Arriving at Ararat

by Eliezer Segal

When listening to the musical “Hamilton” I am struck by how acutely aware its protagonists were that they were participating in an exciting new political experiment that would allow them to change the world in revolutionary ways.

There was at least one prominent Jewish figure among the circles who shared in that adventure. Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785-1851) of Philadelphia made a name for himself as a journalist, playwright, civil servant and politician. In 1814 he was appointed to the post of American consul to Tunisia where he successfully resolved a notorious case involving an American fishing boat that was captured and enslaved by Barbary pirates. 

President Monroe soon dismissed him from his post. Monroe admitted that Noah’s religion was the reason for his removal—but that his motives were not anti-semitic. Rather, he feared that it would create diplomatic obstacles when negotiating with Muslims (though in those days Jews usually had an an advantage over Christians in such situations); and in any case, the consul had overspent his budget for ransoming the crew, a charge for which he was subsequently exonerated. 

Noah warned that the United States should be careful not to erode the support of the Jews at home or abroad. He claimed that European Jewry constituted a commercial network of sufficient influence that it was in the American interest to maintain their good will. 

On the other hand, he was also well aware that the Old World could be a very hostile and dangerous place for Jews, and therefore the welcoming tolerance of America could play a momentous role in shaping the national destiny of the people of Israel. He articulated his extraordinary vision in an address before the Shearith Israel congregation in 1818: “Until the Jews can recover their ancient rights and dominions and take their ranks among the governments of the earth, this is their chosen country; here they can rest with the persecuted of every line, secure in person and property, protected from tyranny and oppression and participating of equal rights and immunities.”

There you have it. Noah never abandoned the traditional Jewish expectation that the national sovereignty to which they are entitled would one day be restored in their historic homeland. In the meantime, however (as Theodor Herzl would later decide when offered an interim solution in Uganda) there was a pressing need for a temporary haven in which Jews could be accepted and protected as equals—and that haven was the pioneering experiment in universal civil rights: America. 

Noah’s project enjoyed support from Christians whose eschatological theologies called for a restoration of Jewish sovereignty (many of them believed this would lead to their conversion to the True Faith) as a precondition for Christ’s return in the Millennium. 

The collapse of the Ottoman empire seemed to confirm this scenario, as did certain features of the European Enlightenment. Although generally indifferent or hostile to nationalism and religious parochialism, Napoleon had recently made a flamboyant show of convening Europe’s Jewish religious leaders in the framework of a revived Sanhedrin, Israel’s ancient supreme court. Noah, who maintained ties with Abbé Henri Gregoire, the outspoken French champion of liberal ideals and inter-faith brotherhood, undoubtedly regarded such a development as a harbinger of imminent redemption in the new liberal world order.

But Mordecai Manuel Noah’s vision of the Jewish future in America was not limited to a passive confidence in his country’s receptiveness to Jewish refugees, nor in the Jewish readiness to assume the responsibilities of productive citizenship. He took it upon himself to found a Jewish state within the United States of America: the colony of Ararat to be established on Grand Island in the Niagara River near Buffalo, New York, not far from the Canadian border. He argued that settling the area with Jews would help guard the region from Canadian encroachment. 

It is nigh impossible to find a description of the founding ceremony for the Ararat project that manages to keep a straight face or avoid sarcasm when outlining the flamboyant pomposity that Noah brought to Buffalo, which was then little more than a sleepy rural village of about 2,500. Contemporary observers were dubious as to whether there were significant numbers of Jews in attendance. At any rate, the area of Grand Island could not have accommodated more than a few dozen families—though there are indications that he expected the pilot project to be further expanded after its initial success. For the occasion, Noah got hold of whatever he could find with an impressive or gaudy uniform–including parades of Masons, military companies, an Indian Chief, exotically costumed musicians and volleys of cannons. Noah himself wore a colourful costume borrowed from a production of Richard III, and made his entrance to the strains of the “Conquering Hero” theme from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus. Numerous biblical texts were incorporated into the ceremony. On the nascent city’s cornerstone were engraved the words of the “Sh’ma Yisra’el.”

The official proclamation of Ararat took place in the town’s largest edifice, St. Paul’s Episcopal church. To Noah’s enumeration of his various professional and political credentials he added “and by the grace of God, Governor and Judge of Israel.” He went on to proclaim “to the Jews throughout the world that an asylum is prepared and offered to them, where they can enjoy the peace, comfort and happiness which have been denied them through the intolerance and misgovernment of former ages.” In other speeches he spelled out in detail how the current venture would serve as a watershed in the sad trajectory of Israelite history since biblical times. To be sure, the Judaism practiced here would be of a particularly enlightened variety. In particular, he declared that polygamy would be abolished (this had been a major concern at Napoleon’s “Sanhedrin”); and that Ararat would be receptive to Hebrews of all varieties, including such exotic flavours as Karaites, Samaritans, those from India and Africa—and especially to the native Americans who, in keeping with the widespread belief of the time, were remnants of Israel’s “ten lost tribes” (Noah himself composed a tract on the subject). Although Noah believed that safety from persecution might be achieved by means of assimilation, he found that option unacceptable. Jews should strive to proudly cultivate their heritage and Hebrew language. Emulating ancient Jewish practices and anticipating the methods later adopted by the Zionist movement, he called for a three-shekel “capitation tax” to be levied upon all the Jews of the world to defray the new state’s expenses. He made efforts to recruit Jews in Europe, though not all his advertisements reached their intended addresses.

The name “Ararat” was of course a clever pun on Noah’s own surname, and it evoked the image of an ark full of Jewish refugees being rescued from a European deluge. He also made use of other biblical expressions, notably that of “cities of refuge” originally devised as a place to which perpetrators of involuntary manslaughter could escape harm from their victims’ avengers.

The ambitious project elicited more than its share of ridicule, parody and insinuations that it might be nothing more than a clever real estate scam. There is no evidence of a single Jew, including Noah himself, ever setting foot on the Grand Island colony.

Though Ararat may have been a failure, it could be argued that the entire continent ultimately came to fulfil Noah’s original vision. More than two million Jews were able to escape the hardships and perils of central and eastern Europe before the gates were closed under the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. Those refugees and their children were thereby saved from the clutches of European tyrants and murderers, in numbers that could never have squeezed into Mordecai Noah’s little refuge on the Niagara River.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, October 20, 2017, p. 10.

• For further reading:
  • Cone, G. Herbert. “New Matter Relating to Mordecai M. Noah.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 11 (1903): 131–37.
  • Gelber, Natan M. “Mordecai Emanuel Noah: His Dream of a Jewish State in America.” Sura 3 (1958 1957): 377–413.
  • Goldberg, Isaac. Major Noah: American-Jewish Pioneer. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972.
  • Gordis, Robert. “Mordecai Manuel Noah: A Centenary Evaluation.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 41 (1951): 1–28.
  • Kohn, S. Joshua. “Mordecai Manuel Noah’s Ararat Project and the Missionaries.” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (1965): 162–96.
  • Popkin, Richard H. “Mordecai Noah, the Abbé Grégoire and the Paris Sanhedrin.” Modern Judaism 2, no. 2 (1982): 131–48.
  • Rock, Howard B. Haven of Liberty: New York Jews in the New World, 1654-1865. Vol. 1. 3 vols. City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
  • Rovner, Adam. In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel. New York and London: NYU Press, 2014.
  • Sarna, Jonathan D. Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981.
  • Shalev, Eran. American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
  • ———. “Revive, Re-New and Reestablish: Mordecai Noah’s Ararat and the Limits of Biblical Imagination in the Early American Republic.” American Jewish Archives Journal 62, no. 1 (2010): 1–20.
  • Weingrad, Michael. “Messiah, American Style: Mordecai Manuel Noah and the American Refuge.” AJS Review 31, no. 1 (2007): 75–108. doi:10.2307/27564261.
  • Weinryb, Bernard D. “Noah’s Ararat Jewish State in Its Historical Setting.” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 43 (1953): 170–91./li>

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My email address is: [email protected]

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The Time of Our Life

by Eliezer Segal

In his pioneering theological treatise “The Book of Doctrines and Opinions,” the tenth-century scholar Saadiah Gaon devoted a brief but significant discussion to the question of whether there is a set length to a person’s lifespan. As was his wont, he formulated his inquiry in terms of biblical texts. On the one hand, Scripture contains passages such as the divine blessing that “the number of thy days I will fulfill” that imply that a person is assigned a predetermined number of days. On the other hand, however, texts such as “the fear of the Lord prolongeth days, but the years of the wicked shall be shortened” seem to teach that your spiritual or moral stature can have a decisive impact on how long you live. 

A central text for many Jewish discussions of this question is the Bible’s story of king Hezekiah who was informed by the prophet Isaiah that his death was imminent—and yet the king’s contrite prayers succeeded in prevailing upon the Almighty to add fifteen more years to his life. 

Saadiah argued that the Almighty assigns to each of us a default lifespan that corresponds to the basic physical health of the body into which one is born. This is usually around seventy years in keeping with the words of the Psalmist that “the days of our years are threescore years and ten.” This lifespan, however, is by no means immutable. Indeed, it is within a person’s power to extend it by as much as thirty years or to shorten it, depending on lifestyle choices and other factors—including the inscrutable dictates of divine will and wisdom.

In discussing the question, Saadiah observed that it would make no sense to believe that lifespans are entirely unalterable and that everybody dies on a predetermined date. If that were the case, there would be no sense to those many tales in the Bible in which God or his agents smite the wicked through violence, plagues or other means; or where the righteous are rewarded with longevity.

Rav Hai Gaon also devoted one of his responsa to this question and its implications. His chief concern was with the concept of divine foreknowledge; specifically: how was God able to “know” the mutually contradictory facts about the times of Hezekiah’s promised and actual demise. Hai proposed a subtle logical differentiation between this case of God’s knowing what will occur the future, as distinct from the death being a fulfillment of the divine foreknowledge. 

