe Yom Kippur for two days.” As evidence for the lethal hazards of excessive fasting he cited a story in the Jerusalem Talmud about the father of Rav Samuel son of Rav Isaac whose intestine split after a two-day Tish’ah be-Av fast, resulting in his death. Still, Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna counted his teachers Raviah and Rabbi Judah the Pious among those who observed the extra day.

Rabbi Jacob ben Asher wrote in his Arba‘ah Ṭurim code that pious and unusually devout Jews in Germany were still accustomed in his days to keep two days of Yom Kippur. Nor was this stringency confined to one or two fanatics—in some communities there were enough people to make up a proper quorum of ten or more worshippers who assembled as a congregation to conduct the entire festival service—in spite of the vocal protests of Rabbi Jacob’s father, Rabbi Asher ben Jehiel.

Apart from some doubts regarding the status of the International Date Line that beset the refugees of the Mir Yeshiva in Far East in 1941, I am not aware of any recent Jewish sects who have opted for keeping a second day of Yom Kippur. 

During the concluding moments of the solemn day, when our cravings can make us impatient to rush through the prayers and get to the dinner table, it might be worthwhile to remember the fervor of those Jews in former generations who chose to transcend their physical comfort in their quests for spiritual and moral improvement.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 6, 2013, p. 19.

• For further reading:
  • Grossman, Avraham. The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981. 
  • Kanarfogel, Ephraim. Peering Through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000. 
  • Lewin, Benjamin Manasseh. “Teshuvat Rav Hai Ga’on Z”L ‘al devar Shenei Yamim Ṭovim ShellaGaluyyot UT’shuvat Rabbenu Yosef.” Ginzei Ḳedem 4 (1930): 33–37. 
  • Marmorstein, Arthur. Teshuvot ha-geʹonim. Edited by Chaim Leib Ehrenreich. Deva: Oṣar ha-Ḥayyim, 1928. 
  • Stern, Sacha. Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE-Tenth Century CE. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 
  • Ta-Shma, Israel M. Halachic Residue in the Zohar. Expanded ed. Sifriyat Helal Ben-Ḥayyim. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2001.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Tell It on the Mountain

by Eliezer Segal

The seventh day of Sukkot, widely known as Hoshana Rabba, has no distinctive rites or identity in the Torah, but it acquired a very special status in the talmudic oral tradition. Its primary association is with a ceremony of circling the Temple altar with willow branches, however later generations found numerous additional ways to celebrate the day.

Documents from the tenth and eleventh centuries speak of a remarkable new ceremony that came to be attached to Hoshana Rabba—a resplendent gathering that was convened under the auspices of the central talmudic academy of the land of Israel, attracting local residents and pilgrims. Allusions to pilgrimages to the Mount of Olives may be found as early as the eighth century in works by the liturgical poet Rabbi Pinḥas of Kafra.

The itinerary included a walk around the gates of the Temple Mount and the recitation of special prayers and orations that were led by the heads of the academy who were clad in their ceremonial finery. They would assemble at a site called the “Gate of the Priest” (likely to be identified with the “double gate” of the Hulda Gate complex) to the south of the Temple Mount and then march in a long procession up to the Mount of Olives—escorted by security guards who were sometime required to protect the participants from harassment.

The principal focus of the pilgrimage was a large stone rectangle whose dimensions were ten by two cubits. The participants circled this this stone seven times after the manner of the Hosanna litanies of old. According to the prevailing tradition, this stone was the same platform to which the Shekhinah, the divine presence, was exiled for three and a half years after the destruction of the Temple and from which it rose up to heaven after it despaired of Israel’s repentance. It was also the site to which the Shekhinah was expected to return in the (imminent, it was hoped) messianic future. At the conclusion of the ceremony, it was also customary to heap cash donations upon that stone slab for the benefit of the yeshiva.

The Jewish traditions about the Shekhinah’s ascent from the Mount of Olives bear an intriguing resemblance to Christian traditions about Jesus’s ascension to heaven forty days after his resurrection. That belief, which may well have been adapted from earlier Jewish legends, inspired the building of several Churches and Chapels of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. The “rock of the ascension,” which they believe preserves the impressions of Jesus’ footprints, became an object of Christian veneration. That rock has since been appropriated by the Muslims who use it to indicate the direction of prayer. Christian legend also holds that their messiah’s second coming will begin on the Mount of Olives.

In addition to its spiritual and liturgical associations, some of which were modeled after the celebrations that were held on Sukkot during the days of the Temple, the Hoshana Rabba ceremony gained importance as an occasion to publicly assert the authority of the Israeli rabbinic leadership at a time when it was being challenged by rivals, both from the anti-rabbinic Karaites and from among the rabbis of Babylonia. 

In the spirit of a corporate annual general meeting, the head of the yeshiva would issue proclamations regarding new appointments, filled vacancies or promotions in the central yeshiva and in the yeshivas of communities that were subject to his authority. Flamboyant honorary titles were bestowed upon generous benefactors in the diaspora. In one of his letters, the tenth-century Gaon of Israel Aaron ben Meir mentioned such a ceremony in which blessings were offered on behalf of Jewish communities and their leaders. Ever zealous to uphold the holy land’s prerogative over the determining of the sacred time cycles, the head of the yeshiva chose this public occasion in Jerusalem to make the official pronouncement of the coming year’s calendar—a ceremony that had hitherto taken place at the yeshiva of Tiberias.

Solemn declarations of excommunication were also issued against those who would defy the court’s authority, such as the Karaites or renegades who chose to take their legal disputes to Muslim courts.

It is likely that this public Hoshana Rabba ceremony was first introduced during the early Muslim era, since it is hardly imaginable that the Byzantine Christian rulers would have tolerated such a proud expression of Jewish autonomy. We may suppose that the practice was instituted around the time when the academy was transferred to Jerusalem from its prior location in the provincial capital, Ramle. Contemporary sources speak of the Jews’ “purchasing” the Mount of Olives—presumably referring only to the right to hold their celebrations there—from the Arab rulers.

The Mount of Olives pilgrimage formed the background for a remarkable tale that was related by Rabbi Judah the Pious of Regensburg in his Sefer Ḥasidim. Rabbi Judah described in detail the various components of the assembly, including the sevenfold circling of the mountain, the recitation of psalms and hymns and the elaborate robes worn by the priests. In his version, Rabbi Abiathar HaKohen the Israeli rabbinic leader, shared his dominant role in the annual assemblies with his Babylonian counterpart Hai Gaon. 

