Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.   

 

Voyaging Into Jewish History

 

Previously, I explored Haredi education through an Abie Rotenberg song. I would like to continue to use Abie Rotenberg to better understand Jewish thought. The song "Journey at Sea" from the album Journeys Five stands as a useful introduction to a traditional view of Jewish History. To be clear, by history here, what I mean is not so much the particular facts about the past but the narrative framework in which we place those facts. Admittedly, part of the song's charm is that it never explicitly says anything about Judaism. If I had heard this song on a Celtic album I would have simply thought that this was a solid song. What follows is my interpretation. You have the ship of Judaism crewed by the faithful and led by wise captain rabbis. It sails on the Sea of Galus (exile). The goal is at some point to reach the port of messianic redemption, but that is of little day-to-day relevance when compared to living as a religious Jew. The challenge of sailing on the Sea of Galus is that inevitably you are going to run into storms that threaten to destroy Judaism either through physical violence or through assimilation. 

It should be noted that the captain and the crew are fundamentally passive figures as events play themselves out. They have absorbed enough of Jewish History to recognize that storms are on the horizon and take measures, presumably the strengthening of Jewish practice, to give themselves a chance of getting through the storm with the ship intact. That being said, no one on the ship ever tries to stop storms from happening. Such actions are presumed to be beyond their power and, therefore foolhardy to pursue. All that is left is to recognize that they have limited power and seek to act only within their means. 

This view of Jewish History has not been limited to Orthodox writers. For example, Heinrich Graetz's Jewish History is famously an exercise in a lachrymose narrative in which Jews suffer and think. There is a reason why Rabbi Berel Wein was able to so easily take Graetz and give him a more religious spin. Graetz's basic narrative remained a fundamentally traditional one in which Judaism managed to survive outside threats even as, for Graetz, Judaism meant something slightly different from Orthodox writers, mainly nothing involving Kabbalah or Hasidism.    

An essential point to understand about political Zionism (whether secular or religious) is that it rejected our traditional model of Jewish History. One thinks of the example of Benzion Netanyahu's biography of Isaac Abarbanel. Netanyahu could never forgive Abarbanel for having been caught by surprise by 1492 and for having no real solution to the problem of expulsion beyond apocalypticism. If Jews had a state of their own, then Jews would not have had to ask themselves the question of what are they to do if they were faced with expulsion or pogroms as Jews living in a Jewish State would not be under the power of gentiles. Similarly, at a spiritual level, Jews would not have had to worry about making themselves acceptable to gentiles and refashioning Judaism to suit gentile tastes. Instead, Jews could have focused on the development of a genuinely Jewish culture. From this perspective, traditional Jewish History, with its emphasis on bracing to be hit in the hope of being able to stand back up again, was a colossal mistake that needed to be fixed.     

It should be appreciated that the State of Israel was founded in 1948 at a time when the traditional model of Jewish History seemed to have reached a dead end. This was in the wake of the Holocaust when a modern state like Germany decided to invest its full efforts in murdering all Jews under its control. Furthermore, neither the United States and certainly not the Soviet Union could stand as plausible candidates for flourishing Jewish life, particularly when being Jewish now meant facing the possibility of something like the Holocaust. Under such circumstances, it seemed unlikely that Judaism could survive without a Jewish State that would physically protect Jews and offer them a space to be productive citizens without abandoning their Jewish identity. In judging the State of Israel over the past seventy-five years, it is a fair question to consider to what extent it has offered a legitimate alternative to traditional Jewish History.

In understanding the traditional narrative of Jewish History, it is useful to also pay attention to the song's chorus: "It's our life a journey at sea, a voyage of fate and destiny." What has allowed Jews to even try to survive as Jews has been a belief that there really was no other way of life available to them. To be a religious Jew has meant believing that God has a literal plan for history that requires Jewish survival so he will not allow the Jewish people to disappear. If you are a Jew, you will always be a Jew and God, often acting through gentiles, will never allow you to escape your Judaism no matter how hard you try. Even for those Jews who formally reject such theology, the basic model of seeing the world can be hard to shake.   

 

Jewish Capitalism and Religious Liberty

 I would like to follow up on my previous post and consider the implications of what I wrote for Judaism. Does not Judaism have its own tradition of religious liberty, independent of Protestantism? For an explanation, let me turn to the example of Max Weber and Capitalism.

Much as I argued that Protestantism is a crucial ingredient for religious liberty, Weber famously argued that Protestantism played a critical role in the development of Capitalism. For Weber, Protestantism allowed for a “worldly asceticism.” Traditionally societies had operated on the assumption that labor was a curse. Most people were fated to be peasants with only a few having the opportunity to be aristocrats leading lives of leisure. The implication of this was that one worked only as hard as one needed to with the goal of having as much leisure as possible. If you managed to get some money, you should stop working.

In the Protestant model, work became the natural state of affairs for human beings. As such, even rich people, in no danger of starvation, should work. If you managed to get ahold of some money, you should not take an extended vacation. You should not even donate the money to support the Church. Instead, you should invest that money back into your business as capital. Instead of being saved through good works like charity, you are saved by being one of the Elect. A possible sign of being one of the Elect is that God causes you to be successful in business. From this perspective, being a capitalist is not contrary to the Protestant faith. On the contrary, capitalism is the logical fulfillment of Protestantism.

To be clear, Weber recognized that people engaged in capitalist-type behavior long before Protestantism. What Weber was arguing was that Protestantism created an ethical revolution where trade was seen as a principled moral good. Think of it this way, the medieval Church accepted prostitution as a necessary evil. This did not mean that being a prostitute was ok. On the contrary, being a prostitute was something that someone was ashamed of and only did for as long as it was absolutely necessary before trying to get out. Similarly, one was not proud to be a merchant and engage in something as “sterile” as trade. Instead, one made some money from trade before retiring and trying to “atone” for having resorted to such base activity.

In regards to Jews, Weber argued that they were “emergency” capitalists. There is nothing inherently capitalist about Judaism. Ancient Jews were not particularly involved in trade. It was only circumstances in Christian Europe, not anything within Judaism, that caused Jews to develop a capitalist element. Medieval Jews were cut out of most professions, so they turned to money lending. As such, Weber did not believe that Jews provided a model of principled capitalism to say that being a capitalist was a positive good.

In response to Weber, I would argue that it is possible for principles to evolve out of pragmatic necessity. For example, Isaac Abarbanel, living right before the Protestant Reformation, rejected the Aristotelian claim that money was sterile and therefore argued that usury was a positive good. Clearly, Abarbanel did not come to this position from an “objective” reading of the Hebrew Bible. This may have been self-interest, but that should not matter. Abarbanel, presumably, honestly believed that money-lending Jews like himself were morally superior to the Christian nobility responsible for the expulsion of 1492. If claiming that Jews were morally superior to Christians required one to believe that capitalism was a positive good, then we can add capitalism as the fourteenth principle of the Jewish faith.

To be clear, Jews never were in a position to bring about a capitalist ethical revolution by themselves. It is not as if, capitalism ever became acceptable just because the Jews did it. Furthermore, the Jewish experience with capitalism remained linked to their place within Christian society.

Much as Protestantism created the grounds not simply to engage in capitalism as a practical necessity, but as a matter of principle, Protestantism helped lay the groundwork for a principled support for religious liberty. This should be distinguished from a pragmatic tolerance where you refrain from murdering members of another faith because you fear they will murder you back. I would see the Jewish tradition of religious liberty, much like the Jewish tradition of capitalism, as being rooted in the Jewish experience as a persecuted minority. It can be argued that the fact that Jews have needed to support religious tolerance for pragmatic reasons, does not preclude the development of a principled belief in religious liberty that it is better for people to persist in their freely believed error rather than be coerced into the truth. An example of this can be seen in the Jewish disdain for missionary activity. Jews in the ancient world tried to convert non-Jews. During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Christian authorities did not allow Jews to try to convert Muslims and Christians. Today, Jews do not try to convert non-Jews and have even developed theological reasons to justify not trying to “save the souls” of non-Jews.

