Convivencia at the Alhambra Library

Next week Tuesday, January 20, I will be speaking about "convivencia" in medieval Spain at the Alhambra Civic Center Library in Alhambra, CA. This came out of a conversation I had with one of the librarians regarding the origins of the city name in Andalusian Spain. She informed me that, despite the fact that the city high school team is called the Moors, most people know very little about medieval Spain. I will be setting forth the contrast between the legacies of convivencia and reconquista. Working from David Nirenberg, I will be arguing that the two of them are inseparably linked, the products of a frontier culture where different societies mixed together. On a day to day basis, this created a society where a spirit of tolerance was taken as a given. This social tolerance, though, had a way of breaking out, in extreme circumstances, in extreme intolerance and a desire to eliminate non-believers.    

Guidelines for Studying History

Clarissa recently put up some pointers for the study of history, things to remember and questions to ask:

Things to remember when reading, watching or researching history:

a. There can never be a fully objective account of history

b. Don’t read accounts of history to find out what happened. Read them to discover what their author says happened

c. Only by accessing and contrasting different accounts can we figure out what took place

d. Every account of history is always ideological

e. There is always a hidden reason for why a person writes about history

Questions to ask:

1. Who is the author?
2. What do I know about this author? Country of origin, political affiliation, profession, etc.
3. How does this knowledge about the author change my understanding of his or her text?
4. What is the goal the author is trying to achieve with this text?
5. What kind of data is used to support the author’s conclusions?
6. What kind of attitude does the author have towards the readers of the text?
7. What are the central concepts that organize the author’s thinking about this subject?

My criticism: While one should initially focus on what the author says happened, the long term goal has to be to come to certain conclusions as to what really happened. All historical accounts are ideological only if you use ideology in its most general sense. Yes there is such a thing as responsible historiography even if the author is a capitalist, a communist, Jew, Christian or a goddess worshiping feminist. This is important as it gives us a standard from which to judge historians of all ideological persuasions and removes ideology as a fig leaf for poorly written history.

I think these are great points to make to students, where I would slightly differ with Clarissa is in the emphasis on the subjectivity. To be clear, we really can never actually reconstruct history "as it was" or make any claims with absolute certainty. That being said we have a historical method that allows us to recreate the past with a reasonable degree of accuracy. While moving students away from a model of "Gospel Truth," it is important not to overstate the subjectivity of historical study. Miguel Cervantes fighting at the Battle of Lepanto was real in ways his Don Quixote fighting windmills is not. To downplay the very real possibility of historical truth (lower case letters) only serves to leave the field open to the Gospel Truth crowd, which I know is the last thing that Clarissa wants. Perhaps part of the difference is one of history versus literature. With all due respect to Clarissa, as a historian it is important for me to be able to look down at literature scholars like her and thumb my nose; my field deals with objective reality and yours does not. Of course I imagine that science people thumb their noses at us historians for our lack objectivity and they in turn can be mocked by continental philosophers and analytic philosophers can feel superior to everyone.    

I would add: 

1. Figure out your source's agenda. Cross out anything that supports it and highlight everything that goes against it.

2.  Treat your sources as a police officer would a witness. You are going to wade through a lot of self serving nonsense,  but every once in a while you are going to strike gold. But even when you do not you can always count on a liar to tell the truth every once in a while if by accident. 

3. At the end of the day reasonable people are going to disagree about events and that is ok.      

Clarissa is teaching about Bartolome de Las Cases, a sixteenth century Spanish Dominican, who wrote about the Spanish conquest of the New World. Las Cases was horrified by the Spanish treatment of Native Americans, believing that such actions stood in the way of their conversion and the Second Coming. Las Cases' genuine concern for Native Americans led him to defend their rights, most famously in the Valladolid debates with Juan Gines de Sepulveda. The fact that Las Cases was a Spaniard eviscerating the Spanish, gives him a lot of credibility and I am willing to assume, based on Las Cases, that massacres of natives and their enslavement really did take place. The discovery of the New World was not just an exciting adventure in expanding human horizons. That being said I would also use Las Cases himself to paint a more nuanced picture of the Spanish. They were not all a bunch of greedy hypocritical religious bigots. Furthermore I would point to the example of Las Cases and other sixteenth century Spanish thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria, Juan de Mariana and Domingo de Soto. These were all in their own ways very "liberal" thinkers, who had all the basic "right" ideas about human rights and that non-Europeans were human beings too. They did influence Spanish policy, at least as far as Madrid was concerned, yet they ultimately failed to create the critical revolution in human thinking of the Enlightenment. This fell to seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers in Holland, England and France. Why did all of this not happen in Spain?    

    

Daniel Lasker - Two Models of Jewish Thought: Rabbi Judah Halevi and Maimonides

Dr. Daniel Lasker gave a second lecture, while he was in Columbus, comparing Rabbi Judah Halevi to Maimondes. Here are my notes; as always, all mistakes are mine.


There is a trend in academia to make everything applied that one should not just be sitting in an ivory tower. This is difficult for Jewish thought. Perhaps we can create nano Jewish thinkers. The purpose of this lecture is to present two Jewish thinkers and consider how they can be applied.

Judah Halevi was born somewhere in Spain around 1075. He left Spain at an advanced age for Israel. We are not certain if he ever made it. According to the legend he was run over by an Arab horseman. There are lots of problems with this story. We do not hear about it until several centuries later. Also Israel was under Christian rule during this time. Halevi wrote poems, but also a work of philosophy, the Kuzari. This is a fictional account about the conversion of the Khazars, a group of people living around Azerbaijan, who converted around the eight century. Maimonides also was born in Spain. He fled the Almohads and ended up in Fez where he may have lived for a time as a Muslim. He traveled to Israel but was unable to make it there so he moved to Egypt where he worked as a doctor.

In looking at these two models of thought, we tend to see them as opposed to each other. Maimonides was the super-rationalist and Halevi was the anti-rationalist. Setting them up as two separate models is unfair as they both came from similar assumptions. They were both concerned with reconciling religion with philosophy. For Halevi, the religion of Judaism was an empirical truth. If philosophy contradicts it then we require a new philosophy. For Maimonides, philosophy has to agree to the truth of Judaism but not literally. One should reinterpret Judaism in light of philosophy. An example of this is anthropomorphism. Maimonides was successful in changing Judaism to reject the notion that God has a body, regardless of what the Bible says because it is a philosophically untenable position. Maimonides also insisted that Hosea did not literally marry a prostitute, because that would be dishonorable for a prophet. Where one draws the line is open-ended and depends on one’s allegiance to philosophy and the literal text of the Bible.

Why is Judaism a divine religion? According to Halevi, the real proof for Judaism comes from history as opposed to a simple rational religion. R. Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on the Ten Commandments, notes that Halevi asked him why the Ten Commandments begin with referring to the exodus and not creation. Ibn Ezra gives a different explanation than Halevi. For Halevi Judaism is true because 600,000 men saw the revelation at Sinai. For Maimonides prophecy is a natural process to pick up the divine message which is constantly broadcasted. God does not change; how one receives it depends on the person. God does not choose people to be prophets. Prophets provide a framework for human society. Humans require such a framework because humans vary in their behavior in ways unlike animals. Thus, all law systems ultimately come from God. The laws of the bible are different from the bylaws of Columbus in that the Bible helps one refine the intellect and obtain immortality.

