Yehuda Halevi Research Articles

Spisy książek z akt notarialnych jako źródło do badań życia religijnego Żydów chełmskich pierwszej ćwierci XIX wieku (edycja dwóch przykładów)

Booklists from Notarial Records as a Valuable Source for Researching the Religious Life of Jews in Chełm during the First Quarter of the Nineteenth Century The article presents an edition of booklists extracted from notarial records focusing on two collections of Jewish religious books belonging to Dawid Wajnberg (ca. 1757–1824) and Nute Mojsze Rubinsztein (ca. 1783–1824), two merchants from Chełm. The records have been identified through historical transcriptions of the local Ashkenazi Hebrew, and the article examines the patterns found within these documents. One such pattern is the consistent placement of Talmud treatises at the beginning of the booklists, following the order of the Mishnah. The author stresses the fact that alongside essential Midrashic, Halakhic, and ethical works, there are also unusual books present, such as the Hebrew-Latin Liber Cosri by Yehuda Halevi (1075–1141), published in Basel in 1660. As a result, the article confirms the popularity of certain religious works in Eastern Europe at that time, and explores the significance of these unique items within the collections, considering their connection to the activities of Halakhic and Maskilic centers in the area.

The Return of Biblical Theology: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and the Theological-Literary Movement

Abstract Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, is probably the most important and well-known Jewish theologian of the twenty-first century. He believed passionately that Jewish values have relevance for all of mankind. What is somewhat surprising is the source of R. Sacks's theology. Orthodox Jewish theology has traditionally been anchored in either the perspective of Talmudic Rabbis as transmitted through the halacha and the aggadda, or based on the works of the great medieval Jewish philosophers such as the Rambam, Crescas and Yehuda Halevi. In contradistinction to these approaches, R. Sacks turned to the Bible as the primary source of his theology. This “returning to the bible” is consistent with other trends in orthodox Jewish scholarship which also emphasizes a return to intensive study of the biblical text using modern methodologies. However, since biblical theology is open to a myriad of differing and even contradictory opinions, the role of rabbinic tradition is of utmost importance. Thus, for Rabbi Sacks's theology to have lasting impact it needs to be based on, and a natural extension of, the timeless Jewish tradition. This essay will explore these issues.

“Es gibt nur eine Sprache”: The ‘task of the translator’ in Rosenzweig’s Idea of Language and Redemption. Its Conceptual Homologies and Expansions

Abstract The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924). In the afterword to the translation of ha-Levi’s lyrical corpus, Rosenzweig outlines a translation model which, trying to convey all the morphological, syntactic and lexical traits of the source language into the target language, gives way to a real linguistic fusion which defies the limits and boundaries of expression and opens onto a redemptive perspective. On the basis of this concluding note and of some passages from ‘The Star of Redemption’, the article tries to analyse Rosenzweig’s idea of language and of its nexus with the idea of redemption with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and, as a point of convergence, with Paul Celan’s conception of poetic language.

“Es gibt nur eine Sprache”: The ‘Task of the Translator’ in Rosenzweig’s Idea of Language and Redemption. Its Conceptual Homologies and Expansions

Abstract The concurrence of different languages is one of the tenets of Rosenzweig Sprachdenken and of his translation activity which finds its main theoretical explication in the afterword to his ‘Zweiundneunzig Hymnen und Gedichte des Yehuda Halevi’ (Konstanz, Wöhrle, 1924). In the afterword to the translation of ha-Levi’s lyrical corpus, Rosenzweig outlines a translation model which, trying to convey all the morphological, syntactic and lexical traits of the source language into the target language, gives way to a real linguistic fusion which defies the limits and boundaries of expression and opens onto a redemptive perspective. On the basis of this concluding note and of some passages from ‘The Star of Redemption’, the article tries to analyse Rosenzweig’s idea of language and of its nexus with the idea of redemption with reference to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ and, as a point of convergence, with Paul Celan’s conception of poetic language.

From Saadia to Yahuda: Reviving Arab Jewish Intellectual Models in a Time of Partitions

Numerous intellectuals associated with the Hebrew Haskalah and the Arabic al-Nahda movements sought to "return" to key historical figures in Jewish and Arab culture—a project that allowed for the reinterpretion of a historical figure's work and image. Within twentieth-century Arab Jewish thought, we find a growing interest and engagement with the Arab Jewish legacy of the medieval Muslim world. The legacies of medieval writers like Saadia Gaon, Moses Ibn Ezra, Yehuda Halevi, and Maimonides became sites of exploration, investigation, and symbols of an Arab Jewish and Sephardi heritage. In this essay, we investigate the role of Saadia Gaon in Abraham Shalom Yahuda's scholarly and political work. We examine the different ways in which Yahuda shaped Saadia as a political and intellectual model vis-à-vis the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars of Yahuda's generation and the al-Nahda circles.

Dīn as Torah: “Jewish Religion” in the Kuzari?