This does not change the fact that Jewish support for religious liberty came out of a distinct experience with non-Jewish cultures. If you are going to have Jews who support religious liberty on principle rather than as a simple matter of deeming non-Jews as beneath even missionary activity, then it will require someone with positive interactions with non-Jewish religions. An obvious candidate would be some kind of Philo-Semitic Protestantism that acknowledges some legitimacy to the Jewish experience.    

Abarbanel on Bilaam's Theology

Here is a short piece from Isaac Abarbanel biblical commentary demonstrating his often oddly naturalistic interpretation of texts. He attempts to strip Bilaam of any magical power to curse while preserving a supernatural deity capable of interacting with the world.

It is said that Bilaam’s thought in going was that the [divine] influence only extended to the celestial order. It might come about that God May He Be Blessed will bless the Israelite nation and give them good blessings with his guidance. This does not prevent, according to what the stars show, much suffering, evils, plagues and the execution of judgments. [He assumed that] matters of [divine] influence worked the same. Because of this, he chose, in following his calculations based on his knowledge of the future things that would happen to Israel based on the celestial order, either destruction or exile from one of many times. He wished to inform Balak about these things in order to fulfill his request so that he would pay him. Because his intentions in this matter were bad, God became angry that he went and placed an angel of God on the path. This angel was not able to kill Bilaam as did the angel of God that smote the camp of the king of Assyria. Bilaam did not deserve to die as he went according to the word of God and his permission. Furthermore, he [God] did not wish to prevent him from going for, as I previously explained, God wished for the sake of his righteousness that Bilaam go and bless Israel and publicize among the gentiles God’s love for his people and their future success that will come to them. Because of this, all the prophecies that he sought to tell over among the nations that were to be prophecies of loss, he did not remember. Not exile, not the destruction that will come upon Israel. For God hid it from him and he could not tell it over for the reason I recalled. But the angel of God went forth to oppose him on the path, meaning to remove from Bilaam the thought that he wished to tell the future evils that will befall Israel and to inform Bilaam that it was not in his power to speak, but a matter of God’s will. For God planted the tongue and gave a mouth to man. For behold, his mouth and tongue was no different than the mouth of his donkey that spoke through wondrous means, which was not in its nature to do. This furthermore served to tell him that the celestial order cannot not be spread nor be maintained except through that which does not contradict the higher influence. But in that which influences there is no power in the [natural] order to nullify the influence or challenge it. For God’s plan will stand no matter what. (Abarbanel, Commentary on Numbers 118a.)    

 

This piece exemplifies both Abarbanel’s general naturalistic scheme and hints at the role played by apocalypticism within it. As a medieval rationalist, Abarbanel’s universe was a distinctly non-magical one with set immutable laws of nature. Human beings like Bilaam have no actual power. As such he is unable, through his own efforts, to actually cause bad things to happen. While this natural order protects people from the likes of Bilaam, it leaves man in a bleak position of utter helplessness against these very laws, which seem indifferent to human welfare. Since man is totally at the mercy of nature and cannot improve his situation, the only meaningful thing for him to do is gain knowledge about the world. Paradoxically, knowledge both liberates man from his state of ignorance, while at the same time trapping him with the awareness of his total helplessness. Bilaam is dangerous in that he is enlightened enough to appreciate his helplessness, but he finds no meaning in this universe beyond using his knowledge for his own material benefit.

The one ray of hope, in what is admittedly a very depressing worldview, is that God exists as the prime mover of the universe. Even this is not immediately a cause for optimism. God is outside of nature, but his working through nature radically limits him by making it as if he were an extension of nature. This is not a God, who can be relied upon to step outside of nature to prevent evil and provide only good. Bilaam knows this and therefore comes to the conclusion that eventually nature, in the form of historical entropy, will catch up with the Israelites. The last joke though is on Bilaam. God may operate the world according to nature, but he is outside of nature and he directs it for a purpose. This purpose is redemption, an act that is both within nature and the divine transcendence of it. As a rationalist, Abarbanel rejected magical solutions that were not rooted in the order of nature. His apocalypticism was thus rooted in this natural order. The same natural laws of history that brought Israel down will also sustain Israel in exile and allow for their return to power. While this remains a natural process, it is ultimately made possible through the divine influence at the root of the natural order.    

My Dissertation's Journey (Part I)

As readers know, I am still in the process of writing my doctoral dissertation in history. It has taken me a few years and I am not yet done. As it stands now, while I possess a flesh and blood dissertation and more, that only needs to be edited, there is a strong possibility that I will have to make major changes, which can set me back months or even longer. Thus, I thought to take the opportunity to fill readers in on the situation and how I got there.

When I started my doctoral work at Ohio State, back in the fall of 2006, I wanted to write a dissertation on Isaac Abarbanel, focusing on either his messianic thought or his relationship to Maimonides. My advisor Dr. Goldish turned this idea down. He did not feel qualified to supervise something on Abarbanel. More importantly, he felt that my job prospects would fare better if I did not simply write something narrowly on Jewish thought, but instead addressed a larger narrative issue that would be of interest to people outside of Jewish Studies.

My next major idea was to write on the theme of vengeance against Christians in Jewish messianic thought. This was inspired by comments by Abarbanel, expressing his very un-politically correct hopes for the destruction of Christendom in the wake of the expulsion of 1492. I figured that writing about Jews thinking in ways that Christians often accused them of doing would be fun and controversial. This line of thinking led me to write an essay on the sixteenth-century adventurer David Reubeni, who claimed to come from the Ten Lost Tribes, and his interest in guns.

The next turn was influenced by a Koran class I took with the remarkable scholar Dr. Georges Tamer. On wrote a paper on Islamic Mahdism focusing particularly on the case of the Shi'i Fatimid dynasty, which seized power in North Africa in the early tenth century. What caught my attention was the fact that we are dealing with an apocalyptic movement that managed to evolve into a political one, once it seized power. I wondered if Maimonides', who took the apocalyptic element out of his messianism, was influenced by this line of thinking. Combined with my reading of Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium, which discusses medieval Christian apocalyptic movements in political terms, I became interested in messianism as a form of Jewish politics. This was to be in contrast to Gershom Scholem's categorizing of messianism as a retreat from politics.

I started to seriously work on the dissertation at the beginning of 2009 after completing my general exams. Using the essays on Reubeni and the Fatimids as well as a more extensive piece placing Abarbanel's messianism within the context of the Christian apocalyptic tradition as exemplified by Joachim of Fiore, I was planning on making my case that Jewish messianism was political largely by placing it within the context of various non-Jewish movements. The chapters would go as follows: Abu Isa's and David Alroy's use of armed force under charismatic leadership as influenced by early Shi'ism, Maimonides' rejection of apocalypticism as influenced by the Fatimids, Abarbanel's use of contemporary history as influenced by Joachim of Fiore, David Reubeni's use of guns as a symbol of state power, Sabbatai Sevi's use of early modern communication networks and Jacob Frank's use of brute force. This idea was grand, bold and completely impractical.

