Chabad and the Benedict Option

To return to the issue of Chabad and its methods of outreach. It is interesting to compare Chabad to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. Dreher urges Christians to recognize that they have lost the culture war and are now living in a society that is not only not even formally Christian but is outright hostile to Christianity. His basic model is of fourth-century pagans. They still believed that they controlled society, regardless of what god the emperor worshipped, and could never imagine that Christians really would seek to eliminate them. Recognizing that, culturally if not politically, they are being ruled by members of a hostile religion that is coming for their children, Christians, instead of focusing on getting Republicans elected, need to turn inward and focus on saving their kids. This is done by buildings self-consciously counter-cultural communities. A critical aspect of this is the value system you give kids. You can no longer raise kids on the model that they are going to college to enter a respectable profession. The reality is that becoming a doctor or a lawyer will require kids to do things that will go against their faith. For example, in my own professional life, I refuse, on principle, to give my pronouns because that would imply that I believe in the metaphysics of gender. Even something as innocent as this carries risk and has likely harmed my career. Kids need to know that their parents would rather that they be religious than be successful or they will never summon the courage to make such sacrifices. 

The term “Benedict Option” is a reference to St. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the aftermath of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He could not change this fact, so, instead, he established a monastery. If your goal was to save Christendom, St. Benedict’s actions might have seemed counterproductive. You are taking your best and brightest and taking them away from society where they might actually do some good. The genius of St. Benedict was that he recognized that the Christianized Roman culture he grew up with was beyond saving so there was no point in trying. What he could do was establish a monastic culture that would, after several centuries become the basis for medieval Christianity.

What is really interesting about Dreher, is that he points blank tells his Christian readers to imitate Orthodox Jews. Orthodox Jews know that they are not going to win over society so the focus then becomes turning inward to family and community. On the surface, one could make the argument that Chabad, with its focus on outreach, serves as a counter-example to the Benedict Option. Outreach is central to Chabad and the Benedict Option is skeptical of outreach. From the perspective of the Benedict Option, outreach all too easily becomes an excuse to stay within society. It is “selfish” of Christians to send their kids to private schools. They should keep their kids in public schools in order that they should have a positive influence on all the non-Christian kids.   

I would argue that Chabad should be seen as a kind of Benedict Option. One might even go so far as to consider it one of the most successful Benedict Option communities in existence. Keep in mind that the Benedict Option is not against outreach per se but recognizes that it can only be possible once there is a functional community to serve as a base of operations. Furthermore, Dreher is clear that forming a Benedict Option Community does not have to be living in a monastery, as was the case of St. Benedict, or even to head to the countryside. The key idea is to be consciously counter-cultural and reach out to other people with similar values in the hope that, by working together, they can keep each other’s kids in the fold.  

Chabad is fundamentally counter-cultural. Chabad has no interest in accommodating themselves to the outside world. For example, despite Chabad being active on college campuses, Chabad has little interest in sending their own kids to college or in giving them an advanced secular education. One of the great ironies of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was that, despite the fact that he had a university education and spent years living outside of the Hasidic community, he opposed college. Contrary to post-Vatican II Catholic priests who tried to present themselves as basically regular people despite their vows of celibacy, often going so far as to drop clerical garb, Chabad rabbis present themselves as being from a different planet with their hats and beards. Despite Chabad’s friendliness, they make no bones about the fact that they are in opposition to modern society and do not simply wish to give it a more spiritual veneer.

One might think of Chabad as setting up Benedict Option communities and inviting people to join them. Keep in mind that Chabad does not simply do outreach in the sense of dropping people in for a brief mission to give a few classes. Chabad embeds themselves within communities with emissaries going out to places on the understanding that this is going to be their lives’ work and not simply something to put on their resume as they seek something better.   

Can Chabad’s particular version of the Benedict Option be replicated by Jews or by Christians? I am skeptical of this as Chabad benefits from a number of specific features. One is the incredible charisma of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that inspired his followers to build their little communities at great personal sacrifice. Two, Chabad possesses a distinctive ideology that allows them to thread the needle between turning into a sect that is simply hostile to the world along the lines of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Neturai Karta and accommodating themselves to the world to the point of becoming Tikkun Olam progressivism.

In one sense, Chabad’s theology can be seen as rooted in conservative Kabbalah. Rather than seeing commandments as pedagogic exercises to aid spiritual development or tools for building the sort of "Benedict Option communities" that are likely to pass on monotheistic beliefs, Chabad assumes that commandments serve a mystical function. This places commandments outside of any rational analysis and forestalls any attempt to reform ritual practice to better allow Judaism to function. Most importantly, the fact that commandments affect the metaphysical realm means that people who violate Jewish law are not just misguided sinners but agents of cosmic evil. In itself, this sort of thinking can easily lead to justifying assaulting women in the street or even executing them for the “crime” of wearing pants. For Chabad, this theology is balanced by a belief in the intrinsic spiritual value of Jews. Chabad’s theology of Jews having special souls is also rooted within this conservative Kabbalistic tradition and is connected to a view of Gentiles as manifestly evil found in Tanya. Historically though, Chabad has viewed non-observant Jews as worse than Gentiles as their Jewish souls allow them to gain access to various spiritual forces and parasitically feed off them in order to maintain the forces of evil.  

To be clear, Chabad, under the leadership of the Lubavitcher rebbe, came to downplay its early rhetoric against gentiles and non-observant Jews. This is likely connected to Chabad’s messianism. Messianism opens the door to holding that a belief is true while simultaneously accepting a contradictory claim on the grounds that the new truth represents a new dispensation. Standing in the doorway to messianic redemption but not yet in a fully realized messianic age, Chabad can believe that non-observant Jews are manifestations of evil and yet also the key to completing the redemption and fully entering the messianic age. 

C. S. Lewis argued that it is essentially impossible for a human being to fully comprehend the reality of sin while perfectly loving the sinner at the same time. Inevitably, one is going to end up sacrificing one spiritual truth in order to maintain the other. This was why it was important for Jesus to dine with tax collectors and other sinners. Anyone else would have fallen into the trap of flattering such people while telling themselves that they were doing "outreach." It is the strength of Chabad that they have come closer to this ideal than mere mortals have any right to expect.     

Thanks But No Thanks to Dan Brown for His Early Modern Science

Over this weekend I finally got around to reading Dan Brown's Lost Symbol, the sequel to the Da Vinci Code. I certainly expected a predictable plot with Robert Langdon spending several hours running around a city discovering ancient secrets with a female companion while being pursued by a creepy mystically inclined assassin while pontificating on all sorts of historical silliness. At this point, I have come to believe that Brown takes pleasure in mocking us historians and that he sticks in historical absurdities just to rub our noses in the fact that most of the public does not know, could not care less and would gladly accept his version of history over ours. This time around, though, Brown actually managed to offend me. Perhaps it was because he brought his brand of historical silliness to my area of history and makes claims that really do have the power to cause harm if taken seriously.

Take the following conversation between Langdon's mentor Peter Solomon (Peter is a Mason so the last name is a play on the Temple of Solomon, an important Masonic symbol) and his sister Katherine, who ends up serving as Langdon's female companion in this adventure, for example:

[Katherine's] brother [Peter]  ran a finger down the long shelf of cracked leather bindings and old dusty tomes. "The scientific wisdom of the ancients was staggering ... modern physics is only now beginning to comprehend it all."

"Peter," she said, "you already told me that the Egyptians understood levers and pulleys long before Newton, and that the early alchemists did work on a par with modern chemistry, but so what? Today's physics deals with concepts that would have been unimaginable to the ancients."

"Like what?"

"Well ... like entanglement theory, for one!" Subatomic research had now proven categorically that all matter was interconnected ... entangled in a single unified mesh ... a kind of universal oneness. "You're telling me the ancients sat around discussing entanglement theory?"