Abstract:The book known in Hebrew as the Kuzari from twelfth-century Sefardic Spain and one of its iconic texts was written by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and is called in Arabic, ‏כתאב אלרד ואלדליל פי אלדין אלד'ליל‏‎‎, usually translated with the English “religion,” as “The Book of Refutation and Proof of the Despised Religion.” Modern Hebrew translators give ‏דת‏‎‎ dat for Arabic ‏דין‏‎‎ dīn, just as English translators give “religion,” presupposing that which has to be interrogated and shown, to wit what did the author of the Kuzari and his contemporaneous translator, Rabbi Yehuda Ibn Tibbon (1120 – 1190) mean when they used the Arabic term dīn or Hebrew dat, or better put, how did they use those words? We dare not read back from modern usages to interpret these medieval texts without risking simply burying their linguistic-cultural world under the rubble of a modern one, the very contrary of an archaeology. My hypothesis to be developed in the rest of this paper is that Judeo-Arabic (at least) dīn corresponds best to nomos as used by Josephus and (with a very important mutatis mutandis qualification) to Torah as well. Some powerful evidence for this claim comes from ibn Tibbon’s translation of Halevi’s Arabic into Hebrew.1 For ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew, I have used Yehudah HaLevi, The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith, newly translated and annotated by N. Daniel Korobkin (Jerusalem; Nanuet, NY: Feldheim Publishers, 2009); Judah ha-Levi, trans., Hartwig Hirschfeld, Judah Hallevi’s Kitab al Khazari, The Semitic Series (London: G. Routledge, 1905). For the Arabic, I have consulted Yehudah Halevi, Sefer Hakuzari: Maqor Wetargum, ed. and trans. Yosef ben David Qafih (Kiryat Ono: Mekhon Mishnat ha-Rambam, 1996). I have also had the great privilege of being able to consult the (as yet unpublished) translation of the Arabic by Prof. Barry S. Kogan, for which privilege I thank him. My translations given here of the Arabic text follow Kogan’s renderings except for when I feel that he has used terminology that is anachronistic, such as “religion,” which is, of course, the whole novellum of my research here.

The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature by Kirsch Adam (review)

The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature Peter Heinegg Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, journalist, and director of the M.A. program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University. The task he undertakes here—a comprehensive survey of Jewish writing from the Bible to the twentieth century—is clearly impossible, especially since he's aiming at readers unfamiliar or marginally familiar with this mountain of material. And what polymathic prodigy could do full justice to all these diverse texts? No matter: despite some rough edges, Kirsch's fly‐over reveals many expansive vistas that are well worth the trip. Of course, the choice of readings is bound to be problematic. Kirsch comments on excerpts from eighteen sources (not coincidentally, in gematria 18 = “life”): Deuteronomy, the Book of Esther, Philo of Alexandria's Exposition of the Law, Josephus’ Jewish War, the Talmudic tractate Chapters of the Fathers, Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary and Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the Zohar, the Tsenerene and the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, Spinoza's Theological‐Political Treatise, the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, the Tales of Nachman of Bratslav, Theodor Herzl's Jewish State and Old New Land, and finally Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman. Whew. But no prophets, major or minor? No Job or Psalms? No Joseph Caro? No Moses Luzzatto? No Heine, Peretz, Kafka, or Buber? (Qoheleth answered this objection in advance, when he said (12.12), “Of making many books there is no end.”) Kirsch's treasure trove naturally defies summary, although he maintains it can be reduced to four basic themes: God, the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people—a sound, if predictable, set of guidelines. But what the newcomer might find more surprising‐provocative is the almost unrelenting contradictoriness of the authors, who are constantly at odds with their heritage, with one another, and sometimes with themselves. Judaism may have a recognizable central vision (or visions); but it has no party line; and a lively dissonance, rather than tame harmony, is its signature. The trouble, or beauty of it all, begins in Deuteronomy (Greek for “second law” or “repetition of the law”). The text, or key parts of it, seems to be the “scroll” discovered by the high priest Hilkiah in the Temple during the reign of Josiah (622 BCE). The king is horrified because it reveals a body of law that the nation had been violating for centuries, in particular the foundational ban on idolatry. So forgetful had Israel, now reduced to the southern kingdom of Judah, become that it no longer even kept the Passover. How could this catastrophic state of oblivion have come about, since Moses had thundered so forcefully (e.g., in Dt. 13) against worshiping false gods and delivered such precise directions for celebrating the Passover (in Ex. 12—even before the event had occurred)? No explanation is given for this; but Kirsch calls Josiah's astonished encounter with the Torah the beginning of Jewish history. If so, it was a rather dark beginning; because the ferocious campaign the king subsequently led against Canaanite religion, destroying pagan shrines (the “high places”) and butchering their priests, proved to be of no long‐term avail. A generation after Josiah's death (609 BCE) the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem (586 BCE) and took the “cream” of the population off to exile in Babylon. Righteous as he was, Josiah's good deeds weighed less in the Lord's scale than the horrific crimes of his grandfather Manasseh (697–642 BCE), which included child sacrifice, and which ultimately doomed the country to its downfall (whence the perpetually nagging issue of corporate guilt). In one final insult, Josiah himself had been assured by the prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22.20) that he would be “gathered to his grave in peace.” But in fact Josiah was slain in battle at Megiddo by the Pharaoh Neco. Back to Deuteronomy. In his last sermons to the Israelites supposedly gathered in the fields of Moab, Moses issues a vehement warning about what would later be called the Deuteronomic Principle: following the Law guarantees prosperity, breaking it brings disaster. The...