Conference Presentations and Why I Now Hate Megabus

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me. I flew out to Grand Rapids, MI for a symposium on religion and politics at Calvin College. I spoke at this symposium two years ago on the topic of apocalypticism in Joachim of Fiore and Isaac Abarbanel. Back when I was more productive on this blog and less so on my actual dissertation, this was going to be a chapter for the dissertation. Since my dissertation writing has become more productive, it has changed its emphasis and so Fiore and Abarbanel will need to wait for a future book. This time I spoke about Max Weber and his influence on my understanding of religion. As a Jew and as a medieval historian I was certainly the odd man out at the symposium. I must say that the people there were once again very kind to me and did there best to try to make me feel right at home.

After the symposium, I took a Megabus to Pittsburgh (which unfortunately went through that den of iniquity known as Ann Arbor) to visit my Nadoff relatives. From Pittsburgh, I took another Megabus to Washington D.C. I got to spend several days with my parents, siblings and my very cute new nephew Boaz. (He was very sneaky managing to get himself born hours after my wife and I needed to fly back to Los Angeles this past January.) This past Thursday, I was supposed to take a Megabus from D.C. to Pittsburgh before transferring to Greyhound for the last leg of my trip to Columbus, OH. After having purchased my ticket weeks in advance, I showed up at the stop only to be informed that the bus had been canceled. I had to quickly run over to Greyhound and buy a ticket to keep all of my plans in line. Now the nerve of Megabus. It is one thing for there to be delays. It is something completely different to point blank decide not to run a scheduled bus line, not tell paying costumers and leave them stranded. Megabus refunded the $1.50 I paid for the fare. This is beside the point and an insult. The $1 fares are door busters meant to serve as a means of advertising and are covered by the majority of times one ends up paying a higher fare. I won a raffle for agreeing to trust Megabus enough to set my plans around them weeks in advance. They violated that trust and broke their contract. At the very least they should cover the $50 for the Greyhound ticket and maybe even throw in some vouchers for future tickets.  

When all is said and done, I got into Columbus on Friday morning. I spoke to the middle school and high school at the Haugland Learning Center, a school for children on the autism spectrum, about college and dating. In terms of college, I emphasized the great reward in store in being able to focus on a particular interest, but that this reward must be earned through the personal discipline of being responsible for one's own work and, by extension, one's own life. In terms of dating, I used a little Nassim Nicholas Taleb to argue that dating is a form of high-risk investment in which most attempts fail. This means that, on the one hand, they should expect most relationships to fail and recognize that there is nothing they can do about it. The positive side of this is the knowledge that failure in these circumstances is not really failure, because they are not the cause of their failure. At the end of the day, a long string of failures with one success at the end means that the entire endeavor, including the failures, was a success.

The Sabbath was spent walking many miles and socializing with old friends (both of which are marks of my wife's corrupting influence on me). Sunday was The Ohio State Graduation and President Obama spoke. While the president encouraged young impressionable college students to forsake the peaceful social cooperation of working in the private sector to join him in a life of crime in government, I was a few blocks away at Hillel speaking about Maimonides for a graduate Jewish Studies colloquium. Even while he attempted to sneak in philosophical ideas, I like to think that Maimonides' attitude toward community was more honest than Obama's. As with Abarbanel, the Maimonides material is also not going into my dissertation, but will hopefully make its way into a future book.

I am flying back to California today. I miss the weather, my kitty and my wife.          

Speaking at a Chabad House (About Messianism No Less)

In South Pasadena, where Miriam and I are living, there is not much in the way of Orthodox life. We have a Chabad house 3.5 miles away where we pray. It is a small, but very diverse group of people. They have been very good to Miriam in the past and are now very accepting of me. I am happy to be part of this family. While most of the people there became religious through Chabad, as with most Chabad places, beyond the two Chabad rabbis and their families it is not a Chabad community.

A few weeks ago someone put forth the idea to me that, as a Jewish historian, I should give a class on Jewish history possibly on what I am writing about. I am an academic historian, writing about messianism; how many sentences do you think it is going to take before the rabbi pulls the plug on me? Somehow this person managed to convince me to go for it and, even more surprisingly, convinced the rabbi to give me a platform. So this past Sabbath, I gave an "Introduction to Jewish Messianism." I guess the biggest shocker was that over twenty people stuck around in the afternoon to listen to me. It was the sort of lecture that I like giving. It went on for about an hour before tapering off into an informal question and answer session. I took a number of questions while I was speaking, which sent me off on lots of side tangents. The problem with this is that it sometimes makes me difficult to follow. I try to balance this with a sense of humor. If people have no idea what I am talking about they should at least think it is funny, whatever it is I am actually talking about. Well apparently everybody liked my presentation so it looks like we may do this again, perhaps make it a monthly event.

Believe it or not, I do have a plan as to how to keep myself from being too offensive. Keep everything theoretical. I am simply reporting on what is going on in my field. Phrase things in questions. I am simply explaining some of the major debates going on and offering points for consideration. Above all else, I should avoid talking about Chabad messianism. As a historian, I should have no problem keeping things in the eighteenth century or beforehand.

Ok, so I did talk about Chabad messianism. I raised the question of calamity based messianism; do messianic movements come about in response to major physical disasters? Isaac Abarbanel writing three books on messianism several years after the expulsion of 1492 and as the Jews of Portugal were being forcibly baptized sounds like calamity messianism. Jews in Poland responding to the Cossack attacks of 1648 by embracing Sabbatai Sevi in 1666 might be calamity messianism. (Of course, that would still not explain why Jews everywhere else did too.) Why did Chabad in the 1980s and 90s turn messianic? What great physical threat did Lubavitchers living in the United States at the end of the twentieth-century face? If you are going to say that this was in response to the Holocaust then why did the Lubavitcher Rebbe not come out in the 1950s with his "bring Moshiach" campaign? (The previous Rebbe, in the 1940s, started a messianic campaign, but it faded away for several decades.)

So no trouble yet. One of the attendees has asked me if, for my next lecture, I could talk about traditional Jewish claims that there will be no Messiah or that all messianic prophecies were already fulfilled with King Hezekiah and the Second Temple. What could possibly go wrong with this?         

At the Calvin College Symposium on Religion and Politics

I am writing to all my readers from Grand Rapids MI (my first overnight stay in the "State up North") where I am attending a symposium on religion and politics hosted by Calvin College's Paul B. Henry Institute. So to get some random thoughts in before Shabbos:

I got a ride up to the conference with another Ohio State student. I can't think of many other times where I talked to someone for nearly five hours straight, the entire car trip. He played Carl Reiner to my libertarian historian Mel Brooks. This was the perfect sort of conversation for me. I got to talk about the things that interest me such as the historical method and libertarianism and challenged by an intelligent person who disagrees with me and asks good questions leading to a conversation that I had not previously worked through every move for both sides in my head. Not that I mind questioning other people. The only problem is that I tend to turn more inquisitorial than most people would like. Not that it is personal; on the contrary, I do not care about people's lives, but only their views of life and whether they are coherent and consistent. Though failure to do so is something I take personally.

I gave a presentation this morning of a draft of my dissertation chapter on Joachim of Fiore and Isaac Abarbanel. Where else but a Protestant institution should a Jew go to talk about Catholics (as well as Jews)? I was the odd man out in my discussion panel in that I was not talking about Thomas Hobbes. (Who could resist at an institution named Calvin?) In general, this has been a very political science conference so it was probably the perfect place to announce to political science people that the study of political history is a political act in that it makes politics relevant and so historians like me are needed to make their academic lives meaningful. Then again perhaps my work will convince some of these political science people to not despair that even though the apocalypse might come, ushering in the end of earthly politics, their studies might still yet not have been in vain. 

