Jewish Scholars Research Articles

The Vojvodina Gallery: Biographical Portraits of Four Jewish Cultural Workers

Abstract The article introduces four cultural workers of Jewish origin from Vojvodina, who were portrayed in the publication Vojvodina Gallery (1927). This unique biographical portrait gallery of influential people living at that time in the Vojvodina region, served as a starting point for this study. Vojvodina’s Jews were well represented in this publication; out of the three hundred and six individuals about sixty (or twenty percent of all entries) were of Jewish origin. Without the existence of the Vojvodina Gallery some of them would almost have been completely forgotten. Rediscovery of this publication is a reminder of the “lost generation” of Jews whose lives and careers were cut short by the Holocaust. The four personalities presented in this essay shed light on different aspects of Jewish cultural activities in Vojvodina: fine arts, literature, charitable work, and Jewish scholarship.

The Arabic-Spanish-Jewish School of Poets: Heinrich Heine’s “Jehudah Ben Halevy” and World Literature

This article argues that Heine’s 1851 poem “Jehuda ben Halevy” modifies Goethe’s concept of world literature to make a place within it for the geographically dispersed, multilingual literature of the Jewish diaspora. Heine’s efforts to imagine Jewish literature as world literature resemble those of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which made explicit the political implications of Goethean world literature by likening the arrival of Jewish literature in a world literary canon to the achievement of civil rights for German Jews. The article argues, however, that Heine goes further than Jewish scholars like Michael Sachs and Leopold Zunz by suggesting that Jewish literature not only deserves attention as world literature, but that its transculturality and multilingualism anticipate it and provide a model for future thought on world literature. Heine’s reflections in “Jehuda ben Halevy” indeed foreshadow contemporary interventions in the study of world literature regarding the status of medieval literature, untranslatability, and multilingualism.

Simon Mills, A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c.1600-1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

“The traveller observing in the light of the day and the scholar ‘blundering’ in the dark corner of a college library” (p. 2) are some of the protagonists of the ‘commerce of knowledge’ interrogated by Simon Mills in this accurate and elegantly written monograph. These Western characters, however, represented just the beginning of the story of the scholarly discover of the ‘Orient’. A Commerce of Knowledge, in fact, is also a story of the role played in this process by Ottoman agents, a key role of Muslim, Oriental Christian, and, to a less extent, Jewish scholars in all its various facets. The result is a very wide-ranging fresco of the intellectual encounter of East and West in the early modern era, very much practical rather than theoretical, in which the author manages to clear the field of an ideological approach to the debate on Orientalism — nearly without even mentioning it.

The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis ed by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky

Reviewed by: The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis ed by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky Seth Ward, retired The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis. Edited by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky. Dispatches from the New Diaspora. Lanham, MD, and London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021. Pp. 307. $110.00. Ellis, the prolific author or editor of some thirty volumes, is best known as a “Jewish Scholar of Conscience” who introduced a Jewish liberation theology. Readers interested in his theological development and approach will find his interview in this book, conducted by its editors, to be especially enlightening. He traces his early influences to Dorothy Day and Richard Rubenstein and provides a needed introduction to key terms used by many of the chapter authors, such as Constantinian Judaism, the ecumenical deal, idolatry, empire, exile, and “the prophetic,” many of which he often describes as having “come to him.” A key element of Ellis’s approach is to emphasize the problem in modern times of the dichotomy between Jewish ethics and the oppression and killing of Arab Palestinians linked to the rise of the Jewish State. Nevertheless, Ellis recognizes that “Anti-Zionism is mostly theoretical,” that “seeing Israel as a colonial venture—only—is historically shortsighted,” and that Jews “are not returning to a position of powerlessness,” to decolonize Israel (p. 15). Ellis’s response may be seen as the “radical position linking the future of the Jewish People to the liberation of Palestinians” (Kwok Pui-Lan, p. 153). The terms in the book’s title, “New Diaspora” and “Global Prophetic,” flow from this as well. Nevertheless, while he raises this as a conundrum in the introduction, his writings often are [End Page 126] not seen that way. In any case, this book is not a venue for critical evaluation of Ellis’s thought in light of this conundrum or working out its ramifications. Books of this nature often seek to add to research in areas of specialization of a deservedly honored scholar or to do innovative studies that honor his or her profile in the field. Exemplifying this are Robert O. Smith’s critique of the term “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” Luis Rivera Pagán’s re-reading of the Bible (Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament) in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and Charles Ramsey’s study of Muhammad Asad. The book most often appears to be engaging the scholarship of Ellis mostly along the lines of “friends paying tribute to him” (p. ix), outlining the crucial role he has played as a colleague, mentor, advisor, and friend in their professional and personal lives. Sources for many essays are largely Ellis’s own writings and personal reflections. For example, Naim Ateek’s dismissal of Yitz Greenberg and other rabbis footnotes only Ellis. Appearing in 2021, the book does not engage the Abraham Accords, although there are references to Black Lives Matter. Unsurprisingly, contributors tend to discuss Latin American and Palestinian issues, with the Palestinian side mostly represented by Christians—themselves increasingly marginalized in a kind of double Exile in the Palestinian Autonomous area. The Foreword is by Susannah Heschel; Scholz and Slabodsky offer the introduction and the Ellis interview. The section headings should be familiar from Ellis’s writings. In addition to contributors already mentioned, the book includes chapters by Sarah Roy, Jessica Wai-Fong Wong, Miguel A. De La Torre, Claudio Carvalhaes, Thia Cooper, Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, William A. Walker III, Jin Young Choi, Brant Rosen, Keren Batiyov, Robert Cohen, Karen Baker Fletcher, and the two editors. Ellis’s sons, Aaron and Isaiah, offer personal and moving tributes as Postscripts. Seth Ward, retired University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY Copyright © 2023 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Understanding Covenants and Communities: Jews and Latter-day Saints in Dialogue

Understanding Covenants and Communities: Jews and Latter-day Saints in Dialogue

Yiddish Sexology

While much has been written about the pathologizing of Jewish bodies by European sexologists, and while the role of Jewish scholars in the study of deviance has been recognized, next to nothing has been written about how European Jews theorized their own sex, in their own deviant tongue. This article proposes to rectify this lack by turning to a completely neglected body of work: sexology written in Yiddish. Yiddish sexology, produced globally across the first half of the twentieth century, reveals an array of new imaginaries of corporeality and sociality, coming from diverse transnational Jewish communities and reflecting varying engagements with the emergent science of sex. This article focuses on the work of one doctor, Leonard Landis, working at the turn of the twentieth century in New York, who was by far the most prolific (and controversial) author of Yiddish sexology and yet remains entirely unstudied. Recovering his unique voice and exposing some of its intricate intertextual and cross-cultural dialogues, this article argues for the vitality of including Yiddish sexology within global histories of sexuality.

The Description of Syntax in Medieval Hebrew Grammars

Abstract: The study of Hebrew grammar by medieval Jewish scholars concentrates on phonological and morphological issues with much lower attention paid to Hebrew syntax. While the majority of medieval Hebrew grammars only contain scattered incidental remarks on topics related to the latter, some discuss syntactical themes at greater length. This paper examines the work of the four medieval grammarians who probably paid the most attention to Hebrew syntax – Abū Alfaraj Hārūn, Yonah ibn Janāḥ, Profiat Duran, and Abraham Debalmes. Surveying the relevant passages, it explores the primary issues they address and the insights they offer, hereby revealing with the nature and scope of medieval Jewish engagement with Hebrew syntax.

Ladin in Lineage: Through the Doors of Jewish Gendered Life at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women

Abstract: This article traces the crossings of religion and gender, American Orthodox and secular Judaism, teachers and students, religious educational institutions and the lives that inhabit them. Highlighting Jewishness and transness as intersecting forms of crossing, it explores periods of personal and institutional transition in the lives of Professor Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University's first openly transgender employee, and three of her former students. Experimenting methodologically with form and source, this piece combines interview with textual and theoretical analysis to link the Jewish gendered lives of its interlocutors—who emerge from different locations across the Orthodox-secular Jewish spectrum—with one another, and with larger communal and institutional forms of American Judaism they index. In doing so, this essay connects gender, religion, and education as intersecting forms of lineage, which pass through the interlocutors' and institution's historical and contemporary worlds. Activating crossing as a form of Jewish learning and queer scavenging, the piece enacts a method of Jewish institutional and embodied knowledge production that moves across lived and textual religion, articulating an alternate path through current struggles for queer/trans religious lives. This path does not opt to lose or loosen these lives from American Orthodox life and its textual discourse, but rather, it links them to both, and to one another.