What is the nature of God and how does one come to know God? For Halevi, the God of Abraham is experienced while the God of Aristotle is understood. One might die for the God of Abraham, not the God of Aristotle. One can only love the God of Abraham. For Maimonides, the God of Abraham is the God of Aristotle. The beginning of Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah is a description of God based on Aristotle. Then Maimonides immediately goes to talking about sanctifying God’s name.

Halevi believed that Jews were intrinsically different from gentiles. This is based on the hierarchy of nature. He did this because he needed to explain why only Jews are prophets. Halevi went so far as to argue that even converts cannot be prophets. Maimonides believed that Jews were different because they observed the Torah. This gives them a better ability to understand the divine realm. Halevi saw Jews as having different hardware. For Maimonides, it is a matter of the software.

Today we have this struggle between science and religion. Maimonides teaches that one follows science wherever it leads. Halevi stressed more the actual text even if it has to be taken allegorically. There is also the question of how one argues for religion. Maimonides' attempt to prove Judaism from the content would have a greater chance of success than a simple historical argument. One last thing is Jewish ethnocentricity. Halevi faced dominant Christian and Muslim religion, which argued for their strength. Halevi needed to therefore argue from Jewish weaknesses and Jewish willingness to sacrifice for their faith. Nowadays we are operating from more of a position of strength it may be time to move away from this point of view toward a more Maimonidean view.

Uthman Dey: A Humanitarian Hero for Al Nakba Day

To all of my readers, I wish you a merry Al Nakba day. In honor of Al Nakba day and the founding of the State of Israel I wish to put in a word for Uthman Dey. No, Uthman Dey was not a leading Zionist; he was the Muslim ruler of Tunisia in the early seventeenth century best known in the West as a sponsor of the Barbary corsairs, the sort of practice that today we call state-sponsored terrorism. (To be fair Christians were also guilty of this practice. See my review of Catholic Pirates, Greek Merchants.) I mention Uthman Dey because of his handling of a major humanitarian crisis at the end of his reign. In 1609 Spain expelled its Morisco population. Similar to Jewish Conversos, Moriscos were Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Because of their concentration in southern Spain, the Moriscos were successful in maintaining themselves as a separate cultural unit and actually waged a number of revolts against Spanish rule until the Spanish simply expelled them. Uthman Dey welcomed these refugees into his kingdom with open arms and integrated these quasi Muslims into Tunisian society. Needless to say many of these Moriscos soon found themselves at work in the piracy business, which gave them the opportunity to get back at Spain.  He did not put them in refugee camps for sixty-three years to rally world opinion to the pitiful state of these Moriscos and force Spain to take them back.

What does it tell you if the entire Arab world lacks the humanitarian compassion of a seventeenth century sponsor of piracy?

Religious Narrative: Medieval Catholicism, Communism and Islam

One of the surprises of the modern world has been the continued persistence of organized religion. Despite several centuries of Enlightenment criticism, religion remains a powerful force within society. Certainly, within the United States, the vast majority of the population subscribes at least formally to some religion. I would argue that much of this is the result of the inability of secularism to present overarching narratives. Make whatever criticism you want about religions, they tend to be quite good at formulating narratives that allow people to make sense of their lives and all the various parts of their universe. This is important not just for regular people living their social lives, but for intellectuals and in a sense especially for them; it is the people who live in the realm of ideas who need things to click together in a larger whole.

I will start by giving an example from what may be the most intellectually successful religious narrative in history, medieval Catholicism. Take the view of a Catholic living in say 1491; he benefited from living in a world that made sense in ways that we can hardly relate to. In this medieval world, we have Aristotle to explain the natural world. This Aristotelian universe, with its prime mover and essences and accidents, fits neatly with Church teaching, solving the conflict between faith and reason. This system also has political implications. We are in a hierarchical universe were everything from plants, animals and people up to the planets, angels and God have their place in a natural order. Therefore it is only reasonable that human affairs should mirror this reality with a king, nobles, the Church, peasants, men and women each having their place. How does one explain and give meaning to suffering, whether the threat of Islam, schisms in the Church, war, political chaos or simply having to bury a wife and child? Mankind fell to Original Sin, giving Satan power over the Earth. That being said, there is reason to hope; Christ died for our sins so we can go to heaven. If the world looks like it is falling apart we can still look forward to the imminent coming of the apocalypse and the final judgment.

Say what you want about this medieval Catholicism; call it unscientific, anti-democracy, sexist and anti-Semitic. Yes, over the next few centuries, this worldview was rocked by numerous intellectual, and political shifts so that, even if there are still Catholics today, that particular creature the medieval Catholic is now extinct. All this may be true, but medieval Catholicism was an internally consistent system and fit well into the known facts of the world at that time. I would add that this system also proved quite attractive to Jews, particularly those in Spain. (Here is a dirty little secret about pre-modern Judaism. The majority of people who left did so freely out of a desire to assimilate and not due to force or persecution.)   

In the history of modern secularism, there has been only one movement to produce a narrative that could compete with organized religion and that was Communism. Try to look at the world, this time from the perspective of a Russian Jew in 1891. Traditional Judaism does not have much to offer, but to be poor, get killed in a pogrom and wait for the Messiah. Now here is Communism. It may not offer a personal God and an afterlife, but instead, it offers the forces of history to guide us and promise us a better world. Faith versus reason? Science has refuted religion, but Communism is the logical extension of evolution applied to human affairs. How should we order our political and social systems? Communism replaces superstition and religious dogma with scientific rationalism, allowing us to create a just system where everyone is equal. How do you explain and offer meaning to human suffering? The problems of this world are the products by the class oppression by the aristocracy and bourgeois. This, though, simply serves to highlight the iniquities of the present systems and hasten the imminent coming of the people's revolution which will create a paradise on Earth in which everyone will work together for the common good and there will be no prejudice nor anti-Semitism.

Again, one can make all sorts of intellectual arguments against this Communist worldview. Ultimately it was undone by the Soviet Union itself, whose blood-soaked history is a better refutation of Communism than anything else. This should not obscure the power of the Communist narrative in its time. Say what you want about Karl Marx, but he has to be viewed as one of the greatest thinkers of all time simply in terms of his ability to craft a system of thought that allows you to discuss not just politics, but history, art and science as one coherent whole. We in the United States fail to appreciate the Communist appeal largely because it failed to ever gain much traction here, but the Communists nearly did win. Forget about the Cold War. After World War I and in the wake the Russian Revolution Communists, without question, had both the intellectual and moral high ground. With that, they nearly took the entire European continent without a single shot being fired. As for Jews, they walked away from traditional Judaism in mass to follow this Communist dream. (See Clarissa for a further discussion about the religious dimensions of Communism.)

