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

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

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

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

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

"Like what?"

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Complete Zohar.

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

...

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

Her brother smiled. "They will."

I don't understand."

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


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

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

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

Rabbi Yissocher Frand on Shabbos and Repentance

This past evening Rabbi Yissocher Frand spoke in Silver Spring at one of the local congregations, Shomrei Emunah. I went, not expecting much, simply to fill in as a neighborly blogger, reporting on the important events of in the community. To my surprise, Rabbi Frand managed to exceed expectations (granted that is quite easy when you have expectations as low as mine). There was nothing seriously offensive and nothing particularly heretical in his speech. Rabbi Frand even brought down a story by Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik. Here are my notes. As usual, any mistakes are mine. Since this blog is read by a wide variety of people, I have taken the liberty of translating many of the Hebrew terms Rabbi Frand’s uses.

There is a tendency to relapse back to undesirable behavior. Even if we actually repent we slip back and our efforts go for not. This is one of the main impediments to repentance. Repentance is like dieting. We might lose a few pounds but we know that we will get it back. I speak from personal experience. In past years I have suggested numerous things. This year I would like to suggest a new approach. This does not involve taking on something new. My suggestion is to keep Shabbos. Most of you have kept Shabbos all of your lives without the intended result. What does Shabbos have to do with repentance? There is a story about a person who was involved in five accidents. It was shown that four were not his fault. The insurance company still wanted to drop him because of “bad karma.” Rabbi Weinberg advised this man that these accidents were a form of stoning because of violating Shabbos. This was a Shabbos observing family so what does it mean that they violated Shabbos. Rabbi Weinberg asked what the household looked like before Shabbos. It was chaotic and the man’s wife often lit candles less than eighteen minutes before Shabbos. This was changed and the policy was reinstated now that the “religious problem” was taken care of. (I have a problem with anything that implies that God is likely to directly interfere in the lives of lay individuals to punish them. It smacks too much of an arbitrary father in the sky, landlord deity. Insurance companies deal with odds. They of all people should understand that, statistically, you will get people who have five accidents and most of them not their fault. If the people who are supposed to understand statistics are failing in the defense of reason then we are in serious trouble.)

What does Shabbos have to do with repentance? We know the story of Cain and Abel. God curses Cain and Cain exclaims that he could not bear the punishment. God puts a mark so that no one would harm Cain. Cain goes out from God. According to the Midrash, Adam asked Cain what happened and Cain said that he repented and that God forgave him. Adam exclaimed how great repentance was and sang the song of Shabbos (Psalms 92). Adam did not know about repentance? Why is his reaction to sing about Shabbos? According to the Nesivos Shalom (Rabbi Sholom Noach Berezovsky, the previous Slonimer Rebbe), Cain was not just worried about his physical being, Cain was worried about his soul. Cain was being banished to a world of temptation and he knew that he could not survive that. God made a sign. That sign was Shabbos, which is called a sign. God was offering a solution to Cain, that he could keep Shabbos and save himself. This was what excited Adam. He knew about repentance but never connected Shabbos to repentance. (My father is a big fan of Nesivos Shalom as is my thesis advisor.) Sin does something to someone’s soul, just like a stroke affects a person’s mind, cutting off the connection between the brain and the rest of the body. Shabbos is the spiritual therapy that restores the damaged connection to God. We are constantly assaulted in this world. But as the Zohar says, Shabbos is the day the soul is restored.

Rabbi Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, in one of his sermons on repentance, told over how, as a child, he used to go to a Modzitz shtiebel (small synagogue). The Hasidism would sing into the evening because they did not want Shabbos to end. There was a porter there whom he knew from his weekday work. Rabbi Soloveitchik could not recognize the man’s regal bearing on Shabbos. Rabbi Soloveitchik, as the Litvak (Lithuanian), asked when the evening services were. The man responded: “are you so impatient for Shabbos to end?”

Back in the old times, when it was still okay to go to movies, they would show newsreels. In 1933 the Munkatcher rebbe’s daughter got married and this got onto the newsreels. You can check this on Youtube. (There is a group of little boys and girls singing Hatikvah and a large group of older children engaged in mixed dancing.) It was a major event. The Rebbe got the chance to speak to Jews in America and he told them to keep Shabbos. The Rebbe, who did not like pictures, agreed to be in a movie so he could speak to American Jews and tell them about Shabbos.