Hai Gaon discussed in considerable detail the thesis that if everyone dies at their predetermined time, then no guilt can be assigned to a murderer who happens to be the physical agent of the death. This question was also addressed by Maimonides in a responsum cited by a medieval commentator. The great philosopher was responding to a query from his disciple Joseph ben Judah Ibn Simeon: “Is the length of a person’s life set to a particular time, which the person will necessarily reach, so that it cannot be abbreviated or cut short? Or alternatively, are harmful circumstances capable of shortening a person’s lifespan when they affect a person who has failed to take appropriate precautions?”

Now, the answer to this question strikes us as quite straightforward—so straightforward, in fact, that it is hard to understand why the foremost philosophical minds in the Jewish world felt impelled to deal so seriously with the obvious truism that lifespans are subject to variation.

For a better understanding of the importance of this question, we must look to the Muslim intellectual environment in which Saadiah, Hai and Maimonides were all writing. 

In the Qur’an, it is possible to point both to passages that assert that the length of a mortal life is inexorably predetermined, as well as to texts declaring that our lives are entirely subject to divine control. Alongside a statement such as “when their designated time has come, they cannot put it off by a single hour, nor can they advance it,” there are also also passages that speak of God’s striking down sinners before their time. 

The concept of a pre-set length to people’s lives was known in Arabic as “ajal,” and it generated much discussion among Islamic scholars. Whereas Jews typically tended to avoid making dogmatic pronouncements on theological questions, Islamic authorities such as the influential theologian al-Ash’ari formulated an official position that reinforced the subordination of humans to divine decrees. 

This was consistent with the broader Muslim approach to the questions of free will and determinism, regarding which the definers of orthodoxy usually opted for a fatalistic or passive outlook in which puny mortals are powerless against divine omnipotence. The political leaders of the early Muslim community, especially the Umayyad Caliphs, sometimes promoted this deterministic philosophy as a way of justifying the reigns of rulers whose religious or ethical standards were less than perfect. If this premise were followed to its logical conclusion, then a leader who seized power by assassination had not necessarily committed a sin, since the victim was destined to die at that time anyway. We have seen above that Hai Gaon discussed precisely this case. Saadiah too speculated about whether such a hypothetical plea might be used in order to exonerate Jezebel for her massacre of the prophets. 

This fatalistic outlook on life and death may well have contributed over the ages to a reluctance in Muslim societies to protest or rebel against vicious and bloodthirsty tyrants. Indeed, the earliest school of rational theology in Islam, known as the Mu’tazila, originated as a movement of protest against corrupt leadership. One of the movement’s cardinal tenets was that people cannot be subjected to the final divine judgment unless they possess free will. Accordingly Mu’tazilites discoursed at length about the relationship between ajal and divine foreknowledge, as well as whether violent deaths fulfill the ajal or undermine it. 

As a rationalist and a scientist, Maimonides had little patience for the theological hairsplitting of his Muslim and Jewish predecessors, especially when they claimed to have intimate understanding of the workings of divine wisdom. For Maimonides, God is essentially unknowable, and it is presumptuous to imagine that we can analyze his reasoning. Instead, he approached the question from more pragmatic directions—from the perspective of the Torah, as well as from a scientific or medical standpoint. 

As regards the Torah, Maimonides cited a selection of biblical precepts that involve taking realistic precautions to ward off life-threatening dangers. These include the requirement to erect railings on rooftops; the institution of cities of refuge to protect unintentional killers from acts of vengeance; or the military exemptions granted to newlyweds and others to keep them from falling in battle. 

Like Saadiah, Maimonides cited verses that invoked length of days as a reward for righteousness and obedience to God. He also agreed with Saadiah in declaring that there is no automatic correlation between righteousness and longevity.

As regards the scientific aspects of the question, Maimonides drew upon his thorough expertise in medical lore to provide a systematic listing of circumstances that, if not averted, might lead to fatal results. These range from the removal or destruction of vital organs to sudden shocks of joy or fear, which allegedly do their damage by altering the delicate balance of body heat. Reckless conduct (such as refusal to inoculate against potential illnesses) can bring on an early demise—but by choosing a cautious and sensible lifestyle, it is possible to steer clear of most of those threats and to live a long life.

That kind of prudent advice is unquestionably timeless.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 3, 2017, pp. 10-11.

• For further reading:
  • Brody, Robert. Sa’adyah Gaon. Oxford and Portland, OR: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013.
  • Griffel, Frank. Al-Ghazālī’s Philosophical Theology. Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Hafeez, Abdul. “The Antinomy of Free Will and the Appointed Term (Ajal Musamma).” Hamdard Islamicus 23, no. 4 (2000): 63-68.
  • Maimonides, Moses. Teshuvat HaRaMBa”M BiShe’elat HaḲeṣ HaḲaṣuv LeḤayyim. Edited by Gotthold Weil and Michael Schwartz. Tel-Aviv: Papyrus Publishing House, 1979. [Hebrew]
  • ———. Über Die Lebensdauer. Edited by Gotthold Weil. Basel: Karger, 1953.
  • Weil, Gotthold. “Teshuvato Shel Rav Hai Ga’on ’al ha-Ḳeṣ ha-Ḳaṣuv la-Ḥayyim.” In Sefer Asaf: Ḳoveṣ Maʼamare Meḥḳar Mugash li-Khvod ha-Rav Prof. Śimḥah Asaf ʻal-yede Yedidav Ḥaverav ve-Talmidav liMlot Lo Shishim Shanah, edited by Umberto Cassuto, 261-279. Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1953. [Hebrew]
  • Wolfson, Harry Austryn. The Philosophy of the Kalam. Harvard University Press, 1976.

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A Preacher’s Dream and an Artist’s Vision

by Eliezer Segal

I suppose that this is the ultimate dream of every rabbi and preacher. At the conclusion of the service, the congregants emerge from the sanctuary with nothing in their minds but the images of the scriptural reading and the sermon that they have just heard. So lasting and vivid was that spiritual experience that they actually believe that they are seeing it reenacted before their eyes as they walk outside.

Precisely such a scene was the subject of a famous painting by Paul Gauguin in 1888 titled “Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel.”

The picture portrays a group of peasant women who are standing outside a church observing the scene of Jacob struggling with the angel, as described in the book of Genesis. 

The creation of this work marked a turning point in Gauguin’s artistic development—and apparently in his spiritual evolution as well.

Now the main outlines of the artist’s life are well-known. Product of a respectable bourgeois upbringing, he was educated in prestigious Catholic schools and pursued careers in the merchant marine and navy and in finance. His success as a stockbroker was abruptly cut short in 1882 with the crash of the Paris stock market, and he found that he now had nothing to lose by devoting himself to his true passion for art. He joined the circles of the Impressionists, sharing some of their interest in the techniques of portraying light and in landscape painting. Eventually, however, his fascination with the “primitive” impelled him to travel to the West Indies and, more significantly, to Tahiti where his most memorable works were produced. 

But in 1888, Gauguin and many of his fellow painters were gravitating toward the lovely rural vistas of northern France which offered them unparalleled opportunities to study nature and the effects of natural light. Gauguin’s “Vision after the Sermon” was created at Pont-Aven in Brittany; however, it is glaringly clear that it bears little resemblance to the kind of output that we expect from the Impressionists. If anything, it is reminiscent of a panel from a comic-strip, rendered in two-dimensional shapes in unrealistic primary colours. As it happens, this style, known as “Cloisonnism,” was inspired by the techniques exemplified by the Japanese artists Hiroshige and Hokusai that were enjoying popularity in France at the time.

More significant, to my mind, was Gauguin’s selection of subject matter. Apparently he chose to paint these ladies as they were stirred by their experience at prayer because they provided him with the best available instance of vital religious life within the range of localities accessible to him. Like many educated post-enlightenment Frenchmen, and in spite of (or as some have suggested: because of) his lackluster Catholic schooling, Gauguin had little personal sympathy for things religious, and he tended to associate faith with primitive, pre-modern culture. The nearest remnant he found to old-time religious faith was among the simple peasantry of the Brétagne countryside.

This premise is one that was solidly entrenched in the academic study of religions. It was common for scholars to seek after an “essence” of religion which they often equated with the original, primordial spirituality from which all the subsequent manifestations of faith and ritual had evolved (a concept that had some kinship with the notion of the “noble savage”). This hypothetical essence could supposedly be reconstructed from the features common to the developed religions, but remnants of it were also to be found in the “savage” cultures that continue to exist outside the bounds of western civilization.

It might have been the quest for these undiluted vestiges of human spirituality that eventually drew Gauguin to the pristine Eden of the South Seas—but at this point in his life he felt that the most approachable version of primitive religion was to be discerned among the peasantry of northern France. In one of his letters, the artist expressed his personal pride that he had “painted a religious picture, very clumsily but it interested me and I like it.” He boasted of his achievement in evoking a mood of severity and the characters’ “great rustic and superstitious simplicity.”

In the picture, the visual area assigned to the Breton women (which he referred to as the “natural” area) is separated from the (“non-natural”) scene of the biblical drama by a diagonal tree-trunk which Gauguin (in a letter to his friend Vincent van Gogh) identified as an apple tree. It is widely assumed that this symbolized the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” in the garden of Eden which in European translations is usually identified as an apple tree, and which somehow functions here as the border line between day-to-day existence and spiritual vision. 

Of all the biblical scenarios and sermon topics that Gauguin might have selected for his painting, why did he choose the particular episode of Jacob’s wrestling match? Judaism has generally read that story in connection with Israel’s struggle over the inheritance of the divine blessing. However, interpreters who are trying to grasp its significance for Gauguin’s inner life point out correctly that in Christian tradition the contest is usually read as a metaphor for people’s internal struggles with our consciences or our sinful natures. 

In the painting, the group of those who behold Jacob’s struggle consists of twelve peasant women all of them wearing the traditional helmet-like white bonnets. There is also a sole tonsured priest or monk who might be intended as a self-portrait of the artist. Of course the number twelve is a meaningful one for Jacob, as it represents the number of his sons who became the twelve tribes of Israel. However, it is more likely that the allusion here is to Jesus’ twelve apostles who were charged with spreading his “good news” to the world.