Kabbala als jüdische Philosophie

Among early modern Christian kabbbalists such as Pico della Mirandola and Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Kabbalah counts as part of philosophia perennis and esoteric Jewish philosophy. Bruckers differentiation between Kabbalah as esoteric Jewish philosophy and Maimonides as exoteric Jewish philosophy is taken up by Tiedemann and Hegel, and is well known to Schelling and Molitor. In opposition to this taxinomy among Christian philosophers, Jewish philosophers and scholars of »Wissenschaft des Judentums« like Salomon Munk, Manuel Joel, Hermann Cohen or Julius Guttmann exclude Kabbalah from the canon of Jewish philosophy proper, exemplified by Yehuda Halevi or Maimonides. It is only after World War I that Gershom Scholem inaugurates the modern research of Kabbalah as »mysticism«, juxtaposed to philosophy and to the rationalistic traditions inJudaism.

Elements of Violence and Nonviolence in Judaism: A Contemporary Israeli Perspective

Elements of Violence and Nonviolence in Judaism: A Contemporary Israeli Perspective Deborah Weissman (bio) Shalom, Shabbat, self-defense, Purim Introduction About a thousand years ago, the great Spanish-Jewish poet and philosopher Yehuda HaLevi wrote what became a central text of medieval Jewish thought, The Kuzari. The Kuzari is a major text for the teaching of Jewish thought in the Israeli school system, especially in the state-religious schools. Apparently based on a historical incident, it describes how the king of an Eastern European tribe called the Khazars invited scholars from the three Abrahamic faiths to come before him. He posed questions to each of them. Ultimately, being most satisfied with the answers offered by the Jewish scholar, he converted himself and his entire tribe to Judaism. The Kuzari recounts the discussions between the king and the Jewish scholar, but twice in the book the king asks questions that the scholar cannot answer satisfactorily. In one case, he asks about the deep connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. If the land is so crucial to Jewish faith and practice, then how can we explain the fact that most of the Jews live outside of Israel? To which the Jew replies: “You have found my Achilles heel.” In the second case, the king asks about Jewish morality, which developed historically in a situation of powerlessness. If you were to acquire military power, asks the king, would you not then become just as violent as any other people? To this also the Jewish scholar had no adequate answer, responding, “I am embarrassed, as you have discovered my weak point.” 1 [End Page 79] Unfortunately, in our own time, there seems to be a connection between these two issues—the centrality of the Land of Israel in Jewish life and the moral use or abuse of power. Jews have returned to the land, and it is within that context that we must confront the challenge of military power. What resources do we have to draw upon from Jewish traditional culture that would inform violent or nonviolent responses? Can biblical and rabbinic traditions be helpful in resolving the bloody conflicts in the Middle East? Prophetic Visions and Legal Traditions Some of the most beautiful descriptions of a world at peace are drawn from prophecies in the Hebrew Bible. The most famous of these, a sentence from which is engraved on the United Nations building in New York, is taken from the prophet Isaiah 2:1–4: This is what Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. It shall happen in the latter days that the mountain of Yahweh’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all nations shall flow to it. Many peoples shall go and say, “Come, let’s go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths.” For out of Zion the law shall go forth, and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem. He will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more. Several chapters later, the vision is elaborated (Is. 11:6–9): The wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf, the young lion, and the fattened calf together; and a little child will lead them. The cow and the bear will graze. Their young ones will lie down together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. The nursing child will play near a cobra’s hole, and the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den. They will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of Yahweh, as the waters cover the sea. [End Page 80] These are certainly among the finest and most noble visions we have of global harmony, epitomized by...