I am not a Hasid; my parents were German Jews. I eat gabruchts (wet matza) on Passover and put tefillin on during Chol HaMoed with a bracha (blessing). There is one thing that I envy about Hasidim, Shabbos. Go to New Square for Shabbos, go to Belz. The better the Shabbos you have the better your soul will be and this will help repentance last. It will allow us to stave of what the world throws against us. If Shabbos is merely a day to crash it will not have the desired effect. There is a program called “Turn Friday Night Into Shabbos.” We need a program to turn Shabbos into Shabbos.

The problem with Shabbos is that it happens every week. We take it for granted. There was a rabbi who had a conversation with a Roman Catholic from Topeka Kansas on a plane. The Catholic asked the rabbi if he kept Shabbos like when the woman of the house, in her finest, lights candles and the family sits down to a meal with silverware and crystal. The Catholic had the advantage of only seeing one or two Shabbosim.

If you want to appreciate something invest in it; buy and read books on Shabbos. We need to stop doing certain things in regards to Shabbos. Try praying at a slower pace; try coming early and say Psalms. Limit your reading to things that are not secular, no newspaper, no sports, no business. The words “never mind Shabbos” should never cross our lips. You have to want Shabbos. Women have the advantage in that they already actively prepare for Shabbos. All they have to do is think about it. I have a letter from a woman who decided to accept Shabbos by midday on Friday. Is this woman crazy? She heard her daughter complain about it being Shabbos because Friday was such a tense time. Now her children come from school to a calm home. Now her children are used to her planning for Shabbos all week long because she cannot start planning Thursday at midnight. (I can easily see this only exacerbating the problem.)

Rabbi Mattisyahu Salomon writes that there is no better way to install faith in children than Shabbos. We all know the temptations that our children are up against. I tell my wife that I am glad that we are out of the child raising business. Let our children deal with it.

I would like to close with an atypical Holocaust story. Judith Novack wrote a book called The Lilac Bush about her experiences. In her town they would speak Hungarian during the week but only Yiddish on Shabbos. In 1944 when the Jews were deported, she was the only one to survive. After liberation she and other survivors got on a train to go back home. They hatched a plot to throw rocks at the synagogue to show how angry they were at God. When she picked up the rock she remembered her Shabbos table. She thought how she could not bear to live her life without Shabbos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

General Exam III: Jewish History (Part IV)

[For the final part of the exam I was given two texts to analyze. One was from Jacob Marcus’ Jew in the Medieval World and the other was from Gershon Cohen’s translation of Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition.]

Text #1: (Modena)
This text comes from Leon Modena’s autobiography, Hay’ye Yehudah; it deals with the printing of his Historia de gli riti hebraici and how he nearly ran afoul of the Inquisition over it. This text is a useful example of the complexities of Jewish-Christian relations in the early modern period, particularly within the context of the age of the printing press and the split between Catholicism and Protestantism.

Modena was someone in regular contact with Christians and engaged in friendly scholarly discussions with them. Historia was written at the behest, we believe, of Henry Wotten, the English ambassador to Venice, and was meant to be given to James I of England. In this book Modena gives an overview of Jewish laws and practices. In large respect he was responding to Johann Buxtorf the elder’s Synagoa Judaica. Modena wrote the Historia in 1616. He later, in 1635, gave this same book to a French-Christian Hebraist named Giacomo Gaffarel. Gaffarel then went and published the book on his own initiative. This created a problem for Modena in that there was material in the book that violated Catholic censorship policies. While the Historia was just a manuscript, one that was also written for a Protestants to boot, this was not a problem. Now, though, that Gaffarel had printed the book, Modena found himself to be an inadvertent promoter of “heresy.” The problem was quickly and painlessly solved. Modena explained the matter to the local inquisitor, who proved to be quite sympathetic and understanding. It turns out that even this was not necessary as Gaffarel did not publish the manuscript as is but, on his own initiative, removed the potentially objectionable material.
This story illustrates something about Catholic censorship. This whole incident happened only a few years after Galileo was put on trial for the Dialogues. Galileo’s real crime was not that he was a heliocentrist, but that he failed to adhere to the letter of the original ban on him writing on the issue and, more importantly, he managed to antagonize Pope Urban VIII. One could get away with a lot during the seventeenth century, inquisition censors or no inquisition censors, as long as one knew how to adhere to the letter of the letter of law and avoided antagonizing any of the wrong people. Publishing books was a political game and one was perfectly safe as long as they knew how to play the game. Galileo was not very adept at this game and suffered the consequences; Modena could play the game and was perfectly safe.

