Study Of Talmud Research Articles

Learning from the Past: Considering the Ethics of Appropriation

Learning from the Past: Considering the Ethics of Appropriation

When Law Goes off the Rails: or, Aggadah Among the iurisprudentes

The Roman jurists still tend to be read in isolation from their surrounding milieu. This article suggests a way of thinking about them as being in conversation with different constituencies within the Empire who competed with jurists to offer their own contributions to the body of law. In this article, I outline some select moments when jurists acknowledged those competing voices, if only to reject them. To do so, I adapt some recent work from the study of Talmud to read these moments as interruptions within an otherwise staid world of jurisprudence. Specifically, I argue that we might productively think of these moments as “aggadah.”

Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity through the Lens of Tradition

Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity through the Lens of Tradition

Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts ed. by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (review)

Reviewed by: Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts ed. by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson Paul Brand Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts. Edited by Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson. (Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press in association with Boydell Press. 2013. Pp. xx, 351. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-903153-44-4.) The first Jews to settle in England arrived not long after the Norman Conquest of 1066, and the medieval phase of Anglo-Jewish history came to an end in 1290 with the expulsion of all of its members other than those who had converted to Christianity. The final decade of the twelfth century looks to have been a major turning-point in this relatively short history. This was the first time serious violence occurred against Jewish communities not just in London but also in at least seven other towns in East Anglia, the Midlands, and York. The present volume is the outcome of a 2010 conference held in York that examined the wider context of the York “massacre.” The first section of this volume is rather misleadingly titled “The Events of March 1190.” Three of the section’s five papers do indeed focus on providing an immediate context for them: they are Joe Hillaby’s paper on the attacks on Jewish communities elsewhere in 1189–90; Nick Vincent’s paper on the literary sources behind William of Newburgh’s chronicle account of the York massacre; and Sarah Rees Jones’s paper on what is currently known about the transformation of York into a major royal center postconquest, Jewish settlement in York from the 1170s onward, and the local inhabitants fined for the York attacks. But Robert Stacey’s important paper specifically rejects the traditional connection made between the 1189–90 Jewish killings and the creation in 1194 of a network of official registries (chests) for records of Jewish loans and the emergence of the Exchequer of the Jews in 1198 and argues that both are connected with something rather different: the assertion of a new royal jurisdictional monopoly over the Jewish community. The second section (“Jews among Christians in medieval England”) includes a characteristically thought-provoking paper by Paul Hyams on some of the barriers to social contact and trust between Jews and Christians in medieval England, a fascinating paper by Eva de Visscher using Hebrew and Hebraist texts from pre-1290 England to reconstruct how Christian readers learned Hebrew, and a paper by Pinchas Roth and Ethan Zadoff looking at the evidence for Talmudic study in England, with a particular focus on Rabbi Elijah Menahem. The third section (“Representations”) has an interesting paper by Heather Blurton on the chroniclers’ use of biblical and other narratives of the destruction and expulsion of the ancient Israelites as a model for their description of the violence against Jews in England, another by Matthew Mesley on a miracle story allegedly involving a blind and dumb Jewish woman at the tomb of St. Remigius of Lincoln and her subsequent conversion, and one by Carlee Bradbury on the visual tradition in English art of the [End Page 623] period from 1190 onward of dehumanizing a Jew present at the funeral of the Virgin Mary. The volume as a whole makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the Jewish community in medieval England and its relationship with the Christian population and English royal government. Paul Brand All Souls College University of Oxford Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press