Do They Contradict Themselves? Very Well Then They Contradict Themselves

Do They Contradict Themselves? Very Well Then They Contradict Themselves Peter Heinegg The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature. By Adam Kirsch, New York: Norton, 2016. xxii + 407 pp. $28.95. Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, journalist, and director of the M.A. program in Jewish Studies at Columbia University. The task he undertakes here—a comprehensive survey of Jewish writing from the Bible to the twentieth century—is clearly impossible, especially since he's aiming at readers unfamiliar or marginally familiar with this mountain of material. And what polymathic prodigy could do full justice to all these diverse texts? No matter: Despite some rough edges, Kirsch's flyover reveals many expansive vistas that are well worth the trip. Of course, the choice of readings is bound to be problematic. Kirsch comments on excerpts from eighteen sources (not coincidentally, in gematria 18 = “life”): Deuteronomy, the Book of Esther, Philo of Alexandria's Exposition of the Law, Josephus’ Jewish War, the Talmudic tractate Chapters of the Fathers, Benjamin of Tudela's Itinerary and Yehuda Halevi's Kuzari, Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, the Zohar, the Tsenerene and the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, Spinoza's Theological‐Political Treatise, the Autobiography of Solomon Maimon and Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, the Tales of Nachman of Bratslav, Theodor Herzl's Jewish State and Old New Land, and finally Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman. Whew. But no prophets, major or minor? No Job or Psalms? No Joseph Caro? No Moses Luzzatto? No Heine, Peretz, Kafka, or Buber? (Qoheleth answered this objection in advance, when he said (12.12), “Of making many books there is no end.”) Kirsch's treasure trove naturally defies summary, although he maintains, it can be reduced to four basic themes: God, the Torah, the Land of Israel, and the Jewish people—a sound, if predictable, set of guidelines. But what the newcomer might find more surprising‐provocative is the almost unrelenting contradictoriness of the authors, who are constantly at odds with their heritage, with one another, and sometimes with themselves. Judaism may have a recognizable central vision (or visions), but it has no party line, and a lively dissonance, rather than tame harmony, is its signature. The trouble, or beauty of it all, begins in Deuteronomy (Greek for “second law” or “repetition of the law”). The text, or key parts of it, seems to be the “scroll” discovered by the high priest Hilkiah in the Temple during the reign of Josiah (622 BCE). The king is horrified because it reveals a body of law that the nation had been violating for centuries, in particular the foundational ban on idolatry. So forgetful had Israel, now reduced to the southern kingdom of Judah, become that it no longer even kept the Passover. How could this catastrophic state of oblivion have come about, since Moses had thundered so forcefully (e.g., in Dt. 13) against worshiping false gods and delivered such precise directions for celebrating the Passover (in Ex. 12—even before the event had occurred)? No explanation is given for this, but Kirsch calls Josiah's astonished encounter with the Torah the beginning of Jewish history. If so, it was a rather dark beginning, because the ferocious campaign the king subsequently led against Canaanite religion, destroying pagan shrines (the “high places”) and butchering their priests, proved to be of no long‐term avail. A generation after Josiah's death (609 BCE), the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem (586 BCE) and took the cream of the population off to exile in Babylon. Righteous as he was, Josiah's good deeds weighed less in the Lord's scale than the horrific crimes of his grandfather Manasseh (697–642 BCE), which included child sacrifice, and which ultimately doomed the country to its downfall (whence the perpetually nagging issue of corporate guilt). In one final insult, Josiah himself had been assured by the prophetess Huldah (2 Kings 22.20) that he would be “gathered to his grave in peace.” But in fact Josiah was slain in battle at Megiddo by the Pharaoh Neco. Back to Deuteronomy. In his last sermons to the Israelites supposedly gathered in the fields of Moab, Moses issues a...

Ruins in motion

This essay examines fragments of a type of medieval Iberian poetry discarded in the storage room or Genizah of a Cairo synagogue. I argue that rather than having suffered a single fragmentation, the poems, known as muwashshahas, have been modified and broken apart according to the interests of their diverse users. To examine the mobility of these poems across multiple cultures, religions, and vast geographies and temporalities, in addition to the creative, material, and scholarly motivations that led to their successive fragmentations, I examine poems of or related to Yehuda Halevi and Moshe ibn Ezra.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (review)

Reviewed by: Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza David R. Blumenthal Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole. New York: Schocken Books, 2011. 283 pp. $26.95. In the newest addition to the Nextbook series, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have written a remarkably literary history of the vast, but scattered, manuscript fragments that make up the Cairo Geniza. They begin their story with the discovery of a page of the lost Hebrew text of Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) at the end of the nineteenth century in Cambridge, England, and close with the discovery of yet another page of that special text at the beginning of the twenty-first century in Geneva, Switzerland. In between, the book moves at a breathless pace as the authors recount the race to acquire the Geniza fragments, then to decipher and publish them, and finally to reconstruct medieval Mediterranean Jewish economic and social history from them. The key to the success of this book is the lively yet meticulous portrayal of the key characters. The portrait of Solomon Schechter, the volatile, driven scholar of Judaica who worked tirelessly to acquire the largest part of the Geniza for the Cambridge University Library, is riveting. Schechter’s battle with the antisemitic undertones of higher biblical criticism turns out to have been as important as his restless curiosity about the contents of these fragments. The portrait of Adolf Neubauer, the representative of the Oxford University Library, who turns out to be the loser in the race for the Geniza, is so clear that one can feel his misanthropy. The portrait of S. D. Goitein, the person who shifted the emphasis of Geniza scholarship from the famous texts in the large fragments to the life of the common person depicted in the smallest fragments, is so well done that I, who had the privilege of knowing him, could recognize his turns of speech. The portrait of the German Jewish merchant, Schocken, shows his vision and drive, not only in his business but in his effort to preserve the Geniza fragments and gather scholars to study them. Lesser known scholars, too, are given their fair treatment in the cameos that make up the core of Sacred Trash. Even the smell and the dust are palpable. Then there is the romance of it all: Ecclesiasticus had been known only in its Greek translation, but the syntax of the Greek suggested a Hebrew original. And there it was! Page after scattered page, the whole suggesting a vibrant Hebrew culture in the post-biblical period. Yannai, an early medieval poet, had been hardly known at all. And there it was! A complete oeuvre that fills an entire book, once it was identified and assembled, suggesting a vibrant Hebrew culture in the post-talmudic period. Dunash ibn Labrat had been a little-known poet of the early Spanish period. Suddenly, there was a whole body of poetry that included a poem by his wife, who seems to have been better at it [End Page 200] than he, and wholly secular poems about wine and love that had nothing to do with the well-known genre of liturgical poetry, and that suggested a precedent for the emerging secular Hebrew poetry of the twentieth century. There were also new poems of Yehuda ha-Levi and Ibn Gabirol, previously well-known Hebrew poets. Then there is the detective story: Fragments from heretics who seem to be linked to the Sadducees and the (later discovered) Dead Sea Scrolls. A heretic who asked really tough questions about the origin and truth of the biblical narrative, suggesting some of the skepticism about the truth of the Bible in the twentieth century. And the Karaites, a Jewish group that accepted the Bible but not the rabbinic oral tradition of interpretation. Karaites, for instance, had a different ritual calendar, different rules for observing the Shabbat, and different prescriptions concerning the mixing of meat and milk. And yet, Karaites and Rabbanites (as rabbinic Jews were known) lived together, with their synagogues in close proximity and their business and social relations intertwined. Karaites and Rabbanites even “intermarried.” So, how...