Rav Hai wandered off in order to conduct a private conversation with the prophet Elijah, whom he pressed for a statement about when the Messiah would be arriving. Elijah informed him that this would happen when the Mount of Olives were completely encircled by priests. Unfortunately, Rav Hai was was also advised that none of the individuals who were then marching so proudly in their priestly attire was actually a kosher descendent of the priestly dynasty—with the exception of a sole disabled straggler dressed in rags, scorned by others and humble in demeanour, who was a true son of Aaron by lineage and moral character. Rav Hai was moved to smile at the irony of this situation.

Though it is unlikely that the historical Hai Ga’on ever attended the Hoshana Rabba pilgrimage, he did take sides in a vicious power struggle involving some priestly families over the leadership of the rabbinate of the land of Israel. This episode likely provides the factual background to the legendary tale in Sefer Ḥasidim.

On one occasion, according to Sefer Ḥasidim, a confessed murderer approached the participating rabbis seeking atonement for his crime, and they gave an order to have him flogged on the Mount of Olives until his blood flowed. The penitent begged to be scourged harder lest he be subjected to a more horrible punishment before the heavenly court. After beating him within an inch of his life, the authorities allowed him three weeks to recuperate, upon which they buried him in sand leaving just a small hole through which to breathe, and then continued to torment him. After three such sessions, they decided that he had been been punished enough to assure his forgiveness—but the sinner insisted that he deserved still more punishment. 

The values expressed in this tale—such as the concerns for priestly purity, moral humility and a quasi-masochistic obsession with acts of penance—are reflective of Rabbi Judah the Pious’s austere pietism, but seem inconsistent with the celebratory mood of the assembly.

What with the ascent of the Shekhinah, the solemn pronouncements by the talmudic academies, chats with Elijah, punishments for wrongdoers—and so much more that was going on—we can only begin to appreciate how deep and variegated was that convergence of sacred time and space that distinguished those Sukkot gatherings on the Mount of Olives.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, September 27, 2013, p. 10.

• For further reading:
  • Ben-Sasson, Menahem. “The Gaonate of R. Samuel B. Joseph Ha-Kohen Which Was “like a Bath of Boiling Water’.” Zion 51, no. 4 (1986): 379–409.
  • ———. “The Self-Government of the Jews in Muslim Countries in the 7-12th Centuries.” In Kehal Yisrael: Jewish Self-Rule Through the Ages, edited by Avraham Grossman and Yosef Kaplan, 2: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Period:11–55. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2004.
  • Dan, Joseph. R. Judah he-Hasid. Gedole ha-ruaḥ ṿeha-yetsirah ba-ʻam ha-Yehudi. Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 766.
  • Elizur, Shulamit, ed. The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Pinḥas ha-Kohen: Critical Edition, Introduction and Commentaries. Sources for the Study of Jewish Culture 8. Jerusalem: Word Union of Jewish Studies: The David Moses and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2004.
  • Gil, Moshe. A History of Palestine, 634-1099. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  • Reiner, Elchanan. “Concerning the Priest Gate and Its Location.” Tarbiz 56, no. 2 (1987): 279–290.
  • ———. “Pilgrims and Pilgrimage to Eretz Yisrael 1099-1517.” PhD, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Dropping in Unannounced

by Eliezer Segal

After Abraham submitted to Sarah’s urging and sent away Hagar with her son Ishmael, the Torah provides only a few cursory details of Ishmael’s subsequent life and career. 

One of the details that it chooses to mention is that “his mother took him a wife out of the land of Egypt.” This terse report might well provoke a few questions in the minds of readers who are accustomed to the laconic character of biblical narrative. This is especially true if one reads such texts through the lens of rabbinic midrash which often pays attention not only to what the words say, but also to what is omitted. Why, in particular, did mother Hagar have to be the one to seek a partner for Ishmael?

Evidently, some ancient readers reacted to the scriptural text by inferring that if Ishmael’s mother was finding him a wife now, he must previously have chosen a wife by himself, but the match did not pan out. If we accept that premise, then we can appreciate why Hagar then took on the task of finding a better mate for her son.

The necessary details were supplied in imaginative detail by the author of a “midrash” known as Pirḳei Rabbi Eliezer. According to that work, Ishmael initially sought a wife for himself, selecting for that purpose a lady from Moab. The Moabites, you might recall, were the inhospitable folk regarding whom the Israelites would later be commanded “they shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord… because they met you not with bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt.” And indeed, such was the ungenerous personality of Ishmael’s first spouse according to Pirḳei Rabbi Eliezer. When Abraham dropped in to visit his son—after assuring the resentful Sarah that he would not actually alight from his camel to set foot in his house—he arrived in the heat of the noonday sun, thirsty and famished from his travels; Ishmael was not home and the wife refused to feed him bread and water. Abraham left her a memo that she was to deliver to her husband on his return: an old man came to visit you from the land of Canaan, and he advised you to replace the threshold of your home. Ishmael understood the metaphoric hint and divorced the unworthy woman. 

At this point it was time for Hagar to take matters into her own hands and find her son a more fitting partner. She chose a fellow Egyptian who was blessed with a more generous disposition than her predecessor. Later, when Abraham decided to pay another visit to his son, Daughter-in-Law #2 graciously offered him bread and water, which prompted the patriarch to invoke bountiful blessings upon their house. 

And oh yes—we should note that Pirḳei Rabbi Eliezer’s account identifies Ishmael’s two wives by name: Aisha and Fatima. Both these names were shared with important personalities in the life of the prophet of Islam. Aisha was Muḥammad’s wife who supported him through his career and continued after her husband’s death to play a pivotal role in the establishment of the new religion. Fatimah was Muḥammad’s daughter and the wife of his cousin Ali who was later elected Caliph, the leader of the Muslim community. 

Very similar tales about Ishmael’s wives were also current in the Islamic tradition. This raises some intriguing questions about the relationships between the Jewish and Muslim texts. The matter becomes more complicated when we take into account that the Muslims themselves held differing views regarding the relative merits of their Aisha and Fatima. The Sunnis were more favourably inclined toward Aisha who contributed to the consolidation of their institutions. Shi’ites for that very reason were suspicious of her, and bestowed their allegiance on Fatimah, wife of Ali whom they saw as the prophet’s legitimate successor and the progenitor of the subsequent Shi’ite Imams.