Eliezer Goldman and Judaism without Illusion

It is somewhat surprising that the theological and philosophical works of Eliezer Goldman are practically unknown in the American Jewish community, as he was a product of that community. Goldman was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, to Eastern European refugee parents and attended Yeshiva College studying under Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, whose philosophy courses he also attended. The study of Talmud and in particular the Brisker methodology remained a lifelong passion and he wrote ‘‘Until I started to learn in Yeshiva I was interested in all disciplines but then things changed because I realized that the intellectual challenge of learning Talmud is immeasurable greater than general studies.’’ Immediately after graduating Yeshiva he made aliyah and eventually became one of the founders of Kibbutz Sdeh Eliyahu where he remained a chaver (member) until his death in 2002. His decision to join the kibbutz was in his own words, ‘‘an opportunity to fulfill the dream of a Jewish religious socialist. The impetus of aliyah came from the desire to build a Jewish socialist society based on Jewish sources.’’ He remained a committed kibbutznik his whole life and was one of the last great kibbutz intellectuals of the twentieth century. In the early days of the Kibbutz he taught four different Torah classes every Shabbat. He worked in the fields and also taught in the local secondary schools before completing a doctorate in philosophy, eventually becoming a professor at Bar-Ilan University. The values of the kibbutz and of selfsacrifice in general, and commitment to a just society remained dear to him throughout his life. In a poignant letter to his daughter upon a visit to America, he wrote summarizing the two great projects of his life,

BACK TO ZECHARIAH FRANKEL AND LOUIS JACOBS? ON INTEGRATING ACADEMIC TALMUDIC SCHOLARSHIP INTO ISRAELI RELIGIOUS ZIONIST YESHIVAS AND THE SPECTRE OF THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE HALAKHAH

This paper will discuss three new methods of teaching Talmud that Israeli Religious Zionist Yeshivas have adopted over the past two decades against the backdrop of the hitherto and perhaps still dominant approach to teaching Talmud in these Yeshivas, namely, the classical conceptual, ahistorical, highly abstract “Brisker” approach: (1) a modified Brisker approach; (2) the “Torat Eretz Yisrael,” “the Torah of the Land of Israel” approach; and (3) what I would call the “shiluv” approach, a term that implies forming a new and harmonious whole. What these three approaches have in common is the desire to retain the conceptual analysis of the Brisker approach, but to abandon its strict formalism and combine it with the search for religious meaning and significance. However, while the first two approaches in their search for the religious significance of the text generally eschew the use of the critical methodologies employed by academic Talmudic scholarship, the third approach embraces the use of those methodologies and seeks to integrate them into the world of traditional Talmud study. I will focus on the theological challenges raised by this attempted integration and on how the exponents of the “shiluv” approach have sought to deal with them.

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

Classical Rabbinic Literature and the Making of Jewish Ethics

Explorer, Nobel laureate, astrobiologist: things you never knew about Barry Blumberg.

Baruch S. “Barry” Blumberg, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and founding director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI), passed away suddenly of a heart attack at age 85 on April 5, 2011, during a conference at Ames Research Center. That Barry spent his last day conceptualizing an International Research Park on the Moon befits the unflagging curiosity that characterized his life in general and his scientific career in particular. In this paper I trace Barry's scientific career, including his early formative years and the unexpected path that led to the Nobel Prize. I also show that Barry's perspective and approach to science in general made astrobiology a natural area to attract his attention after he had retired from medical research. Indeed, his priorities as NAI director reflect directly things that were important to him throughout his career.

Some Reflections on the Publication of a New Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts

Some Reflections on the Publication of a New Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts Yaacov Sussmann. Thesaurus of Talmudic Manuscripts in collaboration with Yoav Rosenthal and Aharon Shweka. Three volumes. (Hebrew.) The Friedberg Genizah Project and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, Jerusalem, 2012. Vols. 1-2 paged continuously, 861 pp.; vol. 3 ix + 419.In 1806-7, the Reverend Claudius Buchanan (1766-1815) paid a visit to Malabar, on the southwest coast of India, and met members of the Jewish community of Cochin. Although a Scot, and a graduate of the University of Glasgow, he had also studied at Queens' College in the University of Cambridge and been ordained as a priest by the Church of England. As with many Christian missionaries of his day, he was devoted to learning more about non-Christian cultures and was enthusiastic about obtaining from that community some of its precious manuscripts. Obviously, as an Anglican missionaiy he wished to spread his faith among the locals, but he was also a scholar and the vice-provost of the College of Fort William, an institution in Bengal devoted to mastering and researching Indian culture. This was, it should be recalled, some sixty years before the University of Cambridge appointed its first professor of Sanskrit.1Buchanan attempted to convince the Jews of Cochin that it would be to their advantage to exchange their old and worn manuscripts for some handsome, newly printed publications (missionaiy tracts?) that he had brought for them. Although he had to argue the point, enough members of the community were impressed by that proposed exchange for him to depart with some literaiy treasures that still adorn the manuscript stacks at Cambridge University Libraiy.2 I am reminded by this incident of an experience of my own. I was showing a foreign visitor around the colleges of Cambridge and pointing out to him a medieval house, a Tudor building, and numerous historical edifices and their unusual characteristics. Is the University veiy poor? he inquired. Not really, I replied. is fairly well endowed. In that case, he continued, could they not afford to replace these ancient structures with some modem ones?It is not obvious to eveiyone that the old is better than the new and that manuscripts may be more valuable to scholars than printed texts. Indeed, the diffusion of the latter medium and its growing popularity from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries appears to have convinced many people that one was better served by a contemporaiy edition than an ancient handwritten text. It seems difficult to get our minds around the fact that Jewish scholarship paid little attention to the evidence of manuscripts, as such, until the nineteenth centuiy. The medieval experts had, of course, no choice; for them, texts were manuscripts. But once Hebrew literature became available in print, it took some four centuries before there was a renewed interest in the form of texts that predated Gutenberg's invention.Many of us will have experienced the great joy of the baalabos and baalaboste who show you with much pride their Vilna edition of the Talmud published by the Romm family in the latter part of the nineteenth centuiy. They are somewhat at a loss to understand why you would wish to point out to them (if, cruelly, you do) that their pristine volumes were set in type some thirteen centuries after the original texts were composed. Indeed, it would probably pain them to be told that many of the texts in that handsome Vilna edition have been corrupted in the course of centuries of transmission and that problems that have broken the heads of generations of learned talmudists may sometimes today be solved by a simple correction on the basis of an early medieval manuscript. What is even more intriguing is that talmudic study was not one of the earliest realms of modem Jewish scholarship to seek manuscript evidence to assist its researches. It took until the last decades of the nineteenth centuiy before such a development began, and the process of catching up with the world of classics in the production of scientific and critical editions is still virtually in its infancy. …

La influencia de Dostoievski en la filosofía de Emmanuel Levinas

Prior to his philosophical and Talmudic studies outside of Lithuania, the main source of Emmanuel Levinas’ intellectual training was provided by the Kovno yeshiva and an avid reading of Russian literature. We contend that the influence of Dostoevsky, particularly, and later reinforced by Grossman, manifests its effect on Levinas’ ethics of excess as well as in many of his key starting points, such as the asymmetry of inter-subjectivity, immemorial past, and Messianic responsibility, therefore we can say that Levinas’ ethical proposal cannot be fully understood without the theological literature of Dostoevsky.

Erich Fromm’s Ecological Messianism

Revisiting Erich Fromm’s works provides a theoretical foundation for a comprehensive and normative theory of human–nature relations that contains psychical, social, economic, and ethical components. Fromm’s system of thought was rooted in understanding humanity’s effort to establish meaningful relations with the natural world and how socioeconomic systems mediate this endeavor. His normative theory maintained that society must develop a nondestructive relationship with the environment by fostering and perfecting the human potentiality of biophilia—a thorough love of living beings. He argued that biophilia will not become the prevailing character structure until society is capable of meeting three prerequisites for human flourishing: security, justice, and freedom. Because Fromm’s social–ecological and ethical insights were partially rooted in humanism and Talmudic studies, he forces environmental scholars to rethink the Judeo-Christian and humanistic traditions, two pillars of Western thought often criticized in environmental literature.

