Gluckel of Hameln gave birth to fourteen children.  But she labored still once more, this time with all of Israel. 

“We were like a woman who sits in labour and suffers mighty pangs,” she wrote in her seventh-century memoir, describing the great anticipation of Jews around the world:  their breathless, anxious waiting to usher-in the Messianic Era. 

It was, after all, on the brink of arrival.  This is what Shabtai Zvi--a powerful charismatic figure who circulated about the Ottoman Empire--had promised the people.  And they believed him. 

In those days leading up to the miraculous dawn of the new era, the Jews described whatever travails they may have had as “hevlei mashiach.”  This term is used by the Biblical prophet Isaiah to describe the searing pains that would come just before the Messiah’s arrival.  The metaphor is a powerful one.  Labor pains, no matter how severe, are all worthwhile once the child enters the world. 

But in this case, the anticipated arrival never came.  In Gluckel’s words, “Thy beloved people Israel sat in labour; but there came forth naught but wind… our, hope was sure [but] we were left, in the end, abandoned.”

In describing just how powerful that hope was, Gluckel writes about the real pragmatic actions some took in preparation for the new era. “Many sold their houses and lands and all their possessions,” she writes, “for any day they hoped to be redeemed.” And don’t write this off as just rumor or hearsay, Gluckel tells us, “My good father-in-law left his home in Hameln, abandoned his house and lands and all his goodly furniture, and moved…for the old man expected to sail any moment from Hamburg to the Holy Land.”

I am struck by this passage each time I read it.  I know that much of the Jewish world became swept up in Shabtai Zvi’s promises and his message of hope.  Even so, how could people have believed so strongly that they chose to give up all their worldly possessions, and abandon any sort of financial security they may have had? I’ve often wondered how – or why – Shabtai Zvi’s message was so successful.  How did it spread so far across the Jewish world, and why did Jews find his message compelling and believable, regardless of where they lived (from Istanbul and Izmir, to the Holy Land, to Amsterdam and Germany)?

Gershom Scholem provides the most erudite answers to these questions in his book Sabbatai Sevi (1976).  Isaac Bashevis Singer, likewise, manages to answer these questions in his fictional novel Satan in Goray.  Unlike Scholem, whose historical eye is broad and far-reaching, IB Singer casts a close, tight gaze on Goray, a small town in Poland. 

The novel is dark and disturbing.  Particularly difficult to read is the life-story of his protagonist Rechele, who was born in the midst of the Chmelnicki pogroms, who lost her mother at a very young age, and who was raised by a deranged old woman who physically abused the child and emotionally tortured her with tales of ghosts and demons.

Despite the horrific tale, I am drawn to the book because it explains – in an immediate, personal way – how the people of Goray came to believe that Messiah was on its way.  And how this belief came to connect this small and out-of-the-way town, into the larger phenomena that swept across the Jewish world. 

Before the age of social-media, rumors of events far away worked their way in through charismatic figures who lived much nearer to home.  They crept in closer and closer through increasingly tighter circles.  First wanderers brought rumors of far-away Shabtai Zvi.  Then a “Legete from Yemen” arrived and drew people close to him with wonders.  He was ultimately is expelled, but not much later Itche Mates arrived from the big city of Lublin.  Though he stirred up the town, he also proved unable to work the people into a frenzy of full anticipation.  Finally, it is Gedaliya, a ritual slaughterer from Zamosc – the next town over  - who sways the people through his bizarre behaviors, his promises, and perverted injunctions. 

His success is so broad because it comes on the heels of all those who preceded him.   Not only the messianic pretenders who had appeared in recent years, but the long line of those who preceded him historically (Eldad the Danite, David Reubeini, and Yemen’s messianic figures made famous through the writings of Maimonides).   So too, Gedaliya rises to success because he draws on familiar messianic symbols and themes prevalent in the Bible and rabbinic texts.  Finally, he uses the powerful vocabulary of words and actions present in Lurianic Kabbalah. 

In Goray, the time is right.  People are looking for a salve to ease their suffering in the wake of the horrific Chmelnicki pogroms.  IB Singer aptly describes the confluence of so many varied factors that came together to stir awake the full and complete belief that the messiah was really here, knocking on the door.

Of course it never does come.  And Satan in Goray peters out without a real ending.  But it leaves the reader with a sense of how charisma functions, and of how powerful and dangerous it can be.

Wealthy and educated Gluckel grew up in Western Europe, where she also raised her many children, and helped run a successful family business.  She was sharp-witted, practical and worldly-wise.  Nonetheless, at the end of her life, she longed for a different sort of existence; a life of spirituality and holiness in the Land of Israel.

