The Classical Liberalism of Wheelock's Latin

Here is my copy of the sixth edition of Wheelock's Latin textbook that I used in Professor Louis Feldman of blessed memory's class as a Yeshiva University undergraduate during the 2003-04 school year. If you want to get a sense as to how long Feldman had been teaching Latin to nice Jewish boys at YU, the introduction to the second edition thanks "Louis H. Feldman of Yeshiva College." Here is a sample of the kinds of sentences you have to translate in Wheelock, parsing Latin's beautifully intricate logical and maddeningly difficult grammar (answers at the bottom of the post)):

Officium liberos viros semper vocabat.

Pericula belli non sunt parva, sed patria tua te vocabit et agricolae adiuvabunt.

Propter culpas malorum patria nostra non valebit. 

Sine multa pecunia et multis donis tyrannus satiare populum Romanum poterit.

Ratio me ducet, non fortuna.

Bonum virum nature, non ordo, facit.

Reges Romam a principio habuerunt; libertatem Lucius Brutus Romanis dedit.

Iste unus tyrannus se semper laudabat.

Civitas nostra libertatem et iura civius conservabat.

I cannot say I ever came close to competency with my Latin but I still learned loads of important things like how to properly play the frack, marry, or kill game. You frack Lesbia, marry the patria and kill Catiline. All joking aside, what did I really get out of Latin? I cannot, over the years of my education, think of a textbook, not even in American History, that was so unapologetic in its classical liberalism. I would be tempted to count the Hertz Chumash but it was never used in any of my classes. 

Obviously, a Latin textbook is not a political manifesto and one could easily use Wheelock and be oblivious to its politics. That being said, Wheelock's reading and translation exercises took classical liberal assumptions as a given. Studying Latin with Wheelock meant entering a discourse on the relationship between liberty and moral discipline. Would a people love virtue enough that they would be willing to resist the temptation to sell their liberty for the promise of wealth and luxury? Reason is the ultimate virtue as it is what allows a person to control their passions. From this perspective, the state becomes a mirror that reflects its people. A virtuous people will keep their government in check. A people without virtue, who cannot rule themselves will be only too happy for someone to rule over them.  

What orients the free person is his love for the patria (fatherland). This is not fascism where whatever the government orders is, by definition, legal and moral. On the contrary, the patria is something that transcends the particular leaders who come to power at a given time and whatever laws they pass. Think of how the British monarch is supposed to be the head of state as opposed to the prime minister who is the head of the government. In the Aeneid, the mythological hero Aeneus turns down the opportunity to help Dido build Carthage. He might love Dido and Carthage might be a nice place to live but it is not Rome, a city destined by the gods to bring law to the world. Hic amor, haec patria est. (This is love, this is a fatherland.) Aenaeus is the perfect Roman precisely because his Romaness is not rooted in geography or time. He is the model of someone willing to subdue his passion in order fulfill his duty to Rome even though he was a Trojan and Rome would not exist for hundreds of years. 

When Marcus Brutus killed Julius Caesar, he was being a patriot. It did not matter that Caesar was the head of the Roman state and was backed by the majority of Romans. (For this reason, the conspirators declared that Caesar's social reform programs were legally binding even though, by their own logic, these programs should have been just as legal as Caesar making himself dictator for life.) Brutus, like his uncle Cato the Younger, obeyed the laws of the Roman patria, which was unchanging in its demand of sic semper tyrannis (always thus to tyrants).     

It is important to keep in mind Benjamin Constant's distinction between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. From the perspective of the Romans, liberty meant that they were free men and not slaves. This was due to their Roman citizenship as opposed to universal principles. Because of this, the Romans, like many of the American founding fathers, saw no contradiction between republican government and the owning of slaves. Furthermore, the Roman model left no room for personal liberty. What made you a free man and not a slave was your status as a Roman citizenship. To blaspheme against the Roman gods in the privacy of your home was not to practice your freedom but to undercut the very basis of what made you a free man. I should also add that the Romans were not much into markets. In fact, one of the major motivations for Roman aristocrats to free their slaves was so that they could serve as fronts to operate businesses. Making money through trade was considered shameful and members of the Senate were forbidden from doing so. My praise of Rome is not for Rome as it was. I am simply enthralled by certain aspects of Roman ideals, mainly its ability to reconcile liberty with personal discipline.   

Why are Wheelock's classical liberal values important and what are the consequences of the fact that this is not the norm among textbooks? C. S. Lewis had an essay where he asked readers to imagine what it might mean to live in a society where the literature was produced by people who took Hinduism as their starting assumption. The challenge of arguing with someone who holds the cultural high ground is that even the opponent is likely to still be under the sway of the dominant assumptions without even being aware of it. It gets even better if the opponent has managed to undergo the rigors of liberating their minds from cultural givens. Such action is almost guaranteed to alienate them from the public and render them unable to communicate their alternative ideas. Think of the libertarian argument that government is violence and that taxation is theft. The logic of it is unassailable. At the same time, it cuts against how we have been trained to think about government. Applying the same moral categories that we apply to individual humans to that of the government may be defensible in the abstract but does not reflect how people live their lives.    

Recently, my son's school had an online field trip to a museum devoted to the history of voting. The guide devoted almost his entire presentation to the United States' very real failings when it comes to women and blacks. What bothered me was less the history that he was presenting and more the simple fact that I never got the sense that this person was ever caught up in the romance of voting that you, the average citizen, and not the politicians should be in charge of this country. There is a moral drama at play. Will the citizen use his reason to research policy and act in a way worthy of a patria, those transcendent values that truly make up a nation, by rejecting both his personal interest and what is popular or will he fall to his passions and become a tool to be manipulated by those in power? 

What subconscious structural narrative do elementary school students pick up from how American history is taught? If the United States is a fundamentally racist endeavor that needs to be radically changed, as tolerant beings, students can consider themselves morally superior to the founding fathers. Thus, the American political tradition has nothing to teach them and they can feel free to promote whatever changes they wish. Such people are never going to develop the sensibility that politics is about making difficult moral decisions and to even get to the starting point they are going to need an incredible level of self-discipline. The recent leftist wave of iconoclasm is a physical manifestation of this thinking. If today's youth can topple the authority of traditional American heroes along with their statues and be hailed as civil rights activists for their actions then they can hope to create a blank slate upon which they can write themselves as the new moral authorities. Having never had to live up to the expectations of others, they can never be found unworthy.    

The United States, like ancient Rome, is a deeply flawed entity. That being said, these flaws can only properly be appreciated by someone immersed in its ideals. If the Roman republic was just another ancient civilization, there would be no sense of its tragic failure. It had its moment in the sun and then it passed on. But Rome was not just another civilization, it was the product of free men who submitted themselves to fulling their duty to their patria. This allowed Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world but also corrupted its people with heroic generals parading slaves and gold through the city. This killed the spirit of liberty and made the empire possible. I cannot say that we Americans are really better than the Romans but I am enthralled by the opportunity to attempt to prove myself worthy of liberty. 