One puzzling component of the picture is a cow that is situated in the space between the ladies and the tree. Although its placement in the physical zone (rather than in the segment assigned to the biblical vision) would suggest that it is to be perceived as part of the physical landscape rather than a symbol, this fact has not discouraged art critics from speculations about its supposed spiritual meaning, particularly through its association with redemptive sacrifice, a theme that likely dated back to the region’s pre-Christian Celtic heritage that was later endowed with Christian overtones. 

At any rate, the primary factor that most probably impelled Gauguin to portray the scene of Jacob and the angel was because it happened to be the actual “parashah” that formed the theme of the sermon, as part of the church service on the particular days in August when he painted his masterpiece. This was in accordance with the venerable local practice of the Celtic Church (which diverged from the mainstream Roman Catholic liturgical calendar).

More specifically, a nearby chapel in the village of Pluméliau was dedicated to St. Nicodème who was revered locally as a protector of flocks, herds and horned animals. A special rite of blessing the animals was part of his celebration (known as a “Pardon”) in August, as were Sunday-afternoon wrestling competitions in which young men vied to impress prospective brides. After all, a successful sermon should serve as a conduit between the ancient scriptural texts and the specific realities of the congregation. 

It is a telling indication of Gauguin’s genius that more than a century later spectators are still striving to grapple with the significance of his artistic vision. This kind of creative achievement provides sublime gratification for teachers, authors—and preachers—when their students and readers persist in wrestling with their ideas and values.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, November 3, 2017, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Andersen, Wayne V., and Barbara Klein. Gauguin’s Paradise Lost. New York: Viking Press, 1971. 
  • Brettell, Richard R. The Art of Paul Gauguin. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988. 
  • Coignard, Jérôme. “La Vision après le Sermon.” Connaissance des Arts, no. 757 (2017): 84–87. 
  • Facos, Michelle. An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Art. New York: Routledge, 2011. 
  • Fraser, Donald Hamilton. Donald Hamilton Fraser on Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon—Jacob Struggling with the Angel. Painters on Painting. London: Cassell, 1969. 
  • Herban III, Mathew. “The Origin of Paul Gauguin’s Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888).” The Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (1977): 415–20. 
  • Maurer, Naomi E. The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses in association with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1998. 
  • Powers, Edward D. “From Eternity to Here: Paul Gauguin and the Word Made Flesh.” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 2 (2002): 89–106. 
  • Silverman, Debora. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art. 1st ed. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000. 
  • Thomson, Belinda, Frances Fowle, and Lesley Stevenson. Gauguin’s Vision. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2005.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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For King and Country

by Eliezer Segal

Like many other successful national liberators who went on to assume positions of political leadership, the popularity of the Hasmoneans did not fare so well after their initial Hanukkah victory over the Hellenistic armies. They established themselves as Judea’s dynastic rulers, appointed themselves to the high priesthood, and were torn by constant internecine intrigues. In the context of the fanatical sectarian divisions that typified Jewish society during the Second Commonwealth era, the endorsement of one faction might entail the ruthless suppression of its rivals. Inevitably somebody was going to be very displeased with the Hasmonean leadership.

Perhaps the most controversial of the successors to Judah Maccabee was Alexander Jonathan, usually referred to by the Aramaic variant “Yannai” (Alexander Jannaeus) who ruled over Judea from 103 to 76 B.C.E. Yannai was the grandson of Simeon, one of the original brothers who had led the insurrection against Antiochus Epiphanes that culminated in the purification of the Jerusalem temple and the establishment of Hanukkah. Yannai pursued a risky (but ultimately successful) strategy of exploiting the divisions of the surrounding Hellenistic states in order to achieve a territorial expansion that involved forced conversions of some neighbouring populations.

Yannai favoured the Sadducees, the religious sect that promoted the traditional priestly leadership and their values, against the Pharisees with their commitment to an unwritten ancestral tradition. This discord erupted into a full-scale civil war that lasted six years and left many thousands dead. 

It is understandable that the literature of the rabbis, who were the heirs to the Pharisees, did not have much good to say about king Yannai. Somewhat less clear are the attitudes expressed in the Dead Sea scrolls.

The community at Qumran that preserved the scrolls, and which is widely believed to have composed most of them, shared the Sadducee belief in the centrality of the sacrificial worship in the Temple and in the primacy of the hereditary priesthood. As such, we might have expected them to support King Yannai by virtue of his priestly lineage. Nonetheless, in the cryptic “Pesher” texts that hint at the history of their community (usually equated with the Essene sect described by Josephus Flavius), they single out for condemnation a figure whom they dub by the code names “the wicked priest” or the “furious young lion.” This villain is also depicted as an opponent of the Pharisees who themselves attacked the “teacher of righteousness”—who was probably the originator of the Dead Sea sect. If these identifications are correct, then the Qumranites—whose division of the world into absolutely righteous and evil realms did not allow for any nuanced grey areas—surely regarded Alexander Yannai as a straightforward villain.

This reasonable-sounding assumption ran into a serious problem with the publication in 1991 of a brief scroll fragment catalogued as “4Q448.” The manuscript contains what appears to be a prayer for the welfare of the monarch: “Holy One, arise on behalf of Jonathan the King, and the entire congregation of your people Israel who are found in the four corners of the heavens. May they all be at peace. And may your name be blessed for the sake of your kingdom.” There was only one Jonathan who reigned as king during that era, and that was Alexander Yannai. His illustrious great-uncle Jonathan, the brother of Judah Maccabee, never served in that capacity.

To be sure, scholars have been most reluctant to accept the above interpretation without some resistance. For example, the Hebrew expression that is translated here as “arise on behalf of” actually occurs in biblical texts in the sense of “arise against”; which would imply that the prayer is asking not for the protection of King Jonathan, but rather to protect us from him (reminiscent of the rabbi’s blessing for the Czar in “Fiddler on the Roof”). While this reading is not entirely impossible, it appears unlikely in view of the way the text seamlessly groups the king together with the people of Israel. In fact, the kingdom—presumably referring to the state over which Yannai was currently ruling—is depicted as God’s own domain over which he is being urged to extend his protection!

In light of these kinds of difficulties, several scholars have proposed that this particular manuscript, although it found its way into the Qumran caves, was not actually written by the Essenes, but by Sadducees or someone else who had a more sympathetic attitude toward Alexander Yannai. Those scholars can point to other stylistic features of the text that distinguish it from more typical Dead Sea scrolls.

The short passage that was cited above was preserved undamaged (a rare phenomenon among the Dead Sea scrolls). The same cannot be said about the following section of the fragment, for which the left edge of the column is missing and has to be reconstructed from conjecture, and which might have been written by a different scribe. Nevertheless, the surviving phrases leave no room for doubt that the prayer is trying to invoke God’s love and constant protection upon King Jonathan and his nation. 

This latter section includes a reference to “the day of battle.” It is possible that this is a generic stereotypical formula of the sort that is still employed in prayers on behalf of heads of state. On the other hand, Alexander Yannai was involved in several military campaigns, including a few very close calls; and various historians have tried to link the words of this blessing with a particular battle.

The first half of the scroll fragment consists of the words of a psalm. To be precise: the text in question is not actually found among the standard canonical Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, but it is included in the collection preserved in the Syriac-Aramaic translation used by the Syrian Christian church, and segments from the Hebrew originals of those psalms were discovered among the Dead Sea documents. 

In the Syriac collection, the psalm—which proclaims how God redeems the righteous from the hands of their wicked foes and has chosen Jerusalem as his eternal dwelling-place—is introduced by the heading: “the prayer of Hezekiah when the Assyrians besieged him and he entreated God to save him.” Based on the remaining letters in the damaged fragment, it is likely that the the caption contained an allusion to a passage in 2 Chronicles: “Hezekiah the king and the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz, prayed and cried to heaven.” That verse is describing the dire predicament of the king and prophet when Jerusalem was besieged by the Assyrian forces. According to the biblical account, the prayer was answered with the sudden and unexplained departure of the enemy army.

The situation of Hezekiah and Isaiah might well have been perceived as an apt parallel to the threat that confronted Alexander Yannai around 103 B.C.E. when Judea was invaded by the deposed emperor Ptolemy IX Lathyrus and the conquest of Jerusalem was narrowly averted by the timely intervention of Ptolemy’s mother Cleopatra III (at the urging of her Jewish generals). To be sure, the authors of the Dead Sea scrolls had a special knack for interpreting biblical prophetic texts with reference to their own sect’s recent history. 

There are occasions, I suppose, when even the most unpopular heads of state must be respected not for their own merits, but for the nation that they represent. The distinction between patriotism and personal endorsement of imperfect leaders becomes especially vague in times of war and other national crises. In the case of Alexander Yannai it is understable that even a community of his ideological opponents could be reciting prayers for him—not as a person who was himself worthy of their admiration, but as the head an independent Jewish state that had been made possible by the heroism of his Hasmonean forbears.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, December 8, 2017, p. 19.