In light of this coincidence of names, there can be no doubt that the author of Pirḳe Rabbi Eliezer possessed some familiarity with Islamic traditions and that his version of the legend must stem from a relatively late date. It is not at all clear who is borrowing or adapting from whom, nor is it obvious what motives might underlie the respective traditions.

As outlined above, the Jewish version of the tale functions effectively as a filling-in of various gaps in the biblical narrative, and as a source of moral instruction regarding hospitality or the choosing of a virtuous wife. In the Muslim accounts the story took place in the vicinity of Mecca and both wives belonged to a local Arabian tribe, the Jarham. Hagar, who had died before these episodes, had no involvement in choosing these women. Most of the Muslim versions of the story present it as a kind of prelude to a central event in their sacred history, the founding of the Ka’aba in Mecca, their holiest shrine which the Qur’an ascribes to Abraham and Ishmael. 

Interestingly, instead of speaking of bread and water, the proverbial biblical expressions of hospitality, as the refreshment that was offered or denied to Abraham, most of the Muslim versions refer to meat (the Arabic word for meat, laḥm is the same as the Hebrew word for bread). In fact, the authors stress that grain does not grow around Mecca, so it would be implausible to expect a host to offer bread to a guest.

Some of the Islamic legends also link this story to a well-known relic in Mecca known as “Abraham’s station,” a rock that is believed to bear the patriarch’s footprint. They tell how Abraham, bound by his pledge to Sarah not to step down from his camel when visiting Ishmael, asked his daughter-in-law to bring him a rock on which he could rest his foot while partaking of his meal. The legend has it that the imprint of his foot is miraculously still visible in the rock and can be viewed by pilgrims. In fact, the normative Muslim tradition traces the stone’s origin to a different episode, when Abraham stood on it in order to reach the upper levels during the construction of the Ka’aba, and the solid rock wondrously softened like clay beneath his feet.

Were it not for the names of the wives it probably would not have occurred to readers to connect the tale in Pirḳei Rabbi Eliezer to the religion of Islam. I would not be surprised if Aisha and Fatima were chosen simply because they were familiar “Ishmaelite”-sounding female names.

Nevertheless, scholars have tried to discern symptoms of interfaith polemics in those stories. For example, Ishmael’s failure to find himself a worthy mate was regarded as an implicit criticism; and any discrepancies between the versions can be (and has been) interpreted as an attempt to discredit the rival tradition. 

All this seems to presuppose a stereotypical attitude of hostility between religions. This assumption, however, finds little support in the actual words of the stories, which seem more concerned with conveying their own narratives and values than in disparaging those of others.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 11, 2013, p. 10.

• For further reading:
  • Firestone, Reuven. Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
  • Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Edited by Paul Radin Translated by. Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003.
  • Heinemann, Joseph. Aggadah and Its Development. Sifriyat Keter. Jerusalem: Keter, 1974.
  • Ohana, Moise. “La Polémique Judéo Islamique et l’Image d’Ismaël dans Targum Pseudo-Jonathan et dans Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer.” Augustinianum 15, no. 3 (1975): 367–387.
  • Schussman, Aviva. “Abraham’s Visits to Ishmael—The Jewish Origin and Orientation.” Tarbiz 49, no. 3-4 (1980): 325–345.
  • Shinan, Avigdor. The Embroidered Targum: The Aggadah in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of the Pentateuch. Publications of the Perry Foundation for Biblical Research in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1992.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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When in Edom…

by Eliezer Segal

When traditional Jews read the Torah’s accounts of Jacob’s twin brother Esau, they are more than likely to call forth sinister associations of his absolute and perverse wickedness. Nor is this stigma limited to the particular person from the book of Genesis; Esau assumed the status of a timeless prototype whose hatred that was embodied in subsequent oppressors of Israel, especially the mighty Roman empire.

The equation of Esau with Rome is so pervasive in our tradition that it can demand considerable effort to confront the actual words and stories of the Torah, and to remind ourselves that the Esau who emerges from that narrative, though perhaps not the brightest lentil in the pottage, is hardly the epitome of evil into which he was transformed by midrashic expositions. Yes, he hastily consented to “sell” his privileges as firstborn, and he threatened violence when his mother and brother conspired to trick him out of his paternal blessing. Nevertheless, in spite of the midrash’s determination to call his sincerity into question, he was ultimately reconciled with Jacob.

Presumably the vilification of Esau was a projection of later tensions that arose between his descendants and those of Jacob. The nations of Edom and Israel came into bitter conflicts throughout the era of the biblical monarchy, and Edom joined gleefully in the plunder of Judea following the Babylonian conquest. Later prophets would poetically project this hostility back on Edom’s ancestor. This tendency was particularly prominent in the oracles of the prophet Obadiah, whom later Jewish tradition identified as an Edomite convert. 

It is one thing to depict Esau or the Edomites as prototypical foes of Israel and their God; however, it requires a remarkable suspension of disbelief to identify this semitic nation who resided in territory to the south of Judea with the European founders of Rome. And indeed, this now-familiar identification probably took quite a while to evolve.

Of course ancient Jews were always filtered their contemporary realities through scriptural lenses, and once Rome became a significant factor in their lives it was natural that they should seek an appropriate biblical archetype by which to relate to it. In earlier works, the nation that was appropriately chosen for this purpose was the “Kittim,” a seafaring people whose forefather, according to the genealogy in Genesis, was Javan—Greece—and who probably originated in Cyprus. This usage appears in the book of Daniel (where the Greek version translated Kittim as “Romans”) and in the Dead Sea scrolls. Early Christian writers chose Babylon to cast in the role of Rome, and they preferred to liken themselves to the younger brother Jacob, with the Jews cast in the role of the elder—but not wiser—Esau.

Some scholars have cited the apocalyptic work known as “4 Ezra,” probably composed shortly after the destruction of the second Temple, as evidence for a metaphoric final battle between God’s people and a prototypically evil Edomite nation that can only be representing Rome. However, the literary imagery and the book’s date are too vague to furnish solid historical proof. 