The Art of Thinking and the Reception of the Parva naturalia in a Fifteenth-Century Hebrew Source

Abstract This article offers an insight into Yoḥanan Alemanno’s study of the ‘art of thinking’ through his notes from Averroes’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics, De anima and Parva naturalia. This case study represents an important example of the 15th-century Jewish learning based on the Arabic-Hebrew philosophical tradition and shows the continuity between the Provençal world and the Italian Renaissance. The textual appendix included at the end of the article aims at showing how Alemanno selected portions of Averroes’s commentaries on logic and psychology that define the role of the faculty of imagination and the processes through which we acquire true knowledge.

“Perhaps The Oldest Piece of Ecclesiastical Furniture in this Country”: The Construction and Destruction of Solomon Schechter’s Cairo Genizah Torah Ark

Abstract In 1897, Solomon Schechter brought a hoard of Hebrew manuscripts, now known collectively as the Cairo Genizah, to England from Cairo. Along with these manuscripts were several wooden Hebrew inscription fragments from Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue. When Schechter left Cambridge to assume the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, these fragments were brought to New York where they were transformed into a Torah Ark. This Torah ark was used at the Seminary for three decades and subsequently exhibited at the Jewish Museum, New York and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was featured on numerous postcards and in major works on Jewish art. In 1997, it was deconstructed by the Jewish Museum to extract the medieval inscriptions. This article explores the history, meaning and reception of the Schechter Torah Ark as a window into the complexities of Schechter’s legacy and the history of Jewish scholarship in the twentieth century.

The Khazar Ancestry of Hungarian Jews

Abstract In late nineteenth century Hungary, progressive Jewish (Neolog) scholars wrote several articles in Neolog journals publicly supporting theories of common ancestry and race with Hungarians. They created a unique identity for themselves through discussions of common origin and history, making Jews into Hungarians. One of their main theories was that of Khazar ancestry, which, despite being controversial even in its own time, enabled stories of a common Judeo-Hungarian past and race to emerge. The Hungarian nationalism that was key to their self-definition underlay all arguments concerning the nature and ancestry of Hungarian Jewish identity. They not only created histories compatible with those of the Hungarians but also molded them into something new. Examining their narratives, we can rethink the conceptual framework of the modern Jewish experience and see the successes of integration from the minority’s point of view. In this way, we can detect another perspective on history, one that does not define the modern European Jewish experience as a story of either the success or the failure of assimilation as measured by the severity of anti-Semitism but allows the minority’s voice come to light.

The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism - Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin

Reviewed by: The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism ed. by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin Paul Lerner The Future of the German-Jewish Past: Memory and the Question of Antisemitism. Edited by Gideon Reuveni and Diana Franklin. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2020. 332 pages. $34.99 (paper). In 1989, Fritz Pinkuss, chief rabbi of the Congregação Israelita Paulista in São Paolo, Brazil, returned to his native Heidelberg and lamented the disappearance of German Jewry, noting the few remaining traces of its once thriving cultural and religious life, the vanishing of its institutions, structures, memories, and legacies. With these words, he was evoking Leo Baeck's famous assertation in the aftermath of the war that the Nazi regime and the Holocaust had brought an end to centuries of German Jewish history. Not long after Pinkuss's lament, however, it became clear that those pronouncements were premature. Neither Pinkuss nor Baeck could have predicted the remarkable resurgence of Jewish life in a reunified Germany; nor could they have foreseen the repopulation of hollowed out Jewish institutions by new waves of émigrés and expats from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and North America. How do the Jewish cultures and communities in Germany today, which consist of a great number of Jews with eastern-European backgrounds, connect to the longer German Jewish past? How does that past look at a moment when the disappearance of the last Holocaust survivors is so close at hand, and when the influx of Syrian refugees and broader immigration patterns have begun to shift perceptions of the homogenous ethnic bedrock of German national identity, even as the backlash against those refugees fuels a resurgent radical Right? How is Israel entangled in this matrix, as a flashpoint of political controversy, and alternately as a projection of philosemitic identification? What, in short, are the geographical, spatial, and temporal boundaries of German Jewish history, and how are those boundaries changing at a time when Holocaust memory is almost completely mediated by recorded testimonies and institutions in an increasingly diverse and globalized Germany? These are among the questions posed throughout this excellent volume, a collection conceived in celebration of the twentieth [End Page 418] anniversary of the official inauguration of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. Beyond demarcating this noteworthy milestone, The Future of the German-Jewish Past does the sub-field of German Jewish Studies an important service by bringing together the contributions of a range of international voices, from younger scholars to established professors, including public-facing historians, memoirists, and academicians in the humanities and social scientists. Taken together, these essays offer glimpses of the exciting new work being done today and catalogue the range of approaches, topics, and methods that animate the study of the "inexhaustible richness of the German-Jewish interrelationship" (xxii), which makes this area of research as vibrant and challenging as ever. What ties many of these works together, beyond the subject itself, is a shared self-consciousness about the ways history writing as practice is itself embedded in historical processes—fittingly so, given the intense historicism of generations of German Jewish scholars and writers. Several focus on often overlooked questions about the raw material of history, how sources are collected and archived, for example, or how museum exhibitions address different audiences and community and municipal pressures. Many of the contributors historicize themselves both concerning their place in evolving disciplinary landscapes and in the context of ever-changing Jewish presents and futures in a Germany marked by both flourishing Jewish life and resurgent antisemitic violence, in cityscapes where pedestrians literally stumble over memorials to the genocidal past, but often partake in a collective blindness toward other kinds of racism and hatred in the present. This rich intellectual thicket makes the volume useful for scholars beyond German Jewish Studies and indeed to anyone interested in considering the limits and possibilities of history, relationships between scholarly history and public memory, trauma and its aftereffects, and antisemitism, ethnicity, and race in the past and present. The volume's 20 chapters (following an informative introduction by co-editor and institute director Gideon Reuveni) are...

Victimhood and the transnationalization of Croatian memory politics

The biblical entreaty zakhor – Hebrew for ‘remember’ – has been central to the efforts of diaspora Jewish scholars, religious leaders, politicians and others to suture the suffering past to the present. The imperative to not only remember but also commemorate histories of suffering is ubiquitous among conflict-generated diasporas as well. For diaspora Croats, victim-centred themes regularly surface in identity narratives, focusing on memories of trauma and suffering after the establishment of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia in 1945. While the manipulation of victimhood narratives and the rehabilitation of controversial histories by Croatian political elites have been examined extensively, the persistence of memories focused on suffering among diaspora Croats has received less scholarly attention. In this article, I ask why, 30 years after the end of the Homeland War and the establishment of the Croatian state, do victimhood narratives continue to resonate for diaspora Croats particularly from the Herzegovinian region of the former Yugoslavia who arrived in Canada between 1945 and 1990. What role do memory activists in Canada originating mainly from Herzegovina play in lubricating and mobilizing memories that reinforce victimhood? Finally, how does the desire for validation and legitimacy beyond diaspora communities factor into commemorations and initiatives focused on collective suffering? The focus here is on research conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Toronto when diaspora commemorations and the memory narratives that have sustained them came under increased critical scrutiny, challenging the veracity of Croatian victimhood claims.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note David N. Myers The study of jewish law has deep roots in Jewish history. With due respect to philosophers and mystics, halakhists assumed a position of millennial dominance in Jewish intellectual culture from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Paris Sanhedrin in 1808. The study of Jewish law did not disappear but became a subsidiary field of the larger project of modern Jewish studies—from the Wissenschaft scholars Zecharias Frankel, I. H. Weiss, and D. Z. Hoffmann to the adepts of mishpat ‘ivri such as Asher Gulak and later Menachem Elon, to a diverse network of global scholars today, including Suzanne Stone and her charges at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization (who are amply represented in this forum). Meanwhile, the study of Jewish history became the central axis of modern Jewish scholarship, exemplified and enabled by the macrohistorians Jost, Graetz, Dubnow, and Baron—and enriched by the evolution of many subfields including intellectual, political, economic, social, gender, and global branches. While the study of Jewish law indeed had deep roots in Jewish history, its encounter with the modern discipline of history was episodic and unsystematic. Recent decades, however, have yielded a far more textured meeting of the subfields of Jewish law and Jewish history, in no small part instigated by the pathbreaking impetus of the late Yale legal theorist Robert Cover. The present JQR forum is the result of a collaboration between the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at the Harvard Law School. The Katz Center is in the midst of a two-year cycle of seminars devoted to Jewish legal cultures that brings together historians and legal scholars, among others. The Julis-Rabinowitz Program has burst onto the scene with great energy, hosting a wide range of events on themes in and around Jewish law; in January 2022, the Julis-Rabinowitz Program cosponsored with JQR and the Katz Center a symposium on the [End Page 599] encounter between Jewish legal theory and Jewish history. This forum draws on the ideas and participants of that symposium. We are grateful to Noah Feldman, director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program, for providing an introduction. [End Page 600] Copyright © 2022 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Abraham ibn Daud’un İbn Hazm’ın Nesih ve Tahrif Eleştirisine Karşı Tevrat Savunusu