Exile and Redemption: Amy Levy's Association with Yehuda Halevi and the Transmission of the Sephardic Tradition of Hebrew Poetry

Exile and Redemption: Amy Levy's Association with Yehuda Halevi and the Transmission of the Sephardic Tradition of Hebrew Poetry

‘Golden Age’ Poetry in Contemporary Israeli and Palestinian Poetry

This article is a small part of a research project dealing with the presence of Hebrew poetry from al-Andalus in Israeli culture in general and in Israeli poetry in particular. In spite of its indisputably canonic status and 800-year history as a central model for the writing of poetry, this magnificent corpus is quite unknown to today’s readers, and its genres are obsolete. It is, as I shall explain, a ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic entity. The article contains some explanatory references to the historical trajectory of the poetry in question, from a central and active position to a marginal and passive presence – dealing with both the particular beneficial conditions in al-Andalus and current internal and external political situations. However, the paper is not about literary history or cultural politics. Rather, it focuses on the ways ‘dinosaur-like’ canonic status is revealed in the writing of contemporary poetry and in its readings. I begin with a short introduction concerned both with the poetry of al-Andalus and with the cognitive and inter-textual aspects related to the ‘dinosaur-like’ existence of texts and models. Owing to lack of space, I then deal with only three of the many characteristic features of this phenomenon: cognitive accessibility (illustrated by two readings of a Palestinian poem by Sami al-Kilani), manifested distancing (illustrated by Amnon Shamosh’s poem that converses with Yehuda Halevi), and modes of alluding (illustrated by a poem of Yehuda Amichai).

Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction by Mark Knight, Emma Mason