Duty always calls free men.

The dangers of war are not small but your fatherland called you and the farmers will help.

Because of the faults of bad men, our fatherland will not be well.   

Without a lot of money and many gifts, the tyrant was not able to satisfy the Roman people.  

Reason leads me, not fortune.

Nature, not rank, makes a good man.

From the beginning, Rome had kings; Lucius Brutus gave to the Romans liberty.

That one tyrant used to always praise himself. 

Our state used to protect the liberty and rights of citizens.

Teaching Latin at a Chabad School

Dr. Jacob Ackerman attended a Chabad grade school in Newark, NJ during the 1950s where he served as the editor of the school newspaper. As an example of what he wrote about he mentions, "Mr. Posner, the Latin teacher, was out for three days because of a cold." So it used to be acceptable for a Chabad school to teach Latin. I am curious as to what texts they read. There is not a lot of Latin literature left if you exclude sex, violence and the gods. For me, that was what made Prof. Feldman's Latin classes fun.

Joseph's Adventures in Communism and College

Previously, I talked about my great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, and the late Prof. Louis Feldman of blessed memory as examples of antifragile Judaism, people who created Jewish lives for themselves under unplanned circumstances. In the world of antifragility, what looks good on a day-to-day basis is not necessarily what will work in the long run because what makes such systems look good is precisely what can bring it down in a once-in-a-generation disaster. I would like to return to this issue of antifragility and its implications for Judaism.

Critical to Jewish survival has been its ability to adapt to situations to which our faith, as envisioned by previous generations, was not designed to handle. The most extreme example of this was the rabbis after the destruction of the Second Temple, who reimagined Judaism without its central sacrificial cult and without the majority of the biblical commandments. This requires us to rethink who the heroes of Jewish history are from those who lived ideal religious lives under ideal circumstances to those who lived non-ideal lives precisely because their circumstances made such ideals impossible. 

The biblical Isaac is someone held up by the rabbis as a person who was able to live his life in Israel in purity without sin. As Rashi teaches, Jacob wanted to live that life but God sent him the calamity of Joseph. Joseph lived his life in Egypt as a slave, a prisoner, and finally as viceroy. Joseph had to carry on for all those years under the assumption that he had been cast out by his brothers and that there was no future for him as part of the Children of Israel. It is Joseph who not only physically saved his family but also made it possible for Israel to spiritually survive 210 years in Egypt. It is not for nothing that, every Friday night, Jews bless their sons to be like Joseph's children, Menashe and Ephraim, who grew up in the court of Egypt. Similarly, we have the later models of Daniel and Esther in the courts of Babylon and Persia, cut off from Israel and with no hope of being able to return. In Esther's case, she even intermarried.

Let us be clear as to what the challenge is here. Ignore the strawman argument that Egypt or Persia (or America) is different. This is easily countered by "we, the faithful, do not change." This strawman argument, though, covers an alternative utterly devasting attack of not that the world has changed but that you have changed. The moment a person wakes up and sees themselves as different and irreparably cut-off from their former selves with no hope of returning, then casting off one's former beliefs and practices becomes natural. One realizes that the hard act of changing has already happened and now it is only a matter of accepting the reality of the situation. In fact, the very tenacity that one held on beforehand, insisting that the new circumstances did not matter, will come to work in favor of giving in as it will make the break, once it happens, that much more obvious.  

Imagine trying to train a twentieth-century version of Joseph. It is the year 1900 and your newborn student lives in Czarist Russia. You have him until he is seventeen. In 1917 the Bolsheviks are going to take over and put an end to open Jewish observance. Your Joseph will have to live out his life without the support of a Jewish community and his observance will be compromised at best. What can you give him that will allow him to maintain a Jewish identity in his own mind and pass it along to his own Menashe and Ephraim to the extent that when he dies in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it will be as a Jew surrounded by a Jewish family?

The members of my family who came closest to living out this story were my maternal great-grandparents, Yitzchok Isaac and Feigy Schwartz. (Note that both my father’s father and my mother’s grandfather were named Yitzchok Isaac.) They survived the Holocaust only to go back home to a Soviet-controlled Hungary where they raised three daughters. As a teenager, my grandmother took advantage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution to flee to the United States because there weren't any good Jewish men to marry. My great-grandfather passed away when I was a kid. I only knew him as an old man sitting in a dark corner of my grandmother's house, who did not speak English. Frankly, he scared me. (I confessed this as an adult to my father and he laughed telling me that I had no idea what a kind man he was.) If I could talk to him now, I would want to ask him how he found it in himself to raise a Jewish family with no Jewish community to rely upon and offer hope for a future.  

The 20th century gave us Communism, the Holocaust, and ultimately the destruction of Eastern European Jewish life. Jews in 1900 could not have prepared for this but, at the end of the day, all of their efforts to build up Judaism that were not centered around the United States and Israel were going to be little better than futile. I have no idea what this century will bring. That being said, is it not unreasonable, for those in the United States to construct an educational system on the assumption (whether or not you are Haredi and oppose college on principle) that students are going to go college for four years without meaningful Jewish support. You have kids from the age of 5 until they are 18. What can you teach that will allow a student to go to college and, regardless of the compromises that they might make there, they will have a Jewish identity that will persevere to the extent that they will seek to rejoin the Jewish community afterward and raise a Jewish family? Anything that is not clearly focused on this goal needs to be cast aside as a waste of time and a distraction.  

Whether we are dealing with the extremes of Communism and the Holocaust or the mundane challenges of college, I assume that a successful pedagogical strategy will try to build a strong Jewish identity backed by theology and a deep emotional attachment to Judaism. Jewish identity here means a knowledge of ritual practice as well as a sense of Jewish history. Theology means having open and honest discussions about God and not simply assuming that kids believe in God just because they are ritually observant. Developing an emotional attachment to Judaism means getting away from threats of hellfire and, instead, making sure that Jewish practice is both joyful and meaningful. This is not to be confused with being fun and entertaining as that will have little staying power. A Passover Seder is not very entertaining but it can be effective if conducted by adults who understand what the Seder is about and are not simply going through the motions. Discussions about identity and theology should best be conducted over a Shabbos cholent or during shabbatons/summer camp along with plenty of singing. 