"Absolutely!" Peter said, pushing his long, dark bangs out of his eyes. "Entanglement was at the core of primeval beliefs. Its names are as old as history itself ... Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman. In fact, man's oldest spiritual quest was to perceive his own entanglement, to sense his own interconnection with all things. He has always wanted to become 'one' with the universe ... to achieve the state of 'at-one-ment.'" Her brother raised his eyebrows. :To this day, Jews and Christians still strive for 'atonement' ... although most of us have forgotten it is actually 'at-one-ment' we're seeking."

...

"Okay, how about something as simple as polarity - the positive/negative balance of the subatomic realm. Obviously, the ancients didn't underst -"

"Hold on!" Her brother pulled down a large dusty text, which he dropped loudly on the library table. "Modern polarity is nothing but the 'dual world' described by Krishna here in the Bhagavad Gita over two thousand years ago. A dozen other books in here, including the Kybalion, talk about binary systems and the opposing forces in nature.

...

The showdown continued for several more minutes, and the stack of dusty books on the desk grew taller and taller. Finally Katherine threw up her hands in frustration. "Okay! You made your point, but I want to study cutting-edge theoretical physics. The future of science! I really doubt Krishna or Vyasa had much to say about superstring theory and multidimensional cosmological models."

"You're right. They didn't." Her brother paused, a smile crossing his lips. "If you're talking superstring theory ..." He wandered over to the bookshelf again. "Then you're talking this book here." He heaved out a colossal leather-bound book and dropped it with a crash onto the desk. "Thirteenth-century translation of the original medieval Aramaic."

"Superstring theory in the thirteenth century?!" Katherine wasn't buying it." Come on!"

Superstring theory was a brand-new cosmological model. Based on the most recent scientific observations, it suggested the multidimensional universe was made up not of three ... but rather of ten dimensions, which all interacted like vibrating strings, similar to resonating violin strings.

Katherine waited as her brother heaved open the book, ran through the ornately printed table of contents, and then flipped to a spot near the beginning of the book. "Read this." He pointed to a faded page of text and diagrams.

Dutifully, Katherine studied the page. The translation was old-fashioned and very hard to read, but to her utter amazement, the text and drawings clearly outlined the exact same universe heralded by modern superstring theory - a ten dimensional universe of resonating strings. As she continued reading, she suddenly gasped and recoiled. "My God, it even describes how six of the dimensions are entangled and act as one?!" She took a frightened step backward. "What is this book?!"

Her brother grinned. "Something I'm hoping you'll read one day." He flipped back to the title page, where an ornately printed plate bore three words.

The Complete Zohar.

Although Katherine had never read the Zohar, she knew it was the fundamental text of early Jewish mysticism, once believed so potent that it was reserved only for erudite rabbis.

...

Katherine didn't know how to respond. "But ... then why don't more people study this?"

Her brother smiled. "They will."

I don't understand."

"Katherine, we have been born into a wonderful times. A change is coming. Human beings are posed on the threshold of a new age when they will begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old way ... back to the ideas in books like the Zohar and other ancient texts from around the world. Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it. There will come a day when modern science begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients ... that will be the day that mankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him." (Pg. 58-60.)


First, let us deal with that little howler about the Zohar. The Zohar was not written until the late thirteenth century. It was not printed until the mid-sixteenth century. Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbalah Denudata, which translated large segments into Latin, was not until the seventeenth century. You have to wait until the nineteenth century for an English translation. I thought string theory dealt with eleven dimensions but I will leave that one to the science people. 

At a more fundamental level, I am concerned with what Dan Brown is doing to science. Now do not get me wrong, as an early modern historian I think it is important that people understand the odd paths that created modern science. Contrary to the standard Whig narrative, science did not come about from people waking up after a thousand years in the Renaissance and deciding to be rational once again. As Frances Yates argued, the scientific revolution came about as an extension of renaissance magic which turned to texts such as the Codex Hermeticum and the Zohar in order to "recover" the "true" religion of the ancients and their magical secrets. In my 111 class, I certainly enjoy teaching my students about Giordano Bruno and how he was and was not like a modern scientist. Under no circumstance though do I wish for the science people in my class to turn around and try to be like Giordano Bruno. There are good reasons why science evolved away from turning toward ancient texts and it should stay that way.  

I do not care if Mary Magdalene carried Jesus' baby. Trying to bring back early modern science does concern me.

The Name of the Rose Starring Giordano Bruno Instead of Sean Connery

I just finished reading S. J. Parris's Heresy. It is a murder mystery set at Oxford University of 1583 starring one of my favorite people from the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno. Bruno was renegade Dominican friar, who ran around Europe as an academic celebrity, preaching his particular brand of reformed Christianity, complete with magic, Kabbalah, and heliocentrism. He eventually made the mistake of traveling to the wrong place and fell into the hands of the Inquisition who burned him at the stake.

In the novel, Bruno finds himself in England searching for a lost book from the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus. This was the most important work on magic in the early modern period. It was commonly believed at the time that the Corpus Hermeticum dated from the time of Moses and contained the original religion of the ancients. While searching for this lost book, Bruno befriends Philip Sydney and through him, Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster. Walsingham recruits Bruno to seek out undercover Catholics. Bruno's duel tasks of book and heresy hunting both lead him to Oxford, where Bruno finds that just about everyone there is hiding something, he is attracted to the daughter of one of the faculty and bodies are starting to mysteriously drop all over the place to the theme of Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 

Heresy reminded me of another novel, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. In my mind Name of the Rose stands as probably the greatest novel about the Middle Ages ever written for its complex plot, charming if morally ambiguous characters and, most importantly, its ability to accurately present a medieval worldview without recourse to polemics about fanaticism, superstition, and misogyny. It was made into a movie starring Sean Connery. Unfortunately, the movie systematically undoes the moral complexity of the book in favor of easy to target corrupt sexually repressed monks and an oppressive Church.

The essential plot of Name of the Rose takes place in the fourteenth century and centers around a scholarly monk named William of Baskerville visiting a monastery along with his young companion Adso of Melk with the charge of looking for undercover members of the heretical Fraticelli group on behalf of inquisitor Bernard Gui. On a personal level William also seeks to examine the monastery's secret library. Before too long Adso finds himself looking into a mysterious girl, smuggled into the all-male society and bodies do start to drop with the murders all being done to the theme of the book of Revelation.

Ultimately Heresy was a fun book and certainly a much easier read than Name of the Rose. Still, the villain most certainly did not compare with Name of the Rose's. It is hard to top a blind guy armed with a poisoned copy of a lost book of Aristotle, the ultimate killer read. Still, Giordano Bruno does make for a great hero. I will even take him over Sean Connery.   

Between Baron and Scholem

In his eulogistic review of Salo Baron, "The Last Jewish Generalist," Ismar Schorsch criticizes Baron and the last ten volumes of his eighteen volume Social and Religious History of the Jewish People for adopting an external view of Jewish existence, one that privileged sociology and economics, over an internal view of Jews, focusing on religious experience. According to Schorsch:

Ours is a politically secure generation hungry for the sacred. Its guide to the past is not Baron but Gershom Scholem, and its own historians tend to concentrate on subjects of religious import often studied from an exclusively internal perspective. If Scholem fertilized all sectors of Jewish thought with his lifelong study of kabbalah, contemporary scholarship is rediscovering the magic of midrash. The present temper prefers text to context, literature to history, meaning to significance, and regards Baron as the pinnacle of positivistic Wissenschaft.

For those of you familiar with the state of academic Jewish history, does Schorsch's declaration from 1993 still stand or was he crowing victory a little too soon? I find his declaration in favor of Scholem to be ironic, considering that, when he made it, Moshe Idel had already become the flag carrier for the revisionist movement in Kabbalah studies against Scholem, a trend that has only accelerated in the past seventeen years. Furthermore only several years ago Schorsch himself, when he stepped down from being the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, delivering a "what is wrong with the Conservative movement" farewell address in which he lamented the fact that the Conservative movement had abandoned the sort of scholarship represented by, wait for it, Gershom Scholem.

In terms of general historiography, I am wondering as to what extent the trend Schorsch describes is representative of the study of European history in general. Baron can be seen as a Jewish version of the sort of socio-economic history represented by the likes of such early and mid-twentieth century historians as Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. So where are we historians at, dropping dry technical sociological studies in favor of a history of "meaning?"

