Did Print Create a Counter Revolution in Judaism?

Robert Bonfil, in "Jewish Attitudes toward History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times," argues for the field of history as having an important role in Judaism, contrary to the position of Yosef Yerushalmi. Bonfil focuses on the case of R. Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century, who banned the reading of "profane bellettristic and erotic literature, such as the book of Immanuel as well as books of wars" on the Sabbath as well as on weekdays. Bonfil sees this position as an innovation. It is far more stringent than even that of Maimonides, who may have philosophically objected to history but never stepped in with a legal ban. For Bonfil this marks a shift in the rabbinic response both to history specifically and secular literature in general due to the rise of print.



As is well known, the authoritarian control over knowledge characteristic of the Middle Ages and particularly of frames of mind such as Maimonides', made possible a wide range of medieval production of profane Hebrew literature, including of course historical writing. I suggest that such a cohabitation of sacred and profane, licit and illicit, was no longer possible now that, in the wake of the printing revolution, effective control over reading material had been lost. A careful definition of boundaries now became necessary. The learned arbiters of Jewish culture, who defined borders according to criteria "known" only to themselves, lost much of their former control over the intellectual activities of the masses. Decisions could no longer be made exclusively by the learned elites. The lost control had therefore to be restored by codifying the elimination of arbitrarity, i.e., by establishing very strict definitions. In so doing, without at the same time radically reforming ancient and medieval basic assumptions, codification was almost inevitably forced into further strictures. (pg. 16)

 This certainly goes against the popular conception of print as a liberalizing force, but it fits with the trend we see in the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church did not create an Index or wage any organized campaigns to ban books until the sixteenth century, when printing became a major force.

De Rossi Really Was Like Slifkin

During the campaign against R. Natan Slifkin one of the claims made by his opponents was that they were following in the footsteps of the rabbis in the sixteenth century who opposed Azariah de Rossi and his book the Meor Enayim. There may be more truth to this than Slifkin’s opponents would like particularly if one accepts the account of the early stages of the campaign against de Rossi offered by Robert Bonfil in his essay, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry (Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman pg. 23-48). Interestingly enough Bonfil wrote this essay in the early 1980s, two decades before this whole controversy.

According to Bonfil’s reconstruction of the event:

De Rossi’s real problem began once R. Isaac Foa of Reggio read the book. The old rabbi, whose intellectual energies seem to have been devoted entirely to Talmudic studies interspersed with mystical speculation, appears to have been shocked at the nonchalance with which de Rossi dealt with certain Aggadot believed by kabbalists to have great theosophical implications. For the likes of R. Foa, this was unthinkable. He dispatched an alarmed letter to Venice, where his son-in-law, R. Menahem Azariah da Fano, had been residing for some months. The letter has not been preserved, so wed do not know exactly what alarmed R. R. Foa. We do know, however, that the letter left a deep impression upon R. Samuel Judah Katzenellenbogen. This scholar, though a competent Talmudist, does not seem to have been distinguished either by his intellectual sensitivity or by his realism, and was, moreover, rather young at the time. He acted impulsively, apparently before he had even had a chance to read the Meor Enayim. In a circular letter addressed to the Italian Jewish communities, he summarized the warnings of R. Foa and appended to it the text of a manifesto against the book that he proposed for signature. The letter itself has not been preserved, and therefore we do not know whether R. Katzenellenbogen was any more specific in it than in his manifesto, where his charge against the book was rather vague, to say the least: “And there were some chapters,” he wrote, “of that third section, called Days of the World, full of new issues never dreamed of by our fathers.”

R. Katzenellenbogen did not claim any position of leadership for himself in the crusade he called for. Perhaps he thought, or hoped, that “the very excellent scholars of each and every city” would agree to sign the manifesto, especially since it merely sought to require that every Jew who wanted to read or own the book “obtain written permission from the rabbis of his city." …

Nonetheless, R. Katzenellenbogen’s initiative seems to have come as a major surprise. Those who heeded his call and signed with him in Venice were no outstanding scholars. Most of them were leaders of the Levantine community, recently settled in Venice; some are unfamiliar to us, and may have also been so to their contemporaries. … (pg. 26-27)

Bonfil brings the example of R. Abraham Manahem Porto ha-Cohen.

R. Porto had not read the book, but testified rather that “through hearsay I heard of him [de Rossi] having treated lightly the words of the Sages.” He had moreover, heard from de Rossi himself about his dangerously novel chronological theory. … R. Porto delivered before his flock a standard sermon on the prohibition of reading sfarim hitzoniyim, warned them of the potential harmful consequences of a practical nature that could result from de Rossi’s chronological reckonings, posted the manifesto in the synagogue without signing it, and stood by for clarifications. (pg. 28)

R. Porto would later retract his ban after de Rossi agreed to make some editorial changes to the book, which did not include his acceptance of standard chronology.