Take away a Jewish community and a person with a strong Jewish identity will continue as a Jew because, at a fundamental level, they see Judaism as essential to who they are and not merely a culture they grew up in or a set of practices they used to follow. To abandon Judaism would become unthinkable as almost a form of suicide. For all intents and purposes, it would be a different person living that non-Jewish lifestyle. A strong identity can allow a person a continuous sense of self that is not broken by anything that happens on the outside. Defending a Jewish identity requires a theology in the sense that our Joseph should be able to answer the Wicked Son's question of "what is this service to you." Having a theology is useful precisely when there is no community to give meaning to your identity. One thinks of the example of Maimonides, who lived for several years as a Muslim and developed the first list of Jewish doctrines. You could have a person living their entire lives without ever being able to practice Judaism. They are still Jewish because they are able to believe certain things even if it is only in their heads. Finally, all the arguments in the world are not going to keep an intelligent person Jewish if they do not already love Judaism. If a person sees Judaism as a burden to be carried in the hope of getting into heaven, a college campus will provide plenty of intellectual justifications for discarding that burden.  

If we accept this model of Jewish education then it raises some difficult questions about Haredi education. Frankly, Talmud, at least how it is conventionally taught, becomes a kind of "spork," in theory good for a lot of things but fails to do any one thing particularly well and is better replaced by alternatives. For example, there are better ways to teach halakha. It is even more difficult to use Talmud to teach theology. Talmud, with its jumping across generations, lacks a clear narrative in contrast to the Bible. The Talmud's strongest selling point would be that it can build Jewish identity by allowing students to develop a sense that they are a continuation of the rabbis with their discussions. Note, though, that while this form of Jewish identity, is well suited for people operating within a Yeshiva system, it is likely to crack precisely when that community is no more. Our Joseph, whether in college or under Communism, is not going to be a rabbi. That option is closed. If our Joseph is to remain Jewish it will be precisely because his sense of himself as a Jew transcends his being a rabbi. 

I readily acknowledge that the Haredi system is better at producing Jewishly knowledgable and fervent kids than the Modern Orthodox schools. Clearly, if the question was keeping kids religious tomorrow, Haredim would win easily. But the lesson of antifragility is that you have to prepare for the extreme. Breaking Haredi kids should be relatively easy. There is no need to argue with them. Take away their tzitzit and yarmulkas; clip their peyos and let them see themselves in the mirror. No need to force them to eat non-kosher, just let them feed themselves from a dining room not designed for kosher eating and make their own compromises. The fact that these compromises may be quite defensible will not change the fact that they are compromises. Once you create a break with their past selves, the rest should follow easily. 

Remember that Haredi kids have not been trained to imagine themselves living outside a Haredi community. On the contrary, they have been conditioned to make that imaginative leap impossible. Thus, the moment you take them away from their community, they will likely see themselves as different people. This is not the case with Modern Orthodox kids, who have identities distinct from their Judaism. This might make them less fervent and more likely to abandon the faith on a day-to-day basis. It also might allow them a stronger sense of continuity even under difficult circumstances. As long as mental continuity exists then Jewish identity stands a fighting chance. 

Moshe Eliezer: Toward an Antifragile Judaism

This past Friday was my son, Mackie's, first Hebrew birthday. So I am taking the opportunity to post the speech I gave at his bris. This speech lays a framework for some ideas that I have been hoping to explore on this blog at some future point. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a concept called "antifragility." The idea is that, if you want to evaluate if a system is stable, you do not simply go by how well it handles everyday stresses. What is important is how the system handles extreme "black swan" events. Systems that are antifragile not only can survive a crisis but even gain strength from it. Part of what is counterintuitive here is that it is possible to end up rejecting the system that is superior based on what we can observe. Often, what appears as the day to day strength of a system is precisely what will bring it down in a crisis. This concept can be applied to Jewish survival. Passing on Judaism to the next generation means not becoming seduced by things that look impressive from the outside to the neglect of things that can survive a crisis. It is one thing to talk about how it is great to raise children in Brooklyn or Jerusalem and what is the best way to do so under those circumstances. The interesting and relevant question is how to raise children when Brooklyn and Jerusalem are not options. In the end, the only kind of Judaism that is going to survive, regardless of geography, is that which can make it outside of such places.

We have decided to name our son Moshe Eliezer in honor of my great-grandfather and my teacher, the late Prof. Louis Feldman. What they both had in common was a Judaism that was antifragile and could survive even under less than ideal circumstances.

My great-grandfather, Rabbi Moshe Eliezer Shapiro, grew up in Israel but had to flee during World War I. He ended up as the rabbi of Atlantic City, NJ. Atlantic City in the 1920s was a relatively family-friendly resort town that inspired the game of Monopoly. That being said, this was never his plan for how he was going to lead his life. For example, my grandmother grew up going to public school. Things would have been much simpler if he could have stayed with his father, my namesake, in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he could have lived out a more ideal Torah lifestyle. Perhaps this is the origin of the Chinn family preference for out of the way Jewish communities. My father was raised in McKeesport, PA and I was raised in Columbus, OH. I now find myself raising my children in Pasadena, CA.

The character trait about Prof. Louis H. Feldman (Eliezer Tzvi) that most struck people who knew him was that he was so much more than the short old man in a baseball cap, crumpled chalk-stained suit, and sneakers that he appeared. At one level, his appearance disguised the fact that he was a genius and the foremost scholar of Josephus of his age. Feldman embodied humility; he honestly did not seek honor nor did he desire people to recognize his greatness. He was able to do this because it really was never about him. He wanted other people to know and love the classical world like he did. The more he could get others to see this and not himself the better.

To dig deeper, Prof. Feldman's scholarship disguised what a holy person he was. If he was not most people's idea of a great scholar, he was certainly no one's idea of a tzadik. What kind of nice Jewish boy would spend his life on Greek and Latin? Feldman was not just a classics scholar who also happened to be a religious Jew. Underlying everything he wrote, was an implicit apology for what Jerusalem had to do with Athens. The world of Philo and Josephus was a model for Feldman as to how to be a Jew in the modern world. Feldman's Judaism was never pure or ideal, but that was its strength; it was capable of surviving in an impure non-ideal world.

In his final years, I used to regularly visit Prof. Feldman. More than history, what he liked to talk about was growing up in Hartford, CT. If you are looking for the key to Feldman's unconventional Judaism, the place to start is in Hartford. As with Atlantic City, Hartford was not anyone's ideal place to raise Jewish children. Maybe that was the point. How could someone be a religious Jew in academia? The same way that one could be religious in Hartford and the same way that one could be religious in ancient Alexandria or in Rome; with unwavering values and a sense of humor.

Moshe Eliezer, welcome to the family. I can't tell you that things are going to be simple and I am sure you are going to have lots of questions but that is the Judaism that I am offering you. It is antifragile enough to survive even when things are less than ideal. There are challenges ahead here in Pasadena but you are capable of handling them. How do I know this? Because your roots run much deeper than just Pasadena. They go back to Columbus, to McKeesport, to Atlantic City, and to Hartford. If you dig deeper you will find that they go back to Alexandria and Rome. I look forward to teaching you about your classical heritage. If you stick with it, you just might find your way back to Jerusalem.   