Where does this leave our modern world? Try seeing things from the view of an Arab in 1991. Communism, which was a tremendous secularizing force in the Arab, has come crashing down with the fall of the Soviet Union so now what? Well, there is Islam, not the watered down variety, but a "purified" form from its original source in Saudi Arabia. What is wrong with the world and how do we fix it? The West has dominated us politically, first through direct imperialism and later through the dictators they support and corrupted us culturally through secularism. Only Islam can unite the Arab peoples so they can take back what is rightfully theirs. As for science, we Arabs invented science before it was stolen from us by the West.

This narrative may lack the comprehensive elegance of either medieval Catholicism or nineteenth century Communism but, for those with no better narrative options, this will likely do. I cannot say that fundamentalist Islam will likely prove a spiritual threat to Judaism but, as a physical threat, it certainly is a match to either of the other narratives.        

Spain the High School Dropout

Clarissa has a short post on an analogy by one of her students, comparing Spain to a high school dropout:

After Spain expelled the Jews, it became similar to a high school dropout who constantly lags behind everybody else, can't keep up with any intelligent conversation, and has to do trivial things just to survive.

I am reminded of the rhetorical trope used by many rabbis in my youth that any country that expelled its Jews immediately went into decline. Spain (really Aragon and Castile) expelled its Jews and it fell from being a great power. Unfortunately for this theory 1492 was also in the year that Spain began its conquest of the New World. The wealth of the New World (particularly the world's largest silver mine in Peru) would eventually fund Spain's domination of the European continent for the next century.

Of course in an exercise of the power of unforeseen consequences, this conquest of the New World would eventually become the downfall of Spain, causing Spain to fail to industrialize. Worse, this wealth ended up strengthening the monarchy making it impervious to democratic reform (much as oil in Saudi Arabia protects the Saudi monarchy).

In the end, I do think the Early Modern Spanish government can be compared to a modern high school dropout, not because it expelled its Jews, but in how it was corrupted by outside funding. Like the modern high school dropout who assumes that he can live off of public welfare as if money could simply be produced and has no incentive to knuckle down and get an education, the Spanish monarchy saw money as something that could just be produced out of the ground and never bothered to reform itself until it was too late.   

(See Secular Theodicy.)

Jewish Philosophy and Politics: A Challenge from Yitzhak Baer

Traditional liberal thought castigates its religious opposition as being superstitious and otherworldly. The idea being that the more rational one is the more one is going to consider problems of this world. This framework is translated into a framework of good guy philosophers who are liberal and tolerant and their close-minded religious opponents. The Jewish historian Yitzhak Baer (1888-1980) was famous for turning this framework on its head. His History of the Jews in Christian Spain heaps scorn on the Jewish courtier class, with their Averroism and Maimonidean philosophy, as people of weak faith, who undermined the Jewish community and abandoned the Jewish people at the first sign of danger. This is in contrast to the simple Jews and the anti-Maimonidean rabbis who exemplified the true spirit of the Jewish nation. In his short book, Galut, Baer challenges the political pretensions of Jewish philosophy. According to Baer:

Philosophical exegesis, when it does not lead to skepticism, occupies itself with the problem of the relationship between faith and knowledge, between Jewish and secular education, between Jewish and Christian doctrine. The contrast between the Jewish world and the larger world is reduced to scholastic problems of dogma. Jewish philosophy is helpless when it approaches the problems of political and historical life, while at the same time many Jews occupy the most prominent positions in the political and economic life of their countries. Here the gap between the religious-historical vocation and real life is widest. (Baer, Galut pg. 50)

So I put it to my readership, do you agree with Baer and what might the implications of this be for Jewish thought? Are all intellectual forms of Modern Orthodoxy doomed to an ivory tower?

Between Military and Missionary Models: Islam and Christianity

Islam historically has operated within an openly military political process where the faith is spread by direct military conquest. This likely is connected to the nature of Islam and its origins. Islam, unlike Christianity, spread by direct military conquest. In the course of a single century, between 632 and 732, Islam went from tribesmen in Arabia to Muslim armies marching into France. Thus the Islamic tradition inherited a different model of spreading itself from that of Christianity. To be fair to Muslims it should be noted that, while pagans had no choice but to convert or die, Jews and Christians were protected as “people of the book,” a relationship encoded into official policy by the pact of Umar in 637. History is certainly far more complex than fanatical barbarous Muslims putting all who would not embrace their faith to the sword and meek Christians converting through rational argument. Nevertheless, there are certain differences in how Muslims and Christians conceive of spreading their religions and this has practical ramifications.

Christianity was born out of the destruction of a failed political messianic movement. (Whether or not the historical Jesus intended to lead a political movement to physically overthrow the Romans in Palestine, even from the New Testament it is clear that his followers, particularly Simon Peter, thought that they taking part in a political movement.) Christianity went through the first several centuries of its existence as a persecuted minority. It was never in a position to spread itself through military conquest and thus developed an ideology that denigrated the military model. Instead Christianity developed a missionary model of spreading the faith. Here an individual or a small group would go out to a territory dominated by unbelievers and attempt to spread the faith by argument or displays of miracles. Crucial to this model is the fact that the missionary is not backed by physical arms and is not the one in the position of physical strength. On the contrary, there is every expectation that the missionary will be harassed, persecuted and even executed for his actions.

It is within this model that the concept of martyrdom could arise. The word “martyr” comes from the Greek word for “witness.” The martyr by willingly dying for his faith testifies to its truth even to non-believers. It is likely because martyrdom is the product of the missionary model that Islam never developed a concept of martyrdom in the classical sense. Yes Islamic thought, from the beginning, developed a concept of dying in battle with unbelievers in the cause of spreading the religion and those who did so could expect to be rewarded in the afterlife. What Islam never developed was a notion of dying for the cause in a situation where doing so would accomplish nothing beyond dying for dying’s sake. There is nothing in traditional Islamic Law about marching up to pagan or Christian authorities and saying “I am a Muslim,” refuse to drop a pinch of incense on an altar and willingly allow oneself to be executed or thrown to the lions. On the contrary, Islam, particularly Shi’i Islam developed a theology of dissimulation; that it could be acceptable and even laudable to lie to non-believers who would seek to kill you.

This is not to say that Christians are incapable of using armed force and military conquest to spread their beliefs nor that Muslims are incapable of trying to convince non-Muslims, through preaching, reasoned arguments and miracle claims, of the truth of Islam. Rather each of these religions developed a certain model and developed a theology around it and thus it becomes the primary go to model, regardless of the sort of pragmatic actions done on the ground in particular circumstances.

Take for example the two most prominent cases of the Christian use of armed force to spread their faith, the Crusades and the Spanish conquest of the New World. While in both these situations it cannot be denied that non-Christians were de facto led to the baptismal fonts by dint of Christian military conquest, neither case involved a specific plan of using military force as a conversion tool, drawing a direct line between Christians conquering a non-Christian area and these non-Christians accepting baptism either at the point of a sword or simply as a matter of accepting the new political reality of Christian rule. Pope Urban II, in preaching the Crusade on the fields of Clermont, did not argue for a Crusade as a means of converting Muslims. Rather his primary concerns were protecting Christians and Christian holy sites in the Holy Land. The Spanish conquest of the New World also operated, in practice according to a missionary model. Military conquest was closely followed by missionary preachers, particularly Franciscans. We are dealing once again with missionaries seeking places where the people “did not know Christ” and attempting to persuade them to accept baptism. Many of these Franciscans seem to have taken a particular tack of searching out the most isolated groups of natives and the ones most likely to bring about their martyrdom. It was certainly clear that military conquest would aid in conversion, but the scenario here is that of a military presence designed to protect the lives of missionaries and their converts.