Rabbi Yigal Sklarin’s Defense of Gershom Scholem

Prof. Gershom Scholem famously devoted a large portion of his nearly thousand-page biography of Sabbatai Sevi to arguing that Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century led to Sabbatianism in the seventeenth. In Scholem's narrative, Isaac Luria revolutionized Jewish thought by fashioning a kabbalistic narrative focused on a process of metaphysical exile and redemption. The very act of creation caused the breaking of the divine vessels, causing the power of the divine light to fall into the hands of the forces of darkness, the klipot (shells). The practice of Jewish ritual, armed with the specific Kabbalistic interpretations of Luria and specific penitential practices would lead to the redemption of the divine light and heal the cosmos. Scholem assumed that by the mid-seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had spread to all Jewish communities in Europe and the Near East. Hence by the time that Nathan of Gaza declared Sabbatai to be the Messiah in the spring of 1665, Jews everywhere were prepared to accept this radical Sabbatian messianism with its explicit antinomianism. When Sabbatai converted to Islam, Nathan was ready to explain away the action as the Messiah descending into the forces of darkness to achieve the redemption of the divine light.

Prof. Moshe Idel, in his essay "'One from a Town, Two from a Clan': The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism," challenges this narrative. His main objection is this assumption of Lurianic Kabbalah becoming the dominant force within Judaism by the mid-seventeenth century. Idel argues that few people, even rabbis were in a position to understand Kabbalah and the Kabbalah that came through Europe was by and large not Lurianic, but that of Rabbi Moshe Codovero. Idel goes so far as to suggest that Scholem had his cause and effect backward. Lurianism did not spread Sabbatianism; Sabbatians spread Luria. Finally, Idel argues that Scholem overplayed the messianic elements within Lurianism. Those reading Luria in the seventeenth century would not have been jumping to some new radical form of messianism.

In a recent essay in the Bernard Revel journal, "In Defense of Scholem: A Re-evaluation of Idel's Historical Critiques," Rabbi Yigal Sklarin attempts to defend Scholem. Sklarin offers the case of R. Abraham Gombiner's Magan Avraham as an example of a popular work written before the outbreak of Sabbatianism that included distinctively Lurianic practices and concepts. Of particular interest to me is the fact that Sklarin attempts to use Gershon Cohen's theory of messianism to explain the popular spread of Sabbatianism. In "Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Prior to Sabbathai Zevi)," Cohen argued that Jews in Sephardic countries, unlike their Ashkenazi counterparts, were far more likely to start messianic movements due to the influence of philosophy. If the philosophical ideas current in rabbinic circles could gain popular currency and create a mass movement then why could not Luria have gone from rabbinic circles down to the masses to create Sabbatianism?


I am certainly intrigued by the prospect of rehabilitating the Luria-Sabbatianism connection. That being said, I find Sklarin's arguments against Idel to be very problematic. Yes, Cohen argued that Spanish culture was more open to messianism and less open to martyrdom due to the influence of philosophy. If I understand Cohen correctly, this was not simply something within the rabbinic elites, but on a mass cultural level. Regular people (or at least the literate ones) had some awareness of philosophy, particularly of astrology, and were willing to therefore willing to engage in messianic calculations. With Lurianic Kabbalah, we agree that this was something reserved for the rabbinic elites, not something that the masses would have been directly aware of. I fail to, therefore, to see how the analogy holds up. Furthermore, Sklarin seems to accept the premise that the Lurianic Kabbalah that reached our rabbinic elite was not the messianic Luria so how are the masses getting Lurianic messianism from the rabbis if even the rabbis are not getting that message? This leaves us with having to find some other solution besides for Lurianic Kabbalah to explain how Sabbatianism became a mass movement in the summer of 1665.

Sabbatianism as a Political Movement

Gershom Scholem, while he focused on the Kabbalistic elements of Sabbatianism, still took Sabbatianism seriously as a political movement. Yehudah Liebes, though, argues that Sabbatianism lacked any serious political component and did not concern itself with the physical redemption of Israel.

Sabbetai Zevi's utmost concern was not the fate of the people but rather a spiritual realm the people count not reach, and he was profoundly alienated from the masses of his followers. Even Nathan of Gaza failed to understand him and was at times forced to take insult and abuse or to work strenuously to restore to the Messiah his faith in himself (it is indeed possible that Sabbetai Zevi's estrangement from public concerns and his immersion in the spiritual realm added to his messianic charm in the people's eyes). Sabbetai Zevi's messianism was directed upward, to his God, which was why he was always careful to refer to himself precisely as the Messiah of the God of Jacob, a title he did not approach as a metaphor. (Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism pg. 100.)

Nathan of Gaza also is seen as abandoning politics for a mystical war between good and evil. As a former converso, Abraham Cardozo's messianism focused on the redemption of the Jews from the sin of idolatry. The Messiah is a human being who seeks out and is enlightened as to the true nature of the divinity.

Needless to say the masses of Jews, who followed Sabbatai, did have an interest in a political redemption. They were expecting Sabbatai to literally overthrow the Ottoman Empire and for Sabbatai to rule in Israel and over the entire world as an earthly Messiah. The Jews, like Glukel of Hameln's father-in-law, who sold their possessions and waited by the docks for a boat to come to take them to Israel, were literally expecting to move to Israel. Liebes dismisses these people as being on the periphery of the movement. From Liebes' perspective, there were the real Sabbatians, consisting of a small elite, privy to Sabbatianism's esoteric antinomian theology. Such people did not abandon belief in the Messiah after his conversion, but accepted it as part of the divine plan for redemption. The mass of Sabbatian believers were not privy to this true understanding of the Messiah and quickly abandoned faith in him. Such people are, Liebes' perspective, irrelevant to understanding true Sabbatianism.

I find myself uncomfortable with the notion of a center and periphery in Sabbatianism as if the later is unimportant. I am certainly not on the side of Scholem, who depicted a seventeenth century Judaism overtaken by Lurianic Kabbalah and waiting for their Lurianic mystical Messiah. Very few Jews were in a position to understand Lurianic Kabbalah let alone the radical variant of it espoused by Nathan of Gaza. Nor am I willing to accept Scholem's premise that Sabbatianism broke the back of rabbinic authority, that the Jews had now experienced the reality of a redeemed world, would not accept going back to the old order and therefore turned to other forms of redemption such as the Enlightenment to bring forth their already redeemed world. The majority of Jews who turned to Sabbatianism in the summer and fall of 1665 were traditional Jews looking for a traditional Jewish Messiah. When Sabbatai converted to Islam in September of 1666, they remained traditional Jews. Does this mean that they were not real Sabbatians? In a sense they should be at the center of the story. Sabbatianism became a worldwide phenomenon not because it possessed a revolutionary theology, but because thousands of simple Jews accepted Sabbatai as a traditional Jewish Messiah, in complete ignorance of "true" Sabbatianism. Thus an understanding of Sabbatianism requires one to confront this "peripheral" Sabbatianism, which was certainly political.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Hebrew Bibliography in Early Modern Europe

Adam Shear – Reuchlin and the Categorization of Jewish Literature circa 1500

How did Early Modern Jews organize books? How did such categories affect how the books were treated? Such a study should reveal something about the mental framework of those who used them. One place to look are lists of books whether Jewish nor non-Jewish. These lists, though, are not divided by categories. Historians are left using modern categories. Using our modern categories can obscure the relationship between these books. All historical research involves translation, but there is still a need to understand things as people at the time understood them. The Christian Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin responded to Johannes Pfefferkorn, a convert from Judaism, who had told the emperor that Jewish literature contained damaging material to Christians. Reuchlin defended the Talmud and Jewish rights. According to Reuchlin, Jews had legal protection and that furthermore their works benefited Christians. Reuchlin offers the earliest bibliographical scheme for Jewish books, going from most authoritative to least authoritative.

Holy Scripture – This carries the highest authority.