History as Autobiography: The Example of Louis H. Feldman

Previously, when discussing the historical method, I argued that a historian, like any academic scholar, needs to be able to distinguish between scholarship and polemic. Scholars are allowed to have ideological beliefs but they are not allowed to use their scholarship to buttress their ideology. Once a clear connection appears between an individual's scholarship and their ideology to the point that the ideology becomes the inevitable conclusion of the scholarship that scholarship becomes tainted and opponents are allowed to point blank ignore it. This raises a serious challenge in that it is simply not possible for a scholar to spend years of their lives on an arcane topic that few other people are ever going to understand unless they feel an intense personal connection to the material that is likely to border on the ideological. How can one delve into material that has real ideological implications without becoming tainted? If all history is autobiography, how do we avoid dismissing it as such?

In my own personal life, the example of the late Prof. Louis H. Feldman is useful. Feldman's claim to fame lay in being, perhaps, the leading Josephus scholar of his generation. It does not take a psychologist to posit why Feldman devoted so many of his ninety years on this Earth to Josephus. To begin with, growing into adulthood as an Orthodox Jew in 1940s America could not have been an easy task for anyone living outside of New York, in Hartford, CT as Feldman did. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for him to have pursued a doctorate in Classics at Harvard. What sort of nice Jewish boy studies Greek and Latin? This basic challenge did not go away as he spent his teaching career at Yeshiva University lecturing to classes of one or two students. In retrospect, one can say in Feldman's defense that he was like the 1970s rock band the Velvet Underground. They may have only sold thirty-thousand copies but everyone who bought one went out and started their own rock band. If Feldman only had a few dozen students, each of them went out and became a Jewish leader. Consider that his close students included people like Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, Prof. Shaye J. D. Cohen, and David Berger.

At an intellectual level, Feldman's academic work was implicitly an apology for him being a religious Jew, who loved Hellenism. He crafted an ideological genealogy for himself and, by extension, for Modern Orthodox Judaism. If there was a running theme in Feldman's work it was Jews, such as Philo and Josephus, making their case to the wider Greco-Roman world that Judaism deserved a place in that culture. This covers everything from Feldman's big narrative work, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World, to his close analysis of how Philo and Josephus used the Bible for Jewish apologetics. Jews arguing, two thousand years ago,  for their legitimacy became Feldman's defense, in the twentieth century, of his own legitimacy as their heir. For Modern Orthodox Jews, there are serious implications for Feldman's work. In essence, Feldman can be read as a playbook for how Jews can thrive in a larger world that appears hostile to it. I can easily imagine assigning selections from Feldman in a class on Modern Orthodox ideology.

With all of that being said, this is the same Feldman that devoted an entire class to subjecting Josephus' autobiography to a line by line reading to make the point to us that you cannot trust what Josephus says about himself; there are just too many times that he contradicts himself. As Feldman told us: "I would not buy a used chariot from the man." If we are to say that Feldman had an ideological agenda, we must admit that Feldman was willing to fire a torpedo at this same agenda when textual analysis demanded it.

This leads me to my second point. For all that I have just written about the very real ideological implications of Feldman's work, I wish to make it clear how absent all of that was from his books and his classes. He did not preach to us about the virtues of Modern Orthodoxy. He argued from the fact that opponents of the Jews like Manetho did not point blank deny the Exodus story that Egyptian sources for the event must have existed as late as classical times. That being said, he never tried a "Josephus proves that Torah is true." If it happened that Feldman was a positive influence on his students in their Judaism, it was because his very persona testified that a living intellectually serious Judaism was possible and not just for rabbis. In this, his kindness and integrity mattered even more than his prodigious intellect.

Above everything else, a Feldman class was about reading texts and he, more than any other professor, taught me how to think critically like a historian and not just to be an encyclopedia of historical information. As a classical historian, Feldman had an advantage in this. It is hard to study ancient history to avoid questions of historical epistemology. He forced us to confront the fact that major claims about the period were dependent on a few lines of text. He would often respond to questions that he wished he could answer it but that there simply was no evidence to go on. This prepared us for the task of reading texts and building a narrative from the ground up.

Every Hannukah, Feldman would give a public lecture on classical history as his "eulogy for the Greeks." Feldman had the sense of humor and the intellectual integrity to acknowledge a tension in his beliefs. Whether I always agreed with Feldman or not (and he very often disagreed with himself), Feldman was a model academic scholar. He humbly taught in his chalk covered jacket and sneakers and churned out books and articles on obscure issues of interest to almost no one. It turned out, in retrospect, that Feldman produced something of importance beyond the narrow scope of his field. His greatest accomplishment though was that, for generations of students, he was a living embodiment of what it meant to think like a historian.        

Do You Trust a Politician When He Claims to Act for the Public Good? A Lesson from Cicero

If history does not teach lessons as to what to do, it does teach lessons as to how to read texts and interpret people. One of the things that I try to put across to my students is to read the statements of historical figures with a critical eye. In my 111 class, we have spent a lot of time talking about the Roman orator Cicero. If Cicero tells us that he selflessly put himself in harm's way in order to fight against corrupt officials like Verres or to save Rome itself from being taken over by Catiline we should not immediately swoon at Cicero's honesty, patriotism, and love of liberty. I wish for my students to wonder if the Sicilians, who came to Cicero for help against Verres, turned to him for his courage or because they knew him personally from his time in Sicily. Was Cicero helping foreign strangers in the cause of justice or some wealthy friends of his? Cicero charged into the Senate to finger Catiline as the ringleader of a vast conspiracy to violently take over the Roman Republic. Was Cicero the one man in Rome willing to stand in defense of the Republic or was the evidence against Catiline less than convincing to anyone who had not, like Cicero, run against Catiline for Consul the previous year? Cicero held the rights of Roman citizens to be sacrosanct and was horrified that Verres could have executed Roman citizens without trial on charges of treason. Of course, Cicero would have Catiline's followers executed without trial, but that was a "national emergency" and the men were so clearly guilty anyway. Later on, Clodius briefly forced Cicero into exile on account of him murdering Roman citizens. Once Cicero was back he defended his friend Milo on the charge of murdering Clodius, arguing essentially that Clodius deserved it. Cicero truly believed in law and order and not executing Roman citizens (unless they really deserved it or otherwise annoyed him).

These points are obvious to any classical scholar and I am grateful to Dr. Louis Feldman for teaching them to me and it is an honor to pass them on to others. In evaluating people, we historians employ a simple rule. You are automatically suspected of acting for base self-serving motives and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. This is done by demonstrating that the resulting action is different from what one might expect if one was acting from more self-serving motives. If an action proceeds logically from self-serving motives then you are guilty, case closed, no further questions asked.