Individual Muslims were certainly capable of writing missionary literature. The Jewish convert to Islam, Samual Ibn Abbas al-Magribi, wrote Silencing the Jews and the Christians through Rational Arguments. That being said, this is not the product of any large scale institutional thinking, plan or societal ideology. The Ismaili Shi’i, who laid the foundation for the Fatimid dynasty engaged in missionary work to prepare the groundwork for the coming Mahdi, but there is no question that once the Mahdi arrived he would triumph through military power as the underground network of believers rose up to join him and cast of the rule of the Sunni Caliphate.

Again it is critical to distinguish between a Christian or a Muslim engaging in activity that might be classified as using military force or missionary activity to spread their beliefs and the conscious decision to adopt such activities as part of a clearly laid out ideological program. Where are the medieval Islamic translation centers like Peter the Venerable’s Toledo, with Muslim scholars, with the possible help of some Jews, translating the Bible into Arabic in order to refute it or learning Latin in order to better debate Christians? Find me the Muslim Raymond Lull, crossing the Mediterranean, risking life and limb to preach the Koran to Christians? Where there Muslim children in sixteenth century North Africa, like the young St. Teresa de Avila and her brother, dreaming of crossing over to Spain to proclaim their faith and die at the hands of the Inquisition?

Are Haredim to Blame for the OTD Phenomenon?

Michael Makovi wrote a series of comments that I thought deserved a posting of its own. He offers an eloquent Modern Orthodox challenge (which may make it beside the point) to Rabbi Dovid Schwartz and the Haredi community as to their responsibility in causing people to abandon ritual observance.


Rabbi Schwartz,

As I indicated, what most troubled me about your letter was that while it was quick to defend the secular Zionists and such (which is remarkable - I do sincerely thank you), nevertheless, it was quick to condemn the contemporary OTDs and such. You admit the "broken school system", and you admit that the school systems are unable to impart true religiosity unless they include 8+ years of kollel. Shouldn't this set off alarms in your head? Perhaps the OTDs are responding to these failures of the school system?

I know more about the Modern Orthodox community than the Haredi one, so it is difficult for me to speak of the Haredi one except as an outsider looking in, but what I see, from where I stand, is that the Haredi community forces an outdated and obsolete worldview on its students. The Haredim try to teach their students as if it is still 1800, as if nothing has changed. My rabbi, Rabbi Marc Angel writes an insightful essay "Modern Orthodoxy and Halakhah: An Inquiry" (printed in Seeking Good, Seeking Peace), in which he argues that the difference between Modern Orthodoxy and Haredism is that they mentally live in different times. The Modern Orthodox want to understand the sages of previous times, but they want to themselves live in today's world. The Western-European Sephardim were similar; they were completely observant, but they lived amidst the greater non-Jewish society, and participated fully. When the Haskalah came, the Jews of Holland and Italy were barely affected, because they were already full participants in the Renaissance. Rabbi Menashe ben Israel had his portrait done by his friend Rembrandt! Rabbi Marc Angel, in "Thoughts on Early American Jewry" (in Seeking Good, Seeking Peace) writes about a Reform historian who mistook the American colonial Sephardim for Reformers, because they dressed normally and spoke English. Rabbi Angel responds that for an Orthodox Sephardi, to dress like his non-Jewish neighbors and speak their vernacular did not contradict living a fully Orthodox lifestyle.

Similarly, Rambam would have been "Modern Orthodox" in that he tried to follow the Talmud, but admitted that he lived in 11th-century Spain (and later Egypt) and not 6th-century Babylonia. Thus, the Mishneh Torah will often say, "The law ought to be like this, but back when I was in Spain, we did like this."

The Haredim, by contrast, try to mentally live in a world that no longer exists, and that in any case, is out of sync with the outside world. The Haredim try to pretend they're still in 18th-century Lithuania or Poland.

The more gifted and intelligent children will realize that something is amiss, that something is being hidden from them. Their intellectual perspicacity will not tolerate this. As Rabbi S. R. Hirsch says:
It would be most perverse and criminal of us to seek to instill in our children a contempt, based on ignorance and untruth, for everything that is not specifically Jewish, for all other human arts and sciences, in the belief that by inculcating our children with such a negative attitude ... we could safeguard them from contacts with the scholarly and scientific endeavors of the rest of mankind…You will then see that your simple-minded calculations were just as criminal as they were perverse. Criminal, because they enlisted the help of untruth supposedly in order to protect the truth, and because you have thus departed from the path upon which your own Sages have preceded you and beckoned you to follow them. Perverse, because by so doing you have achieved precisely the opposite of what you wanted to accomplish... Your child will consequently begin to doubt all of Judaism which (so, at least, it must seem to him from your behavior) can exist only in the night and darkness of ignorance and which must close its eyes and the minds of its adherents to the light of all knowledge if it is not to perish (Collected Writings vol 7 pp. 415-6, quoted in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch—Torah Leadership for Our Times by Rabbi Dr. Yehudah (Leo) Levi).
The brighter students will realize that according to their teachers, Judaism can survive only in darkness and ignorance. Rav A. I. Kook attributes the rise of secular Zionism and the like to the fact that the secularists had more idealism than the religious. As one of my rabbis put it, the secularists were talking about changing the world while the religious talked about meat and milk spoons. The situation is exactly the same today. The OTDs, etc., see the outside world as being more idealistic, more learned, more culturally and intellectually advanced, than the religious community.And you cannot underestimate the influence of mis-education. I have a friend who became a baal teshuva, but went back to non-observance when he started seeing all the stories of revoking conversions. He said, if the Orthodox have so little humanity, so little morality, if they're so perverse and misanthropic, then what do I need with them? He had Haredi relatives, and he heard disgusting and repulsive remarks from them about converts, saying that no converts are really authentic, etc. He said, if the Orthodox can so reject people who truly want to be Jewish, then he doesn't need the Orthodox.

Hillul hashem is powerful, in case we didn't already know.

(By the way, this friend of mine, I've told people that his violation of mitzvot is greater and more G-dly than the observance of others. Why does he violate the mitzvot? Because he saw the Orthodox abusing converts and refusing to give gittin to their agunot, and burning trash cans in Meah Shearim in order to protect mentally-ill child-abusers. I'm not saying I agree with my friend; in fact, I've tried to convince him to become observant again, and in any case, I've seen all the same disgusting things he has, and yet I've myself remained observant nevertheless. My point, however, is that I respect (though disagree with) his reaction - viz. going "off the derekh" - more than I respect the mitzvah-observance of others. Look at the reasons he doesn't keep mitzvot anymore - his reasons to violate the mitzvot are more G-dly than the reasons others keep them!!)