Seventeenth-century Gluckel did not follow her dream.  There were others, however, who lived in the Middle Ages who did manage to act upon their own similar feelings of longing.  Fifteenth century rabbinic scholar, Ovadia Bertinoro was one of them.  He left his family behind in Italy and made a new home for himself in Jerusalem.  Twelfth century poet, Yehuda Halevi, was too.  He yearned for the Holy Land, and set sail for this destination at the end of his life (though it is unclear if he actually ever arrived).  Likewise a group of thirteenth-century rabbis (300 some say!) left France and Germany behind to establish themselves anew in the Holy Land.

What drew these individuals to move to the Land of Israel in the Middle Ages? Of course it’s difficult to make generalizations, as they lived at very different times.  Nevertheless, I think we can learn a few things from the shared aspects of their experiences.

First are a few factors that were not reasons to move to the Land of the Israel:

(1) During much of the Middle Ages, the Land of Israel was not a lively center of religious and cultural activity.  Indeed, only a tiny percentage of the world Jewish population lived there.  Jewish life was so sparse that traveler Benjamin of Tudela writes almost nothing of the communities there, but dwells instead on describing the architectural ruins. Ovadia Bertinoro tells us that when he was there, only 4,000 families lived in Jerusalem (among them only 70 were Jewish).  And letters composed by several of the rabbis who moved there during the thirteenth century suggest that it was a difficult place to study Torah because the institutional infrastructure was so weak. (During Gluckel’s time the situation was somewhat different, as Safed was becoming an active Jewish town under Ottoman rule.  Let’s put this aside, though, for now).

(2) Those Jews who did move to the Land of Israel during the Middle Ages found themselves living under Muslim rule during some periods, and under Christian rule during others.  These Jews may have been living in a land to which they felt a historic and spiritual connection.  Yet, unlike in Israel today, they did not live as sovereign people in their own land any more than did the Jews of North Africa or Western Europe. 

(3) Nor was it easy to make a living there during much of Middle Ages.  Indeed, a large percentage of the Jewish population that lived there was either supported by charity that came from Jewish communities abroad, or they had moved there with some money on which to retire (as in the case of Ovadia Bertinoro).

What then would have motivated Jews to move there?  And even for those – like Gluckel - who never got up the guts to go, why would they have longed to go there at all? 

Historian Ephraim Kanarfogel (who analyzed the responsa letters from those rabbis who moved there during the thirteenth century) suggests that they were motivated by a sense of obligation.  Simply put, they understood there was a religious injunction to live in the Holy Land, and they believed it necessary to fulfill this command.

Ovadia Bertinoro penned intimate letters to his father and brother, which shed some light on his interior world; the personal feelings and motivations that may have led him to the decision to pick up and leave his family in Italy and stake out a new life in Jerusalem. 

He writes with great pathos of the sadness he felt about leaving his father.  When he thinks of his greying old man he is “inconsolable,” and “cannot refrain from tears.”  This emotional display sounds a bit over the top to me.  I wonder if his expression of guilt might not in fact be meant to cover up the fact that he really wanted to get as far away from dear dad as possible.  Perhaps fleeing to the Holy Land was a legitimate excuse to go out on his own. 

That’s just conjecture, but I can’t help but wondering….

Another simpler and more obvious explanation is that Ovadia Bertinoro wanted to live a spiritual, holy life.  Living in the Land of Israel allowed this, because it provided him with the opportunity to leave his business concerns behind.  In addition, he found himself surrounded by others whose primary concern seemed to have been their spiritual lives.  “There are some excellent regulations here,” he writes.  “I have nowhere seen the daily service conducted in a better manner.  The Jews rise an hour or two before day-break… and recite psalms and other songs of praise till the day dawns… the ‘Hear, O Israel’ being read on the appearance of the sun’s first rays.”

What a dramatic and moving description of what it was like to pray in Jerusalem! Though Gluckel of Hameln never made it to the Holy Land, it seems this was precisely the sort of experience she longed for; far away from mundane and trivial troubles.  Connected instead to that which - seemed to her - must really matter. 

“Leaving behind me all the nothingness of this world, I should have taken myself, with the handful that remained me, to the Land of Our Fathers.  There I might have lived as a good Jewess, and the cares and griefs of my children and all the other vanities of the world would no longer have burdened me, and there I might have served God with all my heart and soul.”  It might not have been an easy place to live, but perhaps the Holy Land – even just the thought of it - provided an answer to some of life’s existential troubles. 

For Jews, the Medieval Era—according to Ivan Marcus--is defined by conditions “of corporate subordination to a dominant monotheistic and hence, exclusivistic religious majority in power over them.”  This definition was abstract and unwieldy when we first read it several weeks ago.  But by this time in the semester, it begins to come into focus

In recent sessions we have explored what it means for a society to be divided up into corporate groups.  Likewise, we have focused on the implications of belonging to the Jewish subordinate minority group within such a social structure.