If all I accomplished was to teach my students to chuckle at Cicero's pretensions of acting for the public good, my class would be of antiquarian interest, but with little practical relevance. The real target is not Cicero, but every politician today, whether liberal or conservative, who stands in front of the public and tries, like Cicero but without his genius, to claim that they are acting for the public benefit. If we are serious in applying our historical rule then, by definition, the only time a politician can be believed to act for the public good is when his solution involves giving less power to the government.

Considering this, can a historian be anything but a libertarian? What does it say about the intellectual honesty of those who are not?

(See Historians as a "Special Interest Group.")

Catching Up on Things: History 111 Fall 2010

Sorry for being offline for the past two weeks. This past month, just in time for our string of three-day Jewish holidays, I moved back to Columbus and started teaching again at Ohio State. On top of all this, I did not have an internet connection at my apartment until last night. (While I might miss New York and Silver Spring, what I am paying for my half of a two-bedroom apartment goes a long way to making up for things.) I hope to be back posting on a regular basis, though likely a little less often than earlier in the year.

So to get things back on track, I would like to invite everyone on board my new teaching experiment. For this quarter I decided to run my History 111 class as a book club. Instead of using one textbook and doing a survey of European history from antiquity up until the Enlightenment, we will be doing a series of shorter books on specific topics. Ideally, I would like to do secondary sources, but I am open to doing primary sources and even good historical fiction. While I picked the first book, Bart Ehrman's Peter, Paul & Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, subsequent books are to be picked by the class. We have already voted for the next book, Robert Harris's novel Imperium, which deals with the life of the Roman orator Cicero as told by his servant Tiro. It is similar to Robert Graves' I, Claudius, though it is, I believe, more accessible to a general audience.

I was inspired to do this in part by the wonderful book club I have here in Columbus and in part by my desire to take Alfie Kohn seriously to see what might come about with implementing some of his ideas. (See The Book Club: or How to Destroy School.) If the Alfie Kohn model of education could work anywhere it should be in a college where there is at least some degree of self-motivation among students. By allowing students to pick what books we read I am allowing the opportunity to structure the class to suit them. I still will be maintaining graded assignments, including homework. For example, as in previous years, students are supposed to email me a question or comment about the reading before class. (An idea I took from Prof. Louis Feldman.) I then structure my talk around responding to these questions. That being said, this is a rather open-ended assignment and serves to further make room for student input.

What attracted me to Ehrman was, one, he writes about the historical Jesus and early Christianity, topics of popular interest. He writes in a balanced fashion which, while not openly hostile to orthodox religious sensibilities does a very effective job of explaining how an academic approach differs from an orthodox one and for its superiority. Two, Ehrman provides an entry into the historical method as he talks his way through texts and how to use them. What Ehrman does to the New Testament is what historians do to all texts, sacred or otherwise. Part of what is subversive about the historical method, a Pandora's Box so to speak, is that it is impossible to accept it partway. If you accept the historical method then you commit yourself to applying it to all texts, the Bible just as much as Julius Caesar. Regardless of how orthodox your eventual conclusions, the moment you agree to subject the Bible to the same cross-examination as any other text you have put a knife into orthodoxy, committing yourself to the Kantian charge of placing everything before the bar of reason. There can be no return to innocent belief.

So this experiment seems to be going well even if I seem to be speaking a lot more than I might have liked. If anyone has book recommendations, please feel free to post them.

Rabbi Dovid Orlofsky and the Wisdom of Asking For Sources

Quite a number of bloggers have already discussed the audio clip of Rabbi Dovid Orlofsky of the Haredi outreach yeshiva Ohr Somayach attacking Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb of the Orthodox Union. I would like to add my thoughts to the matter, particularly on the matter of asking for sources. The essence of Orlofsky's tirade against Weinreb is that Weinreb apparently bothered to ask someone if he knew whether Rabbi Moshe Shapiro said anything of use in talking about a natural disaster such as the Tsunami. This qualifies Weinreb, in Orlofsky's eyes, as an idiot.

Coming from the academic world, asking other people for primary and secondary sources to follow up on for your research is expected. Academics hold conferences simply to allow scholars to present research in progress to other scholars in related fields and get feedback. No matter how great you are, you want to hear from other people, get their criticism and yes hear if they know of sources that you do not. I have been working on a doctorate on Jewish Messianism for the past several years; I make no claim to knowing everything on the topic. In fact, it is likely that you, my reader, know something about this topic that I do not. I encourage you, if you know of a book or have a thought that might be of interest, please contact me.

One of the greatest scholars that I have had the privilege to study with is Professor Louis Feldman, the Classics professor at Yeshiva University. Professor Feldman is a man who quite literally has Greco-Roman literature and the Church fathers at his fingertips. He has the practice of asking his undergraduate students to hand in paper topics and then gives them back page long single-spaced small print typed lists of source material to look at. Any issue that you can think to write about, Feldman can give you sources until they are coming out of your ears. Now Feldman, of all people, used joke with us that the problem with scholarship today is that there is too much being written and that we should pay people not to write. Even someone like Feldman, who comes closer than anyone I know to knowing everything, could still feel overwhelmed at times as to what is out there that he does not know.

In reading rabbinic letters, particularly from pre-modern times, one of the major themes that consistently come up is the need for books. "Do you have a copy of this book; can you send it to me?" This was only natural in a world where books were rare and expensive. Yes, even the greatest scholars in Jewish history did not know everything and had to ask their colleagues for help. How does someone like Rabbi Orlofsky deal with this? He probably lives in Artscroll hagiography land where every rabbi knew the entire Talmud by the age of five regardless of whether they lived within a hundred miles of a full set of it.

One of the most basic things about knowledge is that it is so vast that no single person could ever hope to master it; forget about knowing everything, even individual fields are too broad for the individual. Because of this, the pursuit of knowledge is, by definition, a collaborative effort. This leads to a collaborative view as to the nature of truth. I do not know everything. I know a few bits and pieces about something. I will, therefore, seek out other people, even and particularly people that I strongly disagree with and engage in a dialogue with them. Not because I have some Truth to convince them of, but because I believe that they have something to teach me. Whatever views of theirs I may strongly disagree with, I assume they came to those views honestly, through knowledge that I do not have. Put our two sets of knowledge together and, hopefully, we will produce something better than either of us could produce on our own.

I wonder what it does to someone to follow a fundamentalist view of religion, where there is direct divine revelation, preferably in the form of a holy book, understandable to man. Once you have this revelation you have the Truth and there is now no more need for questions; if the process of questions and answers are still used it is merely to demonstrate that all questions have been answered and are unnecessary. Such knowledge would require no collaboration; there is the Truth known to a few privileged men, everything else is error and heresy to be uprooted. In an odd twist on Nietzsche, this mode of thinking requires both that God be made human enough for his wisdom to fit into the human mind and there must be human beings godlike enough to know God and serve as purveyors of the Truth. God is thus abandoned and men, otherwise known as gedolim, are worshipped in his place. (See Rabbi Marc Angel Takes on Kupat Ha'ir.)