Rabbi Schwartz, you say, "And even the much maligned hamon ahm should not be underestimated. While it may be true that many received no more than a cheder education ponder for a moment how vastly superior that system must have been to our own elementary chadorim in that it stood it's students in good stead to live ehrlicha upgeheetaneh lives for a lifetime. Is the fact that in our system having 20 plus years of schooling not being enough, such that anyone who didn't spend 8+ years in Kollel after the chasunah is tsorich bedeeka acharov supposed to be a compliment? That the ahava and yirah that we implant is so flimsy that it will fold like a cheap camera in the face of a few college courses or six months in an office environment?"

Maybe what you've just written should give you pause. Perhaps the OTDs of today are not entirely to blame; perhaps they are the products of a "broken school system". Why shouldn't we judge them as favorably as you judged the secular Zionists?

I will admit that in many ways, the religious state of affairs in prewar Europe was superior to what we have today. Professor Menachem Friedman describes in "The Lost Kiddush Cup" how the Haredim today have rejected their families' mesorot, and no longer use their own grandfathers' kiddush cups. Professor Friedman notes that the kiddush cup is a symbol of tradition, and that if the cups of old are no longer considered kosher, then a great break in tradition has occurred.

Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz's Eyes to See shows at length how the prewar Jews were more concerned with ethics and morality than Orthodox Jews are today. Rabbi Schwarz presents a very ethical and humane Judaism, one that would make Rabbi S. R. Hirsch proud, one that puts less emphasis on technical ritual observance, and more on how one treats his fellow man. Rabbi Schwarz follows the Sifra and says we were brought out of Egypt for the sake of the mitzvot bein adam l'havero. He notes that in Beitzah, and unkind Jew's credentials as a Jew are questioned, a Shabbat-violating Jew's bona fides are not questioned.

Rabbi Yehuda Amital writes (here):
We live in an era in which educated religious circles like to emphasize the centrality of Halakha, and commitment to it, in Judaism. I can say that in my youth in pre-Holocaust Hungary, I didn't hear people talking all the time about "Halakha." People conducted themselves In the tradition of their forefathers, and where any halakhic problems arose, they consulted a rabbi. Reliance on Halakha and unconditional commitment to it mean, for many people, a stable anchor whose purpose is to maintain the purity of Judaism, even within the modern world. To my mind, this excessive emphasis of Halakha has exacted a high cost. The impression created is that there is nothing in Torah but that which exists in Halakha, and that in any confrontation with the new problems that arise in modern society, answers should be sought exclusively in books of Halakha. Many of the fundamental values of the Torah which are based on the general commandments of "You shall be holy" (Vayikra 19:2) and "You shall do what is upright and good in the eyes of God" (Devarim 6:18), which were not given formal, operative formulation, have not only lost some of their status, but they have also lost their validity in the eyes of a public that regards itself as committed to Halakha. Rabbi Amital, like Rabbi Yom Tov Schwarz, sees an overemphasis on ritual observance and a lack of concern for morality.

Rabbi (Dovid) Schwartz, perhaps this is why the OTDs do what they do? Perhaps prewar Europe was better than today's Orthodoxy? Perhaps this superiority of prewar Judaism is the cause of the OTD phenomenon? Perhaps the existence of OTDs is a result of the inferiority of today's Orthodoxy?

Oh, and see Dr. Yitzchok Levine's very Hirschian piece, Orthodoxy, Then and Now.

Inquisition Cholent

"In the records of the Inquisition, adafina [cholent] was so popular a proof of secret Judaism that one gets the impression that the inquisitors like it even more than the Jews did; and because the clerics spelled out its ingredients for the record, one is thankful to the "Holy Office" for an occasional Jewish recipe." (Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos – Split Identity and Emerging Modernity pg. 130)

Now we know the true reason for the Spanish Inquisition. They tortured former Jews so that they would give up the secret Jewish recipe for cholent, allowing the inquisitors to make it for themselves. It would be a fun project to pull out some of these recipes from the archives and make an Inquisition cholent.

Rabbi Dovid Schwartz Responds

I emailed Rabbi Dovid Schwartz some questions regarding his letter to the Yated. Rabbi Schwartz was kind enough to respond.


Haredim are often in the habit of using the failures of Spanish Jewry in 1391 and 1492 to discredit Maimonidean rationalism. Why is this same logic not used to discredit Eastern European Jewry?

Apples and oranges. The primary failure of Spanish Jewry in  1492 was the advent of the conversos and their inability to flee (often equating to Mesiras Nefesh with sinking ships and communicable disease) rather than convert.  There's was a test of the willingness to die al kiddush Hashem.  The Holocaust and it's precursors OTOH were about genocidal racism.  They may have been outgrowths of a clash of faiths/civilizations but by the time Jews began defecting en masse from observance it a. was not to embrace Christianity and b. did not improve their coping or survival rates.

Could not your defense of Eastern European Jews be also used to apologize for Modern Orthodox Jews and even for Reform and Conservative Jews?

Which MOs , conservative and reform do you mean?  For those in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe it might (while there is still a big difference between defecting to the Bund or joining a Reform Temple).  But for those in America I don't see how it could as one can't begin to compare the poverty or discrimination levels of the old and new worlds.  TTBOMK Modern Orthodoxy is a distinctly American post-war phenomenon and had no models in interbellum EE Jewry.

How do we measure spirituality? Does this not simply turn into a defense of any group we wish to offer a positive outlook for?

While by it's non-material nature spirituality is not subject to the kind of qualitative analysis one accomplishes with a good centrifuge there are some relatively objective and quasi-empirical yardsticks.  The "efficiency" argument that I made in the letter i.e. that a smaller volume  Yeshiva World produced a higher number of higher quality Lamdanim and Talmiday Chachomim will not be denied by anyone familiar with both worlds.  If nothing else is convincing see the published works of the products of that world compared to the published works of our own.

But essentially I would not say that I can refute your assertion empirically.  What I can say is that if one believes in the truth of the "intangible" known as spirituality or kedushah at all then, like good art or music, it can be discerned and graded intuitively without resorting to metrics.  Which supreme justice famously opined "I can't write a legal definition for pornography but I know it when I see it?" [Justice Potter Stewart]    While I am certainly no world class expert I fancy myself qualified to voice some opinion on the relative tzidkus, chochmah, pikchus, lev tov and kedushah of the two Jewries.

How do we measure intellectual greatness between different generations particularly considering the major shift in pedagogy over the past few decades in regards to memory? Granted past generations, both Jewish and gentile, were superior in terms of memory. Memorization was a major part of traditional educational systems. We focus less today on memory because information is so easily accessible. In theory, at least, we are more devoted to developing analytical skills.

This point has some validity but more so in the secular sciences than in Torah scholarship in which vast bekius is indispensable. Yeshiva urban legend has it that Rav Chaim Brisker once bragged that his 15 year old Velevla (the eventual Brisker Rov) knew all of Shas Baal Peh. When the person hearing this boast remarked that he considers this insignificant and unbecoming for a son of the great Rav Chaim who would be a fitter son of his father it he excelled at severa and/or lomdus . Rav Chaim supposedly said that any sevara forwarded without complete awareness of all of Shas is by definition krum. Accessing a Talmud data base cannot replace this kind of internal, encyclopedic checks-and-balances on ones analytical skills.