Eliyahu Stern. The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism.

In the classic picture of eighteenth-century European Jewry a major place is reserved for the emergence of three new movements: the Haskalah, Hasidism, and the Mitnagdim. The interrelations among the three are usually marked by tension and conflict. Each had a prominent leader who left his imprint on Jewish history: Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin (1729–1786); Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, in Mezhybozhe (1700?–1760); and Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (the “Genius” from Vilnius, 1720–1797). While Mendelssohn represented the distinctly modern movement that adopted the values of the Enlightenment and proposed a new agenda for social and cultural integration to the Jews of Central Europe, the leaders of the other two rival movements arose in Eastern Europe and were distinctly conservative, if not reactionary. The Baal Shem Tov, known as a popular healer who engaged in practical Kabbalah, was a source of inspiration for a movement of religious regeneration based on faith in a charismatic religious leader (the Zaddik) and the doctrine of devotion to God and spiritual elevation through prayer. The Vilna Gaon, who led the opposition to Hasidism fearing that it would demean the supreme value of Talmudic study, inspired those Jews whose lives centered on the new type of yeshiva (Talmudic academy) known as the Lithuanian yeshiva.

Schooling a Minority: The Case of Havruta Paired Learning

Educational institutions serving minority communities of myriad varieties face the challenge of enculturation into the minority traditions in ways that avoid reification of those traditions, on the one hand, while attending to the surrounding majority culture, on the other. This article explores the practices found in one such context, Talmud study at a religious Jewish Israeli high school. Analysis of paired havruta learning uncovers activity-centered learning in which language and context are key features. A new concept, epistemic appropriation, is proposed in interpretation of this data. This research exemplifies the successful grounding of cultural traditions in linguistic and epistemological practices while raising important questions regarding the feasibility and desirability of analogous enactments in other minority, Indigenous, or religious educational contexts.

Stories of the Babylonian Talmud (review)

Reviewed by: Stories of the Babylonian Talmud Laurence L. Edwards Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, by Jeffrey L. Rubenstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 316 pp. $55.00. It is characteristic of the style of the Talmud that the words of many generations are presented on each page, edited in such a way as to appear to be a single flowing conversation. As in biblical studies, modern scholarship on the Talmud strives to identify, expose, and analyze layers and sources within the received text. This approach, broadly called "Critical Talmudic Studies," is flourishing, thanks especially to the efforts of scholars at institutions like the Hebrew University, Bar Ilan, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. At JTS, the European-trained generation, including such luminaries as Saul Lieberman and David Weiss-Halivni, raised up gifted disciples. Recent attention has [End Page 197] emphasized the labors of the redactors, unnamed "Stammaim," who shaped the ultimate form of the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli). The work of Jacob Neusner, legendary in its scope, made it problematic to read a text as vast and layered as the Bavli synchronically. Early on, Neusner emphasized the shaping over time of rabbinic narratives found in multiple forms in several sources. Whereas a prior generation of scholars trusted narratives about the rabbis as reliable sources of historical and biographical information, post-Neusner writers ask different questions: How did the stories evolve? What do the stories tell us about the issues that mattered to the particular time and place in which a given version appeared? As Jeffrey L. Rubenstein puts it in his first volume, Talmudic Stories (1999), "Stories express the spiritual world of the storytellers, not the real world of the characters" (TS, p. 9). The second volume of his (so far) three-part project focused more intensively on The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud (2003), and in particular on the academies of the Stammaitic period. (The familiar references to rows of scholars, in which the novices sit in the back rows, and advance to the front rows as they progress—often retrojected to the Tannaitic period—actually describe the highly structured world of the late talmudic academies of Babylonia.) Among the current generation of academic Talmud scholars, Rubenstein has carved out a place as the expert on the rabbinic narratives about—rabbis. The goal is not to write mini-biographies, but to understand more deeply the dynamics of rabbinic culture and textual formation. Prof. Shamma Friedman (of JTS and Bar Ilan) has summarized three areas of scholarly attention: "1. The literary shape of the sugya and the historic relationship of its parts. 2. Parallel passages within the larger talmudic-midrashic corpus. 3. Manuscripts of the Talmudic text and other early textual witnesses" ["The Talmud Today" http://atranet.co.il/sf/talmud_today.pdf, p. 9]. This certainly describes part of the program followed by Rubenstein both in his earlier work and the present volume. There are alternative approaches to the material. Emanuel Levinas, for example, reads similar stories and investigates the underlying ethical implications, with little or no regard for redactional history. Rubenstein is not averse to talmudic ethics, but his primary project is the examination of the process of composition. Through close literary reading (with credit to other scholars, notably Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir), comparison with parallel passages in other rabbinic sources (especially the Yerushalmi), and attention to the larger context in which the passage has been situated (by the redactors), Rubenstein aims to uncover the process of the reworking of traditions and what it teaches us about the cultural values of the Stammaitic editors. [End Page 198] Let us take one example from Rubenstein's current collection of readings. In Chapter 9 he considers the well-known passage from Menahot 29b in which Moses, on Mt. Sinai, asks God about the crowns that God is attaching to the letters of the Torah. Moses is then imagined visiting the classroom of Rabbi Akiba, said to be able to derive many halakhot from these crowns. Moses is seated behind eighteen (my text says eight—each chapter has an appendix in which Rubenstein compares major extant versions; mine is apparently from the first printed edition, Venice, 1520) rows of students and...

Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century? The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World (review)

Reviewed by: Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century? The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World Richard Hidary Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century? The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World, edited by Paul Socken. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. 258 pp. $75.00. While Talmud study held pride of place in most Jewish communities in previous centuries by sheer force of tradition, this book seeks out the reasons for this privileged position. After all, Talmud study requires a tremendous investment of time and effort, and the payoff from struggling through its meandering dialectics is not always obvious. In fact, already in the twelfth century, Maimonides declared Talmud study unnecessary since one could simply read his Mishneh Torah. In the fast-paced practical-minded twenty-first century, this issue is even more pressing. Rather than writing programmatic essays about why everyone should study Talmud, this group of sixteen leading Talmudists from a broad range of backgrounds has taken up the more modest goal of explaining why they personally study Talmud. Although each writer speaks individually, when taken together as a group, certain common themes emerge that can add up to something of a programmatic treatment. One theme repeated in many of the responses stands out as the most honest, even if the most prosaic: studying Talmud is enjoyable. Shaye Cohen provides examples of fun Talmudic brainteasers. The Talmud is not only a puzzle, adds Ephraim Kanarfogel, but also like a treasure map that leads every generation to new hiddushim. Jane Kanarek finds pleasure in investing the time necessary to decipher this difficult text, especially when doing so with a good study partner. And Barry Wimpfheimer elaborates on the deep satisfaction and even spiritual joy in the “Eureka” moment when one discovers an insight to explain a difficult passage. This enjoyment of learning itself points to a deeper aspect of the Talmud that is vitally relevant to the twenty-first century. Many people are frustrated [End Page 204] by the Talmud’s playful or even illogical arguments, curious and fantastic stories, and far-fetched interpretations. However, for these scholars, part of what makes Talmud study so engaging is, paradoxically, its very strangeness. In the very attempt to make sense of the foreignness of the Talmud, Devora Steinmetz sees an opportunity to develop the virtues of generosity and humility and to reflect on the irrationality of our own culture. Similarly, Elizabeth Shanks Alexander is not satisfied until her students, who are new to Talmud, wrestle with its counterintuitive logic and are finally able to put aside their own cultural biases and read the Talmud “sympathetically in light of its own internal consistency.” Jeffrey Rubenstein demonstrates that even, or especially, when rabbinic stories seem disturbing and perplexing, further analysis reveals in them sophisticated narrative art and deceptive profundity in their ability to convey in a short space the deepest struggles of the rabbis with critical theological issues. For Azzan Yadin, the rabbinic idiom can sometimes encode much deeper concepts that can be translated for the modern ear using modern literary theory. Similarly, students who find infuriating the Talmud’s compulsion to argue both sides of every issue may be underestimating the value of this multivocality. Richard Kalmin, for example, feels that the Bavli’s open-endedness and pluralism makes its study exhilarating and rewarding. Tsvi Blanchard is drawn to the dialectical nature of the Talmud and argues that it trains us to appreciate the ambiguity inherent in law and reality. The multivalent nature of the Talmud can also help alleviate the problems presented by rabbinic statements that are offensive to women and other groups. Judith Baskin, among others, deals with this dehumanizing of women by recognizing that Talmud also contains, even if only in minority opinions, female voices as well as teachings that bolster the status of women. Most fundamentally, nearly all the participating authors recognize the centrality of the Talmud as the foundation for rabbinic Judaism. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in any denomination of modern Judaism in almost every area of law, thought, and culture. For this reason, Yaakov Elman delivers a strong polemic against traditional conceptual methods of...