At one of the sessions, there were two presentations that were open Christian apologetics. The first argued against non-theistic understandings of the moral imperative to obey authority figures. The second was a defense of Jonathan Edwards' understanding of Original Sin. Edwards argued that if every being was born independently and untainted by Original Sin then every person would be the equivalent of the prelapsarian Adam. Adam as an innocent being in total communion with God was incapable of having any knowledge of sin and evil. Because of this he could not identify evil and resist it. This leads to a cosmology of consistent decay where every person falls from grace when confronted with sin just like Adam. In the Edwardian cosmology, everyone is corrupt from the beginning, but we can then take a more upwards view of things as people at least try to improve themselves. 

This was my first conference hosted by a religious institution so maybe it should have been expected. As a historian, though, I take for granted the fact that my job is to describe "who," "what," "when," "where" and "why," but not "should." I write about messianism, but there is nothing in what I do that can suggest one way or another whether a messiah might be coming or when. My Carl Reiner friend pointed out that coming from a political science perspective there may not be such a simple bifurcation. That is an interesting point; does political science force one out of the neutrality of mere description and into actual advocacy?   

Have a good Shabbos everyone.   

Ayn Rand's Latin

The Economist is in middle of hosting a debate between Lera Boroditsky and Mark Liberman over the role of language in shaping ideas. I have become interested in this issue recently from reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker, as a supporter of evolutionary psychology, argues that genes are the primary arbitrator of how people think and polemicizes against those, particularly on the left, who accept it as a matter of faith that society at large, even with its power over language, truly affects people. As with Pinker's arguments against the blank slate model of  the mind, the debate about the role of language seems to be one of defining your terms. No one is really about to say that language is irrelevant for discussions about ideas and no one is about to say that language form an unbreakable chain, fating all speakers of given language to certain modes of thought.

In the opening round Liberman, in the role of the opposition, attacks the popular belief that certain languages "lack a word for x." Interestingly enough, he takes a swipe at Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. In the novel Rand has a character claim that only Americans have a word for "making money." Liberman retortes:

But this cute theory runs aground on the shoals of fact. If we look up pecunia in Lewis and Short's Latin dictionary, we find the gloss "property, riches, wealth", and a reference to Cicero's use of the phrase "pecuniam facere", which deploys pecunia as the object of the verb facere (to make).


To be fair to Rand, there was an important shift in the early modern period regarding money, which rejected Aristotle's belief that money was something "barren." This belief was the foundation of the Church's opposition to lending money. Even in ancient times people recognized that wealth such as cattle, (the origins of the Latin word "pecunia") could be created by human hands. It was only in modern times, though, that the view of currency changed from something static to dynamic. Of course this still goes back before the United States. I guess Isaac Abarbanel was being an "American" when he defended interest lending, contrary to the Church and Aristotle, with the argument that "money could grow" by being lent out for productive uses.

Isaac Abarbanel Complete with Yarmulke and Full White Beard

Believe it or not, the following passage does not come from a Haredi publication. It comes from James Reston Jr.'s Dogs of God: Columbus the Inquisition and the Defeat of the Moors.

"In King Alfonso's court, Don Isaac [Abravanel] was a popular figure, for he was urbane and voluble. He cut a striking figure: round moonface, piercing eyes, sharply defined nose, high forehead crowned with a yarmulke, and full white beard that covered his expansive chest."


The picture we have of Abarbanel is from after his lifetime. Head coverings were not ubiquitous in traditional Jewish circles until modern times even among Ashkenazic Jews, let alone Sephardim who even today do not insist upon it. So it is highly questionable if Abarbanel wore one around the Portuguese court. Furthermore in the 1470s, when Abarbanel was at the court of Alfonso V of Portugal, he was in his thirties. When Alfonso V died in 1481 Abarbanel would have been about 44. One thing about Abarbanel that we can say with confidence, barring him suffering from premature graying, he did not have a full white beard while in Portugal. Perhaps he grew one at the end of his life in Venice.

Making Religion Asperger Friendly (More Texts, More Rituals and More Opportunities to be Sociable Without Having to Actually Talk to People)

There is a running debate as to the relationship between Asperger syndrome and atheism. Are Aspergers more likely than the general population to be atheists and if so why? (See John Elder Robison and James Pate) I certainly know a number of Asperger atheists and anecdotal experience indicates that people on the spectrum are more secular than the general population. I think it has less to do with religion or no religion than it does about what type of religion. The Asperger mind is not socially based like that of most people, but is more rule-based. One does not relate to people, but to abstract ideas and concepts. This creates a problem in that, not surprisingly, most religions were designed and evolved from a neurotypical perspective and to suit neurotypical needs. Particularly, they rely on social relationships as a means of forming and maintaining themselves. For the purposes of this post I will limit myself to the case of Orthodox Judaism and my own personal experience with it; I would be interested in hearing from those with practical experience with other religions as to what extent what I say here is relevant.

Judaism, as a minority and often persecuted religion, evolved a strong sense of its own vulnerability and of the need to take active measures to pass itself on to the next generation and keep its youth in the fold. What many of these methods have in common are that they rely on creating attachments to other people and, as such, are distinctively ill suited for dealing with Aspergers. Thinking in terms of my own personal experience growing up, it was no good to tell me that I was part of a link in a chain of tradition [mesorah] connecting me to my parents and grandparents and ultimately to the Exodus and the Revelation at Mount Sinai. Regardless of what I might think of the historicity of these claims, the very concept of being attached to other people was foreign to me. (As a historian let me add that the notion that you could have a tradition connecting one generation to the next to the extent that one can draw straight lines and use equal signs is an absurdity.) I was never very good at forming an attachment to a rabbi to learn from. I never found praying as part of a quorum to be spiritually uplifting. The threat of what the people around me were going to think was not going to keep me in line; I was usually blissfully unaware of what other people were thinking.

Orthodox Judaism, though, does have certain features that did speak to me; these have played a major role in keeping me within that orbit. Texts play a major role in Orthodox Judaism and, while I might not relate well to people, I do relate to texts. I might not have taken well to Talmud and being in an environment that forced me to study the subject nearly did me in. I did, though, develop an attachment to the Bible and the commentary of Isaac Abarbanel; reading him for hours on end was certainly a spiritually edifying endeavor. Something should also be said about the role of ritual; Judaism offers things for me to do every day to structure my life. If I were a Christian I do not know how I would deal with my "getting right with God;" am I a good Christian, living up to the Sermon on the Mount? As I Jew, I can wash my hands in the morning, pray, eat kosher food and believe that I am at least on the right track to forming a relationship with God. (One of the ironies of Christianity is that, while it claimed to replace the unfulfillable demands of an Old Testament deity, it is the religion that is truly unfulfillable.)

I would like to end with something that occurred to me over the previous days of Rosh Hashanah, which may sound somewhat counter-intuitive. Being stuck in a room for six hours, two straight days, reciting texts is enough to get anyone to start asking some serious questions about what he is doing and why he is doing it. My father once pointed out to me that Jewish prayer is not very interactive and, if you are an outsider experiencing it for the first time, it can prove quite boring. Most of it consists of people reciting things under their breath and a cantor to pace everyone. Ironically enough, this actually works very well for me because it allows me to be "sociable," for hours on end even, on my terms, without actually having to talk to another human being. I get to read, meditate and think about the things that I like to think about and that I normally do by myself in my room. Now, since I am doing all of this, not in my private bedroom but in a room full of other people, what was something that might have invited reprimands for being anti-social, becomes the exact opposite. Now that I have been such a good sociable person for hours on end no one should be able to deny that I have earned the right to turn back into myself to my heart's content for a few days.

This is one Asperger Jew's take on thing.