A word should be said here about Christian Hebraism; there are quite a few Christians in this story that are interested in Jews and Judaism and some of them are fairly knowledgeable. This had nothing to do with Christians thinking about converting to Judaism; though, as the case of Peter Spaeth illustrates, this did happen on occasion. Rather this early modern Christian Hebraism was rooted in the search for the prisca theologia, the original theology, which lay behind much of early modern thought. The premise was that humanity had fallen away from the truths of antiquity and that these sources could be recovered by a close examination of the sources. One of the major manifestations of this was the interest in “magical” texts such as the Hermetic corpus, thought to date from the time of Moses, and the Zohar. Another manifestation was a renewed emphasis on the bible and reading it outside of the shadow of the Vulgate and the medieval Catholic tradition. Protestantism was a product of this movement. Protestants in particular were interested, in this period, in forming contacts with Jews and Jewish sources because they believed that, while the Jews may have corrupted their own sources, a critical analysis, in light of Christian truths, of such material would allow one to uncover the original true “Christian” religion behind it.

This whole incident is a good illustration of how interrelated Jewish history is with the happenings within the general society. Jews in Europe did not live in a different world from Christians. The printing press, the Catholic Church’s post-Tridentine censorship, the struggle with Protestantism affected someone like Leon Modena just as it affected Galileo.

Text #2: (Ibn Daud)

This text in Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition, deals with the story of the four captives. According to this story four rabbis were captured by pirates and ransomed respectively by the communities of Fostat, Qairawan and Cordova. These rabbis stayed in these given communities and set up communities. Ibn Daud uses this story to explain how it came to pass that the authority possessed by the Babylonian Gaonate passed to Spain. This story is useful, though not in its most obvious sense. The story is clearly a legend and cannot be accepted as historical fact. That being said this story is an excellent example of the telling and use of legends. As such, while this story tells us nothing of use about the origins of the Spanish Jewish community, it is very useful in understanding Ibn Daud and by extension Andalusian Jewry.

The story of the four captives serves as a convenient foundation story. It gives a clear cut, dramatic story that points to a given conclusion. It clearly fits into the overarching narrative of the Book of Tradition. The main purpose of the Book of Tradition is the defense of the rabbinic tradition, particularly in the face of Karaite critic, and the establishment of Andalusia as the center of Jewish life and Torah authority. As such the story is just too convenient to be taken at face value as a historical event.

Within the story itself there is micro narrative that is highly suspicious. We are told that that the captain wanted to violate the wife of one of the captives, R. Moses. She asks him if she would be allowed to throw herself overboard to drown; would such an action bar her from the future resurrection of the dead. R. Moses responds by quoting the verse: “I will bring them back from Bashan; I will bring them back from the depths of the sea.” The wife accepted this and drowned herself. The problem with this story is that it is lifted straight out of the Talmud. In the Talmud the story is that there are two boats sailing to Rome with Jewish captives, one with four hundred boys and another with four hundred girls. Fearing for their chastity, the girls ask the boys if they would be forfeiting their place in the future resurrection by jumping overboard. The boys reply by the same verse. The girls follow this advice and jump. The boys then follow the example themselves and also commit martyrdom. So here in the four captives story we have the same scenario, woman on a boat with her virtue threatened, with the exact same conversation and the exact same verse quoted. What is one supposed to believe; that R. Moses and his wife played out the Talmudic story, apparently unaware of the precedent, or someone lifted the story from the Talmud and used it for the four captives story.