More simply put we have the teaching of Chazal who said that divrei Torah aniyim hem b'mkomam v'ashirim hem m'mokom acher formalizing the symbiosis between bekius and sevara, between sinai v'oker Harim.

If you were put in charge of Artscroll what kind of changes would you make to the type of history books and biographies of gedolim they traditionally publish?

As I haven't read many it's hard to say.  But In general I feel that the culture of Godol hero worship today, while well-meaning, has backfired.  We have made such angels out of our gedolim that an impression of their being born rather than made prevails.  I think that this has nipped the career of many a late-blooming talmid chochom or tzadik in the bud.  Artscroll biographies in hand, the Yetzer Hora comes to such bochrim and claims "forget it.  You're too old already.  If you weren't a child prodigy, if you have already wasted many minutes of your childhood and adolescence then there is no way you will ever vaks ois to be another ______(fill in the blank with the name of a godol of your choosing)".  This is what I meant in my letter when I wrote that I found the surface honesty of the original article refreshing.  At least it wasn't another fluff-piece fairy-tale hagiography.  IMO these are not only untrue but they retard the growth of many a potential spiritual seeker.

Do you believe that we can build a stronger Judaism than that which existed in pre-Holocaust Europe? What would that stronger Judaism look like?

A.  Yes, but it will take a millennium and woe betide us if Moshiach isn't here by then.

B.  The shorthand answer?  Like that which existed in Lithuania and Poland before the war with all of the passion, self-sacrifice and intellectual ferment but with none of the disaffection, poverty and genocidal anti-Semitism.  However I'm not enough of a Sociologist to know if it's even possible to build one without the other.  As Nietzsche said "Whatever doesn't kill me only makes me stronger". (I referenced this maxim in my letter as well but did not attribute it for fear of scandalizing the readership.  They are probably furious that the editor left words such as Trotskyite and revisionist Zionist in!)

Rabbi Binyamin Hamburger - Customs of Ashkenaz

Sunday afternoon, Lionel Spiegel and I went to hear Rabbi Binyamin Hamburger speak at the Yeshiva of Greater Washington. Rabbi Hamburger is a Haredi scholar from Israel who specializes in the culture of Ashkenazic (Germanic) Jews. This is part of a personal crusade of his to support the practice of Ashkenazic Judaism. Rabbi Hamburger has also written a book on Jewish false messiahs and their opponents. Rabbi Hamburger maintains the same sorts of biases that one usually finds in Haredi history writers. For example, his work on messianism is a rabbinic apology. The rabbis protected by their knowledge and faithfulness to Jewish tradition are capable of withstanding the siren's song of false messiahs. That being said, Rabbi Hamburger is capable of dealing with academic literature so he, while dangerous, can be interesting and worthwhile to listen to. Here are my notes from the lecture; as usual all mistakes are mine.



It is difficult to talk about Ashkenaz. German Jewry is the kernel of the vast majority of Jews in the world. Ponevezher Rav was once going to a non-religious community to speak. He wanted to talk about Shabbos, and Kosher, but was told that he could not speak about these things because many in the community were not religious. So he asked what he could speak about. He was told to speak about Judaism. We can start with the origins of Ashkenaz. We know that the two centers were Israel and Babylon. Babylonian Jews went to Spain and Israel Jews went to Italy. The two main cities were Bari and Trento. "Ki miBari tetzei Torah udevar Hashem me'Otranto" was what they said then.  From there they went to Lucca. Here is where we get R. Moshe b. Kolonymous, who was brought by Charlemagne to Mainz. There were very few Jews during the early Middle Ages maybe 10,000-20,000. We consider Germany to be the biggest anti-Semites. In truth, we never see a complete expulsion from Germany. Pockets of French Jewry had some influence on Eastern Europe and Central Europe, not the Rhineland.

R. Moshe Isserles, living in sixteenth-century Poland, in general, goes with Ashkenazic customs, though at times he has more recent Polish customs. An example of the difference between Old Ashkenaz and New Ashkenaz is Shofar. Saadiah Gaon had a wavering tikiah. We have a straight tikiah, this comes from Spain. Old Ashkenaz has a circular shevarim. New Ashkenaz was influenced by other countries. There were pockets that held on to the Old Ashkenaz. Skver Hasidim still go with the Old Ashkenazic way. There was a major controversy over prayer in the eighteenth century. Hasidim brought in their own text based on Lurianic thought. Rabbi Ezekiel Landau attacked such changes. Many Hasidim, today, claim that they come from Spain. This is absurd. R. Judah the Pious claimed that people can die because they change a hymn even to change one hymn for another. There is a story among Vishnitz Hasidim that they stopped saying piyyutim for a while. A plague broke out and they sought spiritual causes and decided to bring back piyyutim, based on the teachings about dangers of stopping/altering piyyutim. This was in the time of the 'Ahavas Yisroel' of Vizhnitz (past Rebbe). Worms had a custom not to eat dried fruit. They were concerned about worms. (No pun intended.)

Why is it important? There is a strong claim of tradition defended by rabbis from one generation to another. Even Maimonides, from Sephard, sticks up for Ashkenaz. He attacked the order of calling people up to the Torah. He notes that one would expect Sephardim to be messed up, but Ashkenazim should know better. Rabbeinu Ashur (Rosh) became a rabbi in Toledo after fleeing from Germany and influenced Sephardic Jewry. He attacked the traditions of Sephard and only trusted the tradition from Germany. Rabbi Yitzchak b. Moshe Or Zaruah was a leading sage in Central Europe. He was questioned as to why one should make Kiddush in shul Friday night. He defended this custom by appealing to Ashkenazic tradition of the Rhineland and attacking his opponent for daring to question that tradition.


Q&A

The custom of cutting the hair of three-year-old boys comes from Arabs. It does not come to even the Hasidim until the twentieth century. We have evidence from the Middle Ages of cutting the hair after just a few weeks. Ashkenazim were never into beards but were very careful with peiyos. This is the exact opposite of Chabad. They were not so concerned about beards for people who were out in the world (as opposed to religious functionaries within the Jewish community). But they did have something with peiyos, see e.g. depictions of Wolf Heidenheim.

I asked Rabbi Hamburger about the debate between Dr. Avraham Grossman and Dr. Haym Soloveitchik about the origins of Ashkenaz. Dr. Soloveitchik argues that Ashkenaz from the beginning was Babylonian based. Rabbi Hamburger responded that Dr. Soloveitchik is a genius and that he has not seen his evidence. Perhaps if he saw this evidence he might be convinced. That being said everyone seems to assume that Ashkenaz comes from Israel. Dr. Soloveitchik might be a genius but the Rosh was pretty big too.

Articles of Interest (AJS, Georgia, Conversos, Brooks, Catholic Anglicans, Female Male Novelists)

I was not able to attend the recent AJS conference in Los Angeles. Thankfully Menachem Mendel and Drew Kaplan both posted on it. A pity we could not get something more extensive. This just goes to show that someone needs to fly me out to the next conference so I can blog on it properly.