• For further reading:
  • Alexander, Philip S. “A Note on the Syntax of 4Q448.” Journal of Jewish Studies 44, no. 2 (1993): 301–2.
  • Eshel, Esther, Hanan Eshel, and Ada Yardeni. “A Qumran Composition Containing Part of Ps. 154 and a Prayer for the Welfare of King Jonathan and His Kingdom.” Israel Exploration Journal 42, no. 3/4 (1992): 199–229.
  • Eshel, Hanan. “Non-Canonical Psalms from Qumran.” In Qumran Scrolls and Their World, edited by Menahem Kister, 209–24. Between Bible and Mishnah. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2009. [Hebrew]
  • ———. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State. Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature. Grand Rapids and Jerusalem: William B. Eerdmans and Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2008.
  • Eshel, Hanan, and Esther Eshel. “4Q448, Psalm 154 and 4QpIsa a.” Tarbiz 67, no. 1 (1997): 121–30. [Hebrew]
  • ———. “4Q448, Psalm 154 (Syriac), Sirach 48:20, and [4QpISA.sup.a].” Journal of Biblical Literature 119, no. 4 (2000): 645–59.
  • Eshel, Hanan, Esther Eshel, Ada Yardeni, Carol Newsom, Bilhah Nitzan, Eileen Schuller, and Ada Yardeni. Qumran Cave 4: VI: Poetical and Liturgical Texts, Part 1. Discoveries in the Judaean Desert. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Kister, Menahem. “Liturgical Formulae in the Light of Fragments from the Judaean Desert.” Tarbiz 77, no. 3/4 (2008): 331–55. [Hebrew]
  • ———. “Notes on Some New Texts from Qumran.” Journal of Jewish Studies 44, no. 2 (1993): 280–90.
  • Lemaire, André. “Attestation textuelle et critique littéraire: 4Q448 col. A et Psalm 154.” In The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years after Their Discovery: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Congress, July 1997, edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman, Emanuel Tov, and James C. VanderKam, 12–18. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society and Israel Museum, 2000.
  • Main, Emmanuelle. “A Note on 4Q448.” Tarbiz 67, no. 1 (1997): 103–19. [Hebrew]
  • Puech, Émile. “Jonathan le prêtre impie et les débuts de la communauté de Qumrân: 4QJonathan (4Q523) et 4QPsAp (4Q448).” Revue de Qumran 17 (1996): 241–70.
  • Sanders, J. A. “Variorum in the Psalms Scroll (11QPsa).” The Harvard Theological Review 59, no. 1 (1966): 83–94.
  • Strugnell, John. “Notes on the Text and Transmission of the Apocryphal Psalms 151, 154 (= Syr. II) and 155 (= Syr. III).” The Harvard Theological Review 59, no. 3 (1966): 257–81.
  • Vermès, Géza. “The so-Called King Jonathan Fragment (4Q448).” Journal of Jewish Studies 44, no. 2 (1993): 294–300.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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A Date with Deborah

by Eliezer Segal

The leaders who arose for Israel after the days of Joshua until the establishment of the monarchy were known as  Shofeṭim, “judges,” but that title can be quite misleading. For the most part we are not speaking here of individuals who were learned in the law or who adjudicated cases. Several of them were little more than crude ruffians who made their names as warriors rather than as magistrates.

In fact the only figure in that group whom the Bible identifies as an actual judge in the conventional sense is Deborah. Concerning her we are informed that “she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Beth-el in mount Ephraim, and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”

Yes, she was a practicing judge. But why is it important to inform us about her palm tree? Not surprisingly, the sages of the Talmud and Midrash jumped at the opportunity to ascribe a deeper symbolic meaning or to extract moral lessons from that gratuitous detail.

Not that the rabbis really needed a specific justification to interpret superfluous words in scripture. Nevertheless, as Rabbi Samuel Edels (Maharsha) argued, the detail seems particularly pointless in this passage. If its purpose was merely to help us in locating her geographically, then it is not very helpful, since date-palms grow in abundance throughout the land of Israel! Hence, it stands to reason that its mention here must have some other purpose.

The Talmud proposed a symbolic explanation of why Deborah preferred to convene her court under a date-palm. Unlike most other trees, palms do not have branches, but rather their foliage grows directly out of a single trunk. According to an exposition in the Talmud, this was an appropriate analogy for the rare spiritual attainment of Deborah’s contemporaries: “Just as this date-palm has only a single heart, so did Israel in that generation have but a single heart that was directed towards their father in heaven.” The palm thus stands as an apt symbol for the solidarity and unity of the Israelite community.

Most of the interpreters found more practical implications in the mention of the palm tree. As it happens, few of the ancient rabbis were troubled by the glaring difficulty of having a woman (albeit one who was also a prophet) serving as a judge—a profession from which she would have been disqualified according to their own halakhah. The rabbis were however concerned with a number of subsidiary legal and narrative problems that arose from Deborah’s situation as a female in a court setting; and they made reference to the palm tree in some of their attempts to resolve those problems.

The author of the midrashic treatise “Tanna de-bei Eliyahu” seemed to understand that the main reason people took their cases to the lady judge was because there was a severe shortage of qualified males. It was this predicament that was being subtly underscored by the allusion to the palm tree between Ramah and Beth-El. After all, Ramah was also the base of the prophet Samuel, the distinguished judge and national leader at the close of the era of the Judges. As the Tanna de-bei Eliyahu put it with rhetorical hyperbole, there were so few Torah scholars in those days that the shadow of that single tree (without branches) was sufficient to provide shade that could be shared by the judges and their disciples!

Another problem that had to be dealt with by a female judge was that of traditional modesty. In keeping with traditional standards of propriety, she was not supposed to put herself in situations in which she would be subjected to suspicions by being secluded with men, as would occur if she were to convene her court in a normal indoor setting. Therefore several talmudic and midrashic interpreters suggested that Deborah’s decision to hear cases outdoors, under a tree without any branches that might offer concealment, was a deliberate stratagem that was intended to preclude the possibility of inappropriate contact between the sexes. 

This may perhaps be compared to the situation described by the twelfth-century traveler Petahiah of Regensburg who had occasion, during a visit to Baghdad, to witness the erudite daughter of the Ga’on Rabbi Samuel ben ‘Ali delivering classes on Bible while enclosed inside a room with a single window, in such a way that the students outside could hear her words but not see her. 

In the eighteenth century, Rabbi Jacob Reischer found a number of problems with the thesis that Deborah had to worry about being secluded with a single man. After all, he observed, a courtroom is quite a public place and at the very least there would always be present a plaintiff and a defendant in addition to the presiding judge. As a possible solution to his objection, he referred to a statement in the Talmud that in order to maintain impartiality a judge is advised to regard all the litigants as wicked. Once they have been so labeled, even a number of such hypothetical scoundrels cannot be trusted in the presence of a lady judge, and therefore it was considered advisable for Deborah to hear her cases outdoors under the palm tree, “between Ramah and Beth-el.”

On the other hand, Rabbi Reischer did make allowances for the opposite premise (proposed by the Tosafot commentary to the Talmud), that Deborah was not really a judge in the literal sense since that vocation was indeed forbidden to women; but rather she served as a kind of law professor who lectured on the subject to students. If that were the case, she had the prerogative of ensuring that she would never offer tutorials to individual men, so there would be no need to meet outdoors beneath the palm tree. 

Conversely, she might have been allowed a special dispensation to act as a judge by virtue of her prophetic credentials, in which case the precautions would in fact be necessary to uphold her reputation. All this has implications (confusing as they might strike the non-talmudic mind) on how to interpret the function of the palm tree in the scriptural narrative.

The tendency among Jewish interpreters to derive lessons from Deborah’s palm tree about the moral standards expected from judges is perhaps comparable to an exposition by the Christian reformer Martin Luther, who understood that Debora’s insistence on sitting in a humble cottage beneath a palm tree should serve as a lesson for all subsequent judges to maintain modest lifestyles and eschew greed or flamboyance.

Trees had a special fascination for the adherents of the Jewish esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. The central doctrine of that tradition consisted of a detailed mapping of the ten divine emanations ( sefirot) that bridge the metaphysical space between the sublimely unknowable, infinite God ( Ein-Sof) and our crudely physical world. A favourite image for expressing the hierarchical progression of the sefirot was that of a tree, especially a “tree of life.”

Rabbi Moses Cordovero of Safed bestowed the name “Palm-Tree of Deborah” upon his treatise on kabbalistic ethics. The central premise of that brief work was the old rabbinic idea that a person’s moral behaviour should strive to emulate the ways of God. In the kabbalistic context, however, this means adapting one’s actions to the qualities of the ten sefirot, each of which embodies its own distinctive virtues.

In his chapter about how to emulate the sefirah of Wisdom, Cordovero set forth his vision of the ideal teacher who must be committed wholeheartedly to the goal of elevating the disciples’ spirituality and moral sensitivity. In pursuit of that noble objective, the ideal teacher must relate to each and every student with compassion and respect for their individuality.

Rabbi Cordovero never explained his reasons for his choice of the title of his ethical manual. I wonder if he might have been inspired by his imagining of the ancient judge Deborah as a patient and devoted teacher instructing her students in the open air, in the modest shade of her palm tree in Ramah.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, January 19, 2018, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Baskin, Judith R.  Midrashic Women: Formations of the Feminine in Rabbinic Literature. Hanover: Brandeis University Press; University Press of New England, 2002. 
  • Ben Shlomo, Yosef.  The Mystical Theology of Moses Cordovero. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1965. 
  • Braude, William G, and Israel J Kapstein, eds.  Tanna Děbé Eliyyahu = The Lore of the School of Elijah. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981. 
  • Dan, Joseph, and Simeon Halkin.  Hebrew Ethical and Homiletical Literature: The Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Sifriyat Keter: 5. Sifrut. Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1975. [Hebrew] 
  • Frymer-Kensky, Tikva Simone.  Reading the Women of the Bible. 1st ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2002. 
  • Ginzberg, Louis.  Legends of the Jews. Translated by Henrietta Szold. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2003. 
  • Hauptman, Judith. “Images of Women in the Talmud.” In  Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Radford Reuther, 184–212. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. 
  • Jacobs, Louis.  The Palm Tree of Deborah. London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1960. 
  • Schroeder, Joy A.  Deborah’s Daughters: Gender Politics and Biblical Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 
  • Segal, Eliezer.  The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary. Brown Judaic Studies, no. 291-293. Atlanta, Ga: Scholars Press, 1994.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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by Eliezer Segal

Napoleonic Codes

I recently reread Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

When reading literary classics, I am often searching for a Jewish angle that I can share with my esteemed readers. In the present instance, that angle turned up about midway through the novel. The hapless hero Pierre Bezukhov was attracted to the Freemasons who injected a strong dose of spirituality into his hitherto meaningless life. One of his new Masonic companions introduced him to a fascinating exposition of a verse in the New Testament Book of Revelation [=Apocalypse]—arguably the best-known passage in that esoteric text. The cryptic verse declares: “let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person. Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” A bit farther down it continues, “The beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months.”

Bezukhov’s informant equated Revelation’s haughty blasphemer with Europe’s current evil aggressor, Napoleon Bonaparte. For that purpose, he applied the technique of numerology— assigning a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet and calculating the sums of words or phrases. And behold, Napoleon’s name added up to 666!