St. Augustine Teaches Rabbi Aharon Feldman Authentic Jewish History

I recently decided to spend part of the morning reading through Rabbi Aharon Feldman's The Eye of the Storm: A Calm View of Raging Issues, so brilliantly skewered by Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. Part of the book deals with messianism so I had a good excuse. (It is sort of relevant to my dissertation so it counts as work.) Central to Rabbi Feldman's claims is that he offers a Judaism untainted by outside values; he is a believer in "authentic Judaism," so to speak. As such, I believe it is of interest to closely examine some of Rabbi Feldman's "authentic" Jewish beliefs.


In his discussion about messianism, Rabbi Feldman offers the following model of history:


The struggle of human history is the struggle over whether the glory of God or the glory of man will reign supreme. It is the struggle which began when the first man sinned. Adam Ha-Rishon was given the choice between serving God and making his own self "like God, who knows how to choose between good and evil." The choice which faced the first man was: Shall he worship God or shall he worship himself?

It is the struggle which took place between Yaakov and his brother Esav. Yaakov was "a man who sat in the tents [of Torah]," while Esav chose to sell his privilege of serving God in the Beis Hamikdash (the Holy Temple) for a pot of lentils.

The same struggle was replayed was replayed in the wars between Rome and the Jewish people, which ended with the destruction of the Temple. Rome, who the Sages tell us were the descendents of Esav, saw Jerusalem as the antithesis of their world-view. To Rome, man was meant to conquer lands, develop commerce, build highways – in short, to glorify man and his power. For the Jew, man was meant to subordinate his appetites and his passion for conquest to the will of God. With their diametrically divergent world-views, the Romans and the Jews could not inhabit the same world: … "when one stands upright, the other most fall." (Pg. 168-69.)

Now for someone so concerned with offering authentic Jewish beliefs, Rabbi Feldman offers little in the way of sources for this idea so it is up to us to consider where such an understanding of history could come from.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in his Lonely Man of Faith, famously talked about the struggle between two types of Adam. Adam One is the man of this world who seeks to conquer it; Adam Two is the spiritual man alone in this world, seeking a relationship with God. Rabbi Soloveitchik was attempting to grant some legitimacy to the pursuit of the glory of man in the hope that the two Adams could be reconciled. So we could rest assured that Rabbi Feldman was not influenced by Rabbi Soloveitchik; if anything he is responding to and denouncing such Modern Orthodox views.


The real source for Rabbi Feldman's model of history was that great authentic Jewish thinker, St. Augustine of Hippo. According to Augustine:

… two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, You are my glory, and the lifter up of mine head. In the one, the princes and the nations it subdues are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love, the latter obeying, while the former take thought for all. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the persons of its rulers; the other says to its God, I will love You, O Lord, my strength. And therefore the wise men of the one city, living according to man, have sought for profit to their own bodies or souls, or both, and those who have known God glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,— that is, glorying in their own wisdom, and being possessed by pride—they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. For they were either leaders or followers of the people in adoring images, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. (Romans 1:21-25) But in the other city there is no human wisdom, but only godliness, which offers due worship to the true God, and looks for its reward in the society of the saints, of holy angels as well as holy men, that God may be all in all. (1 Corinthians 15:28) (City of God Book XIV Chap. 28)

Thus Rabbi Feldman's understanding of history is about as Jewish as the Incarnation, Trinity, or, dare I say it, women's prayer groups. To be fair to Augustine, his view of the earthly city, as exemplified by the Roman Empire, was more nuanced than he is generally given credit for, much closer to Rabbi Soloveitchik's Adam One. I am interested in how Augustinian ideas of history entered Jewish thought. We see an example of this in the apocalypticism of Rabbi Abraham bar Hiyya, in the early twelfth century, and Isaac Abarbanel, in the fifteenth century, certainly read Augustine. If anyone knows anything about the issue please feel free to comment.

The Politics of Jewish Messianism (My Proposed Dissertation Thesis)

Gershom Scholem famously distinguished between two types of Messianism, a restorative Messianism that sought to reestablish the biblical Jewish State and a utopian apocalyptic Messianism that sought the end of the physical political world as we know it. (See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History pg. 72.) Scholem and most students of Jewish Messianism have tended to focus on the latter type of Messianism. I would like to deal with the former kind.

On the surface, Jewish Messianism has very little to do with politics. In fact, it can be seen as a counter politics. Politics deals with earthly power as it relates to a State of this world. Messianism is usually seen as a rejection of politics and the earthly political State. Instead, it looks for an end to earthly politics through the imposition of a supernatural divine State. From this perspective, there is a vast gulf between political thinkers, such as Machiavelli and John Locke, and political revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Maximilien Robespierre, on the one hand, and messianic thinkers, such as Joachim of Fiore, and messianic claimants, such as John of Leiden, on the other. In my work, I seek to argue that, in fact, that the apocalyptic world of Messianism may not be so far removed from the realm of earthly politics. Whatever various messianic movements may have thought of the politics of their day, it cannot be denied that messianic movements by definition interact with worldly political authorities, make political claims and are thus themselves political movements of this world. 

For anyone not wedded to the Whig narrative of bifurcating the “superstitious” Middle Ages and “rational” Enlightenment and ignorant of the past few decades of scholarship, this should not be surprising or controversial. There is a well-established literature linking in various ways the “religious” messianic and apocalyptic movements of the Medieval and early modern periods with the supposedly “secular” revolutionary political movements of the modern period. To give some examples, Norman Cohn, back in the 1950s, in his Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, sought to portray movements as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites and the Anabaptist Munster revolt as the forerunners of modern absolutist movements such as Communism and Fascism. Similarly, though working in the opposite direction, Jacob Talmon, in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism: the Romantic Phase, sought to connect modern totalitarian movements, particularly those of the Rousseauan tradition, with earlier religious apocalyptic movements. David S. Katz and the late Richard H. Popkin, in Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, set forth the evolution of medieval Joachimite apocalyptic tradition into the modern apocalyptic movements of today.

I seek to bring elements of all of these works together and apply them to Jewish history. This serves a number of purposes. Even more important to me than placing messianism within a political framework is the continued effort to place Jewish history within the context of the surrounding society. I seek to place Jewish Messianism within the context of similar movements produced in the Christian and Islamic worlds. Furthermore, I propose that Messianism as a political movement offers us a way to talk about Jewish politics. Jewish history has traditionally suffered from not being able to employ the traditional State narrative, for most of recorded history there has been no such thing as a sovereign Jewish State. More important to modern scholars is the lack of a Jewish political tradition. Messianism allows us a backdoor to bring Jews as actors into the political narrative, beyond being the victims of hateful mobs and capricious rulers. Thus helping us move away from the Heinrich Graetz “Jews suffer and think” lachrymose narrative. Furthermore, by dealing with messianic theorists and their confrontation with worldly politics, we can begin to construct a tradition of Jewish political thought. For this reason, I will be discussing not just actual messianic movements such as the Sabbatians, but messianic theorists such as Maimonides and Abarbanel as well.

As a multi-disciplinary project, my work should be of use in a number of fields. This is a work on Jewish history and particularly Jewish Messianism. The models I propose should be relevant to general students of Messianism and apocalypticism. Finally this is also a work of political theory meant to aid in the understanding of how to integrate Messianism as a political phenomenon.