Other scholars have called attention to Josephus Flavius’ relatively gentle treatment of Esau in his retelling of the stories from Genesis (contrasted to his uncritically admiring depiction of Jacob). Since we know that by Josephus’s time—in the late first century C.E.—the traditions about Esau’s absolute wickedness had become well entrenched in Jewish interpretation, they reason that the most plausible explanation for Josephus’ approach was that Esau was known to be a prototype for Rome, and the Jewish historian was therefore reluctant to offend his readers and protectors in the imperial court. This rather circular argument disregards the fact that Josephus’s characterization is really quite true to the biblical text; it also assumes that the Romans would have been aware of the Jewish tendency to read them into their sacred history.

A theory that enjoyed considerable popularity in modern scholarship traced the origins of the Esau / Rome equation to the figure of Herod the Great. Herod, we may recall, was the scion of Edomites (Idumeans) who had been forcibly converted to Judaism during the aggressive expansionist regime of the Hasmonean kings. Like his father Antipater, Herod was able to maintain his tyrannical hold over Judea thanks to his successful alliances with the rulers of Rome. This explanation would be more persuasive if it were actually attested at or near Herod’s time, rather than many decades later.

Still more far-fetched is the theory that focuses on Esau’s redness which earned him the name of Edom. Now red was the colour associated with the Roman god of war Mars who was the patron deity of the city and its empire, as well as the mythic father of their founders Romulus and Remus. Proponents of this theory claim that this association would have occurred naturally to any ancient Jew or Roman.

Whatever the merits of these theories, the fact remains that the earliest explicit testimony we possess of a Jewish authority who identified Esau with the Romans was Rabbi Akiva who interpreted the scriptural verse “the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau” in the sense of “the voice of Jacob cries out because of what was done to him by the hands of Esau.” Rabbinic tradition understood this as a reference to the destruction by the Roman armies of Betar, the last Jewish stronghold in the uprising led by Simeon Bar Kokhba. Indeed, Rabbi Akiva was a supporter of that fierce and tragic rebellion that lasted from 132 to 135  C.E., the last Jewish attempt to shake off the yoke of Roman oppression. In fact, it was probably Rabbi Akiva who was responsible for bestowing the epithet Bar Kokhba, meaning “son of the star,” upon the leader known previously as “Bar Koseba,” after applying to him the verse “there shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel… And Edom shall be a possession.” From that point onwards, midrashic statements by Rabbi Akiva’s disciples standardly assume that all mentions of Esau or Edom in the Bible are to be read as allusions to their own implacable enemy, the despised “evil empire.”

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch—while subscribing to the traditional identification of Esau with western civilization—was nonetheless deeply moved by Esau’s expression of pure human emotion when he wept sincerely at his reconciliation with his estranged sibling. In a passage that now seems tragically naive, Rabbi Hirsch interpreted it as presaging an imminent rapprochement between the Jews and modern Europe. 

And yet beyond the metaphoric use of Esau as a collective metaphor for Rome there remains Esau the person who, whatever his shortcomings, can hardly be blamed for the injustices of a nation or civilization with which he had no connection whatsoever. Indeed, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra dismissed the Edom-Rome equation as worthy of “people who have not fully wakened from their their drowsy stupor.”

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 25, 2013, pp. 10-11.

• For further reading:
  • Cohen, Gerson D. “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought.” In Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 19–48. Studies and Texts 4. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
  • Feldman, Louis H. “Josephus’ Portrait of Jacob.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 79, no. 2/3 (1988): 101–151. (accessed September 12, 2013).
  • ———. Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
  • Freedman, Harry. “Jacob and Esau : Their Struggle in the Second Century.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1995): 107–115.
  • Hadas-Lebel, Mireille. Jerusalem against Rome. Translated by. Robyn Fréchet. Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 7. Leuven and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2005.
  • Leibowitz, Nehama. Studies in the Book of Genesis in the Context of Ancient and Modern Jewish Bible Commentary. Translated by. Aryeh Newman. Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Dept. for Torah Education and Culture, 1972.
  • Segal, Alan F. Rebecca’s Children: Judaism and Christianity in the Roman World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
  • Zunz, Leopold. Zur Geschichte und Literatur. Berlin: Veit und Comp, 1845.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Wrongheaded Thinking

by Eliezer Segal

I take my hat off to those busy politicians in Quebec who have succeeded in alarming so many of their minorities with their proposed “Charter of Values” and its ban on the display of religious symbols in the public sphere. Surely it’s about time they renamed all those towns and streets that bear the names of Catholic saints. —Oh, you say that they’re not planning to do that? Well then, how about that huge cross that looms atop Mount Royal? —Hmm, so they’re not going to be dismantling that either? 

The list of offending symbols does however extend to Jewish yarmulkes and Muslim hijabs—while making allowances for discreetly small crosses or stars of David.

The Jewish community’s generally negative reaction to the Quebec charter seems to stem largely from suspicions of ulterior anti-semitic motives or from the difficulties it will create for observant Jews employed in the public sector. 

My own initial reaction, as a scholar of religion, was to deride the formulators’ ignorant misunderstanding of basic religious practices. The wearing of a yarmulke / kippah hardly qualifies as a religious “symbol,” nor is there is any category in Jewish religious law that singles out that particular type of cap as a religious obligation. The skull-cap is, at best, subsumed under the more general rubric of “covering the head.” 

The expectation that men wear some kind of hat is, at any rate, a relatively recent development in Jewish legal discourse. Indeed, the Talmud assumes that—unlike women, whose heads were consistently covered—most men were covering or uncovering their heads as they pleased. An old midrash asked about the origins of this elemental difference between male and female behaviour—without apparently regarding it as a uniquely Jewish phenomenon. Ancient sources from the land of Israel contain no references to Jewish men covering their heads whether by law or custom. While the practice is mentioned several times in the Babylonian Talmud, it was confined to a narrow demographic sector consisting chiefly of married rabbinic scholars. 

It thus appeared to me fundamentally wrongheaded for the Charter to be classifying a Jewish head-covering as a “religious symbol.” Certainly if we consult our classic texts, we find no indication that the practice was intended to identify the wearer as Jewish; rather, it functioned as a religious obligation designed to promote moral values and attitudes that are not necessarily distinctive to Judaism. 