MLR,103.2, zoo8 5I7 Chippendale, Josiah Wedgwood [.. .] which outlined indetail the fineartofcombining furniture, textiles,and ornaments to create an individualized [. . ] interior' (p. I77). The book is rounded off with an 'Afterword'on Humphry Repton. It also offers a very extensive and accurate bibliography, of both primary and secondary sources. UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO MARIALUISA BIGNAMI Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Ed. byMARK KNIGHT and EMMAMASON. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. Viii+ 245 pp. IJ5?. ISBN 978-0-I9-9277I0-0. Mark Knight and Emma Mason have produced an ambitious book. Focusing upon English Christianity as distinct fromBritish Christianity, theyargue thatnineteenth century 'Britain was predominantly a Christian culture' (p. 3). This is very ques tionable. There were distinct regional and national differences.Church attendance in factdecreased rather than increased as the century progressed, especially among the rapidly expanding urban population. In their introduction both admit thatChristian ity was fluid, indeed protean, but theydo not sufficientlyexpand upon this.The first chapter focuses upon 'the influence of eighteenth century dissenting culture' (p. 3) with, somewhat curiously, one peripheral reference toDonald Davie's work, although another important scholar, J. R. Watson, fares slightly better.The second chapter fo cuses on Unitarianism, which 'denied thedivinity ofChrist' (p. i i). This chapter is too dependent on thewritings and lettersofElizabeth Gaskell, who 'received aUni tarian education inwhich she studied theBible, classics, and several languages from an early age' (p. 77). Fortunately, in thisbook Knight andMason cannot be accused of confining their references tomaterials published in the lastdecade or so.However, theomission of thename ofBasil Willey and hisMore Nineteenth Century Studies: A Group ofHonest Doubters (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956) is somewhat curious. The thirdchapter, 'The Oxford Movement: Wordsworth toHopkins', does itsbest to explicate a complex and influential set of ideology. The chapter closes with an interesting short account of 'the aesthetic impact ofTractarianism on secular writers like Walter Pater' (p. 12). The following chapter attempts, I think fairlysuccessfully, 'to appreciate the complexity of Evangelicism', drawing upon such mid-nineteenth century fictional texts as Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, The Moonstone, and Bleak House. It also uses 'the treatmentof temptation and the trope of the fallenwoman in Middlemarch and Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (p. 13). An omission is Wilkie Collins's first published book,Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq. RA (i 848), inwhich he describes a father increasingly obsessed with Evangelism, personally bordering on insanity andmystical trances. 'Secularization: Dickens toHardy', the fifth chapter, startswith a detailed reading ofCharles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (I843) and concludes with Jude theObscure (I 895), which Knight andMason perceptively observe 'reminds [them] of the rewrit ing that is intrinsic to theChristian tradition' (p. I4). Indeed, theirconcluding chapter 'Catholicism andMysticism: Huysmans toChesterton', inaddition to encompassing a lengthy 'tradition of British anti-Catholicism' (another curious omission here is Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe (i88o-8i)), attempts to explore 'the extent towhich the religiousmap ofBritain was redrawn at the end of thecentury' (p. I4). Of course, thereare always exceptions: mystical learning occurred before Blake and findtheir way intodiverse nineteenth-century works: the all toobrief discussion ofDaniel Deronda, for instance (pp. i6o-6i), fails to grasp that Mordecai's utterances are in a long line ofmystical tradition, indeed at times paraphrasing inEnglish thewords of the great eleventh-/twelfth-century Jewish visionary Yehuda Halevi and his Kusari (c. I I30 40). Another omission isRobert Browning, where discussion is limited to 'Mr. Sludge 5 I8 Reviews the Median'. Browning's poems often debate issues of religion and belief. It isgood to see, however, some recognition of the importance and impact ofCardinal Newman. D. H. Lawrence (I885-1930) spent the firstfifteenyears of his life innineteenth century eastMidlands. Looking back on the 'ratherbanal Nonconformist hymns that penetrated through and through [my] childhood' in 'Hymns in aMan's Life' (I928), he recalls the tremendous impact theword Galilee had upon him: it was 'Where Jesus loved somuch to be'; Lawrence 'neverwanted to go toPalestine' (D. H. Lawrence, Late Essays and Articles, ed. by James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sityPress, 2004), p. 130). Lawrence's mefmories, however, illustratejust how complex and interwoven are the interrelationships between theChristian traditions and their source, theOld Testament. Knight andMason's...

Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination Miriyam Glazer Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination, by Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 370 pp. $45.00. Sidra Ezrahi’s book on the permutations of the themes of exile and return in modern Jewish imaginative writing is an impressive work of scholarship. Laced with passages of astute literary and cultural criticism, the author’s narrative—itself a journey through a thousand years of touchstone texts exploring fictive wanderings, pilgrimages, deportations, and migrations to and from the Holy Land—raises questions about the durability of metaphors of utopian desire once the conditions of unfulfilled longing on which they are based no longer exist. Her main thesis is that ever since the establish ment of the Jewish state in 1948, the potential for Jews of the Diaspora to make a literal, territorial return to Israel has infected the symbolic resonance of the trope of an endlessly deferred redemptive repatriation, vitiating part of its force and poetic function. The result, in Ezrahi’s view, is that contemporary writings that address these themes must inventively deconstruct the old mythologies and offer new twists and turns on the experience of inner and outer exile in a post-exilic, post-holocaust era. The challenge they face is to negotiate the pull toward a literalism that threatens to destroy the rich lode of allegorical meanings associated with the old idea of a final return to the sacred homeland, while developing an idiom that speaks to the living reality of actual arrival. Ezrahi sets the stage by establishing the character of the genre in the centuries straddling the turn of the first millennium C.E. Epic tales and travelogs about the dislocated Jewish experience, including medieval pilgrimages to the Holy Land and quests for the Lost Tribes of the Jews, are described and analyzed as the book focuses on key works by Eldad Ha-Dani, Yehuda Halevi, and Benjamin Tudela. These poignant narratives of remembrance and frustrated reunion with the holy city preserve the utopian spirit and the redemptive drive that lent eschatological meaning to the nomadic status of the wandering Jew. Jumping next to Jewish authors flourishing around the second millennium (late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers such as S. Y. Abramovitch, S. Y. Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Bashevis Singer), Ezrahi shows how in the modern age the genre of narrative journeys took on the cast of mock epics that offered slanted readings and sophisticated interrogations of the pilgrimage motif. This section of the book contains some of the most striking textual analyses, giving new vitality and an elevated importance to stories familiar to many readers from childhood. One is stirred to revisit these narratives from the perspective of the shtetl culture that reassessed the troubled theme of exiled longing, providing new, complex literary forms to express the changing hopes and fears of enacting, or even in a sense of becoming to themselves, an actual homecoming. In her final segment of the book, Ezrahi treats the work of postwar, post-holocaust writers who tend to present life in Israel not as a settled and glorious repatriation, but [End Page 135] as a different kind of exile. The extermination of six million and of the territory of the Diasporic homelands turns both the told stories and the style of their telling, with all their postmodern turns and twists, into a lament over the unredeemable, and over wanderings gone awry. This is the case whether the writer speaks from the vantage of adopted homelands or from the very heart of Jerusalem. Works by Dan Pagis, Aharon Applefeld, Paul Celan, and finally Philip Roth are presented as examples of narratives and narrators who look askance at the remnants of the contemporary world, presenting literary sojourns of critique rather than of either nostalgia or celebration. By the end of Booking Passage we are convinced that the archetypal concept of exile, fueling its redemptive counterpart, homecoming, provides a powerful lens through which to view the themes of desire and fulfillment in a significant strain of Jewish imaginative writing. The immense theological and historical importance of the exilic motif in...