In the 1920s, Jewish historian Salo Baron called for a “break” with the “lachrymose” approach to the study of Jewish history.   Indeed, the Middle Ages were years of great cultural creativity for the Jews.  Yet, it is difficult to get away from the lachrymose part of the story when reading the Muslim and Christian texts that outlined how Jews were to be treated. 

The Muslim “Pact of Umar” and Augustine’s Christian “Doctrine of Witness” both grant Jews the right to practice their religion freely, and provide them with the promise of security of body and property.  In return for these conditions, however, the Jews were required to accept upon themselves humiliating disabilities.  Furthermore, they were to be marked (through their garb) to ensure that they not pass for anything other than Jewish.

Exactly how influential and pervasive were these documents? The pact of Umar was written (supposedly) in the 7th century, and the Doctrine of Witness was written in the fourth.  Did they continue to invoked?  Where, and for how long? 

Theologian Rosemary Reuther argues that the birth of Christianity was intrinsically linked to the assertion of the Jews’ reprobate status.  One hinged upon the other.  In her words, “anti-Judaism was the negative side of the Christian claim that Jesus was Christ.”

This proposition is well expressed by Augustine in his interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel.  Cain killed his brother Abel, just as the Jews killed Jesus.  Cain is exiled from the Garden of Eden, and forever doomed to a life of groaning and wandering.   His fate as a perpetually homeless outsider serves as a reminder of his sin and degraded status (what a troubling metaphor!).  Yet, he is to be kept alive for “whosoever shall kill Cain, vengeance shall be taken on his sevenfold.”  So too, Augustine teaches, “preservation of the Jews” is to serve as “proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who… put the Lord to death.”

Reuther views Augustine’s theological proposition as the “foundation of the demonic view of the Jews” which in turn, “fanned the flames of popular hatred,” and “laid the inferiorization of the civic and personal status of the Jews in Christian society.”  For Ruether, theology—as explicated by the Church fathers--is the root cause of Jewish persecution during the Middle Ages and into the modern era.

In his work, “Under Crescent and Cross,” Mark Cohen offers a more dynamic and complex analysis of Jewish persecution (in both Christian and Muslim society).  He takes into account social, political and economic factors in addition to theological ones – without privileging one over another.  Regardless of how we view the causes, however, one thing is certain: Jews suffered in the Middle Ages on account of their Jewishness.  In our next class we will look at the cluster of allegations leveled against them in Christian Europe (desecration of the host, the poisoning of wells, and ritual murder) which led to persecution and massacre.

In the second half of class we will move away from this gloomy aspect of history, to address the strategies Jews used – in the Muslim world as well as the Christian one – to create lives of dignity in spite of their degradation. 

How did the Jews fare under Islamic rule?  It is tempting to answer this question by pointing to the Pact of Umar.  This document, supposedly penned in the 7th century, was issued and re-issued throughout history, and across much of the Muslim world.  It lists the humiliating conditions by which Jews (and Christians) were to abide in exchange for security of property and body, and freedom to practice their religion.

Jews were permitted to pray in synagogues, but they could not rebuild or restore those in need of repair.  They could hold religious ceremonies as long as they were not were not conducted in a loud or extravagant manner.  They were required to wear clothing and take names that marked them as different.  They could bear no weapons.  They could sell no wine.  And they were to comport themselves in a subservient manner; their homes were to be lower than their Muslim neighbors, they were not to ride in saddles, and they were to rise if a Muslim wished to be seated.

But these legal stipulations reveal only part of the story.  Jewish historian Mark Cohen explains that “economic, political and social factors acted….as a counterweight to the fundamental theological hostility towards the religion.”  Cohen uses the wide-angle lens of political, economic and social analysis to assess the condition of the Jews under Muslim rule in the broadest strokes. 

To understand how Jews lived under Muslim rule, it is also useful to do a close analysis of particular places at particular points in time.  I recently learned of a trove of photographs taken in Muslim Central Asia at the end of the 1860s.  This historic record is currently housed at the Library of Congress (and available on-line here).  Put together by Russian authorities, it provides a panoramic view of society just before colonialism utterly transformed the society. 

I’ll be speaking about this oeuvre at the conference of the Association of Jewish Studies this December.  In the meantime, here are a few notes:

Among the 1,200 images that appear in Turkestan Album, most are of the region’s Muslim population.  Some 40 or so, however, are of the Jewish minority.  They provide a very interesting window into their life as dhimmi.  In this brief essay, I’ll look at the Jews’ dress, with a particular focus on men’s hair and headgear.