Talmud – Reuchlin makes no mention of the Mishnah nor does mention the Oral Law. He simply views the Talmud as exegesis on the Bible. As a Christian he was not about to lend any extra authority to the Talmud as having any basis in a tradition. This stance, though, also helps when dealing with anti-Christian statements. Reuchlin could argue that such statements were not intrinsic to Judaism.

Kabbalah - This was not something that Pfefferkorn or the Cologne theologians were familiar with. This had more to do with Reuchlin’s interests.

Commentaries – These, Reuchlin points out, are not binding, like the Talmud.

Midrash and Sermons – Reuchlin removes Midrash as a category of series of authority and places it on the same level of medieval sermons. There is no mention of Jewish liturgy.

Philosophy

Poetry, fables – These are deemed by Reuchlin as whimsical. Even the Jews, he claims, do not take them seriously. Reuchlin places the Nizzahon and Toldot Yeshu in this category. He even makes the claim that the Jews forbid these books themselves. Reuchlin may have been a naive sap but a very canny lawyer.

As Yaacov Deutsch argues, this is a period in which Christians, particularly converts, begin to offer descriptions of what Jews do. There is a parallel to the Barcelona debate of 1263. Reuchlin seems to engage in both sides of the Barcelona Debate. Like Nachmonides he tried to limit authority of midrashic literature. On the other hand he wished to give a Christian interpretation of Jewish texts.

(Dr. Shear is the author of the Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity and the Tea, Lemon, Old Books.)


Stephen G. Burnett – Jean Plantavit de la Pause’s Bibliotheca Rabbinica (1645) and Seventeenth - Century Jewish Bibliography

The Christian Hebraist Jean Plantavit de la Pause’s (1576 – 1651) bibliography of Jewish books, Biblia Rabbinica, is often criticized for repeating the errors of Johannes Buxtorf and adding his own. Plantavit is still valuable as an example of this period where knowledge of Judaism growing because of converts and because of more Judaic libraries. Plantavit lead a dramatic life with two theological careers. He was born into a Hugonaut family and trained as a Protestant theologian. He converted to Catholicism after he already had a degree in theology. Interested in Hebrew, Plantavit studied with Leone Modena. Modena encouraged him to start his own Hebrew library. Modena may have done this out of self interest as he was a book seller. Plantavit also studied under Domenico Gerosolimitano, the converted Jew who served as the chief censor for the Catholic Church. (See Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s The Censor, the Editor, and the Text.)

Biblia Rabbinica was intended to replace Buxtorf’s work. Such a bibliography served a Catholic polemical purposes. In a post Index world, Catholics needed a guide as to what books were permitted to read and quote. Plantavit owned over one hundred and eighty books out of eight hundred books he listed. He also owned a copy of the Jerusalem Talmud, even though he does not list it. This book was banned; Plantavit was more interested in telling other people what to read than in following his own advice. While Plantavit had Buxtorf outnumbered by two to one, the younger Johannes Buxtorf put out an updated version of his father’s book five years earlier. This had over a thousand Hebrew books, making Plantavit’s book outdated from the start. Between the two of them, Buxtorf and Plantavit only listed about a quarter of the Hebrew books printed.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages – Authority and Sources

Jonathan Dauber – Knowledge of God as a Religious Imperative in Early Kabbalah

Students of Isaac the Blind referred to themselves as Kabbalists. They developed their own traditions, combining many different elements. Kabbalah is not just the sum of existing traditions, it created something new. Why this impulse to fashion new traditions? One explanation is the coming of philosophy in the form of such thinkers as Abraham bar Hiyya, Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides and the translation of Greek philosophy from Arabic sources. Moshe Idel updates Heinrich Graetz who argued that Kabbalah was a reaction to philosophy. The Kabbalists were trying to set the record set. They saw themselves as the true interpretation of Judaism as opposed to philosophy. This first reaction does not preclude the possibility that Maimonides played a positive role in Kabbalistic thought.

The various philosophical works mentioned share the commonality that the study of philosophy could have religious value. Judah ibn Tibbon translated Bahya ibn Pekudah who believed that one had to “pursue this wisdom.” This is a philosophical turn that does not come from rabbinic thought. In his commentary on Song of Songs, Ezra of Gerona, a student of Isaac the Blind, argued that actively seeking out and gaining knowledge of God is the principle of everything. This is following Maimonides who held that the first commandment is to seek out the first cause. As Jacob Katz points out, Ezra of Gerona’s list of the commandments are close to Maimonides. Rabbi Ezra sees the source from Deuteronomy “and you should know today” and not the “I am the Lord thy God.” This is like ibn Pekudah.

Philosophy would say that one cannot actually study God, but only his actions. Ashur b. David saw the sephirot as God’s actions. Asher b. David was the nephew of Rabbi Isaac. His Sepher HaYichud presented Kabbalah in a popular manner. He uses “and you should know today.” As he explains, Moshe, the prophets and the Messiah charged us to investigate the Creator. This is identified as the catalyst for his work.

The Gerona Kabbalists, who came later, are more hostile to Maimonides than the Provencal Kabbalists. Early Kabbalah is open to a moderate Maimonides. We need a reverse of Menachem Kellner’s book on the influence of Kabbalah on Maimonides and talk about Maimonides’ influence on Kabbalah.


Arthur Hyman – Maimonides on Intellect and Imagination

Maimonides wrote the Guide to the Perplexed to offer a philosophical interpretation of the Torah. He never, though, provided the philosophy itself. Instead he relied on the Arabic books of his day. Leo Strauss, years ago, pointed this out that the Guide is not a work of philosophy. The main purpose of the Guide is to elucidate difficult points of the Law. It becomes the task of the interpreter to construct the background of Maimonides philosophy. Maimonides does not follow one Muslim philosopher consistently. He does not develop full theories of the intellect and the imagination. His interest in the intellect is largely psychological. With the imagination he is interested in the political, its role in prophecy and the creation of a society.

Maimonides attacked the Mutakalim because confuse the categories of the imagination with the intellect, assuming that anything that imaginable can exist. Maimonides is troubled by the Metukalim’s proof for God from creation. These are categories based on the imagination. All that could be pointed to from creation is that there are certain irregularities in the cosmos which imply the existence of God. Maimonides attacks Avicenna as well because he claimed that the intellect enters from without and can return there. Maimonides goes with the early Greek interpretation of Aristotle which claimed that the intellect is a material element that arises in the human being.

This is interesting because it does not offer a mechanism for life after death. Did Maimonides believe in individual immortality or did he follow ibn Bajja and Averroes and believe in collective immortality? Maimonides actually quotes ibn Bajja in the guide. Samuel ibn Tibbon and Moshe Narboni along with more recent commentators such as Shlomo Pines believed the later. Alexander Altmann held the former. Is Maimonides even entitled to a view on life after death? According to Aristotle anything that comes into existence must cease to exist. Maimonides held certain exceptions, such as the world which will forever be maintained by a specific act of God’s will.

Maimonides believed that the masses understand the categories through their imagination while the elites understand through their intellects. Should the masses be enlightened? Averroes said no because it would lead them to unbelief. Maimonides disagreed at least in terms of teaching them that God has no attributes.

Imagination has a positive role to play, for Maimonides, in prophecy. A prophet needs to have imagination. A philosopher and a lawgiver could get by with just intellect. Following the platonic model of the philosopher returning to the cave, the imagination is required for the parables needed to convey ideas to the people.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Enlightenment and Mysticism in Early Modernity

Matt Goldish – Hakham David Nieto’s Failed Skepticism in his Argument from Acoustic Delusion

David Nieto 1654-1728 was born to a Sephardic family in Venice and trained both as a rabbi and as a physician. He went to London in 1701 to assume a rabbinic post there. Upon arriving, he found a lot of religious skepticism. This was a community of former conversos skeptical of the Talmudic tradition and of the Oral Law. Nieto wrote a book titled the Kuzari HaSheni to defend the Talmud. Nieto often referred to science. As David Ruderman discusses, in this he was a parallel to the Newtonian physico-theologians.