The ending of the whole narrative is also simply too convenient and too much to type to be believed. We are told that R. Moses and R. Hanok arrive in Cordova. They go to the central synagogue and sit in the back; everyone just assumes they are simple beggars. While they are sitting there, the leading rabbi, R. Nathan the Pious, is unable to give the correct explanation in a matter of law. R. Moses and Hanok come forward, deus ex machina, and solve the problem. R. Nathan the Pious is so amazed by these two scholars that he steps down and acknowledges their authority. This is the sort of thing that only happens in legends. In real life, revolutions in authority do not happen overnight; the opposition fights with every last breath and goes to its grave kicking, screaming and denouncing the interlopers, who stole what was rightfully theirs.

Shivhei ha-Ari and the Decline of the Generations

One of foundations of Haredi ideology is the concept of yeridat ha-dorot, the decline of the generations. Every generation is inferior to the one that came before it. It is not just that the preceding generations were closer to biblical times, and therefore possessed a stronger tradition, or that we are bound by their precedent; Haredim believe that the people, particularly the rabbis, who lived in earlier generations were, in fact, superior to us. They were bigger, stronger, faster and, most importantly, they were smarter than us. This has many different ramifications, one of them being the authority of science when it comes into conflict with the rabbinic tradition. For Haredim, the view of Maimonides and his son, Avraham Maimuni, that the rabbis spoke based on their knowledge of the science of their day and that therefore, since science has advanced, we should reject the claims, found in rabbinic literature, that go against science as we understand it today, is unacceptable and downright heresy. As they see it, one most believe that the rabbis were smarter and knew more than any scientist alive today. If you are willing to accept the view of scientists over that of the rabbis then you have rejected Jewish tradition. The rejection of scientific claims, like the theory of evolution, becomes, therefore, an act of faith; one is willing to stand up for the tradition and for rabbinic authority even when faced with the full power of the modern scientific establishment. While there are many sources for this notion of a decline, I would like to point to a work that operates outside of this point of view, Shivhei ha-Ari.

Shivhei ha-Ari (Praises of the Ari) is a collection of legends, dealing with Isaac Luria, written by Solomon Shlomiel of Dresnitz in the early seventeenth century and is one of the main traditional sources on the life of Luria. The basic premise underlying Shivhei ha-Ari is that Luria was not merely a link in a chain, going back all the way to Mount Sinai, passing on the work of his teachers. For Dresnitz, Luria was a messianic type figure, outside of this world and outside of the chain of tradition. Luria was placed here on earth in order to bring about the spiritual salvation of the world by repairing the damage down to the saphirot by creation and man’s subsequent sins. As befitting his savior status (one could almost view him as a Kabbalistic Jesus Christ) Luria was privileged to receive information straight from heaven:

He merited that every night his soul went up to the celestial realms. The ministering angels would come and escort him to the heavenly academy and ask him which school he desired to attend. Sometimes he said to the school of R’ Shimeon bar Yochai , or to the school of R’ Akiva, or to the school of R’ Eliezer the Great, or to the rest of the Tanaitic or Amoraic sages or to the prophets. (Chapter 2. All translations are mine.)

These nocturnal study sessions gave Luria knowledge of “secrets, mysteries and treasures of Torah that had never been heard and were unknown even to the Tanaitic sages.” (Ibid)

Shivhei ha-Ari makes Luria to be a greater figure then even R’ Shimeon bar Yochai, who, according to tradition was the author of the Zohar, the foundational text for Lurianic Kabbalah. Luria understood of the Zohar surpassed even that of its author because, in his youth angels, he was taught the Zohar by angels:

Sometimes they told him in a dream that he understood the book of the Zohar, and it was according to R’ Shimeon bar Yochai, but there was in it a secret beyond him. Sometimes they told him that his understanding was correct, but it was not the intention of R’ Shimeon bar Yochai because of the errors that fell into the book of the Zohar. (Ibid)

Luria is given the authority to overrule a rabbinic sage like R’ Shimeon bar Yochai. To the extent that, even when Luria misread the Zohar, his misreading was really the correct understanding and it was the Zohar that was wrong.

As we shall see , the mystic’s claim to divine illumination, outside of any religious tradition, is not that different from the scientist’s claim to be able to go outside of tradition. The line between mysticism, magic and science is much narrower than you might think; particularly if you know something about the history of science and the origins of the Scientific Revolution.