This water carrier is identifiably Jewish. Ephraim Neumark who traveled to Central Asia in the 1880s, writes in his travelogue that Jewish men were permitted to wear only one sort of cap, referred to as a “tilpak.”  Neumark describes the cap as “made of sheepskin.”  Others have described it as “conical shaped” and fur-trimmed, which all fit the description of the hat worn here by our friend the water-carrier.

His side-locks also mark him as Jewish.  The Biblical injunction that a Jewish man may not cut the corners of his hair has led to the sporting of peyot – sidelocks - among Jewish men in various parts of the globe.  It is worth noting that Alexander Burnes, who traveled to Central Asia in the 1830s, describes this hair-arrangement as a fashion statement rather than as Jewish religious prescription.  He writes, “Their features are set off by ringlets of beautiful hair hanging over their cheeks and neck.”  Rather than a mark of difference imposed by the Muslims, this style is a self-identifier chosen by Jews of their own volition.

The photo of a Jewish man, below, matches these same descriptors.

Were Jews the only ones whose headgear and hairstyle marked them as different?  A comparison to the portraits of other men (which also appear in Turkestan Album) indicates that each group had its own distinctive headgear.  Here are a few noteworthy images.


        A Kazakh Man                    An Indian Man                 A Kyrgyz Man

From the perspective of 21st century America, this fashion variety may be mistaken for celebration of ethnic difference.  And, one might assume that the Jews were just one of many groups who enlivened the social landscape through their own special garb.  

Neumark’s travelogue cautions us against such a view.  In addition to describing the tilpak hat that Jewish men did wear, he also describes what Jewish men were not allowed to wear.  Unlike the Muslims—he explains—Jews were not allowed to wear turbans.   In this social landscape, the turban was a sign of masculine respectability. 

To the left, for example, is a picture of a Muslim judge.   One did not need to occupy an honorable position to wear a turban (although one that was wide and bulky, like this judge’s, was the mark of status).  Below we see a few simpler men sporting turbans.  The photographer who took their shot in the marketplace may have bought lunch from them.  He labeled them “Vendors of Boiled Giblets."  Bon appetite!

Luminous.  Beautiful.  Precious. Luxurious.  These adjectives are evoked by the term “Golden Age,” used by Jewish historians use to refer to Spain in the medieval era.   The period is remembered as a time when Jews were at ease with their non-Jewish neighbors, when they could breathe easily, express themselves freely, and walk proudly. 

This chapter in history has long provided a message of hope.  Jewish intellectuals in 19th-century Europe lamented their own frustrating attempts to be accepted into the non-Jewish world.  But, they looked to medieval Spain as a promise of what they might achieve if only their gentile neighbors embraced them.  More recently, in the wake 9/11, the Golden Age of Spain has provided an example of how warfare and hatred between religious communities might be replaced by tolerance and good-will.

Hillel Halkin has little patience for this narrative.  His book Yehuda Halevi (2010) is a biography of one of the most prominent Jewish cultural figures of Medieval Spain.  More broadly, the work provides a portrait of the period during which Halevi lived.  Not doubt it was a time when Jews produced literary and intellectual masterpieces.  It was also a time when cultural ideas and forms flowed freely between Spain’s Muslim, Christian and Jewish populations.  Yet, these conditions did not mean that Jews lived with a sense of security.   They were hardly “golden.”

Yehuda HaLevi provides a wonderful subject for a biography because of his tremendous creative output and his great diversity of talent.  He was a doctor, a community leader, a philosopher, a poet and a lively character.  During many of his years, he lived the high-life – surrounded by friends, drinking wine, entertained by music amidst luscious gardens, where cool fountains flowed and soft breezes carried the scent of almond blossoms.

But these experiences were set against a dark backdrop.  If Yehuda Halevi is a mascot of cultural and intellectual achievement, he is also an icon of the wandering Jew, moving from one place to the next, with the trials of persecution always on his trail.  

Born in northern Spain (around 1070) he moved to Granada as a young man to join the city’s lively Jewish intellectual scene.  Paradoxically, this city – a center of Jewish life – was living under the shadow of destruction.  An estimated three thousand Jews were killed in a popular uprising just a decade before Halevi’s arrival. 

If a sense of tranquility had returned to Granda, it was not long before it was shattered.  In 1090, just a few years after Halevi arrived, the zealous Almoravid’s invasion whipped up anti-Jewish sentiment once again.  Halevi fled, along with many of his fellows.  He travelled to Lucena, picked up again for Seville and then again for Toledo.  There he settled, but not for long.  In 1109, a war of royal succession brought with it terror and destruction to the city’s Jewish community.