Several talmudic sources portray the wearing of head-coverings—they were referring to turbans or scarves (“soudarion”) rather than skull-caps—as an act of extraordinary piousness. For example, after astrologers predicted that the child Naḥman ben Isaac was destined to a life of crime, his mother instructed the future rabbi to keep his head covered in order to reinforce his constant awareness of the reverence due to Heaven. Most of the relevant rabbinic texts present some variation of this rationale. In keeping with the widespread perception—whether literal or metaphoric—that God dwells above us, it was considered disrespectful and arrogant to bare one’s head before the divine presence. In a similar spirit, several sources characterized the wearing of head-coverings as an expression of humility or of exceptional saintliness.

One midrashic passage proposed a more prosaic reason for wearing hats: to do otherwise might cause rheumatism. Some later authorities in Spain and Italy were prepared to exempt students from the obligation because of climate-related discomfort.

It took several centuries for the wearing of head-covering by men to establish itself as the recognized norm among traditional Jews. A work from the early eighth century notes that the Jews of Israel and Babylonia differed on the question of whether the Kohanim should cover their heads when reciting the priestly blessing. One responsum even ruled that it was only allowed if the hat was being worn for protection from the elements, but not if it was intended as a sign of reverence! The tenth century commentary from the school of Rabbi Gershom of Mainz suggested that a lay person who insists on always wearing a hat may be guilty of arrogantly assuming the prerogatives of a Torah scholar. Other compendia tried to formulate systematic lists of which liturgical passages or religious activities that do or do not require covered heads. Even after the authoritative Shulḥan Arukh forbade walking four cubits with a bare head, distinguished scholars like Rabbis Solomon Luria and Elijah of Vilna protested that there was no real talmudic basis for such an obligation.

Nevertheless, a perception eventually took root among many Jews that covering the head did function as a “religious symbol ” that differentiated between Jews and Christians. Thus, one author writing toward the end of the thirteenth century berated “those wicked and presumptuous people…who enter a synagogue just like the gentiles when they frequent their idolatrous shrines haughtily and disrespectfully.” When Rabbi Israel Isserlein was asked whether a Jew was allowed to remove his hat in order to conceal his religious affiliation in a locality where Jews were unwelcome, he forbade such conduct; he argued that since most gentiles believed that Jews are strictly forbidden to uncover their heads, observers would conclude that the hatless Jew was an apostate. In a similar vein, Rabbi Israel Bruna identified bare-headedness as an identifiably Christian practice, and hence Jews who went about without hats were committing the grave offense of following in “the statutes of the gentiles.”

It is interesting to note that around the same time, the Catholic Church was deeply concerned that Jews and Muslims in many European communities were indistinguishable in their apparel—including their head-gear—from their Christian neighbours, giving rise to a scandalous extent of inter-religious fraternizing and romantic liaisons. It was this situation that prompted the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to institute the infamous Jewish badge. The decree noted that the Jews should have no objection to this measure since their own Torah prescribed distinctive clothing (in the form of ẓiẓit). Evidently, the authors did not consider the presence of absence of hats to be a sufficient indicator of a person’s religious affiliation.

The perception that baring one’s head or respectfully doffing one’s hat were identifiably Christian customs became increasingly entrenched among Jews in eastern Europe. In the seventeenth century Rabbi David Halevi went so far as to conclude that this instance of avoiding the “statutes of the gentiles” should be observed with especial zeal.

This might lead us to maintain that not wearing a hat is as much a Christian religious symbol as wearing a kippah or hijab is a Jewish or Muslim one. As it happens, some Jewish religious authorities were careful to point out that in more recent times the conventions of European and American etiquette have been secularized and no longer have any specifically Christian associations. Rabbi Leone de Modena (1571–1648), in a responsum defending his own practice of going bare-headed, made a cogent case for adapting Jewish law to changing social realities. In nineteenth-century Frankfurt a/M, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch ordered students and teachers in his community’s school to remove their hats in the presence of non-Jewish teachers or administrators. Rabbi Moses Feinstein declared that in contemporary American society there are rarely any religious considerations behind most non-Jews’ choices about wearing hats. Consequently the matter could be treated leniently when it creates social or economic hardships.

I look forward to the Pope’s next official visit to Quebec when he will presumably be instructed to remove his skullcap at all public ceremonies.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 8, 2013, p. 10.

• For further reading:
  • Krauss, Samuel. “The Jewish Rite of Covering the Head.”Hebrew Union College Annual 19 (1945): 121–168.
  • Plaut, W Gunther. “The Origin of the Word ‘Yarmulke’.”Hebrew Union College Annual 26 (1955): 567–570.
  • Rabinowitz, Dan. “Yarmulke: A Historic Cover-up?”Ḥakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 4 (2007): 221–238.
  • Rivkind, Isaac. “A Responsum of Leo da Modena on Uncovering the Head.” In Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. English Section, edited by Saul Lieberman, Shalom Spiegel, Solomon Zeitlin, and Alexander Marx, Hebrew:401–424. New York: The American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945.
  • Zimmer, Eric. “Men’s Headcovering: The Metamorphosis of This Practice.” In Reverence, Righteousness, and Rahamanut: Essays in Memory of Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, edited by Jacob Schacter, 325–352. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992.
  • ———.Studies in the History and Metamorphosis of Jewish Customs. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996.

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Light from the Right 

by Eliezer Segal

As Jewish holidays go, the observances of Hanukkah are relatively straightforward and undemanding. They add up, basically, to a few additions to the daily prayers, and a ceremony of lighting candles with accompanying blessings. 

The one source of confusion that I most consistently stumble over in my own Hanukkah observance has to do with the directions—right or left—in which the candles should be placed and kindled. This is a topic that received minimal treatment in the Talmud, and is further complicated by ambiguities regarding the spatial perspective from which the directions are being framed.

The following is a typical example of the instructions that are routinely issued by synagogues and religious organizations: “The candles are placed in the menorah from right to left. The flames are lit from left to right, with today’s flame being lit first.” Even after we have mastered the confusing hokey-pokey dance, the directions strike us as annoyingly arbitrary: Are we speaking of right and left as seen by the person who is lighting the candles, or from the vantage of the observers for whose sake they are lit? And in any case, why should it make any religious difference?