My uncle, Rabbi Dovid Landesman, has Georgia on his mind over at Cross Currents as he talks about his recent trip to the Former Soviet Union and meeting Jews who have returned to Judaism after seventy years of Communism.

The Jews of the Former Soviet Union may be the modern day conversos, but Sandee Brawarsky gets to meet up with some modern old time conversos from Mallorca Spain, returning to Judaism after five hundred years.

For plain old converts to Judaism, Jennifer Medina writes in the New York Times about converts to Judaism and Christmas. The article features Aliza Hausman of Jewminicana, who criticizes the article for its mistakes.

David Brooks once again offers a principled conservative defense of the Obama administration, this time on their failure to foresee the recent attempted terrorist attack. To expect the government to be able to stop all terrorist attacks means that we have to invest more and more in expanding government programs. Conservatives who believe that government is imperfect, and should be limited, need to be careful what they say about this administration.

George Will discusses the recent offer by the Catholic Church to allow Anglicans to join while maintaining their particular traditions. Back in Elizabethan England you could still be Catholic as long as you did not attend a Catholic mass and recognized Queen Elizabeth I as the head of the Church of England. So now can you be an Anglican Catholic who holds on to the old traditions of believing that the Pope is the anti-Christ, trying to destroy the true English Church, the right to burn papist "spies" (Jesuits) and celebrate the Oxford martyrs?

Julianna Baggott advises women who wish to succeed as novelists to be men or at least write like them. Good thing I am a man writing about an eleven-year-old man with guns, blood, medieval surgery and Talmudic dialectics to boot.

Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: Religious Polemics and Conversion in the Middle Ages

Anastasia Keshman – St. Stephen’s Hand in the Wrong Hands: On a Little-Known Anti-Jewish Account from Medieval France

We have an account of how the hand of St. Stephen came to Besancon in France. The purpose of this account was to justify the authenticity of the relic. St. Stephen’s relics were hidden until they were supposedly discovered in Jerusalem in the fifth century. Immediately after the hand was brought to France from Rome it was placed in a reliquary. This reflects the reality of twelfth century France when the story was written rather than the early Middle Ages when the event allegedly took place.

Jewish thieves stole the relic in the time of Protadius (seventh century) because they wanted the golden reliquary. They threw the hand into the river Dubius. This is a parallel to the original martyrdom of St. Stephen who was stoned by the Jews. A miracle happened and the river split, leaving the hand unharmed. Fishermen found the relic. The people of the church came to the river and brought it back in solemn ceremony. According to the account, the joy of the people was as if St. Stephen had come down from heaven.

Jews play a prominent role but this is not an anti-Jewish polemic. Rather it is a miracle story in which Jews play an incidental role. Jews are greedy for gold and driven by the Devil. They do not see or hear the truth. That being said, there is no physical description of Jews. They are not described as stinking or as big nosed. The St. Stephen text avoids abusive language of Jews. Unlike later medieval texts, there is no violence done to the Jews. The Jews in the text are transient, coming and going. This may be a reference to Jewish merchants passing through. As is often the case in Christian miracle stories, Jews know but do not believe. Thus, even though they do not accept Christ, they have access to particular knowledge that serves the Christian cause. For example, the Jew, Judas, finds the true cross for Queen Helena. The Host desecration miracle of the later Middle Ages also serves this purpose. Jews steal the Host and torture it. The Host then bleeds as in Paolo Uccelo’s Miracle of the Profaned Host painting.

The Jew serves to demonstrate the power of the holy object and set the miracle in motion.


Luis Cortest – Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, and Alonso de Cartagena on Forced Conversion.

One way to think of the Latin fathers is a period in which doctrine was established. You have history of events which also serve to establish doctrine. Few works can rival Augustine’s City of God. One of his goals was to explain the existence of Jews. According to Augustine, the Jewish Diaspora helps Christians. Jews need to be dispersed to serve as witnesses. Augustine’s was a policy of relative tolerance. Whether this position is true it is clear that there is an alternative that is far more hostile as in the case of the Visigoths. It was official policy to engage in forced conversion in the seventh century as was the case with Sisebut in 612.

Isidore of Seville was a contemporary of Sisebut. Besides for his etymology, Isidore also dabbled in the contra Judaeos genre. In this period conversion was a collective act not something for individuals. Baptism was considered the beginning of the road to becoming a Christian. There is a demise of the pagan intellectual elite. This created a need for a new line of apologetics to go after those who were only nominally Christian.

The thirteenth century has been viewed as a time of intense anti-Semitism. Jeremy Cohen connects this to the friars. Such leading members of the Dominican order as Raymond Martini and Raymond of Penafort wanted a lasting solution. In pursuit of this they created an organized mission to the Jews and used rabbinic texts. Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa Contra Gentiles as per request by Penafort. There is no call for forced conversion in Aquinas. Jews and heathens are not to be compelled to believe because they never received this belief. Those who received it, though, ought to be compelled to keep it. According to Aquinas, Jews ought to be able to practice their rites because it helps the Christian faith. Other religions carry no such benefit. Jewish children should not be baptized against their parents’ will. This would violate the rights of their parents. Also children might be persuaded later if only they could come to Christianity through reason; this opportunity would be lost if force were used. There is also the argument from natural law; according to natural law the child is connected to his parents until it comes to the use of reason. Clearly not all of the friars followed a fanatical line in regards to Jews.

Alonso de Cartagena was a converso and son of Pablo de Burgos. Cartagena defended the sincerity of the conversos. Norman Roth sees Cartagena as one of the key figures in establishing the Inquisition. He put through the decree from the Council of Basil banning the practice of Judaism by conversos. Forced conversion was a practice to be done in mass and not to individuals. This was something Torquemada would later fail to understand.

A Different Sotomayor

Reading Yosef Yerushalmi’s From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto I find mention of a Fray Antonio de Sotomayor, who served as the confessor to King Philip IV of Spain before becoming Grand Inquisitor of Spain. This Sotomayor served as the dedicatee of a work by Don Juan de Quinones, which argued that Jewish men menstruate. (For more in this topic of Jewish men menstruating see David S. Katz’s essay “Shylock's gender: Jewish male menstruation in early modern England” in the Review of English Studies 50(1999): 440-462) Sotomayor headed the Inquisition for about a decade until 1643. Apparently he is remembered in history as being one of the more moderate members of the Spanish Inquisition at least compared to his successor Diego de Arce Reinoso.

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.

My Presentation to the International Medieval Congress (Part II)

(Part I)

Did Jews have the power to act against those accused of heresy? When faced with other types of threats the heads of the Jewish community proved themselves quite capable of putting through legislation, which regulated the behavior of individuals. In 1397, in response to the events of 1391, the leader of the Jewish community, Hasdai Crescas passed through a series of takkanot, in Saragossa that increased the powers of the communal trustees, making it easier for them to act without consulting the community as a whole. He placed a ban of excommunication on anyone who would tamper with his regulations.[1] Crescas wrote a book, Or Adonai (Light of the Lord), attacking Aristotelian philosophy and Maimonides yet he did not bother to place any restrictions on the study of philosophy. If Crescas really believed that Aristotelian philosophy posed a mortal threat to Judaism then surely he should have done more than engage in a philosophical debate with Aristotle and Maimonides. He should have put the considerable power, that he wielded, and used it to rid the community of Aristotle’s books and Aristotelian philosophers.