Well, not exactly. Napoleon’s name only totals 216. But if you insert his French title “L’Empereur,” then you will reach the desired sum. Furthermore, not only do the French words “quarante-deux” add up to 666, but Napoleon’s age in 1812 was 42 years. Indisputable proof that the Corsican’s reign would end during that year—especially if you conveniently forget that the scriptural forty-two referred to months, not years.

The next step was to employ the same technique to discover who would be Napoleon’s vanquisher. Permutations of the name of Tsar Alexander (in French) did not yield the desired result. But what about Pierre’s own name? This required a bit of tweaking, such as the use of a non-standard spelling [Besuhof instead of Bezukhov], the insertion of a national identifier [Russe] and an incorrectly elided definite article [“l’” instead of “le”]—and voila!: “L’ russe Besuhof” equalled 666. “This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for a moment.”

Actually, the entire basis for 666 being the “number of the Beast” might be altogether mistaken. Although this reading was preferred by church authorities in the fourth century, some of the oldest traditions and texts attest to a reading “616,” which is reinforced by discoveries of ancient papyrus manuscripts.

The method employed by Count Bezukhov and his Masonic informants is familiar from Jewish tradition as “gematria,” a hermeneutic technique that was occasionally applied in the Talmud and Midrash to the interpretation of biblical texts. An incorrect popular perception, particularly among Christians who dabble in the occult, associates gematria with Kabbalah. It is therefore understandable that it should attract Freemasons, who cultivate an exotic mathematically based cosmology. Nevertheless, I have not found evidence of an extensive Masonic predilection for gematria.

Back in the 1990s a fashionable theory of “Bible codes” claimed that the Torah contains a statistically significant number of meaningful word patterns that emerge from letters that are equally distant from each other. Interestingly, the scholars who debunked this theory did so by eliciting similar results from a Hebrew translation of… War and Peace.

As we can learn from TV evangelists, there exists an unquenchable market for identifications of the 666 Antichrist with whatever adversary one wishes to vilify at the moment. Most historians identify Revelation’s original target as the nefarious Roman emperor Nero whose name and title, transliterated into Hebrew (albeit with a bit of orthographic creativity), can add up to 666.

An eighth-century commentator on Revelation, Beatus of Liébana, even imagined that Nero will reappear in the future to spite the Jews! “Because the Jews crucified Christ and expect Nero the Antichrist in the place of Christ—therefore God will send this one resurrected as king worthy of those worthy of him, and as a Christ such as the Jews deserve.”

Napoleon’s initial victories generated heated debates among Jewish leaders about his likely impact on religious and communal life. Proponents of liberalism and enlightenment were gratified by the emperor’s determination to demolish the ghetto walls and extend civil rights to Jews in his dominions; however many traditionalists preferred Tsarist tyranny and oppression, because they feared that Judaism could not withstand the threats of freedom, affluence and assimilation.

In Ḥasidic circles, there were teachers who justified their respective political positions from their readings of biblical texts. In classic Jewish eschatology, the redemption is preceded by a cataclysmic battle described by Ezekiel as the “war of Gog and Magog”; and some of Ḥasidism’s dominant figures were convinced that the present conflict fit that prototype. Some of them strove to hasten the messiah’s advent by praying for l’Empereur to triumph against the Tsar, even if this should demand a heavy toll of suffering and bloodshed.

Rabbi Israel Hapstein, “the Preacher of Koznitz,” expounded the biblical expression “nabbol tibbol” (“Thou wilt surely wear away”) as a pun alluding to Napoleon’s collapse: “Napol[-eon] tippol.” A similar expression occurs in Esther, when Haman is advised not to antagonize Mordecai because: “thou shalt surely fall before him.”

At any rate, by the end of Tolstoy’s novel, Pierre Bezukhov has rejected the apocalyptic outlook implicit in the Masonic exegesis: “The idea that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of his name in connection with Bonaparte’s more than once vaguely presented itself. But the idea that he, L’russe Besuhof, was destined to set a limit to the power of the Beast was as yet only one of the fancies that often passed through his mind and left no trace behind.”

If we may paraphrase Einstein, Count Bezukhov had come to realize that God does not play Scrabble with history or international politics.

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• First Publication:
  • The Alberta Jewish News, Edmonton and Calgary, November 8, 2022, p. 14.

• For further reading:
  • Alfasi, Yitsḥaḳ. Bi-Sedeh ha-Ḥasidut: Meḥḳarim, Pirḳe Toladah, Havai u-Masoret. Tel-Aviv: Ariel, 1987. [Hebrew]
  • Assaf, David. Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis & Discontent in the History of Hasidism. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press, 2010.
  • Bacher, Wilhelm. Die exegetische Terminologie der jüdischen Traditionsliteratur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965.
  • Bar-Hillel, Maya, Dror Bar-Natan, Gil Kalai, and Brendan McKay. “Solving the Bible Code Puzzle.” Statistical Science 14, no. 2 (May 1999): 150–73.
  • Engels, Friedrich. “On the History of Early Christianity.” In Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 168–94. edited by Louis Feuer, [1st ed.]. Anchor Books, A185. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
  • Head, Peter. “Some Recently Published NT Papyri from Oxyrhynchus: An Overview and Preliminary Assessment.” Tyndale Bulletin 51, no. 1 (2000): 1–16.
  • Levine, Hillel. “‘Should Napoleon Be Victorious…’: Politics and Spirituality in Early Modern Jewish Messianism.” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 17 (2000): 65*-83*.
  • Lieberman, Saul. Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B. C. E.-IV Century C. E. Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, v. 18. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1950.
  • Mevorach, Baruch. Napoleon u-Tḳufato: Reshumot ve-‘Eduyyot Ivriyyot shel Benei ha-Dor. Sifriyat “Dorot.” Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1968. [Hebrew]
  • Ono, Fumio. “Chapter 15 The Tragedy of the Messianic Dialectic: Buber’s Novel Gog and Magog.” In Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy, edited by Sam Berrin Shonkoff. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018.
  • Sanders, Henry A. “The Number of the Beast in Revelation.” Journal of Biblical Literature 37, no. 1/2 (1918): 95–99.
  • Schefski, Harold K. “Tolstoi and the Jews.” The Russian Review 41, no. 1 (1982): 1–10.

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My email address is: [email protected]

Cagney, Kelly…and a Coin Clattering in a Keg

by Eliezer Segal

I recently had occasion to watch the 1941 film “Strawberry Blonde” on television. It takes place in New York during the 1890s and tells the story of scrappy young Biff (James Cagney) who is struggling to rise above his lowly economic situation, but in the meantime is distracted by the lovely but shallow Virginia (Betty Grable, the blonde of the title) who eventually ditches him. 

At that point the Cagney character becomes appreciative of the more genuine qualities of Amy (Olivia De Havilland). His conservative temperament had previously been put off by her posturing as a “free-thinker” whose mother had been a Bloomer Girl, her aunt an actress and she herself a cigarette smoker! Nevertheless Biff is now impelled to make an aggressive pass at her. Tearfully, Amy now owns up that she is really an innocent girl and her background was not really quite as scandalous as she had presented it. Mother had merely expressed admiration for the Bloomer Girls (but Father had forbidden her to act on it), Auntie’s theatrical experience had been confined to church productions, and her own cigarettes were never lit. 

To this revelation Cagney retorts: “Just as they say: ‘An empty barrel makes the most noise.’”

The film never bothers to divulge the identities of “they,” and it seems to assume that the average moviegoer will understand the point of the proverb. 

My own reaction, as someone who is familiar with Jewish traditional literature, was along the lines of “Hey, Jimmy Cagney just quoted from the Talmud!”

The passage I had in mind appears in the Babylonian Talmud in the context of an exposition of a verse from the biblical book of Proverbs: “Wisdom resteth in the heart of him that hath understanding: but that which is in the midst of fools is made known.”

By way of illustrating the contrast between wisdom that rests unobtrusively inside one’s heart and the kind which is broadcast publicly, Rav Ḥama applied the former text to a student who is the heir to a family of Torah scholars; whereas the latter speaks of a scholar who comes from an uneducated background, so that his wisdom stands out in sharp contrast to the ignorance of the rest of his family environment. 

The Talmud then introduces a comment by the sage ‘Ulla: “It is as they say: An istira in a lagin calls: kish, kish.” 

This proverb might benefit from a few explanations. The Aramaic “istira” alludes to the Greek “stater,” a widely circulated denomination of (usually) silver coinage in the ancient Mediterranean world. The “lagin” was a medium-sized ceramic or glass vessel that was often kept in the dining room, especially at formal dinners, and used to fill cups with wine after the beverage had been removed from its original storage barrel. ‘Kish kish” is the onomatopoeic sound of a coin rattling against the insides of an otherwise empty container.

As the commentators understood it, ‘Ulla’s proverb was being attached to Rav Ḥama’s distinction between pupils from scholarly and ignorant families, in order to exemplify how a scholar appears much more conspicuous against a background of uneducated kinsfolk. I prefer to attach it directly to the biblical text, which is being understood as saying that inferior intellects always make a point of actively publicizing their thoughts however banal they might be—and therefore there is an inverse proportionality between people’s boastful oratory and their actual intelligence. 

A seventeenth-century Yiddish lexicon of proverbs and folk sayings, the Mar’eh Mussar (Tzucht-Shpigl, Mirror of Morals) by Seligman Ulma-Guenzburg of Hanau, proposed some alternative ways of expressing this idea: “A half-penny coin in an empty money-box jingles much more than if it contained a thousand gold coins,” or: “At first he talks big but then does nothing—a lot of wind to no avail.”

In any case, ‘Ulla’s analogy is to of a solitary coin clattering about and making the “kish kish” noise in an otherwise empty container. If the same object had been deposited inside a purse that was packed with coins, the sound would have been muffled and inaudible. This fits quite nicely with the context of Jimmy Cagney’s line in the movie, which conveys the meaning of: “I never took your boasting seriously, since everybody knows that the louder the clatter the less basis it has in fact.”

Did the creators of “Strawberry Blonde” know the Talmudic passage? Unlikely, but not altogether unimaginable. The authors of the screenplay’s final version were the prominent team of Julius and Philip Epstein, a pair of twins who were responsible for such masterpieces as “Casablanca” “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Although the Epstein brothers were Jewish, their pre-university education took place in the New York City public school system and they do not appear to have received any substantial Jewish instruction.