In the fourth dialogue of his Kuzari, Nieto discusses the issue of acoustic delusions. People can be tricked into thinking they hear heavenly voices. This is Neito’s explanation of the story in the Talmud of the ovens where a heavenly voice comes out to defend Rabbi Eliezer and the rabbis still go against him. This is why Rabbi Joshua was right to reject the heavenly voice. To accept it would open one up to tricks by those with greater knowledge of technology. Nieto brings down various stories of tubes use to amplify the voice; there is one for example about a lord who watches his servant with a telescope and calls out with a voice tube, scaring the servant nearly to death. Where did these tales come from? Nieto was almost certainly familiar with the German theologian Athanasius Kircher. This line of work is part of a larger body of works, which attempted to use the new science of sound to explain ancient texts. These texts are often viewed as an embarrassment by modernists. They are in many respects closer to the magic of Robert Fludd and John Dee than to the science of Newton.

Despite Neito’s university education his sources were thirty to sixty years out of date. Nieto was interested in science but he was dealing with issues of a generation ago. He was still going up against the likes of Uriel de Costa, who challenged the Talmud. His congregants were dealing with Spinozism and radical skepticism, which point blank denied scripture. He kept to the role of a learned cleric devoted to dealing with the breaches that he could deal with.

Why was the Haskalah a German phenomenon? Nieto with his congregation of former conversos had the opportunity to do what many of his contemporary Christian clerics were doing to create a conservative Enlightenment. Why did Nieto not have followers like Mendelssohn? Nieto was just not a big enough guy. He stops sort of the big argument. Maybe he was acting as a provocateur? If the head of the Beit Din of Venice (Leone Modena) could be suspected of writing Kol Shakol maybe Nieto as well. Neito, though, seems to have been a very conservative person. That being said, we do have him early in his career saying that God is nature and that nature was God.


Sharon Flatto – Ecstatic Encounters on the Danube: Enlightenment and Mysticism

The maskil Moshe Kunits (1774-1837) writes of a mystical encounter on the river Danube where God tells him to write the biography of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. This becomes the book Ben Yochi. This work was supposed to offer the reader a mystical experience. This is not as strange as it might seem as many maskilim espoused Kabbalistic ideas. Moshe Maimon and Moshe Landeau followed a similar line.

It has generally been claimed that the haskalah and Kabbalah had nothing to do with each other. Isaiah Tishby and Gershom Scholem argue for this. Shaul Magid, today, also claims this. As Boaz Hoss, though, argues, the early maskilim did not always reject Kabbalah. This is in keeping with the work of David Sorkin and Shmuel Feiner who argue that the haskalah was actually not that radical. We have a poem by maskil Moses Mendel eulogizing Rabbi Ezekiel Landau that is built around the names of the sephirot. Contrary to Alexander Altmann, who argued that Mendelssohn banished mysticism from Judaism. Mendelssohn goes with the Kabbalists over Maimonides in regards to the principles of faith. Solomon Maimon talks about preferring Cordovarian Kabbalah over Lurianic Kabblah.

Scholem believed that Kabbalah served as a means to argue for Halachic reform. Jacob Katz disagreed. This talk plays to both views. Many of these maskilim were still committed to normative Jewish practice, but they were also committed to challenging the status quo. Kabbalah served both sides of this agenda.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies - Jewish Thought: New Challenges

Alan Brill – Is There Still a Mystery to Mysticism after Modernity?

You can find the full lecture at Fordham. This is just a small piece that deals with Judaism. Today mysticism has dropped off the map. Instead we tend to use words that are more descriptive. There are five major schools in thinking about mysticism.

The first school treats mysticism as a series of texts that offers images. This is the view you can find in Bernard McGinn and the Chicago school. Michael Fishbane is a Jewish representative of this school. For him mystical texts are a continuation of midrashic interpretation. The second school focuses on the lack of divine presence. This is very useful for people who do not want to talk about God anymore. An example of this is Arthur Green. According to Green, God withdraws from a dimension and allow us to engage in our own interpretation. You can use god language without dealing with the implications of it. The third school is the political. I will not deal with it here, considering where we are. The fourth school sees mysticism as esoteric writing and knowledge. This covers a wide range of people. Moshe Idel, for example, treats Kabbalah as esoteric knowledge, a map that one becomes familiar with. The goal of Kabbalah is to unpack the text using a number of methods. He downplays negative theology and Neo-Platonism in Kabbalah. Moshe Halbertal now follows this. In a strange way the Kabbalah Center also works like this. They have hidden secrets, technology of sorts, to understand the universe. To go to the other extreme, Haredi Kabbalist Moshe Shapiro works within this school. This allows him to go against science. From his perspective, he knows the secrets of reality and you in the university are just grasping at it. The fifth school focuses on meditation. Mysticism is not secret but an open practice that one learns how to do. The Dalai Lama and Mary Carruthers of NYU operate within this model. Carruthers even looks at medieval texts like this.

Many of us are used to looking at the Zohar from twentieth century categories. The first model looks at the metaphors for their own sake. What do they mean? The second model would try to deflect the theist language. If God is a tree it is not as scary. The fourth wants to ask about how you go from the plain meaning to the esoteric. The final model looks at the pragmatic elements. In the last twelve years there has been a turn away from devekut. Texts have become resources in of themselves. To make the comparison of the spider and the silkworm. In the Ingmar Bergman film, Through a Glass Darkly, a woman sees God as a spider. In the Zohar God is a silkworm spinning the universe. In post modernism we are no longer interested in the experience but in the image itself, god as the spider, god as the silkworm.

(See here for a series of clips of Dr. Brill teaching meditation. I will leave it to the reader to come to their own conclusions as to where Dr. Brill stands in terms of the various models he outlined.)

Eric Lawee – Adam’s Mating with Animals: New Data on Christian and Jewish Receptions of a Strange Midrash

And now for something completely different. According to the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, Adam mated with every species of animal but was not satisfied until he mated with Eve. Midrashim can have an effect even centuries after it was written. Rashi modified the midrash, but did not view this as strange that the first man engaged in bestiality. It only becomes a problem once Christians pick up on it. In the thirteenth century this Midrash was used by Nicholas Donin to attack Jews. Pablo Santa Maria also used this Midrash to mock Judaism. One solution for Jews was to read this non-literarily. Shem Tov, for example, argued that one should interpret such things according to their allegorical meaning in the way of Maimonides. Moshe ibn Gabbai interpreted this Midrash as saying that Adam investigated every animal with his intellect.

There is new data from the sixteenth century. This is the start of print and a wider diffusion of rabbinic writing among Christians. Sixtus of Siena, an apostate, used this Midrash. Johannes Reuchlin defended Rabbi Eliezer by saying that he only felt desire when he came to Eve. Rauchlin’s Jew, Simon, quotes Sefer Nizzahon (See David Berger’s Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages.) arguing that Adam could not have had intercourse with insects. Censorship was one Christian solution for such a problem. In the third Bamberg edition we see a denuded Rashi that does not refer to this midrash.

In modern times we have Pastor Cohen G. Reckart in the role of Nicholas Donin for the internet age. He says about the Talmud that “No Christian could read this book in a true heart of faith in Jesus and not come away from a study of it shocked and alarmed.”Rabbi Shimon Schwab distinguished between higher order versus lower order animals. Adam might have had intercourse with high more human like animals. The Schottenstein Talmud goes in a different direction of earlier Artscroll references to Rabbi Eliezer, which acknowledged different opinions on the matter. The Schottenstein Talmud simply follows Maharal and says that this should not be taken literally.

Just Say No to Polytheism: Why it is Important to Believe in a Singular Non-Physical Deity (Part III)

Part I, II

My intention is far from picking on Christianity, even pagan Christianity. My real interest and the reason why I am writing this are those Jews who have the hypocrisy to attack Christianity while holding on to doctrines that are equally as problematic as the Trinity or the Incarnation. There is no way easier to have yourself thrown out of the Jewish community, whether it is the Haredi community or the most liberal Reform community than to imply an openness to the Trinity. If this was more than just politics, we would expect equal thoroughness in going after certain other doctrines. These problematic doctrines are closely related to the Jewish mystical tradition, particularly that of Kabbalah. This is not to say that all mysticism or all Kabbalah is bad; statements have to be taken one by one and judged before the bar of monotheism and those that fail must be cast aside.