Abraham ibn Daud (ö. 1180) İspanyalı önde gelen Yahudi âlimlerdendir. Onun yaşadığı dönemde İspanya toprakları Murabıtlar, Muvahhidler ve Hıristiyan krallıklar arasında savaşlara sahne olmuştur. İbn Daud, Müslümanlar ve Hıristiyanlar tarafından Yahudiliğe yöneltilen eleştirilere karşı Yahudiliği savunmuştur. İbn Daud, ayrıca Karaî Yahudilerin Rabbani Yahudilere yönelik eleştirilerine de cevap vermiştir. İbn Daud, Yahudiliği savunmak üzere biri inanca dair diğeri de Rabbani geleneğin otantikliğine dair iki temel eser yazmıştır. Bunlardan biri Arapça kaleme aldığı el-ʿAḳīdetu’r-Rāfiʿa, diğeri de İbranice Sefer ha-Kabala’dır. Sefer ha-Kabala, Karaîlerin eleştirilerine karşı Rabbani Yahudiliğin Musa’dan itibaren kesintisiz bir şekilde geldiğini ispatlamaya gayret eden bir eserdir. İlk Aristocu Yahudi düşünür olarak bilinen İbn Daud, başyapıtı olan el-ʿAḳīdetu’r-Rāfiʿa adlı eserinde ise Aristo felsefesi ışığında Yahudi inancının üstünlüğünü göstermeye çalışmakta, aynı zamanda Müslümanların nesih ve tahrif iddialarına cevap vermektedir. Elinizdeki makalede, İbn Daud’un nesih ve tahrifle ilgili cevapları incelenecektir. Bunu yaparken İbn Daud’un muhtemel kaynakları ve istifade ettiği eserler de tespit edilmeye çalışılacaktır. Diğer taraftan İbn Daud’un nesih ve tahrif iddialarını hangi Müslüman âlimin eserleri üzerinden okuduğuna dair soru da bu makalede cevaplandırılmaya çalışılacaktır.

Constance M. Furey, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Vol. 19: Midrash–Mourning

Constance M. Furey, et al., eds. <i>Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception</i>. Vol. 19: <i>Midrash–Mourning</i>

A Tale of Two Catechisms: Education, Generational Conflict, and Geographical Division in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism

A Tale of Two Catechisms:Education, Generational Conflict, and Geographical Division in Nineteenth-Century American Judaism Laura Yares (bio) In the second issue of his English-language newspaper The Israelite, published in July 1854, Isaac Mayer Wise offered his appraisal of the current state of American Jewish education in an editorial column acerbically titled "What Should Be Done?"1 He had been in the United States for just eight years, but with characteristic belligerence Wise showed no hesitation in decrying what he deemed the "pitiable deficiencies" of the American Jewish educational scene. He admitted that he was no admirer of the Jewish Sunday school, pioneered by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 and replicated in Jewish communities across the country. As an institution of Jewish learning, he complained, it was superficial in scope, hardly capable of offering the intense training in Hebrew language and literature that he deemed necessary for the education of American Jewish children. Such educational curricula, he argued, required instruction by educators trained in the Jewish textual canon, as Wise himself had been.2 Yet he retained his principal animus for catechisms, short question-answer primers that were popularly used in Sunday schools to teach the basics of Jewish religion through rote memorization. "It appears to us," he opined, "that catechisms were written in imitation of Christian schools, for the purpose of giving to the pupil who does not study the Bible a superficial knowledge of his creed as the author understands it." Wise's appraisal was not inaccurate. In most Jewish Sunday schools, students were drilled in catechisms rather than required to study the Torah in Hebrew. Memorizing catechetical questions and answers offered an expedient means to instill a basic understanding of Jewish religion in the [End Page 283] few hours that classes convened each week. Few mid-nineteenth-century American Jewish parents were interested in pursuing more intensive Jewish education for their children, particularly as free public schools opened across the country. Rote memorization of catechisms was the dominant pedagogy used in American Jewish Sunday schools throughout the nineteenth century. Wise may have been idealistic when it came to Jewish learning, and indeed nostalgic for his own Jewish education in Europe, but he was also pragmatic.3 Within a few years, as he carved out a leadership role within the emergent American Jewish Reform movement, Wise would not only become a supporter of the Jewish Sunday school but would also author a catechism that would become one of the most popular texts used in American Jewish schools for decades. This article explores Wise's embrace of catechisms as an educational technology and his attempts to standardize catechetical instruction to advance his platform of American Jewish unity based on moderate reform. His efforts would be thwarted by a new generation of Reform rabbis at the end of the nineteenth century who would challenge not only Wise's moderate approach to Reform Judaism but also the ideological monopoly of American Jewish thought by a self-appointed leadership class based in Cincinnati. In most historical surveys of American Jewish education, catechisms have been dismissed as overtly Christian incursions on Jewish pedagogy, representative of the assimilationist approach to Jewish education characteristic of the nineteenth-century Sunday school movement.4 This article argues that, while nineteenth-century catechisms may not offer paradigms for Jewish pedagogy, as sources of print media they transcended the classrooms of American Jewish Sunday schools and served as a conduit for ideological, geographical, and generational power struggles in American Judaism writ large. [End Page 284] CATECHISMS IN AMERICAN JEWISH EDUCATION As a genre of introductory Jewish theological writing, catechisms can be situated within a long tradition of synthesizing Judaism for popular consumption. From Maimonides's Mishneh Torah to Joseph Albo's Sefer ha-ʿiqqarim, primers and codes have offered guides to Jewish theology and outlined the demarcations between Judaism and other systems of religious thought.5 As a specific print medium within this broader tradition, however, Jewish catechisms are a particular product of modernity.6 Typically short texts presented in the form of question and answer, Jewish catechisms offered concise explanations of Jewish thought, and were believed to constitute an effective pedagogical tool to convey the essentials of...

Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement by Julian E. Zelizer

Reviewed by: Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement by Julian E. Zelizer Robert Eisen (bio) Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Life of Radical Amazement. By Julian E. Zelizer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. xxiii + 297 pp. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) was unique among modern Jewish thinkers. These thinkers usually had some combination of the following three characteristics: a mastery of Jewish learning, a mastery of Western learning, and a public career devoted to social and political activism. Yet while almost all distinguished modern Jewish thinkers excelled in two of these three areas, only Heschel, it would seem, excelled in all three. He had a rare combination of gifts. Julian E. Zelizer's biography does a wonderful job capturing this remarkable individual, and he does so in a manner that will appeal to academics and non-academics alike. Zelizer's book is not the first biography of Heschel; Edward Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner produced one in 2007. However, the latter work was two volumes, while Zelizer's book is a far more concise and readable single volume. Moreover, it is clear from the first pages of Zelizer's book that his biography is more focused than that of Kaplan and Dresner. Zelizer is primarily interested in Heschel as a social and political activist. The prologue opens with a description of Heschel standing alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., as they and others led a famous civil rights march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. From Chapter One onward, Zelizer tells the story of Heschel's life in order to explain how Heschel ended up becoming a social and political activist. One would not have easily guessed from Heschel's upbringing that he would take on such a role. Zelizer describes how Heschel grew up in Warsaw in an ultra-Orthodox family. His father was a rabbi who [End Page 325] presided over his own Hasidic court, and Heschel distinguished himself at an early age as a prodigy in traditional yeshiva learning. However, as a teenager, Heschel encountered the world of secular Jewish intellectuals in Warsaw, and his interactions with that world prompted him to seek secular learning. His family reluctantly agreed to send him to Vilna (Vilnius) to study in a secular Jewish high school so that he could eventually attend a university, and the plan succeeded. Heschel was admitted to the University of Berlin. Chapter Two details Heschel's years in Berlin, where he earned a doctorate and was introduced to the rich Jewish culture of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which included such leading Jewish intellectuals as Martin Buber. But with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, Heschel eventually had to flee Europe. His academic credentials allowed him to obtain a visa to join the faculty of the Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, the flagship institution for American Reform Judaism, just months before the onset of World War II. Chapter Three describes Heschel's years in Cincinnati, which were among his most difficult. Not only was the world in turmoil due to the war, but the Holocaust unfolded and claimed a number of Heschel's family members. Adding to Heschel's despair was that HUC was not a good fit for him because Heschel never abandoned his life as a traditional Orthodox Jew. Fortunately, in 1943 he was offered a position by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the flagship institution for Conservative Judaism, which was much closer to Heschel's brand of religiosity. Chapter Four focuses on Heschel's intellectual life in New York in the 1940s and 1950s when he began to process what had happened in World War II in a large body of writings. His writings tried to arouse American Jews to adopt a genuine religious spirituality that he felt was lacking in their lives. The same writings also attempted to inspire these Jews to express their spirituality through social and political activism. These lessons, it would seem, were the ones that Heschel gleaned from the events of World War II. Jews needed to be more spiritual, and their spirituality had to motivate them to alleviate human suffering. The stage was now set for Heschel...

‘Rabbinising’ in sixteenth-century polemics

‘Rabbi’ is the title of Jewish scholars and teachers. Yet, in the sixteenth century, the word was sometimes employed in Christian discourse, when Christian scholars referred to their Christian peers as rabbis. How could non-Jews be called rabbis? This article explores the meaning of the term ‘rabbi’ in sixteenth-century intra-Christian polemics and discourse. It shows how the image of the ‘rabbi’, a figure of (negative) intellectual authority, penetrated the speech of Christian intellectuals and polemicists. It suggests that this ‘rabbinic’ figure was not necessarily Jewish. Although ‘rabbi’ is a Jewish term – the incarnation of Jewish intellectual life – the term also denotes Jesus as well as his opponents, the Pharisees. Thus, polemical ‘rabbinising’ of Christian scholars potentially involved very different images of scholarly authority.

Abraham ibn Daud’un (öl. 1180) Sefer ha-Kabala İsimli Eserinde Rabbani Geleneğin Otantikliği

Abraham ibn Daud (d. 1180) was one of the leading Jewish scholars from Spain. During his lifetime, the Spanish lands witnessed wars between Christian kingdoms, Almoravids and Almohads. During this turbulent period, Rabbinic Jews were also exposed to Karaites’ criticism of religion and practice. In this process, Abraham ibn Daud wrote two basic works, one on faith and the other on history, to defend Judaism against attacks from outside. His work on faith is known as al-Aqidah al-Rafiah, the original has been lost and has survived in medieval Hebrew translation as ha-Emunah ha-Ramah. In his work al-Aqidah al-Rafiah, Ibn Daud tries to interpret Judaism in the light of Aristotelian philosophy. Another major work of Ibn Daud is Sefer ha-Qabbalah, which is the subject of this article.