At this point in the historical narrative, Halkin comments that the loss of Jewish life and property in Toledo was yet “another reminder of how precarious….the Jewish situation in the Iberian peninsula was” (70-71).  On the surface a spirit of convivencia (co-existence) reigned.  But this disposition was no more than a fragile veneer; a mood that could be shattered at any moment.

After leaving Toledo, Yehuda Halevi moved to Cordoba.  As he contemplated establishing himself in a new city yet again, it should come as no surprise that he simply gave up.  Tired, weary, lost and nearing old age, Halevi lost hope of ever having a good life Spain.

He announces that he will move to Jerusalem.  For Maria Menocol (who wrote Ornament of the World, 2002) Yehuda HaLevi’s declaration of leaving was akin to a defection.   It was a denouncement and abandonment of the very culture “that made his poetry possible.”  For Hillel Halkin, by contrast, Yehuda Halevi’s greatness lies in this very act of bravery.

In Halkin’s words, Halevi’s voyage to the Holy Land was one “of no return to a country where nothing awaited him but danger, loneliness, and hardship” ; a plan so unlikely, his contemporaries must have thought him mad.  “There would be no one to welcome or honor him,” Halkin tells us, “no Jewish community worthy of its name to take him in.”  Then he asks, “What was he thinking of?  What?” (p.128)  This question is of course rhetorical, for Halkin provides his own answer: 

For Halkin, Yehuda Halevi is a heroic figure because he had deep understanding of the Jewish condition.  So too, he had an honest and pragmatic view of how thin Spain’s culture of tolerance really was.  His leaving was an “expression of ultimate commitment” to a singular idea: that “All the best of grand Spain” was not worth even “one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust.”

“Circumcise the foreskin of your heart.” What can this verse from the Torah possibly mean?  I won’t answer that here.  I’m interested, instead, in knowledge theory.  By that, I mean:  How should one go about figuring out what this Biblical verse means?

Let’s consider this issue through the eyes of a hypothetical, Reuven, who lived in 9th century Baghdad.  Reuven found himself perplexed by the notion that a heart has a foreskin, and wondering about how one might go about circumcising that foreskin.  What might he have done to find answers to his questions?  That depends, of course, on the sort of relationship he had with the text of the Torah. 

If Reuven traveled in Rabbinate circles, he would have turned to the religious authorities of his day for answers to his questions.  “Rabbi Yehoshua,” he might ask, “the Torah commands us to circumcise our hearts.  What does this mean?”  Rabbi Yehoshua would frame his answer in terms of the knowledge and understanding that he had received from his teachers, who in turn would have received this from the generations of teachers who came before them.  The central text around which this chain of tradition would have been transmitted was the Talmud.

If—by contrast--Reuven traveled in Karaite circles, finding answers would have taken a very different course.  For if he had turned to an erudite Karaite scholar with his questions, he probably would not have received an answer.  Instead, he would have been met by reprimand.  “Search ye well in the Torah, and do not rely on my opinion.”

Reuven--it seems--would have been on his own.  He would not have had the Talmud to turn to for answers, for Karaite authorities decried the authority of that text.  He also would have been bereft of contemporary figures of religious authority. Karaite creed valorized an unmediated relationship to the text.  Each individual was enjoined to read it on his own, and to reach his own understanding of its meaning and its practical implications.  In the words of ninth century Karaite Al-Kumisi “he who relies on any of the teachers of the dispersion and does not use his own understanding is like him that practices heathen worship.”

Al-Kumisi’s approach was re-articulated in the fifteenth century text, Aderet Eliyahu.  Outlining some of the basic principles of Karaite Judaism, author Elijah Bashyatchi wrote:

1.     The physical world was created.

2.     It was created by a Creator who did not create Himself, but is eternal.

3.     The Creator has no likeness and is unique in all respects.

4.     He sent the prophet Moses.

5.     He sent, along with Moses, His perfect Torah.

6.     It is the duty of the believer to understand the original language of the Torah.

The chain of transmission as outlined here is clear and succinct:  God gave the Torah to Moses.   The Torah, in turn, was given to each and every individual in its pure, unadulterated and perfect form.  The text is open and accessible to all.  It requires no mediator, and it is the duty of the believer to study it (in the original of course – not through any one else’s translation), to gain an understanding of it, and to figure out how it should be applied. 

Contrast this map of transmission to that which is written in the Rabbinic text, Mishna Avot:  Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it Joshua. Joshua transmitted it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. They [the Men of the Great Assembly] said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise many students, and make a protective fence for the Torah.