The Homilies on Mishnah and Talmud Study at the Close of Bavli Bava’ Metsi‘a’ 2 and Yerushalmi Horayot 3: Their Origin and Development

The final sugya of the second chapter of bBM II bears a striking similarity to the final sugya of the third chapter of yHor. Careful comparison of the two units demonstrates that the closing unit in bBM owes its genesis to the parallel material in yHor. The detailed two-part discussion in the Yerushalmi was condensed in the Bavli into two shorter parallel units, one concentrating on the relationship of the various fields of endeavor to one another, and the other focusing on an aggadic discussion of the importance of Talmud and the preference for the sage over the simpleton. Our analysis of this sugya has important ramifications for Bavli and Yerushalmi scholarship. Our study shows that the editor of the Bavli expanded short tannaitic units, which were correctly attributed to tannaim, by augmenting them with related amoraic material, showing the importance of using parallel sugyot to confirm or reject the authenticity of attributed material in the Talmudim, and explaining how inauthentic attributed material can be generated. Our analysis also indicates that just as the opening passages of chapters and tractates have unique qualities because they are a crucial locus for halakhic- and savoraic- type discussions, the ends of chapters or of tractates likewise have unique qualities, for precisely the opposite reason: a dearth of organically relevant halakhic material led the editors to seek aggadic material taken from elsewhere to augment the discussions of the final mishnayot in a tractate or chapter, enabling the unit to end on an edifying note.

Buddhist Meditation for the Recovery of the Womanist Self, or Sitting on the Mat Self-Love Realized

In this essay, I will argue that Womanist-Buddhist dialogue is beneficial not only for advancing theory in our respective disciplines, but for the practice of social justice. In the dialogues for which we gathered, we followed a process of learning inspired by chavruse, the method of Torah and Talmudic study found in yeshivas, in which one reads a text with friends, in order to see and understand in ways that would be impossible for individuals alone. The mutually constitutive project of Womanist-Buddhist engagement with Buddhist texts has helped to shift the boundaries within Womanist religious thought and Buddhist studies. We are grateful for the trust—essential to any healthy dialogue—embodied in our work together, and for the deep humility and honor that has been shown by all who are engaged in the process.

