Preachers of the Italian Ghetto (review)

Abstract

146 SHOFAR Spring 1994 Vol. 12, No.3 Threading -through the Geonic and Genizah eras we encounter the Piyut-religious poetry. "Poets and cantors innbvated and improvised in a most extensive fashion and produced a vast variety of new forms of language and poetry" (p. 145), and "the acceptance of a written Siddur as one ofJudaism's authoritative sources became a reality" (p. 147). It was, of course, inevitable that in the process a great degree of pluralism developed, necessitating "halakhic guidelines in the forms of codes, responsa and rubrics" (p. 154). We get to know an abundance of such rites as Sefardi and Ashkenazi, Babylonian and Palestinian, Persian and Roman, French Tosafists and German Hassidim, and we learn of the influence exerted by such as Geonim Natronai, Anuam, Maimonides, and his son. The discovery of the printing press affected appreciably current practice, as did the Kabbalistic influences and the popular Zemiroth table songs. The advent of the modern world introduced such novel ideas as Haskalah, Wissenschaft des Judenthums, Zionism, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox branches of Judaism, as well as the ideologies of such scholars as Zunz, Geiger, Frankel, Adler, Singer, and Baer. While I regret that in the last chapter, dealing mainly with the current era, no attempt was made to adequately describe the contemporary Hassidic population of Borough Park, Williamsburg, and th~ Catskills, I consider this volume an altogether successful endeavor. It succeeds in doing justice to a complex subject. Max Wohlberg Jewish Theological Seminary Preachers ofthe Italian Ghetto, edited by David B. Ruderman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992. 168 pp. $32.00. The sermons of Italian rabbis constitute a relatively neglected yet highly important genre ofJewish self-expression, for the preacher and his sermons served as a bridge, mediating berween the ghetto and the outside world, berween elite and popular modes of thought, and berween tradition and innovation. Therefore, the essays in this volume of original scholarship , written by the leading experts in the field and for the most part based on presentations at a faculty seminar on Jewish preaching organized by David Ruderman at Yale, are a very significant and welcome addition to Book Reviews 147 the study of the intellectual, religious, and social history of early modern Jewry. The volume opens with a most thoughtful and stimulating editor's introduction by David Ruderman. It is followed by a penetrating state-ofthe -art survey by Marc Saperstein, entitled "Italian Jewish Preaching: An Overview." Saperstein compares the field to a vast jigsaw puzzle from which 90 percent of the pieces are missing and 75 percent of those that remain lie in a heap on the floor-and there is no picture to inform us what the design looks like. Furthermore, many sermons were never written out, while others were subsequently lost. Then a major problem arises regarding those which are still extant, for since they were delivered in the Italian vernacular but almost always written in Hebrew, it is unclear whether the Hebrew represents what was actually delivered in the synagogue or rather a subsequently embellished version. In any case, the vast majority of extant sermons have not been published but remain in manuscript, while those published have hardly been studied. After asserting the need for a complete list of all known manuscripts of Italian sermons and the creation of a data base incorporating significant information, Saperstein discusses some of the very important aspects of Italian Jewish religious, cultural, and social life on which sermons could shed considerable light. In "Judah Moscato: A Late Renaissance Jewish Preacher," Moshe Idel incisively analyzes Moscato's treatment of his sources as an illustration of how Italian culture often shaped the way Jewish thinkers interpreted the Kabbalistic teachings of Spain and the Ottoman Empire. Idel concludes that Moscato was so affected by the syncretistic culture of the Renaissance, which he believed ultimately to "flow from Jewish wdls," that the Renaissance and not Judaism became his standard for evaluating truth, as he interpreted (or better, misinterpreted) Kabbalistic sources to conform to non-Jewish patterns. Thus for him the Kabbalahpre.ated as a form of I speculative philosophy, became, because ofits theological and hermeneutical pliability, the main avenue...