If “they” (the source of Cagney’s adage) were not the rabbis of the Talmud, then who were they? The next likely suspect in such cases is often Shakespeare—and our present search there does in fact produce a positive result. In some of the plays in the bard’s historical cycle there appears a character named Ancient (or: Ensign) Pistol, one of Falstaff’s cronies and a drinking buddy of Prince Hal’s dissolute youth, who eventually enlists in the French campaign that is the subject of “Henry V.” This swaggering, sycophantic loudmouth comes across as a cowardly and opportunistic braggart who is constantly inflating his negligible accomplishments. One character says of him, “I did never know so full a voice issue from so empty a heart. But the saying is true: ‘The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.’”

A similar idea is voiced by the loyal Earl of Kent in “King Lear” when he tries without success to persuade his misguided monarch that Cordelia’s understated filial affection is more authentic than the ostentatious fawning of her elder sisters: “Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound reverbs no hollowness.”

There are a few earlier instances of proverbs that make a similar point. One of my favourites appears in an essay by Plutarch, an ancient writer whose observations often dovetail with those of his contemporary rabbis. The premise of his essay “Concerning Talkativeness” (De Garrulitate) is that garrulous talkers are usually very poor listeners and therefore miss out on much of what they should be hearing. “Consequently, while others retain what is said, in talkative persons it goes right through in a flux; then they go about like empty vessels, void of sense, but full of noise.”

Now let’s fast-forward to October 2017 when White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly, accused (inaccurately, it seems) Florida’s Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson of taking credit for something she had not done. Gen. Kelly placed her “in a long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise.” 

In a retort that puzzled even the administration’s most ardent opponents, the African-American Wilson insisted that “empty barrel” was…a racist expression! For a few days the American news media were scrambling to track down reasons why the expression or its background could by any stretch of the imagination carry racist connotations. As far as I can tell, the best they could come up with was the claim that any criticism of a black woman by a privileged white male must be stigmatized as racist and sexist.

Advocates of liberal education have often looked back nostalgically to the days when civilized society was held together by its partaking in a shared cultural and literary heritage, so that people could assume that their listeners would recognize and understand allusions to the Bible or Shakespeare (and perhaps even an occasional quote from the Talmud). Whatever the weaknesses of that shared heritage (yes, it is overwhelmingly European and male), it probably is preferable to our present situation of incoherent discourse among virtual illiterates who are thereby stunted in their abilities to communicate meaningfully.

But that’s just my own two cents. Hopefully they are not just rattling around in an empty pot.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 9, 2018, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Brand, Yehoshua. Ceramics in Talmudic Literature. Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1953. [Hebrew]
  • Epstein, Julius J., and Philip G. Epstein. The Strawberry Blonde (1941): Shooting Script. Alexandria VA: Alexander Street Press and Warner Brothers, 1941.
  • Munro, Lucy. “Speaking History Linguistic Memory and the Usable Past in the Early Modern History Play.” Huntington Library Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2013): 519–40.
  • Shmeruk, Chone. Yiddish literature in Poland: Historical Studies and Perspectives. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1981.
  • Sokoloff, Michael. A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods. Ramat-Gan and Baltimore: Bar Ilan University Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
  • Sperber, Daniel. Roman Palestine, 200-400, Money and Prices. 2nd ed. with supplement. Bar-Ilan Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Culture. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1991.
  • Steinschneider, Moritz. “Jüdisch-deutsche Literatur, nach einem handschriftlichen Katalog der Oppenheim’schen Bibliothek (in Oxford).” Serapeum 10 (1849): 9–16.
  • Yeck, Joanne L. “Epstein, Julius and Philip.” In International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, edited by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, 4th ed., Vol. 4: Writers and Production Artists:267–69. Detroit: St. James Press, 2000.
  • Zevulun, Uzza, and Yael Olnick. Function and Design in the Talmudic Period. Tel-Aviv: Haaretz Museum, 1978. [Hebrew].

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Fast or Fantasy

by Eliezer Segal

According to standard Jewish practice, the day before Purim—that is to say, the thirteenth of Adar—is observed as a fast day on which no food may be eaten from sunrise until night-time (it is customary to wait until after the Megillah is read before breaking the fast). In the prayer-books, this day is grouped together with daytime fasts that commemorate stages in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temples and the loss of Jewish sovereignty, and like them it is marked by a special Torah reading, penitential poems ( seliḥot) and other additions to the liturgy. 

And yet the status of the pre-Purim fast in the Jewish calendar is quite different from those other fasts. For one thing, it is not mentioned explicitly as a mandatory practice in the Bible. When the prophet Zechariah proclaimed that “the fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts,” he omitted any reference to a “fast of the twelfth month”—the month of Adar in which Purim occurs. 

Nor, evidently, does the fast on the thirteenth day of Adar merit any discussion in classic rabbinic texts, even though the Mishnah and Talmuds include entire tractates that are devoted to the topics of Purim, the Scroll of Esther and communal fast days. 

Well, you might contend, isn’t it amply clear that the fast’s origin is solidly rooted in the book of Esther itself. In that dramatic and suspenseful episode—when the queen prepares to risk her life by approaching King Ahasuerus unsummoned to invite him to the banquets where she will intercede on behalf of her people—she instructs Mordecai “Go, gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day. I also and my maidens will fast likewise.” Obviously this is what we are recalling when we refrain from food and drink on the day preceding Purim. 

Well, not necessarily. 

For one thing, the fasting that Esther ordained in that passage lasted for a full seventy-two hours, much more demanding than the mere twelve hours or so that make up our standard practice. Furthermore, Esther’s fast did not occur in the month of Adar—near the date that was selected by Haman’s lottery for the massacre of the Jews, and which was thereby transformed into the date of their salvation—but at the time when the plot became known and she was preparing to approach the king. Rabbinic tradition calculated that this took place eleven months before the appointed date, in the month of Nissan. In fact, the Talmud states that because of the urgency of the situation, Mordecai took the extreme step of ordaining a fast on Passover itself. In this respect as well, the familiar Fast of Esther does not fit the biblical narrative.

There are, however, additional mentions of fasting in the Book of Esther. When Haman’s decree, issued on the thirteenth of the first month (Nissan), became known to the Jews of the Persian empire, “in every province, whithersoever the king’s commandment and his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting and weeping and wailing.” No specific date is attached to these laments, but there is no reason to suppose that they took place on the thirteenth of Adar.

In fact, the thirteenth of Adar was known from Hasmonean times as “Nicanor Day,” celebrating Judah Maccabee’s victory over the Syrian general Nicanor in 161 B.C.E. The ancient “Scroll of Fasts” lists many such festive days and prohibits fasting on them, though rabbinic Judaism generally ruled that the prohibitions lapsed after the Temple’s destruction. The medieval liturgical compendium Massekhet Soferim stressed that the fast cannot be observed on the thirteenth of Adar on account of Nicanor Day, nor should it be kept earlier because of the talmudic principle that sorrowful occasions should be delayed and not advanced. 

A more influential scriptural text in this connection is found near the end of the Purim story, after the Jews prevailed against their persecutors and the annual holiday was established to express their joy and gratitude. Esther and Mordecai sent out official letters to that effect, “to confirm these days of Purim in their times appointed, according as Mordecai the Jew and Esther the queen had enjoined them, and as they had decreed for themselves and for their seed, the matters of the fastings and their cry.” Although the precise implications of the passage are not entirely clear, it seems to be saying that the people’s fasting was an important element in the story that was to be remembered in the newly instituted festival. When the verse is cited in the Talmud, at least one manuscript inserts a later addition stating that “upon this support did our rabbis rely when they stated that we fast on the thirteenth, prior to the fourteenth.”

Although an extensive discussion of the pre-Purim fast appears in versions of the earliest post-Talmudic code, the She’iltot of Rav Aḥai from the eighth century, the authenticity of the relevant passage is doubtful. The oldest reliable writings to refer explicitly to such a fast on the thirteenth of Adar stem from no earlier than the ninth century. The Ga’on Natronai ben Hilai (late ninth century) includes the “fast of Purim” in his discussion about the Torah readings for various fast days, and Saadiah Ga’on composed Seliḥot poems for the “fast of the Megillah.” The inconsistency in the terminology makes it hard to decide whether the fast is intended to commemorate the collective fasting of the Jews in their distress or the specific fast observed by Esther before her encounter with Ahasuerus.

For the most part, those medieval authorities who were seeking earlier sources for the fast found it in an unexpected place. The Mishnah describes an ancient practice, according to which the residents of small farms and rural villages, for whom it was inconvenient to travel to a large town to hear the communal reading of the Scroll of Esther, had the option of hearing it instead on the previous Monday or Thursday which were in any case the market days and the occasions when courts convened in the towns. Monday or Thursday are designated in rabbinic parlance as “ yom ha-k’neseh,” a day of gathering.

The book of Esther relates that the Jews “gathered themselves together” on the thirteenth and fourteenth of Adar. In the context of the story it is probably describing how they rallied together to do battle against their enemies. The Talmud accordingly designates those dates as “ z’man ḳehilah”—a time of assembly. Medieval rabbis combined these concepts in peculiar ways to transform them into references to the fast of Esther which must sometimes be held on the previous Thursday so as to avoid impinging on Sabbath preparations. Thus, the Babylonian authorities treated the fast not as a custom, but as a binding obligation that is rooted in the Bible itself; though most other interpreters treat only it as a popular custom. 

Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra reported that the Karaites kept the fast for three days, a claim for which there is no other source. Several texts from the Cairo Genizah attest to a practice in medieval Rabbinite communities who followed the Israeli rite, of fasting for three days during the month of Adar—on a Monday, Thursday and again on the next Monday. The texts diverge as to whether the fasts should be observed before or after Purim. 