We see a similar pattern with the Synod of Valladolid in 1432, under Don Abraham Benveniste that focused on the need to reestablish community authority. The ordinances focused on five things: instruction in Torah communal judges, denunciation and slander, taxes and services and restrictions upon extravagant dress and entertainment. The council was concerned with the lack of Torah study amongst the Jewish community in Castile. In order to rectify the situation and support those involved in the study of Torah and teaching it, a tax was levied on cattle slaughtered, wine, weddings, circumcisions, and death. Every community was to appoint its own judges and officials to serve terms of one year. In case of any indecisions, the matter was to be brought to the Rab de la Corte, who would appoint someone himself. These judges wielded the power to levy fines and even use corporal punishment. They could force people to appear before the court and fine those who refused. They could order the arrest of any Jew provided they first signed a warrant in the presence of witnesses. The Synod forbade Jews to take other Jews to a Christian court or denounce other Jews to Christians, except if it was a matter of taxes due to the king, something pertaining to the king’s welfare or if the Jew in question did not recognize the authority of the Jewish court.[2] The Synod forbade Jews to attempt to seek special privileges from the Christian authorities in order to exempt themselves from community taxes.[3] Finally, the Synod placed restrictions on what sort of clothing Jews could wear. [4] The idea being that Jews should not wear fancy garments so as to not incur the ire of their Christian neighbors. [5]

Benveniste was Rab de la Corte under John II of Castile. In accordance with these statutes, Benveniste, as Rab de la Courte, was the supreme legal authority amongst all Jews in Castile and had power over all courts. We know from Ibn Musa that Benveniste was critical of philosophical interpretations of the Bible. According to Ibn Musa, Benveniste once responded to two scholars, who preached about “matters alien to our tradition,” using “figurative interpretations,” saying:

My brothers, children of Abraham, believe that when the Bible says in the beginning God created (Gen. 1:1) or Jacob left Beersheba (Gen. 26:10), it is to be understood in its simple meaning. Believe also in all that is written in the Torah, and what the rabbis explained in accordance with their tradition. Do not believe those who provocatively speak of alien matters.[6]


One would have imagined that Benveniste, among all of his various community regulations, could have spared a few lines as to the regulation of rogue preachers engaged in undermining popular belief with their philosophical allegories. As Rab de la Courte he certainly would have had the power to successfully wage the sort of campaign that had been attempted with limited success by Solomon of Montpellier, in 1232, and Solomon ben Aderet and Abba Mari, in 1306.

Part of the solution to this historical problem lies, I believe, in rethinking the issue of what these anti-philosophical polemics were about. I would suggest that rabbis wrote these polemics not written in order to warn ordinary Jews as to the dangers and failings of philosophy, but to reach out to conversos and make the case to them that Christian theology was a denial of the God of the Bible, and that by remaining as Christians they were abandoning God’s covenant and were no different than the Israelites in the Bible who worshipped Baal. Since we are dealing with a population that the church and the civil authorities viewed as Christian, Jews could not directly write anything that tried to get conversos to remain Jewish in any fashion. Therefore any outreach to conversos needed to be esoterically written.

To give an example of this, Solomon Alami accused philosophers of exchanging the garments of the “pure” Torah for Greek garments.

According to their [the philosophers’] words they have raised Aristotle with his calculations above Moshe, Peace Be Upon Him, with his Torah. For, were it not for his work and his books on nature, we would be left in the darkness of our intellect and we would not go out into the light from the barriers. And this is a little like the Christian argument when they say that all the righteous descended [to Hell] and were lost until their Messiah came and atoned for them through his death.[7]

Alami clearly connects philosophy to Christianity. Other examples follow this course and we can see philosopher as a codeword for Christian.

Assuming that rabbis wrote anti-philosophical literature in order to reach conversos solves our problems. It would explain why no one made the jump from attacking philosophy to actually taking action against it. The “philosophers” in question, whom the rabbis saw as such great threats, lived outside of the formal control of the Jewish community so any attempt to take action against them was futile. No Jewish communal bureaucracy could touch a Christian. When faced with the fact that a large percentage of the Jewish community officially lived as Christians, one could quite comfortably choose to ignore the issue of Averroeist Jews reading large swaths of the Bible allegorically. The rabbis were addressing a contemporary issue and were not simply going through the troupes inherited from earlier generations. Previous generations had the luxury of not having to face mass apostasy so they had the ability to look inward and take action against those Jews deemed to be too philosophically minded.

This move to reach out to conversos would also explain the turn towards dogma and why it did not lead to any attempts to follow through and take action against those deemed to possess heterodox beliefs. If one viewed Judaism as a set of beliefs and not as practices then it is possible to say that a Jew who did not keep the practices of Judaism, but who still believed should not be counted as an apostate. If one followed Maimonides even if a Jew violated every commandment in the Bible he still counted as a member of Israel and must be treated as one in every respect as long as he accepted all thirteen Principles of Faith. Since this move to dogma came about in order to accommodate those who could not actually practice Judaism or even count themselves as part of the Jewish community, any attempt to rid the Jewish community of those who counted themselves as part of the community, even though they might not accept everything in Judaism, would have been counterproductive.

In dealing with rabbinic anti-philosophical polemics in the fifteenth-century one cannot simply pass them off as a form of reactionary conservatism aimed at rooting out philosophy. If the rabbis of this period had wished to fight philosophy then they would have gone beyond simply denouncing philosophy to using their political power in order to excommunicate philosophers and ban their books. The fact that these people did not take such action forces us to rethink our understanding of this literature. The solution I have offered connects the issues of conversos and rabbinic polemics against philosophy. The real concern here was not philosophy but the mass apostasy of Jews. The anti-philosophical polemics from this period did not serve as vehicles to purify Judaism from the threat of heresy. Rather they served as a means to reach out to other Jews, even those who did not practice Judaism in any sort of traditional sense.


[1] Baer HJCS II pg. 126-29 and Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien Erster Teil I no. 463, pg. 727-32.
[2] One wonders what sort of Jew this is meant to refer to. One source of possible candidates would have been conversos.
[3] This statute is found in almost every community ordinance in the middle ages both amongst Sephardic communities and Ashkenazic.
[4] Ibn Verga in his book Sevet Yehuda, argues that Jews brought about the expulsion of 1492 upon themselves because they paraded themselves in fancy garments in front of Christians, which made Christians resentful of them.
[5] Baer, HJCS II pg. 261-70 and Die Juden im Christlichen Spanien Erster Teil II no. 287, pg. 281-97.
[6] Saperstein, Jewish Preaching pg. 385-86.
[7] Iggeret Musar pg. 41-42.

My Presentation to the International Medieval Congress (Part I)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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



(To be continued ...)