According to this theory of knowledge, if an individual wishes to know what the Torah means, that individual must first recognize that he cannot sit alone with the text. To understand it, he must enter a study-house that is occupied by authorities; those who are versed in the teachings of the generations of scholars who preceded them.  These authorities’ readings must, in turn, be refracted through the authoritative knowledge of those who studied before them, and those before them.  In this scenario, the individual’s relationship with the text is anything but unmediated.

This difference between the Rabbinites and the Karaites that I’ve portrayed here is a caricature-like depiction.  How could Karaites not have any norms, authority figures, teachers, leaders, and texts through which the Torah is mediated? Likewise, how could the Rabbnites have no allowance for personal, spontaneous, malleable readings of the text?  Of course, neither scenario is possible in an unadulterated form.

Yet, the contrast provides a very compelling heuristic; a way of allowing us to think about religious knowledge theory.  What is the place of religious authority and tradition on on the one hand, and the place of personal autonomy and meaning on the other?  I struggle with these questions in my religious life every day.  

In the mid-twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela embarked one of history’s most well-known Jewish journeys. We are fortunate that he had the foresight to record what he learned along the vast distances he traveled, and among the great numbers of communities he visited.  We are also lucky that those who lived in subsequent generations saw the value in Benjamin’s text.   It was copied, circulated, and re-copied so many times, that we today in the 21st century can still read his words.

Yet, I must confess that I find myself disappointed each time I read the work.  So much information lacking, so many details absent:  How did Benjamin travel?  What languages did he use? What dangers did he encounter on the way?  And what about the people whom he met:  What did their homes look like?  How did they greet him and interact with him? 

Here is what Benjamin wrote about his experiences in Beziers, “There is a congregation of learned men.  At their head is R. Solomon Chalafta, R. Joseph, and R. Nethanel.  Then it is two days to… Montpellier.”  

That is all!  Like this portrait here, the information he offers throughout much of the travelogue are sparse.   So too, Benjamin’s tone is dry and impersonal.   Utterly absent are the sorts of details that abound in memoir-style travelogues of today.  There is no first-person perspective.  We learn nothing about the details of his life, or what sort of man he was.  Nor does he give any indication of why he traveled, how he funded his journey, or who he may have left behind.

Yet, I continue to read Benjamin’s travelogue.  I return to it, fascinated by the bits of information he did leave behind.  I am drawn to the work as a historian; interested in the few tid-bits of information that he does provide about Jewish life in the Middle Ages.  And I am also interested as a contemporary social theorist. His observations – scantly as they are - teach us about the organization of the Jewish world in days gone by.  And they continue to have resonance today.

Here are a few of the lessons we can take away from his travelogue:

1.  Viewing the Jewish world through a wide-angle lens. 

Jewish values, knowledge and identity are largely shaped in local synagogues, community-centers, schools and camps.  Yet--Benjamin reminds us—these institutions are embedded in a system of large far-reaching networks.  

Although he does not tell us why he traveled, some guess that Benjamin may have been scouting out places of safe refuge for those considering fleeing from instability in Christian Spain.  Others take note of his focus on Jewish communities on the Mediterranean coast who were engaged in commerce, and suggest that he may have been looking for far-reaching business connections.  Or perhaps he simply sought comfort in learning that Jews lived across much of the Mediterranean world, and that they were faring well.   Regardless, Benjamin’s expansive wide-angle view of the Jewish world is a compelling one, and it may be one of the reasons his book continued to be copies and circulated for centuries.

2. Dynamic Authority in the Jewish world

Baghdad is one of the few cities that receives extensive treatment in Benjamin’s travelogue.  As backdrop to his description of Jewish life in the city, he opens with a depiction of Muslim society.  Focusing in particular on the Caliph (Islam’s political and religious leader) and his lush palace and grounds, Benjamin provides a very interesting note on this leaders’ family members.  While they each had a luxurious dwelling space within the palace grounds, they were “all fettered in chains of irons” and guards were placed to keep watch, “over each of their houses” so that none would attempt to usurp the Caliph. (p.96-97)

While the Caliph was able to exert authority through the force of arms, Jews did not have this possibility.  How, then, were medieval Jewish leaders able to garner and rise to authority?  Without state power at their disposal, they had to resort to other means.  They relied on knowledge, charisma and wit.  They drew on pedigree and on relationships with the wealthy.  So too, alignment with authorities in the non-Jewish world provided leaders a source of power upon which to draw.  In short – without any real power, authority could never be fully agreed upon in the Jewish world.  It was (and still is) fluid, open to much change, and—as a consequence—it is dynamic, creative and adaptive.