The Alan Brill (Not Saadiah Gaon) Book of Doctrines and Opinions Blog

During my five years at Yeshiva University, one of my favorite teachers was Dr. Alan Brill. I took him for Philosophy of Maimonides. (So I guess he carries at least part of the blame for my bullheaded Maimonideanism.) His was the most rigorous class of my undergraduate career, with a final that was literally a two day affair. That being said he was also a remarkably generous grader. (This model of demanding course work coupled with a generosity in grading is something I seek to emulate in my teaching.) A. N. Wilson notoriously labeled the late Sir Isaiah Berlin as the "Dictaphone Don." By this Wilson meant to attack Berlin's willingness to create elaborate structures to categorize wide varieties of intellectual figures and his casual reductionist method of writing his way through intellectual history, a style of writing that brought him to the status of academic celebrity. Not to get into the justice of Wilson's claim, but this label would also suit Dr. Brill. In this I mean it in every positive sense. Dr. Brill brought to the table an overpowering command of the literature to the table, the likes that few of us undergraduates had ever seen. His class was a running meditation on everything from Greek philosophy to medieval Islamic thought (mostly consisting of thinkers that I, up to that point, had never heard of) to post-modern philosophy, presented in an intoxicating and exhilarating whirlwind. I doubt he seriously expected us to read let alone comprehend the vast amounts of material he assigned us. I suspect his motive was so that we could comprehend how much there was out there, how little we knew, and to what extent he was making a compromise in teaching non-specialists like us. Dr. Brill could engage in this method of teaching and make it work because he was also a master systemizer. There were the esoteric radicals like Averroes, Moshe Narboni and Leo Strauss. They are in conflict with divine supernaturalists like Isaac Abarbanel and Marvin Fox. Yes there was something reductionist about this style of teaching and Brill had a way of putting down and mocking various thinkers as it suited him. Particularly memorable was his "Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch is bourgeoisie Judaism." I suspect that this was done if for no other reason than to challenge a favored idol of his students. (In a Modern Orthodox school one is hard pressed to find a closer equivalent than Hirsch to patron saint.) It would not take too much of a stretch of the imagination to envision a group of self confident and self righteous undergraduates arrogantly mouthing off Brill's lines as Gospel truth and deciding that if Brill dismissed someone then one could afford to move on and not bother reading. For me Dr. Brill was just the opposite, a key into a world and a directive to go read. Yeshiva University in its great wisdom decided to not grant Dr. Brill tenure and let him go. He now teaches at Seton Hall.

Now Dr. Brill has graced us with a blog of his own so anyone with an internet connection can gain from him. I am particularly fond of his analysis of modern trends within Christian thinking and their implications for Orthodox Judaism. There is also his musings on the passing of John T. Elson and the rise of popular mysticism where he notes: "And finally we have a variety of Jewish based kitchen deities, where one prays for everyday miracles, prosperity, and that the kugel comes out OK."

Dr. Brill is still looking for a name for his blog. I am up for "Dictaphone Mystic." It would be really something if readers of Izgad could come up with a name.

Learned Jewish Women in Sixteenth Century Italy

Renaissance Italy is usually a good place to look for precedents for liberal Jewish practices. In terms of Jewish education for women and women studying the Talmud Andree Aelion Brooks points out:

Shortly before Dona Gracia was born, a Talmud Torah for girls had opened in Rome; its women graduates emerged as poets, writers and patrons of the arts. A woman known as Pomona da Modena, living in Ferrara at the beginning of the century, was said to be as well versed in Talmud "as any man." Another member of Pomona's family, Fioretta, was constantly engaged in Hebrew and rabbinic learning. Others worked as scribes.

Then there was Bienvenida Abravanel, a niece of the famous Don Isaac Abravanel, the man who led the Jews out of Spain at the time of the Expulsion and later settled in Naples. Bienvenida was so smart and well educated that she became the tutor, and later advisor, to Leonora, daughter of the viceroy of Naples. When the Jews were expelled from Naples in 1530, it was Bienvenida who maneuvered through her court connections to have the order rescinded. After the death of Bienvenida's banker husband, Samuel, Bienvenida continued to run his banking business and use her wealth to ransom Jewish refugees captured by pirates. (Brooks, The Woman who Defied Kings pg. 27)

 It should be noted that Isaac Abarbanel believed, in some sense, that women did not have souls and that only men possessed them. Having elite learned women does not mean that women as a group were educated. People who are wealthy and clearly intelligent are going to be allowed a fair degree of eccentric behavior no matter what society they live in and are going to be able to get away with breaking certain social taboos.

My Presentation to the International Medieval Congress (Part I)

Philosophers, Conversos, and the Jewish Campaign against Heresy in 15th-Century Spain – Benzion Chinn (The Ohio State University)

One has to admit that there is something just a little bit odd about studying orthodox attempts to suppress “heretical” ideas. As academics, our very lifeblood is free inquiry. It would only be natural for us to simply view these defenders of orthodoxy as the “ultimate evil,” attempting to destroy "reason" and establishing the tyranny of “dogma” and “superstition.” I believe this speaks to the best of the historical profession that we are committed to giving all those from the past a chance to speak, particularly those who seem to be the most distant from “modernity.”

This paper is primarily about a question and I will spend most of my time dealing with this question. I will suggest a solution. Not that I am convinced that I have the evidence to completely solve the question. I would be interested in getting feedback if anyone can offer anything to further my case or to refute it.

One of the major features of Spanish Jewish thought, during the fifteenth century, was its polemic against philosophy. Philosophy was supposed to lead to the abandonment of the commandments, to heresy and even to apostasy. This element received particular emphasis in the work of the late Yitzchak Baer and his History of the Jews in Christian Spain. (Probably the finest study of any one particular Jewish community.) I first started exploring this topic with the intention of writing about the practical side of this move against philosophy, such as bans, book burnings, and excommunications. It seemed only logical that such things went on; what is the point of denouncing philosophy if you are not going to actually do something about it? As I am sure many of you can relate to, this project took a dramatic shift when, after several weeks of work, I realized that I had absolutely no evidence of such things happening. Out of frustration, as strange as this sounds, I found myself almost yelling at my sources: “what is wrong with you people? Why do you not show some spine and ban something?” I could have pretended that I had the evidence and hoped no one would notice. Instead, I chose what I think is the more interesting option and asked myself why I had no evidence. We are left with the conclusion that the reason we have no evidence of bans, book burnings and excommunications is that they did not happen.

So why would a rabbinic establishment devote so much energy to denouncing philosophy without taking any practical measures against it? To suggest some obvious possibilities: Maybe Jews were remarkably tolerant and did not go for banning books? Maybe Jews were just not that interested in dogma? Maybe the Jewish community during this period was remarkably orthodox and there were no dangerous philosophers? Maybe Jews just did not have the power to do something about it?

Attempts by the Jewish community to take action against perceived heterodox beliefs had clear precedent both within Spain and outside of it. Spanish Jewry possessed a particularly strong precedent for the active suppression of heterodox beliefs since it served as the host for most of the Maimonidean controversies. In 1232 Solomon of Montpellier and his students, Jonah of Gerondi and David b. Saul banned Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. Furthermore, Solomon sent Jonah of Gerondi to Northern France in order to gain support for the ban. The Rabbis of Northern France themselves went and banned this book as well. The Maimonideans responded with a ban of their own against Solomon of Montpellier. Furthermore, they sent David Kimhi to Spain to rally support for their position. While Kimhi gained the support of a number of important community leaders, he met some fierce opposition from such Jewish leaders as Nachmonides, Judah Alfakar, and Abulafia. This fighting only came to a close when the Inquisition got involved and burned copies of the Guide.[1] This event shocked both sides and caused them to temporally halt their campaigns.