Indeed, fasting was a popular way to express piety in those communities (it was also common to observe three days of fasting before Rosh Hashanah), and listings of occasions for fasting show up quite frequently in their liturgical texts. One of those manuscripts makes an explicit distinction between the scriptural fasts (especially the ones mentioned by Zechariah) and those that are kept “according to tradition.” The “three fasts before Purim” fall under the category of those that “the nation customarily observes.” 

Although three days of self-affliction might strike us as a bit extreme for a joyous celebration of national deliverance, a one-day fast seems like a more reasonable way for us to recall how our ancestors responded to their desperate predicament when confronted with Haman’s brutal decree. 

And anyway, you’re sure to gain back all that lost weight—and more—in tomorrow’s holiday feasting.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, February 23, 2018, p. 9.

• For further reading:
  • Brody, Robert. The Textual History of the She’iltot. New York and Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1991. [Hebrew]
  • First, Mitchell. “The Origin of Ta’anit Esther.” AJS Review 34, no. 2 (2010): 309–51.
  • Fleischer, Ezra. “Haduta—Hadutahu—Chedweta: Solving an Old Riddle.” Tarbiz 53, no. 1 (1983): 71–96. [Hebrew]
  • ———. “Seridim Nosafim mi-Ḳovṣei Tefillah Ereṣ-Yisre’eliyyim min ha-Genizah.” Kobez Al Yad 14, no. 15 [25] (2001): 1–37. [Hebrew]
  • Hilewitz, Alter. “Ta‘anit Esther.” Sinai 64 (1969): 215–42. [Hebrew]
  • Margulies, Mordecai. “Mo‘adim ve-Ṣomot Be-’Erets Yisra’el Uve-Vavel Bi-Teḳufat Ha-Ge’onim.” Areshet 1 (1944): 201–16.
  • Noam, Vered. Megilat Taʻanit: Versions, Interpretation, History with a Critical Edition. Between Bible and Mishnah: The David and Jemima Jeselsohn Library. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi Press, 2003.
  • Schwarz, Adolf. “Taanith Esther.” In Festskrift I Anledning af Professor David Simonsens 70-Aarige Fødselsdag, edited by Aron Freimann, 188–205. Copenhagen: Hertz’s Bogtrykkeri, 1923. [German]
  • Segal, Eliezer. The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary. Vol. 3: Esther Chapter 5 to End. Brown Judaic Studies 293. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994.
  • Sperber, Daniel. Minhage Yisraʼel: Meḳorot Ṿe-Toladot. Vol. 1. 8 vols. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1989. [Hebrew]
  • Tabory, Joseph. Jewish Festivals in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995. [Hebrew]

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My email address is: [email protected]

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The “Get Out of Jail Free” Card

by Eliezer Segal

For Jews, one of the most disturbing passages in the New Testament is the one in which the Jewish crowd in Jerusalem is offered a choice between two prisoners slated for execution by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. This episode is found in similar form in all four of the “Gospels” that are included in the Christian scriptures. Scholarship generally regards the Gospel according to Mark as the earliest and most credible witness to the events and as the one that is lacking many of the overtly anti-Jewish elements that crept into the other accounts; unfortunately, however, most of the problematic elements are already found in Mark’s Gospel.

This tradition speaks of a custom that allowed “the people” to select a prisoner to be released in honour of the festival, which in this context refers to Passover. At the time of Jesus’s arrest, there was another prisoner named Barabbas [i.e., bar Abba] who had been arrested for his involvement in acts of rebellion against Rome. The Jewish crowd approached Pilate asking him to pardon Barabbas in keeping with the tradition. Thereupon Pilate offered them a choice between Barabbas and “the King of the Jews,” as they mockingly dubbed Jesus of Nazareth. The people insisted that the one they wanted pardoned was indeed Barabbas, and that Jesus should be crucified. In order to placate the crowd—while acknowledging that Jesus had not committed any real crime—Pilate, with a show of reluctance and his famous washing his hands of the matter, released Barabbas and turned Jesus over for flogging and crucifixion.

The later Gospels are even more outspoken about presenting the Jewish role in a diabolical light. Mark situates Barabbas “in prison with the insurrectionists,” though he himself is not explicitly identified as one of those insurrectionists; but other traditions state more explicitly that he was a murderer. Whereas for Mark the mob is being manipulated by the leaders of the priesthood (who were especially threatened by Jesus’s disruptions of the Jerusalem Temple), later texts place the responsibility more directly on the collective shoulders of the malicious populace who are crying out together—not so much to set Barabbas free as to crucify the blameless Jesus. 

The story’s dire implications are spelled out most clearly in an alarming addition that is found only in the Gospel according to Matthew, in which Pilate’s ostensible concerns about executing the innocent Jesus are answered by “all the Jews” with the words: “His blood is on us and on our children!” That declaration has inspired innumerable pogroms over the centuries.

Anyone who attempts to reconstruct the precise details of the event will quickly be confronted with an overwhelming profusion of questions and obscurities about the supposed “Passover pardon.” Was the practice of granting pardons on special occasions a standard one in the Roman empire, or was it peculiar to Judea? Indeed, was it originally a local Jewish custom that was subsequently adopted by the occupying régime? (One tradition portrays it as Pilate’s own initiative, without reference to a prior custom.) Was the pardon invoked only on Passover, as in this instance, or on other festivals as well? Was the privilege limited, as in the New Testament account, to a choice between two specified prisoners, or did the populace get to propose their own candidates? Was Barabbas currently facing trial, or had he already been sentenced by the court—and for what crime exactly? 

For more than a century, the overwhelming approach of historical scholarship has been to dismiss the story as an utter fabrication, one that was intended to divert the blame for Jesus’s crucifixion from the Romans to the Jews, and to distance Jesus from the stigma (whether or not it was true) of being an anti-Roman insurgent, the charge for which he was ultimately crucified. 

A key factor behind this skeptical assessment of the passage’s veracity is the absence of any tangible evidence of similar practices either in Palestine or in any other province of the Roman empire. Indeed, scholars scoured the legal and narrative records of Rome, Greece, Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria and beyond in order to locate examples of rulers who released prisoners, if only temporarily, on holy days or other celebrations. Although they found some precedents for lenient bending of the laws on festive occasions, such a policy was deemed to be unthinkable for the obdurate colonial administration of rebellious Judea or the notoriously inflexible Pontius Pilate.

So if the story is not true, then how did it arise in the first place? While some have been satisfied to read it as a purely fictional outgrowth of the animosities between rabbinic Judaism and the nascent “Jesus movement,” others have proposed more elaborate theories as to its origins. A thesis that enjoyed some popularity at one time argued that the passage was actually a conflation of two versions of the same story. Since there are manuscripts in which Barabbas is endowed with a first name of “Jesus” (that is, Joshua), it was suggested that it was initially referring to the same Jesus of Nazareth—”bar abba” translates as “son of the Father”—but that later narrators mistakenly understood that there were two distinct prisoners named Jesus, and accordingly they manufactured the legend in which the Jewish mob was allowed to choose between them. An alternative explanation conjectured that the story evolved out of Pilate’s asking somebody to identify two different Jesuses who were being brought before him for trial at the same time. I find none of this particularly persuasive. 

There is in fact one rabbinic source that does refer incidentally to releases from prison on the eve of Passover. In the Mishnah this scenario is grouped together with cases of people who find themselves in situations (such as periods of mourning or ritual impurity) where they are temporarily prevented from participating in the slaughter of the Passover sacrifice, but will become eligible to eat it in the evening. Rabbi Yoḥanan in the Talmud discussed the different applications of this rule if the release is promised by a non-Jewish authority (who cannot be trusted to keep the promise) or by a Jewish court (who always uphold their commitments). It has therefore been suggested that the pre-holiday pardon was instituted by the (often unpopular) Hasmonean rulers in order to ingratiate themselves among the populace, after which it came to be regarded as a right that could even be demanded from foreign rulers. 

Now, the Mishnah is hardly an obscure text and it was long accessible to New Testament scholars. And yet the passage appears to have been systematically ignored in the discussions of the Barabbas episode until as recently as 1985. When it was eventually put on the table for consideration, the general response was to insist that it was irrelevant to the topic at hand as long as it does not explicitly speak of an official administrative policy of releasing a single prisoner. To my mind (as in the talmudic rules of evidence), this kind of indirect report carries even greater weight than explicit statements that are more likely to be consciously tailored to make a point.

It is hard to dispute the view that the verbal exchange between Pilate and the Jewish mob—with or without the part about their accepting the guilt for Jesus’s blood—is nothing more than a malicious fiction. Indeed, this would apply to any description of a large crowd—especially Jewish crowd!—conducting conversations in a unified, coherent voice (although such conversations were a beloved literary convention of ancient historians).

As to the specific matter of the “Passover pardon,” I do not find it intrinsically implausible; and methinks that the haste of so many Christian scholars to dismiss the story, and to turn a blind eye to supporting evidence, derives largely from the fact that they saw it as an embarrassment and were alarmed by the suffering it has caused to Jews over the ages. 

Whether or not this is sound historical scholarship, it is undoubtedly preferable to the older tradition of baseless vilification. As a community we can feel some gratification for being liberated from the ancient slanders that so often darkened the celebration of our festival of freedom.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, March 23, 2018, p. 14.