3. Waxing and Waning Centers of the Jewish World

Why does Baghdad receive so much of Benjamin’s attention?  In part, because the community there of 40,000 is one of the largest that he visits.  So too, the city was rich in its institutional life.  Religious academies abounded, the influence of the Jewish leaders stretched across great distances, and students flocked to the city from afar.   It is no coincidence that Baghdad was located in one of the Muslim world’s important centers of art, finance, scholarship and politics.  

Even today, the Jewish communities that are most active and influential, are those that are situated in centers where cultural, political, and economic life thrives; in educational hubs; in tourist destinations.  So too, throughout history, the lives of Jewish communities have waxed and waned with the fortunes of non-Jewish worlds in which they are embedded.

In his book Zakhor, Yosef Yerushalmi draws a clear distinction between history and memory.  I am not convinced.

Yerushalmi tells us that Jewish history was not written from the time that the Bible was canonized until the emergence of the Wissenschaft school in the mid-19th century Germany. 

It is not that Jewish scholars were not interested in the past.  They were!  Indeed, the injunction “Zakhor” (Remember) has always been a Jewish preoccupation.  Yet, the rabbis did not write “history” in the ways that we—in our class, and in the American academy--think of history.  Yerushalmi tells us that they spoke and wrote of events in the past, but did not see it necessary to narrate those stories in chronological sequence.  Instead, they played with Time, “as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will” (p.17).  (Remember Moses’ presence in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom).  And in cases when the rabbis did tell of the past in chronological sequence – the particularities of the events under discussion did not hold importance.   

Here is an essay a university student today might be asked to address: Describe the economic, political and cultural events that led to the vanquish of Jewish independence in 586 BCE (at the hands of the Babylonians) and in 70 CE (at the hands of the Romans).  How do they compare? 

For the rabbis, these socio-political details were of no interest.   The two events were both commemorated on the 9th day of Av, and it was the moral messages--which can be read as one and the same for both events--which were seen as most relevant. 

Rabbi Nahman (whose words were preserved in the seventh-century text Vayikra Rabba) took this same approach in his interpretation of Jacob’s dream.  The angles who appeared in the dream were the rulers of various kingdoms:  the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.  Just as each rose up and came to rule over the Jews, each eventually came down.  Fear thou no, O Jacob my servant, God told the patriarch upon his awakening (p.22).  This message continued to resonate for Jews across the generations – Yerushalmi tells us.  The particular socio-political causes for rise and fall of each kingdom were of no interest to the rabbis.  Each historical epoch was collapsed into the previous.  Indeed all the eras bled into a single story, embedded within the Biblical narrative itself. 

Moving forward in time – from the Rabbinic period to the Middle Ages—Yerushalmi contends that Jews still did not write “history” the way we know it today. 

He points to several works which people have argued are “histories” but he discredits each one.  The works, for example, that provided a chronological survey of the transmission of rabbinic law are not really, “histories.”  Why?  Because they “did not come into being out of a desire to write or interpret the history of the Jewish people.” Rather, they were composed as a means to “refute those heretics from within and adversaries from without who denied the validity of the Oral Law.” (p.32) In other words, they are not really “histories” because they are polemical in nature, written with particular agendas in mind.

I think this is where Yerushalmi’s argument begins to get murky.  He is suggesting, that there is such as thing as “pure” “unadulterated” history, which is motivated only by the desire to reconstruct the past, nothing more. 

In contrast to history stands “memory.”    If history is un-invested, dispassionate, and purely intellectually motivated; memory is the opposite.  It is invested and emotional.  It is evoked through experience – through the foods eaten at the Passover seder, through the mournful chanting of Lamentations on the 9th of Av, through the act of sitting in huts on Sukkot.

I do not believe the divide between history and memory is as strong as Yerushalmi suggests.  Indeed, the Me’ah classroom defies this strict dichotomy.  We study in an intellectual fashion, reading works produced in the American academy.  Yet, we also learn and discuss together in the synagogue, and as a community.  We analyze, but we also sing.  In the space where we gather, there is room for both of these ways of engaging with the past.

At the end of his book, Yerushalmi mourns the erosion of Jewish group memory.  Prior to the modern era, Jews constituted a cohesive community, knit together through their shared faith and through “an entire complex of interlocking social and religious institutions.”  Bound together, they were able to transmit a common collective memory from one generation to the next.  

This transmission eroded in the modern era.   And now, who can step in to repair the breach?—he asks.  Not the historian.  She cannot heal the wounds that have been left in the wake of the rupture of community, faith and memory.  Jews today who are in search of a past “patently do not want the past” that the historian offers - Yerushalmi explains. 