The early mystical text Shiur Koma (Song of Ascent) was listed by Maimonides as an idolatrous book because it offers measurements of God’s body. For our purpose, it is not enough to reinterpret Shiur Koma as a mystical allegory that is not meant to be taken literally. Our apologist would still have to explain how Shiur Koma serves to spread monotheist ideas more than it does to give people the idea that God has some sort of body, even an elevated preternatural one. If this person really believed that Shiur Koma was just an allegory he would have the good grace to recognize that, as with any explanation that requires more explaining than the thing it is trying to explain, it should be dropped. Thus we can assume that any Jew who actively supports Shiur Koma is either an open or closeted corporalist, thus a pagan, or is demonstrably lacking in proper monotheistic zeal. One way or another, such a person should not be allowed to hold any position of respect and authority within the Jewish community. Just as we would not allow someone who believed that God, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, possessed a human body.

There is a whole body of early medieval Jewish mystical literature known as Merkavah texts. These texts deal with ascents into the heavenly realms by the use of various mystical names. They are premised on the notion of the heavens as a realm that can be traversed and that one can even reach the inner sanctum where God “dwells.” While one can reinterpret this as something innocuous, there is no doubting the inescapable premise that the divine realms are a place that can be conquered through the right secret knowledge. The moment you allow this you turn Judaism from a rational ethical religion to a magical and hence a pagan religion.

Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed is often blamed for the mass apostasy in Spain. The Guide was quite popular in Spain, but so was the Zohar, a body of mystical texts attributed to Rabbi Shimon b. Yochai and is the main source for the concept of Sephirot. Now I ask you what is more likely to get people to sincerely convert to Christianity, a book like the Guide that takes one of the most hard-line stances imaginable against God being in any way physical or a book like the Zohar that suggests that God might have different parts to him? This is ultimately the same sort of territory opened up by the Trinity. Abraham Abulafia made the argument that the belief in Sephirot was worse than the Trinity as the Christians only had three persons in their godhead and not ten. It is not for nothing that early modern Christian Hebraists were so interested in the Zohar and the concept of Sephirot. If you accept Sephirot than you have no intellectual reason to reject the Trinity. In fact, the Trinity can easily be worked into the Sephirot. God the Father could be the three highest Sephirot, Keter, Chochma, and Binah. The Holy Spirit could be six of the lower Sephirot. Jesus would then be the Sephira of Malchut. Malchut is special because it is the one Sephira that directly interacts with the physical world, a Kabbalistic version of the Incarnation. So what sort of person would support a book like the Zohar? Someone whose primary concern is not defending strict monotheism.

Zoheric concepts are developed into some of their worst features in the thought of Isaac Luria. Luria postulated an elaborate creation story in which the divine vessels were damaged in the very act of creation, leaving human beings with the task of tikkun olam, healing the world. At the heart of this theology are the notions that God is in some sense “imperfect” and in “need” of human aid to make himself perfect once again and that human beings have the power to affect the divine.

While books like Shiur Koma, Merkavah texts, Zohar and the Lurianic corpus are held in high esteem by most in the Haredi world, the group that has done the most to popularize such texts has been Chabad. This makes Chabad a logical target for someone like me who believes that such books, for all intents and purposes, advocate paganism. In addition, Chabad has its own sacred text, Tanya, which features many of the same problems as these other texts. So what do we assume about our Rabbi Eli Brackman, the Chabad rabbi at Oxford mentioned previously? If his interests are really in the realm of ethical monotheism than he would be spending his time trying to pass along the philosophy of Saadiah Gaon, Judah Ha-Levi and Maimonides. He would not be spending his time with Tanya. For that matter why, considering that Chabad has more and more become not just a side issue for Chabad Jews but the central issue of their Judaism, is Rabbi Brackman identifying himself with Chabad? Now Rabbi Brackman has denied having any polytheist intent; this leaves the conclusion that either Rabbi Brackman is just a closeted pagan or that he fails to appreciate the gravity of the situation, a common failing of so-called monotheists.

In conclusion, I admit that I have not offered a thorough discussion of Jewish mysticism nor do I claim to be an expert in the field. This is a more formal version of the challenge that I touched upon earlier and I hope that this could the start of future dialogue. My challenge to Rabbi Brackman or anyone else who wishes to defend Kabbalah in general and Chabad specifically is not whether they can offer acceptable interpretations of the texts in question but whether these texts offer something to ethical monotheism that can justify tolerating them in light of the very obvious heterodox lines of thought inherent to them.

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.

History 112: More on Giordano Bruno and the Challenge of Skeptical Relativisim

To continue with our discussion from the other day, you remember our friend Giordano Bruno, the renegade Dominican. If you were paying attention to your reading you may have noticed that he was mentioned in the section about Rudolph II. Rudolph II and his circle are an example of what Frances Yates argued, mainly that the Scientific Revolution had its origins in Renaissance magic. Rudolph II was into the occult and he gathered around him magicians, alchemists and astrologers from around Europe, one of them being Giordano Bruno. You might think that all this magic and occult has nothing to do with “science.” Except that one of the characters hanging around Rudolph II’s court is a man by the name of Johannes Kepler, one of the founding figures of modern physics.

Yesterday, in class, Dr. Breyfogle talked about Martin Luther and the Reformation. Having someone like Giordano Bruno offers an interesting perspective on the Reformation and the origins of modern secularism. One of the million dollar questions of early modern history is where does modern secularism come from. In the United States today only a third of all Americans go to a religious service on a weekly basis. Now America, by Western standards, is a very religious country. We have the second highest per capita level of church attendance of any Western country. Ireland is first. We tend to think of medieval Europe as being dominated by religion and people living in the Middle Ages as being very religious. Accepting this assumption, and it is actually not so simple, one is left with the question as to how and why things changed; if people were once very religious during the Middle Ages how and why did they become secular in modern times. Giordano Bruno is interesting in that he serves as a half way point. He rejected Christianity, as we are used to thinking about it, creating his own religion based on hermetic magic and Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, yet he viewed himself as a Christian trying to restore “true” Christianity, as practiced by Jesus and the Apostles, from the corruptions of the Middle Ages. In this he was like Luther. So when does someone stop being a Christian? When you deny the authority of the Pope, of Church councils and most of the sacraments, like Luther did? What about if you deny transubstantiation, like John Calvin? What if you deny the Trinity, like Isaac Newton and John Locke? Luther saw himself as restoring Christianity to the way things were in the Bible. The Bible says nothing about a pope so let us get rid of popes. Of course the Bible says nothing about transubstantiation so you have Calvin getting rid of that; no more Fourth Lateran Council. At the end of the day, though, the Bible says nothing about a Trinity so if you are Newton you can go and dump Nicaea overboard. From this perspective a Giordano Bruno makes perfect sense; you can believe in nothing and still call yourself a Christian.

As we talked about last time, in this class you will be learning about the historical method. History is a lot more than just names and dates, though you do need to have some knowledge of these things. History is a method of thinking, one that is useful beyond the narrow confines of history. Just as the scientific method is a means of thinking that goes beyond “science.” As a method of rational inquiry, the historical method, as with the scientific method, is premised on the notion that the human mind is capable of coming to know certain truths. This is the counter of what I like to refer to as the skeptical relativist position. Scientists have done a better job at presenting their method to the public. They have not had the luxury of other fields not to do so. As a historian I will never have to get up in front of a school board in Kansas or any other place and defend the proposition that the existence of a Napoleon Bonaparte is historical fact and that anyone who thinks otherwise deserves a straightjacket, a padded cell and a lifetime supply of happy pills.