Asperger Discrimination: Some Self Evaluation

One of my recent posts dealt with some of my reactions to being let go by the high school I was teaching at. I used an email sent by a member of the administration, which praised the job that I did for them even if I they would not be able to have me back as a launching pad to muse about the nature of discrimination and where one draws the line between saying that those with certain character traits are ineligible for a job and saying that members of certain minority groups are ineligible when the characteristic in question is closely related to a specific minority group. The example I gave was that of a black teacher. We need to be honest that integrating society and creating a more tolerant one is not a simple or painless task. Having a black teacher teach a white class is likely to create friction. A world in which blacks carry the burden of integration, of making sure that there is no friction and of having the right "touch" in dealing with students civil rights is one in which civil rights would never get off the ground. Every act of bigotry can be hid behind a smile and the claim that unfortunately the person fails to socially integrate himself. As an Asperger, I see myself as a member of a minority group and feel we should receive everything that society grants to other minority groups such as blacks and gays. Looking back at the post I can see how it could have been misread by people, not familiar with my thought processes, casually glancing at.

To be clear, I was not arguing that I had been discriminated against. I specially pointed out that, even in my black teacher scenario, it is not clear to me that our black teacher would or should win. It would be touch and go. I practice, I suspect, it would come down to the school being able to demonstrate that they are acting in good faith in dealing with blacks and the struggle with students was not simply an excuse or a more politically correct way of framing discrimination. This piece was also not meant as an attack on the school for daring to fire a teacher as "talented" as me. I specially said that I was very grateful to the administration for the opportunity. My whole argument is dependent on the fact that it was very kind of them to write me this letter. A person is never truly in a position to evaluate himself so I have no desire to argue one way or another as to whether I am a "good" teacher or not. I took the stance that overall I did a good job on all things subject to empirical evaluation since that was the school's stance and because it sets up the whole theoretical issue, which I wished to discuss.

My evaluation of myself is pretty much in keeping with how I think the administration saw me. I have a very strong background in the material and I am a good lecturer. I still need to work on my back and forths with students and my tendency to just wind myself up and speak for forty-five minutes straight. My ability to control a classroom is a major problem. I may love teaching and honestly care about the students in my classroom, but I certainly do not have an easy time relating to them. I am brash, loud, and students often find me intimidating. This leads to situations where issues that should have been easily defused blow up into major issues and reach the attention of administrators, by definition a losing situation for me. If I were an administrator, I would have questions about rehiring me since I am one more thing to worry about and a parent brought lawsuit waiting to happen. In the end I think I am a very good teacher for certain types of students. My ideal teaching job would be what Dr. Louis Feldman has at Yeshiva University teaching Classics to two students. I could be the quirky teacher at some college off to the side with his pack of students. This sort of job, of course, is rare in this day and age and is unlikely to come my way.

Any final judgment of my teaching comes down to a question of values. What is the most important part of teaching, being a fountain of knowledge for students to tap or someone that students like and avoids trouble?

Articles of Interest

Linda Baker, in Scientific American, has an article about getting Americans to bike more as is common in most European cities. Her suggestion is to get more women involved.

Peter Stothard reviews, for the Times Literary Supplement, Robert Harris’ new novel, Lustrum, about the life of Cicero and exams how Harris uses ancient Rome to comment on modern British politics. I have read the first book in the series, Imperium, and cannot wait for the sequel to come out here in the States. Lustrum continues the story of the Catiline conspiracy. This was a much-beloved topic in the classics courses of Dr. Louis Feldman. Dr. Feldman felt that Catiline was unfairly maligned by Cicero, upon whom we are completely reliant for our information about these events. Harris follows Cicero and turns Catiline into one really scary villain. So far I love every minute of it.

John Elder Robison asks why the Autism community cannot just get along.

Jessica Bennett writes in Newsweek about how the city of Oakland is leading the way for the legalization of marijuana.

Clayton Neuman interviews Eoin Colfer about continuing Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Colfer is best known for the Artemis Fowl series. Certainly not in Adam’s league, but he is talented enough that he should be able to produce a book that Hitchhiker fans can be proud of.

Frank Schaeffer and the Humanities Question

I would like to thank James Pate for recommending Frank Schaeffer’s memoir Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Frank Schaeffer is the son of the late Christian thinker Francis Schaeffer. Frank grew up in the shadow of his parents in a villa called L’Abri in Switzerland. One of the major themes of the book is the struggle between his parent’s deeply held evangelical beliefs and their love of art and literature. While Frank Schaeffer grew up in a very strict home, without movies, television and other “corruptions” of modern life, he was raised to love classical literature, music and art. Francis Schaeffer did not approve of rock music until the 1960s but he played classical music in his room every waking hour. The highlight of the year was vacationing in Italy where Frank was tutored in painting by a gay artist. On the one hand, Francis was far more sheltered than his Evangelical peers in America yet he was also far worldlier. Frank explains the dilemma as follows:

We wanted nothing so much as the respect of the people who found our ideas backward and foolish. In a fantasy world of perfect outcomes, you would write a “Christian book” but have the New York Times declare it great literature, so great that the reviewer would say he was converting. And in the Style section, they would say that Edith Schaeffer [Frank’s mother] was the best-dressed woman in the world, so well dressed that this proved that no all fundamentalists were dowdy and that “we have all been wrong about you Christians.” And if those reporters visited L’Abri, they would say they had never been served so lovely a high tea, and that they had never heard such clever answers to their questions, and that because of the sandwiches, the real silver teaspoons, the beautifully cut skirt and jacket Mom was wearing, the kindness of the Schaeffer children, the fact Dad knew who Jackson Pollock was, meant that the Very Wealthy and Very Important people all over the world would not only come to Christ, but would, at last, admit that at least some real Christians (in other words, us) were even smarter and better-dressed than worldly people, and that you can believe Jesus rose from the dead, not drink or smoke or dance, and yet be even happier, even more cultured, better in every way!
What I never heard Mom or Dad explain was that if the world was so bad and lost, why did they spend so much time trying to imitate it and impress the lost? (pg. 52-53)

Frank Schaeffer has hit on one of the main challenges facing anyone attempting to build a religious movement that can stand its ground intellectually against the best of secular modernity. It is all too easy to make the pretense of being modern as a cover thus making the entire enterprise a scam. It is very easy to say the line that your religion works well with modernity. This goes for both the humanities and the sciences. Even Haredim have for decades now been in on the act, espousing what, in theory, is supposed to be Modern Orthodox rhetoric. Ask a Haredi person about the relationship between science and religion and they will be quick to give you the thirty-second talking point about how science does not contradict religion and in fact supports it. It is only when you start to dig in that you will find that the person does not believe in evolution. The science they are talking about is creationism, likely even young earth creationism. It is this sort of thinking that allows a group like Chabad, which engages in soft-core denial of heliocentrism to publish its own “science” journal, B’or Ha’Torah, and claim that they support science. Following the same logic, fundamentalist Christians can create institutions like the Creation Museum in Kentucky to give a scientific veneer to their Christian missionizing. Haredim and fundamentalist Christians are similarly able to create their own micro-artistic cultures, with books, music, and movies. These are ultimately pale imitations of the secular culture and thus fail in their stated purpose to offer a counter to secular culture.