A similar controversy occurred in the fourteenth century. In 1304 Abba Mari ben Moses (d.c. 1310) and Solomon ben Aderet (1235-1310), the chief rabbi of Barcelona and student of Jonah of Gerondi, issued a ban of excommunication on all those under twenty-five who studied philosophy. The focus of Abba Mari and Aderet’ zeal was Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche who supposedly claimed that Abraham and Sarah represented Form and Matter and were not real historical figures. As with the case of Solomon of Montpellier, this attempt also met with stiff opposition from a number of scholars, most notably Menahem Meiri. Abba Mari collected his correspondence in a book titled Minhat Kinot (Offering of Jealously). It serves to detail all of his efforts to stamp out Aristotelian thought within the Jewish community. His efforts to get different communities to sign on to his ban, the rabbis that he convinced to sign and those that turned against him. He also recounts his efforts to defend himself against his opponents, who went after him personally and tried to destroy his reputation.[2]

As strange as this sounds, one has to admire these people. They took a principled stand, based on what they believed, and where even willing to put themselves at some professional risk for those beliefs. Keep in mind that the pro-Maimonidean forces possessed considerable power and were perfectly capable of moving against those who dared oppose them.

To move on to the issue of dogma. The central figure in the history of Jewish dogma was Maimonides (1138-1205) with his Thirteen Principles of Faith. As Menachem Kellner has argued, Maimonides attempted to reformulate Judaism as a theologically based religion as opposed to a law-based one. Furthermore, Maimonides redefined the meaning of being a Jew. For Maimonides a Jew was not simply someone born to a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism; a Jew was someone who believed in the dogmas of Judaism. While Maimonides’ thought played a major role in the theological controversies of the Middle-Ages, his Principles of Faith only came to play an important role in fifteenth-century Spain. It was Hasdai Crescas (1350-1410) and his student Joseph Albo (1380-1445) who first made an issue out of it. They criticized Maimonides’ choices as to which doctrines should be viewed as the foundations and axioms upon which Judaism was to be based and put forth their own alternative lists of dogmas. Kellner suggests that the reason for this sudden interest in dogma was the church’s missionary assault at the end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Christianity set the terms of debate and that meant dogma. Any responses on the part of Jews needed to formulate a conception of Jewish dogma and how it was different from Christian dogma. This predicament lead Jews back to Maimonides and the acceptance of all or parts of his reformulation of Judaism.

While Kellner notes in passing that this interest in dogma did not lead to any fissures within the Jewish community, he does not bother to follow through and consider the implications of this lack of any real-world crackdown on heresy. One would think that the point of formulating an official established dogma was so that one could define heresy. Once we have an official dogma all those who do not conform to it are heretics and should be persecuted. Why would someone go through so much trouble formulated dogma unless they intended to use it as a platform with which they could hunt after heretics? Both Crescas and Albo, in the early part of the fifteenth century, and Isaac Arama (1420-97) and Isaac Abarbanel (1437-1508), in the latter part, engaged in anti-philosophical polemics and in attempts to formulate official Jewish dogma. For some strange reason, though, none of these people ever banned a book or excommunicated someone for their philosophical leanings.

Where there radical Jewish philosophers in the fifteenth century? We do have some evidence to indicate that the Jewish community possessed some active philosophical radicals during this period. The mid fifteenth-century preacher, Haim ibn Musa, in a letter to his son wrote:

Now there is a new type of preacher. They rise to the lectern to preach before the reading of the Torah, and most of their sermons consist of syllogistic arguments and quotations from the philosophers. They mention by name Aristotle, Alexander, Themistius, Plato, Averroes, and Ptolemy, while Abbaye and Raba are concealed in their mouths. The Torah waits upon the reading stand like a dejected woman who had prepared herself properly by ritual immersion and awaited her husband; then, returning from the house of his mistress, he glanced at her and left without paying her further heed.[3]

While Ibn Musa did not give any specific names, the preachers he attacked clearly lived in his time.




[1] Whether or not the anti-Maimonideans denounced the works of Maimonides to the Inquisition is an open question. Maimonideans, such as Hillel of Verona, blamed their opponents for what happened and sought to use this event as a means of discrediting them. Daniel Silver has argued that such actions would have been highly unlikely as it would have elicited the complete opposition of the Jewish community at large.
[2] For more on the Maimonidean controversies see Joseph Sarachek, Faith and Reason, Daniel Silver’s Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy and Bernard Septimus’ Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: the Career and Controversies of Ramah.
[3] Saperstein, Jewish Preachers pg. 386.



(To be continued ...)

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response (Part II)

(Part I)

What does Goldish mean when he says that your work must fit into "some larger narrative?" Do you fit your work into a narrative that other historians have created?
On a normative level, should historians be creating "narratives?" And who are these narratives created for? The general public? Other historians? Academia in general? Posterity? It seems I would favor your initial desire to just do a textual analysis, and eschew from making your work fit into a larger narrative. The main reasons to fit your work into a narrative would be for personal ends (i.e. career advancement, pleasing your superiors) than for any pedagogical or academic ends. One last thing I'd like to touch on is the relationship between "fitting your work into a narrative" and post-modernism's criticism and skepticism toward such metanarratives. I agree with your general assessment that post-modernism offers interesting analytical tools, but is probably misguided as an end in itself. Could you elaborate your thoughts on this topic?


There is, without question, a pragmatic issue at stake; one day, with the help of God, I hope to find myself, with my dissertation in hand, applying for a job at some university. I will be sitting in a conference room with a collection of professors from both inside and outside the history department, administrators, graduate, and undergraduate students. (I have been one of those "other" people sitting in the room.) It is likely that there will not be a single Isaac Abarbanel scholar, apart from me, in the room. Most of the people will not have much of a background in Jewish studies nor will most of them even be medievalists or early modernists. At some point, a scholar, maybe from the gender studies program or a modern American history person, is going to ask, not necessarily even with words, "why anyone should care?" There is, furthermore, a particular subtext to go with this question; why should anyone care enough about what I am saying to give me a position at this university that could just as easily be given to someone who does gender studies or modern American history?

At a broader level, anyone who wants to work in the humanities is going to have to answer this question in the courthouse of society. The fact is that jobs in the humanities are dwindling; there are not enough jobs for all the newly minted PhDs that our universities produce each year. This situation has only been made worse by the recent downturn in the economy. (For more on this topic, I recommend The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue. Donoghue, coincidently, used to work at Ohio State.) Ohio State recently slashed its search for someone to fill a new position in the women’s studies department. I do not expect the people in the women’s studies department to forget this and it is going to be an issue for anyone, like me, who does “dead white male” history, trying to get a job at Ohio State.

The humanities have no utilitarian value. I know that nothing that I or any of my colleagues, both the ones whom I work with here at Ohio State and the ones I will compete with in the future, do is going to cure cancer, stop Global Warming, or end our dependence on foreign oil. My younger brother is about to start medical school. I joke that he is a modern doctor while I am a medieval doctor; you come to me if you need your humours balanced or some limbs cut off. It is certainly a fair question to ask why society should fund my work and not simply leave it as a hobby for those who enjoy this sort of thing. Last I checked Ohio State is not offering any jobs for people who can beat Super Mario Brothers. (I seem to recall a Farside cartoon on the subject.) This question is particularly acute because up until the nineteenth-century history was merely a hobby for gentlemen of leisure. Edward Gibbon was a member of the British Parliament in the eighteenth century who, on the side, wrote a seven-volume work called The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that we could go back to this state of affairs. There are thousands of accountants and lawyers with an encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War. (I used to be one of those people during my adolescence.) Why do you need professional Civil War historians?