Last time we considered a skeptical relativist position, that my blog, Wikipedia and the scholarship of Frances Yates are all the flawed products of the human mind and human biases and therefore are all equal; one is not really better than the other. Who would support such a position? We are used to thinking of relativism as product of liberal secularism. We are used to hearing from secularists that all values are relative and there are even those who would apply this relativism to science. Now there is another group that has the same interest, religious fundamentalists. In my opinion one of the major misunderstandings of religion in the modern world is the equation of skepticism and relativism with secularism; religious fundamentalism is also built around extreme skepticism and relativism. What is left standing if all human knowledge collapses and no longer can claim any authority? (In a Southern drawl) “The Bible! The Bible is word of God. All those so called scientists and scholars they do not really know anything. You need the Bible to set you straight.” If you have ever been around campus come summer time, you will hear people like this, standing around on the oval. Now I grew up dealing with Jewish fundamentalism, it sounds a bit different. (Yiddish accent) “Mimelah all the scientists are bunch of apikorsim (heretics) and what you need is to have emunah pshuta (simple faith) in the Torah hakodosha (the holy Bible).” This is an example of Yeshivish. Think of it as a sort of Jewbonics.

So all of you here! You are my deputy historians. We stand against skeptical relativism in both of its forms. We believe in the power of human reason and over the course of this coming quarter we are going to see the historical method in action as it takes apart texts.

AJS Conference Day Two Session Four (Insults Through the Ages)

Hartley Lachter (Muhlenberg College)
"The Little Foxes that Ruin the Vineyards: Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov on the Pernicious Influence of Jewish Philosophy"

Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov, in Sefer Emunot, refers to philosophers as foxes that ruin the vineyard of Jewish tradition. For Shem Tov it is Kabbalah that represents the true Jewish tradition. Sefer Emunot serves to educate the reader as to the true nature of Kabbalah. Shem Tov even attacks Maimonides for going after the Greek Aristotle and human reason. Shem Tov sees Maimonides as being an elitist. For Maimonides, knowledge comes to the worthy few. Shem Tov does acknowledge some philosophy as being useful; just as long as it is kept in its place by revealed tradition. The fox in Shem Tov's analogy is not just clever it also is a violator of boundaries. Their actions lead to apostasy. As such philosophers destroy the one vehicle for divine truth to reach the world. Thus it is a threat not just to Judaism but to the world as well.


Matt Goldish (Ohio State University)
"Rabbinic Insults in the Early Modern Period

There is a thanks in order to the conference for lowering their standards thus allowing for Allan Nadler to take part.

Rabbis do not pay much attention to the laws against loshon hara. The early modern period is rich in rabbinic insults. This reflects a crisis in rabbinic authority. Rabbis saw the oral law and rabbinic tradition as being under attack and they felt the need to its defense. For example we have R. Jacob Sasportas attacking the Sabbateans. Referring to the four sons of the Passover Haggadah, he comments about Nathan of Gaza that first Jacob Hagiz thought he was a Tam, a simpleton, than he realized that he was the child who does not know how to ask. Sasportas calls Sabbatai Raphael a tub of urine. Leon Modena attacks Kabbalists and asks that boiling lead be poured down the throat of Shem Tov b. Shem Tov for insulting Maimonides. According to Modena, Kabbalists have not produced a single worthwhile Talmudist. Their work is the overcoat of idiots.

Alexander Joskowicz (University of Mississippi)
"Jewish Insults in the Modern Period: On Neo-Orthodox Popes and Jewish Jesuits"

Insults serve an important role as source material. In the late nineteenth century making fun of Catholics becomes an important part of inter communal Jewish polemics in Germany. In 1876 there was the famous debate over the law of separation. This measure was supported by the Orthodox party. It allowed them to form their own separate communities outside the control of the Reform establishment. Reformers attack the Orthodox as being Jesuits. Just like the Jesuits are first and foremost loyal to the Pope and not the state so to the Orthodox refuse to remove references to Zion from their prayers, demonstrating their disloyalty to the state. We also see the counter argument that Reform rabbis are like Catholic priests; they have no natural authority and seek to simply bully people into submission. This anti Catholic sentiments can be seen as a type of pathway to modernity. Jews were taking part in the Protestant culture around them and framing their arguments within a distinctively Protestant value system.

(Allan Nadler served as the respondent for the session and stole the show. First he returned the favor to Dr. Goldish by pointing out that it was now past shkeia, sunset, so Dr. Goldish could tuck his tzitzit in. Then he introduced us to some interesting background about the name Nadler. Apparently, during the early modern period, the name Nadler was a common insult. The source for this seems to have been a family of Nadlers who were bigamists. So calling someone a Nadler was the Jewish way of calling someone a bastard. Indeed even the famous R. Joel Sirkes got involved and ruled that it violated the laws of lashon hara to call someone a Nadler.)

AJS Conference Day Two Session Three (Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah and its Aftermath)

Mor Altshuler
"Tikkun Leil Shavuot of R. Joseph Karo and the Epistle of Solomon ha-Levi Elkabetz"

The tradition of tikkun leil Shavuot, of studying all night on Shavuot, comes from the Zohar where the practice is associated with the Rashbi circle. In essence playing out the revelation of Moses at Sinai. The first historic tikkun that we have evidence of was practiced by R. Joseph Karo, R. Solomon Elkabetz and their circle in Salonika. According to Elkabetz, the voice of the Torah came out of Karo. The voice identified itself as the Shechina in exile; God had left her and her children had abandoned her for idols. The revelation of the Shechina takes them from Moses at Sinai to Joshua conquering the land of Israel. Soon afterwards there was a plague in Salonika. Karo lost his wife. This eventually led Karo and Elkabetz to moving to Safed and establishing the golden age of Safed Kabbalah.


Zohar Raviv (University of Michigan)
"Rabbi Moses Cordovero's Sefer Gerushin: Contemplation, Devotion, and the Negotiation of Landscapes"

R. Moses Cordovero's Sefer Gerushin has not been heavily studied. Lawrence Fine has done the most extensive study of it to date and he only gives it a page and a half. The main theme of the book is the exilic existence of the Shechina and how one relates to it. The book advocates the practice voluntary exile in order to enact the exile of the Shechina. By doing it specifically in the Galilee one is literally following in the footsteps of the Rashbi. One should do what was done in the Zohar in the specfic place done there. Codovero advocated a practice in which a living mystic would lie on the grave of an ancient sage whereby the person would become the Shechina and the ancient sage would take on the persona of Yesod. Underlying all this was the premise that if one understands the divine structure once can force God to do certain things.


Eitan P. Fishbane (Jewish Theological Seminary)
"Identity, Reincarnation, and Rebirth in the Writings of R. Hayyim Vital"

Belief in the afterlife and ressurection is a basic part of many religions. R. Hayyim Vital's Shar ha-Gilgulim is about the search for ones place and function in the redemptive restoration of the primal cosmic order. The identity of the person is the soul that travels from body to body. Isaac Luria's great ability was that he could identify the identity of his students' souls and understand their purpose. (See Lawrence Fine's Physician of the Soul) The actions of a person can have a cosmic affect. The intentions of a person, while having sex can affect the children born. A father's energy can make a child wild or lazy.


Lawrence B. Fine (Mount Holyoke College)
"Spiritual Friendship in Jewish Mystical Tradition: The Bet El Contracts"

There is a difficulty in studying the history of friendship. Friendship is something so universal that it is easy to ignore. One has to recognize that the concept of friendship differs from place to place. Friendship also has to be distinguished from other social realities. There is the prescriptive (what friendship should be) and the descriptive (what friendship is).

The Bet El circle is an example of community friendship. Bet El did not go the way of Hasidism; it remained an elitist and not a popular movement. They signed a pact as a group to love one another and to share in each other's merits. Members of the group were not to praise another too highly and everyone was to treat each other as equals. This pact has its precedent in the circle of David ibn Zimra. Among the people included in this pact was Isaac Luria. To go further back one can point to this model as being rooted in early Christian and early rabbinic thought.