So what is the solution?  Is there any way in which the study of the past amongst those who have “fallen” out from under Judaism’s collective sacred canopy can serve as a comfort or a salve?  Sadly, Yerushalmi tells us that he has no “catalogue of remedies.”  Perhaps he would have been pleased, though, to come upon a Me’ah classroom; a place in which we build community in the present through the common study of the past.

As we begin our semester together, the first question we must confront is:  Where to start our story?  At what point does "Medieval Jewish History" begin?  

It's difficult to answer this question because the term "Medieval" or "Middle Ages" was coined by scholars of European history (who had no particular interest in the Jewish experience).  It referred to the period in between classical antiquity and the renaissance.  Those "in between" years were viewed as a period of darkness.  Hence, "Middle Ages" and "Dark Ages" became synonymous. 

Jewish Historians adopted the term so that they might be in conversation with their colleagues.   

(Here's a conversation that would not work:
European Historian:  What era of history do you work on?
Jewish Historian:   I work on the period of Geonim.
European Historian:  Hmmm....?)

So, Jewish historians try to overlay the periodization schema of European history onto Jewish history.  But this raises a number of problems.  

First, the Jewish experience during the period that Europeans calls "The Dark Ages" was hardly dark!  Of course Jews suffered terrible persecution during this era.  But, this was also a period of tremendous cultural and religious flowering.  

Second, Jews were not living only in Europe.  Scattered across much of the Mediterranean and further east, the story of the Jews in Iraq clearly differed from those in Italy (for example).  We cannot, therefore, speak of a single "Middle Ages"  with one "start date" and one "end date" for all the dispersed Jewish communities. 

Here's where Ivan Marcus' definition of the Jewish Middle Ages becomes useful.  Rather then saying when it begins, and when it ends, Marcus identifies the features that characterize Jewish life during this period.  During the Middle Ages, he explains:

• Jews lived as a minority within a "dominant host society."
  
• Their communities were treated as corporate units, and were largely "self-governing"
• The larger societies in which lived were "monotheistic in religious ideology"  (from The State of Jewish Studies, ed. Shaye Cohen, 1990).

Taking Marcus' definition as our cue, we will begin our story with the advent of Christianity, and the advent of Islam.  

But before we go back to the past, we first pause to consider:  How do we learn about the past?  Is the goal to "study" the past, or to "remember" it?  What is the difference between these two?  We will turn our attention to these matters this coming Thursday, September 27.   Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor will ground our discussion.  Be sure to have a look at the reading guide.

Wishing all of you a happy, healthy new year.

I am looking forward to meeting all of you on September 20, at the first session of Medieval Jewish History.  

In the meantime, here is the list of materials that we will be using in class, and a few notes about how to obtain them.

1. Course pack.  This provides a small collection of articles that I've selected for the course. You can order it through University Readers at the following site:  (url appears below)
https://students.universityreaders.com/store

2. Books suggested by Hebrew College:  Hebrew College sends out an email to all Me'ah students inviting them to read the following two books prior the beginning of the Medieval semester:  

• Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln
  
• Journey to the End of the Millennium (A.B. Yehoshua).  
  

To clarify how this suggestion relates to our class in particular:  I have put Gluckel's memoirs on the syllabus, and in class we will be referring to a number of selections in the work, so I do recommend you purchase it (or borrow it from the library).  Regarding Yehoshua's novel:  I love this book, and if you have a "TO READ" list, I recommend you add this to it.  That said, I will NOT be using this book in class, and do not recommend you prioritize it for the purposes our our upcoming semester.

3.  Books we will be using during the semester.  You do not have to purchase all of the books on this list.  I've put a note next to each one, so you can decide which you would like to add to your personal library.

• Zakhor: Jewish History and Memory by Yosef Yerushalmi.  We will discuss this on Sept 27 (the second session of the semester).  Click here to read the background information on the book that I've posted, as well as questions to think about as your read it.  I suggest you purchase this book or borrow it from the library.  Here is the link to purchase it through Amazon. 
• The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela -  This book is available for free on-line.  Here is the link: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14981.  I still prefer the old-fashioned way of holding a book in my hands.  If you are interested in doing so as well, you can purchase the book through amazon here.
• Sacred Trash:  The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole.  This is a wonderful book!  But for this class, we will read only two chapters from it.  Feel free to purchase it if you would like to add it to your personal library. Otherwise, I will distribute copies of the two chapters we'll use in class.
  
• Yehuda Halevi, by Hillel Halkin.  I recommend reading all (or most) of this book for our course.  Please purchase or borrow from the library.
  
• The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, Marvin Lowenthal (trans).  Please purchase or borrow from the library.
  
• A Maimonides Reader, Isadore Twersky (ed.) Please purchase or borrow from the library
• Satan in Goray, see blog-post below ("Preparing to Teach" 8/16/12)