In Iberia and beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures

In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews between Cultures. Bernard Dov Cooperman, ed. USA: Associated UP, 1998. x+390 pages. As Bernard Dov Cooperman explains in his Introduction, this collection of essays-the proceedings of a symposium held in 1991 at University of Maryland at College Park-endeavors to give reader a sense of breadth and scope of Spanish Jewish studies today, of range of scholarly disciplines used in field, and of new approaches and insights which characterize recent work in (2-3). In spite of fact that several years have elapsed since these papers were originally presented, topics they explore continue to be among most current in field of Sephardic studies. Dwayne E. Carpenter (The Portrayal of Jews in Learned's de Santa Maria [15-42]) examines in which Jews are protagonists (the corresponding illuminations for six of these are included), as well as those in which they are subjects of incidental references, and concludes that Alfonso does not go out of his way to malign Jews, especially in widely diffused stories involving Jews, but neither does he provide positive portrayals (24). Carpenter's study ends with a very useful enumerative appendix, References to Jews in Cantigas (31-34). Bernard Septimus (Hispano-Jewish Views of Christendom and Islam [43651) discusses reasons why Spanish Jews, unlike their European coreligionists, tended to prefer life under Christian rather than Islamic rule. In Economic Life of Jews of Murviedro in Fifteenth Century (67-95), Mark D. Meyerson illustrates that Jews to play significant roles in economy of Murviedro after a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms swept through Valencia in 1391. Moreover, while anti-Jewish sentiment was intensifying throughout Spain during fifteenth century, in Murviedro the variety of Jewish economic activity created a complex network of economic interdependence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims-a network characterized far more by cooperation and stability than by competitiveness and conflict (86). In a study which reaches a similar conclusion concerning Jews of northeastern Spain, Benjamin R. Gampel (Does Medieval Navarrese Jewry Salvage Our Notion of Convivencia [97-122]) re-evaluates concept of convivencia between Jews and Christians in socio-economic context of late fifteenth-century Navarre, a region in which Jews continued to have relationships with all religious and social classes within their society (117) until they were ordered, in 1498, to convert or face exile. Isaac Benabu (Poetry in Two Languages: The Kharja and Its Muwassah [12342]) focuses on Golden Age of Andalusian Hebrew poetry in his analysis of linguistic and thematic relationships between several of Yehuda ha-Levi's Hebrew muwassahs and their corresponding Hispano-- Romance kharjas. Eleazar Gutwirth (Widows, Artisans, and Issues of Life: Hispano-Jewish Bourgeois Ideology [143-73]) dispels myth that late-medieval Spanish Jews were mainly aristocrats by establishing that their financial, domestic, and literary activities more accurately depict existence of a Jewish bourgeois i. …

Booking passage: exile and homecoming in the modern Jewish imagination

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's sweeping study of modern writing is in many ways a long meditation on the thematics of geography in culture, what she calls the 'poetics of exile and return'. Until the late nineteenth century, Jews were identified in their own religious and poetic imagination as wanderers and exiles, their sacred center-Jerusalem, Zion-fatefully out of reach. Opening the book with Jewish Journeys, Ezrahi begins by examining the work of medieval Hebrew poet Yehuda Halevi to chart a journey whose end was envisioned as the sublime realignment of the people with their original center. When the Holy Land became the site of a political drama of return in the nineteenth century, writing reflected the shift, traced here in the travel fictions of S.Y. Abramovitsh, S.Y. Agnon, and Sholem Aleichem. In Jewish Geographies Ezrahi explores aspects of reterritorialization through memory in the post-Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Aharon Appelfeld, I.B. Singer and Philip Roth. Europe, where Jews had dreamed of return, has become the new ruined shrine: The literary pilgrimages of these writers recall familiar patterns of grieving and representation and a tentative reinvention of the diasporic imagination - in America, of course, but, paradoxically, even in Zion.