AJS Conference Day Two Session One (Studies in Mystical Experience and Identity)

Pinchas Giller (American Jewish University)
"Kabbalah and Meditation"

Can we speak of a Kabbalistic meditation? This concept seems to be rooted more in modern interests than in traditional source material. When we speak of meditation we mean something very specific. It involves specific uses of the body and mental states. Contemplation is not the same thing as meditation. Kabbalistic prayer is not easily reconciled with meditation. Cleaving to God is not becoming one with him. Jews tend to work with a transitive model of prayer, engaging in rites directed at a given object, in this case a monotheistic God. The closest thing to meditation in the Kabbalistic tradition is Abraham Abulafia. Abulafia's teaching do involve breathing exercises and body positions in order to achieve a spiritual result. But Kabbalah never developed a methodological school with a living tradition. Abulafia's tradition was lost and failed to achieve any wide influence. Where meditation does come into play in Judaism is the Sufi inspired tradition of Bahya ibn Pakuda and Abraham Maimonides.

(Giller and Menachem Kallus got into a debate about certain technical issues involving Hindu-Buddhist meditation traditions, which went completely over my head. I did recognize one of the terms they were using, chakra, from having watched Naruto. I take it as a bad sign if I am getting my knowledge of Eastern meditation from Japanese anime.

It struck me as interesting how important Eastern thought has become for Kabbalah studies. I recognize that this is a legitimate line of scholarly inquiry. As a historian, though, I am more inclined to focus on narrative questions such as who, what, when, where any why as opposed to methodological questions; I am not concerned with defining the nature of mysticism as something spanning time, space and cultures. I know that medieval and early modern Kabbalists were not talking to Hindus and Buddhists. Muslim Sufis, and Christian mystics is another story entirely and therefore of interest. In this respect I guess I come down into the camp of Gershom Scholem and not Moshe Idel.)


Menachem Emanuel Kallus (Haifa University)
"On a Purported Copy of the Cosmographic Diagrams of R. Hayim Vital"

(Dr. Goldish had me read some of Kallus' work so I had become a fan and was really looking foward to hear him speak. Unfortunately his presention went right over me. Therefore I am not going to even make the attempt to summerize what he said. )


Igor Victor Turov (National University, Kievo Mogilyanska Akademiya)
"Attitude of the Founders of Hasidism to Gentiles"

In general Hasidic attitutudes toward gentiles are quite negative. Gentiles are physically and spiritually dangerous. That being said you do have certain streams of Hasidic thought that, in a strange sense, are positive. For example, Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk talks about admiring the beauty of the gentiles. The Besht makes a treaty with Carpathian bandits; he would pray for them and in return they would not attack Jews. At the root of this "positive" view of gentiles is the notion that God concealed himself amongst the gentiles and that by interacting with gentiles one released the divine sparks trapped within them.

(This brought to mind an essay my Kallus which talks about a sort of "parasitic" Kabbalism where you can have someone so wicked that there is no hope of saving him. The Kabbalist sage would therefore take the little merit that this person had, leaving him completely with nothing, in order that some good should come of this merit.)

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.

AJS Conference Day One Session Three (Jewish and Christian Learning During the High Middle Ages: Parallels and Points of Contact)

Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University)
“Tosafists, Cathedral Masters, and Their Critics”

We see a contrast between Tosafists and Spanish rabbis; in general Tosafists are not expected to have had the sort of cultural contacts that we see in Spain. That being said, as Ephraim Urbach argued, the Tosafists were influenced by Christian dialectics. This was largely the result, not of reading texts, but simply from hearing preachers on the street. For example Peter Abelard talks about hearing a learned Jew speak. Even the narrative of the debate between the adherents of dialectic and their opponents is very similar to what we see with Christians. It all just happens a generation later.

In the Christian world we see in a shift in the eleventh century from the monastery schools to Cathedral schools. At the center of this was dialectic. The monastery schools were not interested in dialectic. Their method focused simply on the gathering and processing of vast quantities of material, without putting texts against each other. The Cathedral schools, such as Chartres, were built around dialectic. Not only that but they operated around given masters. Their prestige was not dependent upon the local but on who taught there.

The use of dialectic often brought charges of theological unorthodoxy. The dialectician Anselm of Laon talked about two wills of God; God allowing human beings to do something, even that which is evil, and God actually wishing for something to be done. Anselm was attacked by Rupert of Deutz, who saw this sort of theological hair splitting as having nothing to do with Faith, but simply as a matter of masters being interesting in their own glory. Similarly Bernard of Clairvaux attacked Peter Abelard. According to Bernard one should flee to the Cathedral schools to “cities of refuge.” One could learn more from the woods and the forests. Bernard was not against dialectics per se, in fact he made use of it. He was simply against what he saw as some of the abuses of it.

This conflict over dialectic finds its parallel amongst Jews. The Tosafist academies were based around a given master and not a local. Tosafist dialectics came under a similar line of attack. For example the Hasidai Ashkenaz saw dialectic simply as a means for a given individual to gain an inflated name for himself. Interestingly enough, they refer to Christian dialectics. The sort of more nuanced critique of dialectic exemplified by Bernard finds its parallel in Elijah of Paris, who also attacked the abuses of dialectic even as he proved willing to use its methods himself.


Daniel J. Lasker (Ben Gurion University of the Negev)
“Jewish Knowledge of Christianity in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries”

How would a Jew learn about Christianity? A medieval Jew did not have the sort of resources that modern scholars take for granted in pursuing their own research. Ironically enough, Jews living in the Muslim world would have had more of an opportunity to engage Christians in an open dialogue and therefore probably had a better understanding of it. Ashkenazic Jews, as a rule, did not have these sorts of opportunities. For example the Christianity that Rashi confronts in his work is a product of Midrash and not of the contemporary Christian culture around him. The exception to this were Jews who consciously set out to refute Christian theology. Jacob b. Reuben’s knowledge of Christianity came from his dialogue with a priest. This priest even lent him the works of Augustine, Paul, and Jerome, which Jacob was able to read in Latin. Moses b. Solomon was also someone who read Christian literature. He even urges his fellow Jews to familiarize themselves with non Hebrew languages, i.e. Latin, in order to deal with Christians. This sort of familiarity with Christianity and ability to directly engage Christian sources must be seen as atypical.


Sharon Koren (HUC-JIR)
“Echoes of the Eve/Mary Dichotomy in the Zohar”

Gershom Scholem focused on connections between Kabbalah and heretical Christianity. He never dealt with orthodox Christianity. We see in the Zohar a counter ideology to the Christian adoration of Mary and the doctrine of her immaculate conception. As other scholars have noted there is the Sechina, which is feminine. Beyond this, though, we see the biblical matriarch Sarah used in ways that parallel the Christian view of Mary. Mary is the counter to Eve. Eve sinned through her disobedience and brought death to the world. Mary, through her act of obedience, restores mankind to the life that Eve lost for them. The Zohar talks about Abraham and Sarah’s descent to Egypt as a descent into the forces of darkness, the Sitrah Acher. By doing this, and overcoming the obstacles they face there, they succeed where Adam and Noah failed. Eve was polluted by the serpent. Sarah, by remaining undefiled in Egypt, achieved a tikkun for Eve’s sin. Abraham and Sarah are the Sephira of Hesed, which acts a ritual bath and is protected from the forces of judgment.

The Zoharic circle gained their understanding of Marian devotion from the Christian world around them, seeing it on displayed on churches. They felt a need to respond to it. This is accomplished by brining in Sarah as the true exemplar of Marian salvation.

(Looking around AJS you see a wide variety of characters who seem to transcend the usual Jewish categories. Dr. Koren is an example of this. Judging at least from how she was dressed at the conference, she looks Orthodox; that is until you see on her name tag that she is with Hebrew Union College. I do not know her, but I imagine there is some sort of story behind all of this.

I most say I particularly liked Dr. Koren’s lecture. It went beyond simply pointing out a similarity to what we see in Christianity. She considers the process of how a Christian idea got into Judaism. She also considers the why; why were Jews so open to a given Christian idea? This gives her a narrative to work with.)