Significance of the Talmudic Study and the Promotion of the Critical Spirit in Judaism(<Special Issue>Religious Education and Transmission)

Significance of the Talmudic Study and the Promotion of the Critical Spirit in Judaism(<Special Issue>Religious Education and Transmission)

Yeshiva College and the Pursuit of a Jewish Architecture

Yeshiva College and the Pursuit of a Jewish Architecture Eitan Kastner (bio) In the 1920’s, New York City saw the culmination of a great Jewish building boom. Between the end of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression, elaborate and impressive synagogues, temples, and educational institutions were built by the entire range of the city’s prominent Jewish factions. The members of the oldest Reform congregation in Manhattan, Temple Emanu-El, raised a colossal Romanesque house of worship on Fifth Avenue in 1929.1 The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA), which would serve as the flagship institution for Conservative Judaism, opened the doors to its grand Georgian Morningside Heights building in 1930.2 And while these two institutions decided upon established aesthetic styles for their buildings, the fledgling Orthodox Yeshiva College chose a striking and innovative combination of traditional and modern styles for the first structure of its Washington Heights campus in 1928.3 As is apparent from promotional documents aimed at potential donors, public statements from the schools founders, and comparisons with other buildings constructed by the school’s architects, the appearance of the Yeshiva College campus served as a physical embodiment of the school’s mission. At a time when American Jews struggled to find an appropriate and fitting architectural aesthetic for their various structures, Yeshiva’s founders chose to erect an edifice [End Page 141] that boldly proclaimed pride in their ideology of teaching secular and sacred Jewish studies under one roof. In the battle to retain a strong modern Orthodox population, the founders of Yeshiva sought to impress American Jewry with a grand and original Jewish aesthetic that simultaneously emphasized their commitment to Jewish tradition and progress. The Origins of Yeshiva College Yeshiva sprang from the combination of two of the earliest Orthodox educational institutions in America: Etz Chaim and the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS).4 Founded by Eastern European immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 1886, Etz Chaim served as the first full-time Jewish school in the country. The students spent the bulk of their day in traditional study of the Talmud and Jewish law. In the late afternoons, the school administration hesitantly sanctioned the teaching of state-mandated secular courses, but Jonathan D. Sarna points out that Etz Chaim “resisted modernity as much as possible.”5 A decade after Etz Chaim entered the scene, the Orthodox eastern European Jews of the Lower East Side founded RIETS, America’s first yeshiva (institute for the advanced study of Talmud), where high school graduates could continue their traditional Jewish studies. Many of the students at RIETS desired pastoral training and secular studies as supplements to their Talmudic learning, but the yeshiva’s higher-ups frowned upon such pursuits. The restrictive atmosphere caused some of the students to transfer to JTS, especially after noted Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter took control of the Seminary in 1902. While the Seminary could not boast a strength in traditional Talmud study as RIETS could, it offered the combination of rabbinical training and academic Jewish studies that many found attractive.6 While the students and administration clashed over the nature of the education at RIETS, the Orthodox community felt overburdened by its support of two educational institutions. In 1915, Etz Chaim and RIETS [End Page 142] merged under the new umbrella organization known as the Rabbinical College of America and thus streamlining their expenses. Both schools retained their original names and purposes, but shared expenses while the high school served as a feeder of students and funds for the rabbinic ordination program of RIETS.7 Prominent New York builder Harry Fischel, the new vice president of the institution, chaired the building committee for the Rabbinical College’s new home at 9–11 Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side. Fischel, who possessed a strong interest in architecture, had struck it rich as an investor in real estate.8 Just a few years prior to his involvement in RIETS, he held the presidency of the Uptown Talmud Torah, a modernized Orthodox supplementary school. Fischel’s push for modernization, such as placing a piano in the Talmud Torah’s sanctuary and showing motion pictures at...

Focus on Policy: For the Sake of Heaven: Locating Standards

This essay addresses issues central to educational discourse in the United States by calling on texts and forms of inquiry generally unfamiliar and often unrecognized in current conversations regarding schooling and education, the Jewish tradition of Talmudic studies. Although Rabbis in this tradition never doubted the necessity of standards, their advocacy of them in the Talmudic context offers a perspective distinct from that prevalent in our current, often contentious, conversations. The essay contains a brief history of the idea of curricular standards and some thoughts about what it means, as suggested by the issue theme, to “locate” standards.