Romantic Roots of the Debate on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible

Romantic Roots of the Debate on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Brian Britt Abstract Siegfried Kracauer's criticism of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation reflects his views on religion and contemporary culture. While the translators felt a new German Bible could provide fresh religious insight and experience to modern Jewish readers, Kracauer, like Walter Benjamin, argued that modern culture itself was the site of modern religiosity. "For today," wrote Kracauer, "access to truth is by way of the profane." The sharp exchanges between the translators and Kracauer have more to do with ideas of religion and culture than with matters of style and translation. Yet both sides of the debate were influenced heavily by romantic ideas of language and translation from Humboldt, Hamann, Schleiermacher, and Goethe. In this essay, I argue that Benjamin and Kracauer were engaged in projects that aspired to the same kind of romantic ideals as the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible. When Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig published the first volume of their German Bible in 1925, Siegfried Kracauer called it "romantic and arbitrary," and Walter Benjamin tentatively agreed. In fact, Benjamin took credit for giving Kracauer several of his main critical points.1 The objection concerned not only the quality of the translation but also its rationale. "For today," wrote Kracauer, "access to truth is by way of the profane."2 This essay explores the roots of this dispute in the two sides' divergent ideas of Judaism, language, culture, and translation. Despite this conflict, I argue that Benjamin and Kracauer were engaged in projects that aspired to the same kind of romantic ideals as the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible.3 I seek to show how ideas of language and translation in Benjamin and Rosenzweig depend on works of the romantic thinkers Humboldt, Hamann, Goethe, and Schleiermacher. The debate on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible also echoes romantic debates on religion expressed famously in Schleiermacher's 1799 Speeches on Religion. Both disagreements had to do with religious experience and the cultural means to attain it. Buber and Rosenzweig saw their German Bible as a source of religious experience and relief from modern alienation. Without challenging the sacrality of the Bible, Benjamin and Kracauer doubted that the new translation could live up to these hopes. Like those romantics who disagreed with Schleiermacher's ideas of religion (Novalis and Schlegel, e.g.), Benjamin and Kracauer sought religious qualities outside institutional religion, in such profane expressions of modern culture as art and film. [End Page 262] Terms of the Debate When Martin Buber was offered the opportunity to produce a new version of the Hebrew Bible, he made his acceptance conditional on Franz Rosenzweig's cooperation. Rosenzweig had already distinguished himself as a translator from Hebrew into German with his work on liturgical materials and the medieval poet Yehuda Halevi, and translation was a basic part of the religious philosophy of his 1921 Star of Redemption. Despite his physical paralysis and misgivings about the project, Rosenzweig agreed to the collaboration, and the two worked together from 1925 until Rosenzweig's death in 1929.4 Buber and Rosenzweig held the Bible to be an antidote to the ills of modern experience. In his 1926 essay "People of Today and the Jewish Bible," Martin Buber challenged moderns to return to the Hebrew Bible as a means of returning religion to reality. Modern people were advised to undertake a program of reading the Jewish Bible "as if they had never seen it."5 Buber and Rosenzweig set out to make the Bible unfamiliar by making a German version vastly different from Luther's but heavily influenced by romantic ideas of language and translation. While Buber and Rosenzweig saw biblical translation as a way to restore meaning to modern life, Benjamin and Kracauer tried instead to analyze modern life. For them, studying the contemporary world-especially new art forms such as film-was a necessary and more interesting basis for genuine understanding than Bible translation. From at least 1916, when he wrote an essay on language after a falling-out with Buber, Benjamin thought that modernity blocked direct access to revelation. In his harsh Frankfurter Zeitung review of the translation in 1925, Kracauer objected as much to the...

Refiguring the Middle Ages: Reflections on Hebrew Romances

AMONG ASHKENAZIC JEWS, the chanting of the Scroll of Esther is characterized by an interesting convention: at verse 6 of chapter 2, where Sreference is made to the Babylonian Exile, the traditional melody is momentarily abandoned, and the verse is sung in the tune of Lamentations. After its completion, the proper chant is resumed.' The mention of the exile hints, in its own melancholy tonality, at the impending disaster to be plotted by Haman, but ultimately alludes to something broader and far more general than its local context. It has often been pointed out that the name of God occurs nowhere in Esther, but even where the Jews did not bring with them the divine name, they brought the mournful music of exile. A brief change intimates the origins, not merely of Esther and her uncle, but of the entire Jewish community scattered through the 127 provinces of Ahasuerus, and so indirectly brings to mind the shaping force of a momentous idea in Jewish history. This idea was that for their sins the Jews were compelled to live in exile from the land promised and given by the Lord. It was an idea built upon their forcible deportation by Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors, and elaborated in the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah and some of the later Psalms; and it was intensified and spiritualized after the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus in the year 70 C.E. Both the first and the second hurban, traditionally assigned to the same date (the Ninth of Av), are of importance in seeking to define the elusive concept of Middle Ages for the purposes of Jewish literary history. The chronological boundaries of the Christian Middle Ages are applied conventionally to Jews and Arabs, and in many respects such categorization makes excellent sense: to mention Hebrew poetry, for example, is to think of Yehuda Halevi, Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, or Moses and Abraham Ibn-Ezra, all poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Their poetry may properly be called medieval because it may be seen to belong to an intermediate phase in the history of Hebrew letters, characterized by the reclamation of the Hebrew language for