• For further reading:
  • Aus, Roger David. Caught in the Act, Walking on the Sea, and the Release of Barabbas Revisited. South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 157. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998.
  • Bond, Helen K. Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation. 1st pbk. ed. Monograph Series / Society for New Testament Studies 100. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Brandon, S. G. F. Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity. New York: Scribner, 1967.
  • Brown, Raymond E. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. 1st ed. The Anchor Bible Reference Library. New York: Doubleday, 1994.
  • Carter, Warren. Pontius Pilate: Portraits of a Roman Governor. Interfaces. Collegeville, Minn: Liturgical Press, 2003.
  • Chavel, Charles Ber. “The Releasing of a Prisoner on the Eve of Passover in Ancient Jerusalem.” Journal of Biblical Literature 60, no. 3 (1941): 273–78.
  • Cook, Michael J. Modern Jews Engage the New Testament: Enhancing Jewish Well-Being in a Christian Environment. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2008.
  • ———. “Where Jewish Scholars on Jesus Go Awry: Last Supper, Sanhedrin, Blasphemy, Barabbas.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 28, no. 3 (2010): 70–77.
  • Davies, Stevan L. “Who Is Called Bar Abbas.” New Testament Studies 27, no. 2 (1981): 260–62.
  • Goguel, Maurice. The Life of Jesus. New York: AMS Press, 1976.
  • Maccoby, Hyam. “Jesus and Barabbas.” New Testament Studies 16, no. 1 (1969): 55–60.
  • ———. Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance. London: Orbach and Chambers Ltd, 1973.
  • Maclean, Jennifer K. Berenson. “Barabbas, the Scapegoat Ritual, and the Development of the Passion Narrative.” Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 3 (2007): 309–34.
  • Merritt, Robert L. “Jesus Barabbas and the Paschal Pardon.” Journal of Biblical Literature 104, no. 1 (1985): 57–68.
  • Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. Twentieth anniversary ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008.
  • Nodet, Étienne. “Notes Philologiques: Barabbas, Un ‘Brigand Religieux’ (ληστής, Jn 18,40).” Revue Biblique 119, no. 2 (2012): 288–99. [French]
  • Rigg, Horace Abram. “Barabbas.” Journal of Biblical Literature 64, no. 4 (1945): 417–56.
  • Strack, Hermann Leberecht, and Paul Billerbeck. Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch. 4., Unveränderte Aufl. München: Beck, 1965. [German]
  • Winter, Paul. On the Trial of Jesus. 2d ed. Studia Judaica 1. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter, 1974.
  • Wright, Arthur M. “What Is Truth? The Complicated Characterization of Pontius Pilate in the Fourth Gospel1.” Review & Expositor 114, no. 2 (2017): 211–19.
  • Zeitlin, Solomon. “The Dates of the Birth and the Crucifixion of Jesus. The Crucifixion, a Libelous Accusation against the Jews.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 55, no. 1 (1964): 1–22.
  • ———. Who Crucified Jesus? 5th ed. New York: Bloch, 1964.

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My email address is: [email protected]

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Access Denied:

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg’s Unsuccessful Aliyyah

by Eliezer Segal

The centrality of the land of Israel finds expression in every facet of Jewish literature, practice and thought. The rabbis often encouraged Jews from the diaspora to immigrate to the holy land. For all its idealistic and patriotic advantages, however, a decision to “make aliyyah” could often be a source of friction, especially if not all members of a family were willing to take it on, or if it involved unreasonable risks or expenses.

When a husband and wife disagreed about moving to or from Israel, the law formulated in the Mishnah generally favoured the spouse who intended to dwell in the holy land.

In the thirteenth century, Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg was asked about a father who was trying to prevent his son from immigrating to Israel. The father argued that the commandment to honour one’s father and mother should take precedence over the religious virtue of dwelling in the holy land. Rabbi Meir replied that what we really have here is a case where the son had to choose between obeying God and obeying his parents—and in such instances, the Torah requires us to comply with the divine will.

In a similar vein, he issued a ruling that a husband can compel his unwilling wife to accompany him on aliyyah under threats of divorce and forfeiting the benefits of her marriage contract. In this he was following the tradition of the Jerusalem Talmud that differed from the prevalent view of the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Meir insisted that there was no negative moral or religious stigma to such coercion.

In various places in his voluminous writings he stressed the great spiritual advantages of living in the land of Israel, such as the opportunities that it provides for forgiveness of sins by virtue of the fulfilment of precepts that can only be observed on its soil. His personal practices as recorded by his disciples included a custom of kneeling toward Jerusalem every time the city was mentioned in prayers. Every night before going to bed he would recite Psalm 122 with its effusive praises of Jerusalem; and he observed several other liturgical customs derived from the ancient Israeli rite.

There were important figures at the time, especially among the German Pietist movement (Ḥasidei Ashkenaz), who saw matter differently and were were opposed to the prospect of emigration to the promised land in their generations. Their concern was fuelled by a combination of factors. They cited the talmudic passages (the same ones that are adduced today by sects like the Neturei Karta) that speak of Israel’s “oath” not to hasten the redemption by migrating en masse to the holy land; and they displayed a palpable fear that imperfect mortals could not live up to the sublime standards of purity and holiness that are demanded in the sacred precincts of Israel. 

True, the ancient religious texts were quite persistent about urging Jews to live in our homeland and not to abandon it; however, for various reasons, those exhortations were understood as not applying to the Jews of medieval Europe. A similar attitude found its way into the Tosafot commentary to the Talmud, which noted how perilous the journey could be and cited Rabbi Hayyim HaKohen’s assessment: “Currently there is no requirement to dwell in the land of Israel because there are several commandments that are applicable in the land and several punishments for transgressing them.” 

In keeping with the pattern set by such distinguished lovers of Zion as Rabbis Moses Nahmanides and Judah Halevi, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg did not confine himself to verbal or theoretical praises of the holy land. In the summer of 1286 he set forth on a personal journey. The precise details of this ill-fated venture are at times vague, and it is difficult to untangle the documented facts from pious legends spun by later authors. 

Similar historical questions surround the migration of “three hundred great rabbis” from France and England in 1211 according to a sixteenth-century chronicle. Although reliable documents verify that some prominent French sages did arrive in Jerusalem, the number is clearly an exaggeration and we are unsure as to their underlying religious motives or practical expectations. 

Rabbi Meir assembled a group of family members, including his sons and daughters and their spouses, in hope of embarking by sea from Lombardy, which would have served as a rallying point for other groups with similar objectives. This provoked a royal edict calling for confiscation of the property of Jews from five different German communities—which suggests that there were at least a hundred participants in the project.

The plan was overturned when the clandestine travelers were recognized by an apostate who reported them to the bishop of Basel, at which point they were arrested and turned over to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I. Evidently, Rabbi Meir’s group was large and influential enough that its absence would have created a tangible deficit in Rudolf’s fiscal resources. The rabbi remained incarcerated for the remainder of his life at the castle of Ensisheim in Alsace. A later tradition of questionable veracity has it that he forbade the community to pay the ransom.

There is much speculation about the motivations that fueled Rabbi Meir’s decision to migrate to Israel at that particular time. Some have tried to trace his inspiration to mystical currents; however his was not a particularly mystical personality—and in any case, as we have seen, the most influential mystical pietistic movement in his environment was quite opposed to aliyyah. 

There is perhaps a greater likelihood that the pilgrims were imbued with messianic fervor. The late thirteenth century was, after all, the final phase of the Crusades, and Jews understandably discerned eschatological significance in the way that the mighty empires of Ishmael and Esau were embroiled in a prolonged military conflict over the land of Israel. Rabbi Meir had actually remarked that the inability of any foreign nation to maintain a foothold in the holy land was a consoling proof of God’s providence over the land and its legitimate proprietors. 

But such expressions of religion-based motives do not necessarily preclude the concrete realities of politics or economics There were some very practical considerations that made this a particularly opportune time for Jews to get out of Germany and seek a better life in the holy land. Their political freedoms had suffered a serious setback when Rudolf I declared the Jews “servi camerae” [“serfs of the treasury”]. The burning of the Talmud in 1242 (for which Rabbi Meir composed a moving elegy) was a harbinger of the intense persecutions that lay in store for the Jewish religion in Europe. 

On the other hand, the impending elimination of the last Christian holdouts and the consolidation of Muslim rule in Jerusalem (Saladin had previously extended an invitation to the Jews to return to Jerusalem) would have made the holy city appear very attractive at a time when conditions in European lands were becoming increasingly inhospitable to German Jews. Thus, from a very practical perspective Rabbi Meir and his confederates might well have recognized a strategic window of opportunity to abandon Germany and set their sights for Israel. And the project might well have succeeded had it not been impeded by that unfortunate encounter with the apostate in Lombardy.

As was noted previously, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg was scrupulous to end each day with a recitation of Psalm 122, which contains such moving passages as: “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem… Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee.”

The sentiments expressed in that text can serve as a fitting statement of how the love of Zion inspired Rabbi Meir and the like-minded Jews across the generations who undertook personal sacrifices and hardships in their resolve to take up residence on the soil of their cherished homeland.

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• First Publication:
  • The Jewish Free Press, Calgary, April 13, 2018, p. 13.

• For further reading:
  • Agus, Irving Abraham. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, His Life and His Works as Sources for the Religious, Legal, and Social History of the Jews of Germany in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia: Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 1947.
  • Cuffel, Alexandra. “Call and Response: European Jewish Emigration to Egypt and Palestine in the Middle Ages.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 90, no. 1/2 (1999): 61–101. 
  • Emanuel, Simcha. “Did Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg Refuse to Be Ransomed?” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2017): 23–38.
  • Grossman, Avraham. “Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenburg and Eretz Israel.” Cathedra for the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv 84 (1997): 63–84. [Hebrew]
  • ———. The Early Sages of Ashkenaz: Their Lives, Leadership and Works (900-1096). Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981. [Hebrew]
  • ———. “Ziqatah shel Yahudut Ashkenaz ha-Qadmonah ’el ‘Erets-Yisra’el;” Shalem 3 (1976): 57–92. [Hebrew] 
  • Henkin, Eitam. “‘Iyyun Meḥuddash be-Farashat Ma’asaro shel MahaRa”M me-Rotenburg.” Yerushateinu 5 (2011): 311–18. [Hebrew]
  • Prawer, Joshua. The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1988.
  • Kanarfogel, Ephraim. “The ’Aliyah of ‘Three Hundred Rabbis’ in 1211: Tosafist Attitudes Toward Settling in the Land of Israel.” Jewish Quarterly Review 76, no. 3 (1986): 191–215.
  • Lieberman, Saul. Tosefta Ki-Feshuṭah. Vol. 6. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1973.
  • Ta-Shma, Israel M. “‘Inyane Ereş Yisra’el.” Shalem 1 (1976): 81–91. [Hebrew]
  • Urbach, Efraim Elimelech. The Tosaphists: Their History, Writings and Methods. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1955.
  • Yaari, Abraham, ed. Letters from the Land of Israel. Ramat Gan: Masadah, 1971. [Hebrew]

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My email address is: [email protected]

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