If you are only engaging in the sciences and the humanities as an act, without believing in what lies behind them, the act is going to wear thin very quickly. I would see this as the cause of the failure to build a serious religious intellectual culture beyond eccentric individuals. By all counts, Frank Schaeffer’s parents were true believers in their humanities-based Christianity. Yet they failed to bring that humanities element to the wider evangelical culture, which simply wished to use them as intellectual cover. This is best captured in the book when the Schaeffers are told by a Christian film producer that they needed to cut out a shot of Michelangelo’s David from a documentary about Western art because it was male nudity.

This is a challenge that I face in my life. If I were debating me, the issue that I would go after is that I may be a smart religious guy, who values science and the humanities, but that I am just an individual who does not represent anyone. All I am doing is providing cover for those who do not really believe in science and the humanities and are just making the pretense of supporting these things to better advance their cause. The fact that I am a true believer in the sciences and the humanities makes the damage to these things all the greater. I would not be nearly as effective if I were simply pulling off an act like everyone else. I have a lot of sympathy for the Schaeffers. Like them, I see my religious beliefs as a necessary underpinning for science and for the humanities, where I actually work. My faith serves as a tool that I use to interact with the culture around me, helping me to further the cause of what is best in that culture. I matured into this belief through the influence and example of people like Rabbi Shalom Carmy, Rabbi Moshe Tendler, Dr. Alan Brill, and Dr. Louis Feldman during my years at Yeshiva University. In order to continue to operate within Orthodox Judaism I need to believe that such people are more than just eccentrics off to the side, but the elite representatives of a wider movement, a movement in which I am but a lowly foot soldier. I also need to believe that this movement has the potential to dominate Orthodox Judaism as a whole. As of now, I do not believe that we even control Modern Orthodox Judaism let alone the Haredi world.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: The Temple in Second Temple and Rabbinic Literature

Louis H. Feldman – Philo’s Attitude toward the Temple in Jerusalem

Despite the fact that Philo was so important in the political life of Alexandria, he says very little about himself. He had a brother, Lysimachus, whose son, Tiberius, left Judaism, become governor of Egypt and was a general in the war against Judea. We have more philosophical writings from Philo than anyone in the period. Josephus mentions him briefly. Jerome refers to him as a Christian monk in Alexandria. There is a legend that Philo met with Peter. In essence Philo was made a Christian in honoris causa.

Philo wanted to be a philosopher and a mystic rather than a communal leader. As a biblical commentator, he criticized both extremes in the literal versus inner meaning debate. This would destroy the sanctity of the Temple to just go with the inner meaning. This was certainly an issue of great importance to Philo as talks about personally going to the Temple. He also prominently discusses the attempt by Caligula to stick a statue of himself in the Temple. In the letter from Agrippa to Caligula, quoted by Philo, Agrippa talks about how the Temple is the most beautiful in the world and that he is proud to have it in his home city. Philo does not mention the temple of the Samaritans. For him the Temple in Jerusalem is the end point of heaven and earth. He is proud of the fact that money collected from Jews around the world goes to the Temple. According to Philo, there are two temples; the one in Jerusalem and that of the rational facilities.
(I asked Dr. Feldman about Philo’s Hebrew. It is generally acknowledge that Philo did not know Hebrew and that he was completely dependent on the Septuagint. If Philo loved the Temple so much why did he not bother to learn the language spoken in it. Feldman suggested that Philo may have been so devoted to the Bible and connecting it to Greek thought that he neglected other issues like the language of the Bible.)

Michael Tuval – From Temple to Torah: On the Development of Josephus’ Religion

Josephus went from Jerusalem to Rome and became a Roman citizenship. He changed as a person from a Jerusalem priest to a Diaspora intellectual. Diaspora Judaism was different in that it downplayed the role of the Temple. Instead it focused on synagogues and other communal institutions. For Jews in the Diaspora biblical heroes were better intercessors in heaven than earthly priests. For Judean Jews, Mosaic Law was the law of the land. For Diaspora Jews, Mosaic Law was something they kept as a matter of choice. Josephus places greater emphasis on Mosaic Law in his later work Antiquities than in the Jewish War. Jewish War can be seen as a theological text. God destroyed the Temple because of the sins of the Judeans. It had nothing to do with the strength of Rome. This is a Temple centered world view. By the time we reach the Antiquities he is a biblical expert. He is also takes a more favorable view of the Pharisees as interpreters of the Law.

History 112: Renaissance and Reformation (Q&A)

The new quarter has started and my new History 112 class is coming along quite remarkably. I seem to have been given a remarkably strong group of students. Following in the footsteps of Professor Louis Feldman, I am having my students email me questions before class which I then use for my lecture. As part of my effor to continue to post material from my classes in order to give those who cannot be present a chance to take part in my class I thought to post some of these questions and my responses.

1. The text mentions to different sets of writings on the subject of the renaissance, these being writing on the smaller movements associated with change due to humanism on one hand which it says are really only affecting a small portion of society and then a changeover to writing about the lives and lifestyles of the people themselves in a broader context, is there also an element where both of these topics are written about at the same time (other than our book, so is it a large element of scholarship)? Along with this, I see no real reason to split them unless dealing with a very specific region where the prior was not occurring to any significant degree, so was this change in scholarship done because of a feeling that too little was being covered or was it perhaps a feeling that effort could be better spent on the latter topic?