So de Rossi was the victim of a bunch of little known rabbis, who went after him without having bothered to read his book and the issue cascaded from there. Rather than demonstrate the cohesiveness of the sixteenth-century rabbinate the de Rossi affair shows a rabbinate that was in disarray and easily manipulated to suit the purposes of those pulling the strings. Does this remind you of anything?

A Proper Jewish Education

David ibn Yahya (1465-1543) was a Spanish exile who went to Naples and served as a Talmud teacher. In addition to Talmud, he also taught a variety of other topics. He offered the following description of the curriculum he taught.

In addition, I studied with them a daily chapter of Talmud, and other subjects such as grammar and poetics and logic and [al-Ghazali’s] Intentions of the Philosophers and [Jediah Bedersi’s] Book of the Examination of the World. And on the Shabbaths [I would] sometimes teach [Judah ha-Levi’s] Kuzari and at times [Maimonides’] Guide for the Perplexed. And all this, even though I was only required to teach one Talmudic lesson every morning, in order that they should know what is required, and to rule on what they ask me each day. But in order to fulfil(l) what is required of me by heaven and by the people, I went beyond my [required] quota, with great effort and painful labor. (Robert Bonfil, Rabbis and Jewish Communities in Renaissance Italy pg. 148-49.)

Ibn Yahya viewed the teaching of philosophy as a requirement from heaven, alongside the teaching of Talmud. Not only that but the philosophers in his curriculum included not only Jewish philosophers like Judah ha-Levi, Maimonides and Jediah Bedersi, but also the Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali. Ibn Yahya’s use of al-Ghazali and his use of the Intentions of the Philosophers in particular was not an anomaly with the Spanish Jewish tradition; he formed a basic part of the Jewish philosophical educational system. (See Steven Harvey “Why Did Fourteenth-Century Jews Turn to AlGhazali’s Account of Natural Science?” JQR XCI(2001): pg. 359-76)

Judah Messer Leon on Kabbalah

The fifteenth century Italian scholar, Judah Messer Leon, in his Epistle to the Jews of Florence had this to say about the use of intermediaries in prayer and Kabbalah:

It is clear from the articles of Faith that anyone addressing his prayers to an intermediary between himself and the Creator is behaving in a false and evil manner. Shun, then, the tents of the Kabbalists, buried beneath the evil they do themselves by multiplying their invented attributes of God [a clear allusion to the Sefiroth], not hesitating in their ravings to attribute materiality, change, and multiplicity to the Creator, blessed may He be. They grope forward through the darkness of their misunderstanding of the purposes of the founders of their Doctrine, which, as far as I can see, is definitely in partial accord with the doctrine of the Platonists, a doctrine not of course without its sweetness. (Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy pg. 182-83.)


For Messer Leon, the prohibition against praying to intermediaries is not something simply to denounce pagans or even the Catholic veneration of saints. It also applies to practices that are generally viewed as being within the boundaries of traditional Judaism. If one is going to accept Messer Leon then all Kabbalists that operate within the framework of Sefirot along with a hefty percentage of other traditional Jews are heretics. I have no problem with this, this would remove certain problematic elements from any sort of contention as Jewish authority figures. How many Haredim today would pass Messer Leon’s standard for being a believing Jew?


Unlike Kabbalists, Messer Leon had a certain affection for Platonism. It would seem then that it would be better for a believing Jew to spend his time becoming a classicist and studying the work of thinkers like Plotinus than to learn in a Haredi yeshiva where one will certainly be exposed to heretics who parade themselves around in beards and black hats and call themselves religious Jews. While one will likely also be exposed to heresy while studying classics, since it is in Greek and Latin and written by gentiles, it is not nearly as dangerous. One is not likely to confuse Greco-Roman philosophy with Judaism.

Robert Bonfil on Jacob Burckhardt

In a previous post I talked about Jacob Burckhardt and the continued use of many of his concepts, despite their refutation. Robert Bonfil succinctly summarizes the problem as follows:

It is probably true that today, more than a hundred years after the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, first published in Basel in 1860, a good proportion of the interpretative categories Burckhardt proposed have managed to survive the destructive criticism to which the book has since been subjected. It seems equally true, however, that our reliance upon these categories is no longer the same as it once was. On the one hand, the modern tendency to shy away from large syntheses, preferring instead detailed descriptions of very limited segments of the overall picture, using techniques of analysis previously unthinkable, has led to a curious situation: everything that is not the immediate object of such meticulous analyses is left to the old syntheses. The result is a persistence of terms and concepts difficult to characterize unless we call them “inertial.” On the other hand, the growing interest in the study of mental attitudes has led us to reevaluate the testimony of the people of the Renaissance and to discover in it points of contact with the old interpretative categories, which were based, more than those that came later, on that firsthand testimony. (Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy pg. 3.)