The earliest known halakhic authority to deal with this question was the thirteenth-century Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg whose copious responsa and compendia of liturgical customs are among the cornerstones of Ashkenazic practice. As was common among important rabbis in that culture, his disciples scrutinized his practices assiduously and recorded them to serve as normative precedents for posterity. It was related that Rabbi Meir “would light the candles commencing from the left, proceeding towards the right.” His custom was adopted as authoritative by subsequent scholars in the Rhine valley, including Rabbi Jacob Moelin of Maintz (Maharil).

The rationale for this sequence was rooted in a rule found in the Talmud: “whenever you turn, it should always be towards the right” —a rule that can best be carried out if one is commencing from the left. That talmudic principle is invoked in connection with a number of ritual matters, for example to determine the proper route for a priest to encircle the altar when offering sacrifices. It dovetailed with the general preference that Jewish tradition (like most other world cultures) has always had for the right as the most auspicious side. 

Maharil’s nephew Rabbi Jacob Gellhausen challenged his esteemed uncle as regards the appropriateness of applying the talmudic principle to Hanukkah candles. After all, the examples cited in the Talmud involved cases where the person was actually ambulatory, so that he could literally turn his body toward the right. The kindling of Hanukkah lamps, however, is normally performed in a stationary position, and hence it makes better sense to start lighting from the right and then to progress leftward. Among other things, such a procedure would be consistent with a precedent inherent in the structure of the Hebrew language itself: when a scribe sets to writing a Torah scroll, tefillin or a mezuzah, he naturally commences from the rightmost edge and then continues towards the left. 

Maharil had little patience for this sort of fine distinction. Applying a familiar talmudic idiom, he dismissed his nephew’s arguments by declaring “I can’t fathom what is compelling you to pass an elephant through the eye of a needle!”

Other authorities at that time had to deal with similar questions, and no clear consensus emerged with respect to either deciding on a normative practice, or explaining the reasons underlying it. In the fifteenth century, Rabbi Israel Isserlein of Neustadt, Austria, was asked to choose between the two major options: Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg’s custom of proceeding from left to right, or of starting from the rightmost extreme and progressing toward the left. 

In response, Rabbi Isserlein observed that the matter was subject to regional variations. Rabbi Meir’s procedure had become the norm in the Rhineland regions; whereas the Jews of Austria preferred to start with the right side. In explaining this custom, he also cited Rabbi Gellhausen’s example of writing Hebrew from right to left.

Later generations of halakhic authorities continued to be consulted on this basic question that ought to have been resolved by entrenched local custom. This situation likely reflected the migrations that were then taking place in several European Jewish communities, which intensified encounters between Jews who followed differing practices and raised doubts about their own traditions

Rabbi Joseph Colon of Italy was perhaps the first to formalize the procedure that has since become standard: The candles should be arrayed from right to left, but each night one should begin the actual lighting with the leftmost candle, which is the newly added one and hence the one over which the blessing is being recited. This was in contrast to the established Austrian custom of beginning from the rightmost candle and advancing leftward.

In his attempt to account for the evolution of the divergent practices, Rabbi Isserlein had linked the controversy to yet another difference that he had noted between the observances of the Rhineland and Austrian communities. He pointed out that the rooms where the Austrian Jews lit their menorahs did not usually have mezuzahs on their doorways, whereas those of the Rhine valley did.

This disparity in ritual custom was evidently rooted in the climatic variations of northern Europe. As we know too well, Hanukkah falls during the coldest days of winter, a season when many persons in medieval Europe were forced to dwell in special “winter quarters,” designated rooms in their houses that were enhanced by heating. It was not then the universal practice to affix mezuzahs on the doorways of rooms that were not used for normal habitation; and consequently the winter quarters, which were not inhabited all year long, were often left without mezuzahs.

According to Jewish law, the presence or absence of a mezuzah on a room’s doorway can have a decisive impact on the positioning of the Hanukkah lamps. The Talmud ruled that the candles should be positioned on the left side of the entrance, since the mezuzah is on the right doorpost, and this would  create a situation in which people would be symbolically “surrounded” by religious precepts whenever they passed through the doorway. Subsequent authorities concluded that if a room had no mezuzah on its lintel, then the preference for the lamps should naturally default to the right side of the doorway. This inference was not accepted without some reservations. The eminent twelfth-century German talmudist “Raviah” (Rabbi Eliezer ben Joel Halevi) described how “for a long time I continued to debate the question, reluctant to rely on my own humble opinion, until Rabbi Menahem reported to me in the name of our Rabbi Ephraim that he had heard directly from his lips that in the absence of a mezuzah one should light from the right side.”

In this way, concluded Rabbi Isserlein, the disparity between the Rhineland and Austrian practices regarding the lighting of Hanukkah lamps may be traceable to their differing policies regarding mezuzah use and to how they adapted to the northern winters. 

All this might inspire us to express our appreciation on Hanukkah not only for the triumphs and wonders that were experienced by our forefathers in ancient times—but also for the central heating that warms our winter hearths in our own days.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 22, 2013, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Zimmer, Eric. Studies in the History and Metamorphosis of Jewish Customs. Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1996. [Hebrew]

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My email address is: [email protected]

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A War of Convenience

by Eliezer Segal

The closing chapters of the book of Genesis describe the twilight of the age of the Hebrew patriarchs, and contain descriptions of the deaths and funerals of the principal protagonists. In recognition of Joseph’s senior position in the Egyptian administration, his father Jacob was given a solemn state funeral attended by Egyptian dignitaries, and was then buried in the family tomb in Hebron. Joseph, on the other hand, stipulated that his bodily remains should not yet be transferred to their ancestral soil, but were to be interred in Egypt until the day when the Almighty will take the entire family out of Egypt—as would indeed come to pass when the Israelites were liberated from Egypt in the days of Moses.

But what about Jacob’s other eleven sons, Joseph’s brothers—what was done to their bodies when they died? The Bible provides no information about their funerals, and we might suppose that they were given inconspicuous burials in Egypt. 

Not surprisingly, this question was addressed by the rabbis of the midrash and by traditional commentators. Most Jewish interpreters preferred to believe that Joseph’s brothers were also transported for interment in the holy land. Rabbi Meir discerned a textual clue to that effect in the wording of Joseph’s final assurance to his siblings that God will “bring you out of this land unto the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” The “you” here was understood to refer to the brothers themselves, and not merely to the family or nation as a collectivity. “This indicates that each and every tribe will escort the head of their tribe.”