(To be continued …)

Historians in the Philosophy Department: A Response

In response to an earlier post, a commentator posed the following series of questions which I would like to respond to:

What is the historian’s relationship with philosophy? Is it merely to document which philosopher's were influential and their personal and philosophical effect on contemporary and future society? Should historians comment on the content of a philosopher's works? Does a historians training prepare them to understand philosophy in a manner which could justify any opinions, theories, conclusions they may state? Should historians abstain from analyzing the content of philosopher's work? My questions are focused on getting insight on how a historian conceptualizes his relationship and duties when dealing with philosophy.

The issue of the relationship between history and philosophy is a pertinent one for me since I operate within the gray zone between them as an intellectual historian. For me, the line between the history of philosophy and philosophy is that a historian is only interested in the who, what, when, where and why of an issue. A historian when approaching a given philosopher will, therefore, try to explain what that philosopher actually believed, where did he get those beliefs from and who was influenced by this philosopher. What will be noticeably absent from the work a historian of philosophy is any indication whether the historian actually agrees with the philosopher in question. A philosopher on the other hand, when faced with the work of a philosopher from a previous generation is going to have to voice some sort of judgment about the work of said philosopher. For example, as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, I took an Intro to Philosophy class where we learned all about Anselm, Aquinas and Descartes and their arguments for the existence of God. The byline for the class, though, was “why you are not going to march up to the blackboard and demonstrate that there is a God in under forty-five minutes.” As a side point, the professor who taught this class, Dr. David Johnson, is, surprisingly enough, a deeply religious Christian and this was one of the best classes I took in college.

There is a story told about Thomas Kuhn and his history of science class. It was his custom to assign his students a primary source text in early modern science for analysis. From the responses, he was able to tell which of his students were history majors and which were philosophy majors. The history majors would just analyze the text, regardless of whether it made sense or not. The philosophy majors would try to make sense of the text even if the end result they come up with was very different than the actual text.

Some people would take a firmer line than I do in regards to history and philosophy, particularly my advisor, Dr. Matt Goldish. When I first came to Ohio State to start work on my Ph.D. I wanted to do a dissertation either on Isaac Abarbanel’s relationship to Kabbalah or his views on Maimonides. Dr. Goldish insisted that whatever I did it could not simply be an analysis of a text but must work to fit itself into some larger narrative. We went back and forth on this issue but in the end, Dr. Goldish prevailed. He is my advisor so his word is law. He is also a far more knowledgeable historian both in terms of the craft itself and also in terms of the politics of the field. Finally, he managed to convince me that, no matter what my views on history, in order to get a job, I am going to have to write something that will speak to people outside my narrow field and that means addressing larger narrative issues.

Certainly, a major part of what historians of philosophy have to do is to document which philosophers were important in a given era. This is important because not every philosopher who we moderns think is important was prominent during his own lifetime or immediately afterward. For example, it is a matter of some debate as to how widely read Enlightenment philosophers were doing the Enlightenment. I think historians are capable of analyzing works of philosophy. The fact that historians have a unique ability to deal with the societal context of a given philosopher gives them an important seat at the table when discussing philosophy.

AJS Conference Day One Session Four (Reading the Medievals: Case Studies in Reception History)

Eric Lawee (York University)
“Scripturalization of Rashi’s Torah Commentary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Times”

Even though Rashi was not widely accepted in Spain initially and was not even mentioned by Ibn Daud, by the thirteenth century Rashi had a achieved an almost canonical status. We see a move to treat Rashi like the Talmud, a flawless source that most be analyzed line by line. Nachmonides, even though he himself criticized Rashi, played a large role in this by putting Rashi on the map as a major figure to contend with. This veneration of Rashi can be seen in both the rationalist and Kabbalistic streams of Jewish thought. Moshe ibn Gabbi attacks his philosophical opponents by labeling them as little foxes who attack Rashi. Sefer Hameshiv talks about Rashi having prophetic power and claims that his commentary was written with the help of an angel. On the flip side you have people like Isaac Campanton who, in his Darachi HaTalmud, states that the process of iyyun, in depth textual analysis, applies not just to the Talmud but to Rashi and Nachmonides as well. Two of Campanton’s students, Isaac de Leon and Isaac Aboab, wrote super commentaries on Rashi.

(Isaac Abarbanel’s teacher, Joseph Hayyun, was also a student of Campanton. It is interesting to note that Abarbanel does attack Rashi, though Rashi is certainly a key source for Abarbanel. I would see this as another example of how Abarbanel fits into an Nachmonidean line of Jewish thought.

Lawee is one of the world’s foremost experts on Abarbanel. I was even considering applying to York in order to work with him. We spoke on the phone and came to two conclusions; one, we got along very well and, two, York would not be a good fit for me. So this was actually the first time I ever met Lawee face to face. And I most say it was an honor.)


Yaacob Dweck (Princeton University)
“Leon Modena as Reader and as Read”

There is often a tension between the correct and the plurality of readings as in the case of Leon Modena’s understanding of the Zohar. Modena’s Ari Nahom has traditionally been read as an attack on the Zohar. Modena attacked Kabbalistic theology as being akin to Christianity. He also denied the traditional Rashbi authorship and placing Moshe de Leon as its author. In other places in his writing, Modena laments on how easily available Kabbalistic texts have become and that anyone can purchase them and pretend to be a scholar. This has been Modena’s reputation down to modern times. In truth though, there is actually more to Modena. He praised the Zohar for its language and style. He even used it in his sermons. Modena had no objection to the Zohar as long it was simply treated as a medieval commentary on the Bible and not as a canonical text on Jewish theology and law.

Modena was directly targeted by a member of the Luzzatto circle in his defense of the Zohar. This shows that Ari Nahom was influential and did circulate even though it was not printed until the nineteenth century. Contrary to the Elizabeth Eisenstein model, print did not simply eliminate manuscripts. An active manuscript culture continued to exist for centuries.

(Matt Goldish is a big fan of Modena and it has rubbed off to some extent on me as well. This was an excellent lecture. It comes out of Dweck’s dissertation, which he recently finished. I am looking forward to reading it when it gets published.)


Daniel B. Schwartz (George Washington University)
“A New Guide? The ‘Modern Maimonides’ Motif in the Maskilic Reception of Spinoza”

Who was the first modern Jew, Benedict Spinoza or Moses Mendelssohn? This question assumes that modern equals secular and that these figures can be viewed as secular. Even with Spinoza that is not so simple. In a sense it is justifiable to talk about Spinoza as the first modern Jew in that he filled that script and served as a usable past for many maskilim. In Maskilic literature Spinoza is often placed alongside Maimonides. This is strange since Spinoza attacked Maimonides. Though one could make the case that Spinoza started off as a Maimonidean and that Maimonides continued to play a significant role, in some sense, in his thought. Maimonides is important for Spinoza because he played an important role in how Spinoza was read by Maskilim. The idea of Maimonides acted as an interpretive framework for understanding Spinoza. Spinoza becomes a second coming of Maimonides.


Devorah Schoenfeld (St. Mary’s College Maryland)
“Who Asks the Question? Rashi’s Constructed and Constructing Readers”

Does Rashi serve to teach Bible or teach Midrash? Different early commentators took different approaches. This can actually be seen in the different manuscripts we have of Rashi’s commentary. We have examples of copyists who take away the line by line element of Rashi, removing Rashi’s commentary from its direct interaction with the biblical text. An example of this can be seen in the variant versions of Rashi’s explanation for the binding of Isaac. In some versions instead of Satan accusing Abraham, like in Genesis Rabbah, it is divine judgment. We also have texts that talk about God testing Abraham in order to perfect him; this takes the text in a very different direction than Genesis Rabbah.

General Exams IV: Orals

Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.

I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.

The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.

Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.

Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.

So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)