I would say that the most important development in historiography over the past few decades has been the “discovery” of regular people. Traditionally history has been about wealthy male elites who were either literate themselves who could pay someone to write for them. There were certain ideological reason for this, but also pragmatic ones as well; as historians we are slaves or our source material and that usually means written texts. That creates a bias in favor of those who could write. Since in pre modern times most people were illiterate this is a problem. One of the major revolutionary books in this new movement, which Davies refers to, is Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worm (It is on the recommended list for paper topics.). This book is about a miller, Menocchio, with some fairly heterodox ideas. He believed that the universe and God with it came into existence through a process of fermentation not unlike that of cheese and he denied Original Sin. This brought him in front of the Inquisition. Unfortunately for Menocchio, but fortunately for us, Menocchio seems to have had some serious difficulties in keeping his mouth shut. This resulted in the demise of poor Menocchio and several volumes of Inquisition files just waiting for a modern, scholar such as Carlo Ginzburg, to find. Thanks to the Inquisition we now know all about this relatively normal person, Menocchio, the story of his life and of his beliefs even though he was not a member of the aristocracy, a high ranking church official or some great philosopher.
As Davies indicates there is now a tension between the traditional mode of history and this new form. On the one hand we have our traditional history of kings and popes and we have this new history of millers, shopkeepers, healer women/witches etc. They are both operating within their own spheres. One of the big questions facing historians today is how to integrate these two histories; we know that our millers, shopkeepers and healer women were living on the same planet as our kings and popes. I would agree with you that these things should be put together. Considering the nature of present day scholarship it is somewhat difficult.

2. What was the people's reaction to Luther's theses? Did they encourage others to act out their frustrations with the Church as well?

Luther was certainly very popular among the common people in Germany and he even managed to gain the protection of the Elector of Saxony. This is a good example of the importance of low history as opposed to the traditional history of the elites. In many respects the really important story is not Martin Luther but the thousands of regular people who joined him and made it a movement.
Luther, left to his own devices, was not much of a revolutionary. He was just a young theologian with some mildly radical ideas. In the 95 Theses he is still very Catholic. At this point he still believed in the papacy, confessions, the full list of sacraments and even in the value of works. Hand him thousands of followers and all of a sudden you have something far more extreme than just a debate over indulgences or papal power; you have a Protestant movement.



3. Who are "the Canons" that was mentioned in Luther's document? I assumed it was the Church, but not sure.

This is a good question to ask. There are going to be terms in the reading that are going to be unfamiliar. You should not be ashamed to ask. You have every legitimate reason not to know. In thesis five Luther states: “The pope does not intend to remit, and cannot remit any penalties other than those which he has imposed either by his own authority or by that of the Canons.” Canon refers to the Church legal structure. For example we talk about Canon Law and Canon Lawyers. This is important because it is clear that at this point, in 1517, Luther is still committed to working within the Church structure. While he may be on the side for less power to the Pope, he assumes that power lies in the hands of the body of the Church structure; we are talking about elite officials here and not lay believers. Luther is in no way handing people a blank check to simply pursue the dictates of their own Christian consciousness.

4. I am a little confused on how both, Luther and Calvin both contributed to the development of Protestantism. … So I guess for my question, could elaborate on how the two men placed such different ideals into the same religion without creating chaos?


The truth of the matter is that there really is no such thing as a Protestant religion. Protestant is just a convenient term for Christian movements in the Western tradition that are outside of the Catholic Church. (Mormons are in their own category.) Luther and Calvin were very different so there are very good reasons to put them in their own separate categories. Since they were both operating around the same time and were both fighting the Catholic Church we tend to group them together. As we shall see the major religious groups in Europe are going to be Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist).


5. I don't understand why Luther didn't support the peasant political revolts. From what I gathered from the reading assignments, he was challenging the greed of the Church that was manifesting itself through the selling of indulgences. But I thought this kind of greed was also brewing in the ruling elite, so I don't quite understand why Luther wouldn't support a peasant revolt challenging that. My only guess is that it has something to do with Luther's prince. … Luther has been immortalized for challenging the Catholic Church and laying the egg that hatched the Protestant religion and the belief that a personal relationship with God can be attained without needing some sort of middle man. But were his sentiments really genuine? Or was he getting some extra incentive from his prince for challenging something he had banned? Why wouldn't he support a political revolt that challenged exactly the same kind of corruption, just in a different sphere of life? … I just feel like this seemingly insignificant refusal of Luther to support the peasants might be responsible for the later tendency of princes to embrace Luther's ideas.

You have hit the nail on the head. Again we see that Luther was not some revolutionary out to overturn the system. He was very much part and parcel of the established order. This is not to say that Luther was wrong for not supporting the peasants. We have to be careful and refrain from making personal judgments. One also needs to keep in mind that Luther was dependent on the Elector of Saxony. A major part of Luther’s success is that he is able to get support in all the right places. He has the political and popular support to make him untouchable. Unlike with most of the many radical preachers of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was never in a position to eliminate Luther.


6. Why did the Christian sects have to fight instead of coexisting? Faith is based on personal choice not force.

In one sense this is a very bad question as it goes outside of the historical method and judges the past by our present day standards. We think of faith as a personal choice. People in the sixteenth century did not. They had their way of thinking, we have ours. That being said this is actually a very useful question when put in the right light. We take it as obvious that faith is a matter of personal choice and that it is not particularly beneficial to have full scale wars over the nature of the Eucharist or things of that nature. Why was this not obvious to them? Keep in mind that Luther, Leo X, and John Calvin were all very smart people; they probably had higher IQs than you or I. So why did they not get it? We will be exploring this issue in future classes. One thing that I will say here is that we think the way we do in large part because Europeans managed to make such a mess out of religion during this time period. For example when the Founding Fathers were writing our Constitution one of the major things that was on the back of all of their minds was we do not want to repeat what happened in Europe here in America so let us figure out some alternatives. So it is not that we are more “enlightened” than they were; we have the benefit of being able learn from their experience.

AJS Conference

Here I am at the Association for Jewish Studies Conference (AJS) in Washington DC; a three day gathering devoted to Jewish Studies. It has been wonderful on many different levels for someone with my interests. I cannot think of many of places where I can accidentally run into people whom I know based on having read and admired their books. For example I was sitting in a lecture and I turned to the person sitting next to me and I see on his name tag Marc Saperstein. I also got to talk to Lawrence Fine and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. I have posted on both of these people in the past. (See here and here.) I even got to trade barbs over the History Channel with Lawrence Schiffman. Apparently he was just interviewed for a program on the Garden of Eden by a person who was trying to ask him for a geographic location. I also got to touch base with some old professors of mine from Yeshiva University such as Louis Feldman, Elisheva Carlebach, Steven Fine and Ephraim Kanarfogel. Finally there was the pleasure of running into old friends from various places. I even ran into an ex girlfriend. She did not cheat on me, lie to me, steal from me or do anything calculated to put me in a dangerous depression state so this was actually a good meeting. We left on good terms. She is now happily married and I wish her the best. I got to meet a blogging friend, Baruch Pelta, in the flesh.

While this was a vast conference and I was not able to be everywhere at once, I will be posting one the various lectures I attended. Obviously this reflects those things that interest me, mainly medieval and early modern Jewish history as it relates to philosophy, Kabbalah or messianism.
More to come so stay tuned.