Some  remarkable theories regarding the funerals of Jacob’s sons are to be found in texts that were composed during the era of the second Temple, representing a vast literature that was devoted to interpreting, elaborating and retelling the narratives of the Jewish scriptures. 

For instance, the ancient library unearthed at Qumran—the Dead Sea scrolls—preserves several fragments from an otherwise unknown Aramaic work that has been given the title “the Visions of Amram,” and which claims to be a memoir written by Moses’s father. In this document, the hero recalls the time when he went up to the land of Canaan as part of a large cohort that included children of all Jacob’s sons in order to arrange the burials of their fathers. However, in the first year of their mission an ominous rumour of impending war caused most of them to hurry back to Egypt. Amram himself remained in Hebron to complete the construction of tombs, and after the outbreak of hostilities between the Philistines and the Egyptians he found himself unable to return. The subsequent defeat of Egypt brought a halt to all travel between the countries.

The Visions of Amram was not unique in introducing a war between Egypt and Canaan in order to fill in gaps in the biblical story. Remarkably similar accounts appear in other writings from that era, most prominently in the “Book of Jubilees,” a volume that was widely known to ancient authors in Greek and Ethiopic translations, but whose Hebrew original was lost until the unearthing of the Dead Sea scrolls in the mid-twentieth century. In its retelling of the stories in Genesis, Jubilees inserts many details that are not found in the biblical account. Some of these additions are clearly intended to promote the author’s distinctive religious beliefs, especially his advocacy of a solar calendar and his division of history into forty-nine-year “jubilee” units. However, there are also details that seem to be responding to the same kinds of exegetical questions that stimulated other commentators.

Thus, the Book of Jubilees makes extensive reference to the war that broke out between Canaan and Egypt shortly after Joseph’s death, going so far as to identify specific localities on the strategic map. It regards this war as the principal factor that prevented Joseph’s immediate burial in the land of Israel, in that it resulted in a closure of the borders between the two states. 

Joseph’s deathbed testament to his brothers, which appears in the scriptural text as a terse insistence that his bones must remain in Egypt until “God will surely visit you,” is supplemented in Jubilees by a detailed account of the political and military circumstances that underlay the injunction: a Canaanite king named Makamaron attacked Egypt and succeeded in killing its monarch. The new Pharaoh was able to turn the tide and take the battle into Canaanite territory. In the end, the hostilities brought about a closure of the border, preventing Jacob’s descendants from conducting funerals in Canaan as they had done for Jacob. Joseph, who was always adept at forecasting future events, anticipated that approaching war, and for that reason released his brothers from any obligation to bury him in Canaan.

The insertion of this otherwise unknown war helps resolve several of the difficulties and gaps in the biblical narrative. For example, the sudden death of the Pharaoh at the hands of the Canaanite enemy provides us with a specific explanation for how the continuity of Egypt’s royal succession was interrupted at around this time, so that “there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” It also provides a setting for the new Pharaoh’s fears that “if war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.” Some scholars have suggested that the Book of Jubilees was really relating to political and military events closer to its own time, such as the ongoing hostilities between the two principal Hellenistic kingdoms, the Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria.

As for Joseph’s brothers, Jubilees found a way of dating their burials based on the timeline of the Egyptian-Canaanite campaign. The Egyptians, following their initial defeat, were able to rally their troops to a successful counterattack, thereby providing the Hebrews with a window of opportunity during which they could bury Jacob’s sons in the family tomb of Machpelah in Hebron. This occurred shortly after their deaths, before the enslavement. Only Joseph’s body was left in Egypt in deference to the oath that he had imposed on his brothers not to remove his bones until the entire nation was ready to be liberated from exile.

According to Jubilees, some of the Hebrews who made the journey to Canaan found themselves unable to return to Egypt on account of a reversal in the military situation, as a new Canaanite attack led once again to a sealing of the international border. As in the “Visions of Amram” scroll, Jubilees singles out Amram as one who was stranded in Canaan and separated from his wife for four decades. Perhaps this curious detail was introduced in order to explain why Amram and Jochebed produced only three offspring in a generation that was notable for its prodigious birth rate.

The lasting value of these details lies not so much in their veracity but in the insights they furnish into challenges and anomalies that are inherent to the scriptural accounts. While helping to resolve these difficulties, the motif of the Canaanite-Egyptian war is also drawing our attention to their existence.

Pseudepigraphic works like the Visions of Amram and the Book of Jubilees were not accepted into the normative rabbinic tradition, and for two millennia they remained lost and unknown to most Jews. Perhaps the time has come for these precious records of the Jewish exegetical spirit to be repatriated, instead of being relegated to virtual burial in neglected scholarly tomes.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, December 6, 2013, p. 14.

• For further reading:
  • Berger, Klaus. Das Buch der Jubiläen. Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Vol. 2. Studien zu den jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 1. Gutersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1981.
  • Beyer, Klaus. Die Aramäischen Texte Vom Toten Meer: Samt Den Inschriften Aus Palästina, Dem Testament Levis Aus Der Kairoer Genisa, Der Fastenrolle Und Den Alten Talmudischen Zitaten: Aramaistische Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Deutung, Grammatik/Wörterbuch, Deutsch-aramäische Wortliste, Register. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984.
  • Blidstein, Gerald J. ÒThe Ephraimite Exodus from EgyptÑA Re-Evaluation.Ó Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 5 (1988): 1Ð15.
  • Doran, Robert. “The Non-Dating of Jubilees: Jub 34-38; 23:14-32 in Narrative= Context.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman Period 20, no. 1 (1989): 1–11.
  • Duke, Robert R. The Social Location of the Visions of Amram (4q543-547). Studies in Biblical Literature v. 135. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
  • Kugel, James L. In Potiphar’s House: The Interpretive Life of Biblical Texts. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994.
  • Puech, Émile, ed. Qumrân Cave 4 22: Textes Araméens, premiere partie 4Q52-549. Discoveries in the Judean Desert 31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
  • Segal, Michael. The Book of Jubilees: Rewritten Bible, Redaction, Ideology, and Theology. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism volume 117. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.
  • VanderKam, James C. “Jubilees 46:6-47:1 and 4QVisions of Amram.” Dead Sea Discoveries 17, no. 2 (2010): 141–158

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My email address is: [email protected]

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A View to Die for

by Eliezer Segal

Rabbi Jacob says: If a person is walking on the way while learning Mishnah, and he interrupts his recitation to declare ‘How lovely is this tree!’ or ‘How lovely is this furrow!’—they consider him as if he were deserving of death.

This austere pronouncement appears in the Mishnah tractate Avot, and a survey of traditional commentators finds few indications that they were troubled or puzzled by this text. For the most part they did not regard it as a disparagement of natural beauty, but rather as an encouragement to focus on religious study. We should bear in mind that studying Mishnah was an enterprise that was more susceptible to distractions in ancient times when the vast oral Torah remained unwritten and had to be preserved through memorization and recitation, even at the expense of otherwise laudable values like the admiration of God’s creation. As explicated by Rabbi Israel Lipschutz of Danzig, a person’s failure to concentrate on his studies demonstrates that “his eye and his heart are not bound to the words of the living God.” 

Although the basic message—that one should not interrupt one’s religious learning in order to indulge in extraneous musings—may seem clear enough, commentators differ as to the significance of specific details in Rabbi Jacob’s scenario. 

Some were troubled by the vague “they” who purportedly pass such severe judgment on the culprit. In similar contexts it is common for the rabbis to present such statements with the wording “Scripture considers him…” and to adduce an appropriate verse from the Bible. In the present instance, indeed, some texts of the Mishnah do use that formula but do not provide any proof text. This omission served as a challenge to interpreters to come up with passages from the sacred scriptures that could serve as a source for Rabbi Jacob’s pronouncement. Some chose Deuteronomy 4:9: “Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life.” Others invoked Job 30:4, in which the hero speaks of starving people “who cut up mallows by the bushes” [Hebrew: “siaḥ”]; the verse was expounded homiletically in the Aramaic Targum and the Talmud as a condemnation of those who interrupt their recitation of Torah in order to indulge in idle chatter [also expressed by “siaḥ”].

Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller felt that Rabbi Jacob seemed somewhat reserved in his wording—employing the qualified expression “as if as if he were deserving of death,” rather than the more straightforward “he is deserving of death,” a formula used elsewhere in the Mishnah. Rabbi Heller inferred from this that the student’s lapse here was, after all, viewed as a temporary and inadvertent one, and therefore should be treated leniently.

Some interpreters stressed that under different circumstances there would have been nothing objectionable about admiring the beauties of nature. Quite the contrary, it is through the appreciation of our environment that we are inspired to praise the Almighty’s creation through the recitation of blessings. Indeed, the classic Jewish rationalists taught that the study of natural science is an essential stage in the refining of the religious mind. In this spirit, Rabbi Azariah dei Rossi (16^th>-century Italy) argued that Rabbi Jacob’s condemnation was only aimed at persons who failed to recognize that the true appreciation of nature is an indispensable component of religious study rather than being a distraction. A similar position was cited in the name of the Ḥasidic master Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotzk. 

Other ḥasidic preachers combined their antipathy to talmudic casuistry with a flair for ingenious interpretations and blatant disregard for the formalities of Hebrew etymology. A metaphoric explanation ascribed to the Ba‘al Shem Ṭov turned the Mishnah passage completely on its head, presenting it as a metaphoric criticism of scholarly egos—targeting those arrogant talmudists who see themselves as the tall trees and lush meadows of the Jewish religious landscape.

Some commentators attached significance to the fact that the Mishnah depicts its subject as walking along a path, a place where he would have been especially vulnerable to the assorted human, natural and supernatural dangers that imperil wayfarers. Jewish tradition taught that involvement in a spiritual pursuit bestows divine protection on travelers; hence ceasing from sacred study is the religious equivalent of unfastening one’s seat belt on the freeway. 

In a similar vein, the Maharal of Prague observed that by specifying the two examples of a tree and a furrow, the Mishnah was trying to convey the extreme gravity of the transgression: students are deemed culpable not only for allowing their attention to wander afar to a distant tree, but even for noticing a field, presumably one that is lying right next to them.

In more recent times, Rabbi Jacob’s statement acquired considerable notoriety. Pioneer Hebrew authors like J. Ḥ. Brenner and M. J. Berditchevsky felt that the Mishnah’s attitude epitomized all that was wrong with the Judaism of the rabbis; it advocated an anemic commitment to a cloistered scholarly ethos that is entirely removed from the glories of nature or esthetic pleasures. Modern writers insisted that the reborn Jewish nation must reject and overturn the values that issue from that insidious Mishnah text.

For instance, in his seminal novel Fishke the Lame, the renowned “grandfather of Yiddish literature” S. Y. Abramovitsh introduced his persona “Mendele the Book-peddler [Moykher-Sforim]” as his soul was ensnared in a dilemma during the solemn prayers on a fast day, struggling to choose between the demands of Rabbi Jacob’s teaching and the seductions of his “evil urge” in the guise of an idyllic pastoral vista of lush trees and fields. 

I suspect that Martin Buber had this same Mishnah passage in mind when he penned his famous description of an “I-Thou” encounter with nature:

It can happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation with it, and the tree ceases to be an “It”… This does not require me to forego any of the modes of contemplation. There is nothing that I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget.

The poet Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik tried to salvage the Mishnah’s teaching by suggesting an audaciously novel reading: it is only as long as Jews are “walking on the way” of exile in foreign lands that they must take care not to become too enamored of the local landscapes, lest they extinguish their desire to return to their ancestral soil. 

However, Bialik’s hero Asher Ginsberg (“Aḥad Ha‘am”) had to remind the poet that the author of the problematic statement was not some medieval denizen of the diaspora, but a resident of the land of Israel.

All this concern about the dangers of distracted strolling prompts me to wonder how those authors would have coped with a world in which the students (who might well have their earphones tuned to a Talmud lesson) are not just ambling along peaceful country paths, but hurtling ahead in motorized vehicles while their concentration is being continually assaulted by intrusions from their cell phones and iPods.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, January 10, 2014, p. 12.

• For further reading:
  • Benstein, Jeremy. “‘One, Walking and Studying…’: Nature Vs. Torah.” Judaism 44, no. 1995 (2002): 146–168.
  • Goldin, Judah. The Living Talmud; the Wisdom of the Fathers and Its Classical Commentaries. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
  • Leaman, Oliver. Jewish Thought: An Introduction. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.
  • Miron, Dan. A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century. 1st Syracuse University Press ed. Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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