The Talmud (26 page)

The Cairo Genizah

In 1896 Mrs Agnes Smith Lewis and Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson, twin sisters, now widowed, travelled to Egypt. They’d been there before. Both women were accomplished scholars, able to read Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew. On a previous visit to the Middle East they had discovered a fifth-century Syriac gospel, the leaves of which were being used as butter dishes in the refectory of St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai.
37

On this trip they were in a Cairo market when a vendor offered them some pages from a Hebrew manuscript. On their return to England they showed them to Solomon Schechter. He realized they must have been torn from a Hebrew version of the book of Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sira, which previously had only been known in Syrian or Greek translation.

Ancient Hebrew documents had been circulating in Cairo for a number of years. Several had made their way back to the USA and England. It was known that they were being filched from an ancient storeroom, or
genizah,
in the old synagogue in Fostat, where worn-out, sacred documents were deposited. Schechter, realizing that there may be many more valuable treasures to be found, organized a trip to Cairo and negotiated with the synagogue authorities to buy the entire contents of the store.

The storeroom had no windows or doors. To enter Schechter had to climb a ladder and crawl through a hole in the wall. He was amazed at what he found. The Cairo
Genizah
turned out to contain nineteen thousand documents, some sacred, but many just the ordinary ephemera of community life: legal contracts, letters and school books. Amongst them were lost fragments and manuscripts of the Talmud dating back to 870
ce
.

Schechter brought the contents of the
Genizah
back to Cambridge. Over a century later its manuscripts are still being analysed. They have helped to
explain many obscure or corrupted Talmudic passages and have thrown light on life and conditions in ancient Egyptian communities.

When he arrived in New York Schechter would have encountered people who reminded him of the family he had left behind in Romania. Waves of immigration from eastern Europe had brought many strictly observant families to the city. Their style was very different from those with a cultured German or English background. They’d come from rural towns and villages where traditional Talmud study had been the norm, and the new ways of thinking an oddity. In New York they found that the reverse held true. They couldn’t make any sense of Reform at all. Even Schechter’s Jewish Theological Seminary seemed too radical.

But this was America and even the most traditional methods of Talmud study couldn’t completely avoid change. The immigrants set up their own seminary, on the Lower East Side, and adopted the latest method of study, which had been developed in the Lithuanian tradition once pioneered by the Volozhin
yeshiva
. The method, even more analytical than its predecessors, had met with considerable opposition when first introduced in Europe by Hayyim of Brisk.

Whereas traditionalists were interested in studying the Talmud to determine practical law, the Brisker method was focused purely on analysis of the argument. Students tended only to study those volumes of the Talmud where the keenest argumentation was found. On one occasion Hayyim of Brisk was grappling with a difficult legal problem. He wrote to Isaac Elchanan Spektor, after whom the New York
yeshiva
would be named, gave him all the facts and asked for his ruling. But he insisted that Spektor was not to tell him his reasons. He was happy to defer to a practical decision but he didn’t want to know the reasoning behind it. In case he was tempted to review it, and reach a different conclusion.
38

The Talmud was now well and truly embedded in America. As events unfolded it became clear that it had crossed the Atlantic just in time. Events in Germany were about to put an end to its thousand-year sojourn in Europe. For the next half century America was to be its most important home. But Europe still had one major contribution to make.

A page a day

A young man stood up at a conference of traditional rabbis in Vienna, in 1923. Meir Shapiro was a highly accomplished orator, he sat in the Polish parliament and was the rabbi of a smallish town in south-east Poland. He had won acclaim in parliament for a detailed plan he submitted to reform the Polish economy
39
but his abiding passion was education, particularly its improvement and reform. He would soon found a Talmud academy in Lublin that would become renowned not just for its rigorous curriculum but also for its inspiring physical environment, which he felt was essential for successful study.

Meir Shapiro told the conference that he was concerned about two aspects of contemporary Talmud study. One, that it was accessible only to an elite, who had the opportunity and educational background to enrol in a
yeshiva
and spend years studying there. The other, that only a small number of volumes were studied, notably those which lent themselves to detailed analytical investigation.

Shapiro’s suggestion was brilliant in its simplicity, and far-reaching in its outlook.
40
He proposed setting up study groups for lay people in which one page of Talmud would be studied each day. The two thousand seven hundred pages of Talmud would take nearly seven and half years to complete and would involve a commitment from participants of around an hour a day. It was a significant commitment but it was achievable. It would bring the Talmud to a much wider audience and bind its world together, the same page would be studied on the same day everywhere; travellers would be able to continue their studies wherever they went.

Shapiro’s plan didn’t go down well with everyone. His namesake, the ultra- conservative Hayyim Eleazar Shapira, a Hasidic leader in the Transylvanian town of Munkacz, opposed it on the grounds that it was a deviation from traditional methods of learning, that in any case topics did not end neatly at the bottom of each page and, perhaps most pertinently, it was an initiative of those who supported the Zionist cause, to which the Munkacz Hasidim were firmly opposed.
41

But Meir Shapiro’s proposal was agreed by the conference and in 1924 the first cycle of what became known as the
daf yomi
or ‘daily page’ programme began. It was to become perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most democratising, Talmud initiative of all time. But that wouldn’t happen until long after the rise, and downfall, of Nazi Germany.

Notes

1
Bava Kamma 92b.

2
Tarshish, 1985.

3
Tarshish, 1985.

4
Editor’s preface to
The Sabbath Service and Miscellaneous Prayers
, adopted by the Reformed Society of Israelites, founded in Charleston, SC, 21 November 1825, ed. Barnett A. Elzas (Bloch Publishing Company, New York, 1916).

5
Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995.

6
Mishnah Orlah 3.9.

7
Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995.

8
Schreiber, 2002–3. The collection,
Eleh Divrei HaBrit
included praise for Moses Mendelssohn, against whose approach Moses Sofer was firmly opposed.

9
Samet, 1988.

10
Heinemann, 1951.

11
Meyer, 1988.

12
Grunfeld, 1962.

13
Hirsch’s slogan,
Torah im derech eretz
, is taken from Mishnah Avot 2.2.

14
Heinemann, 1951; Shreiber, 1892.

15
Shreiber, 1892.

16
The main impediment to Geiger’s rabbinic career was Solomon Tiktin, the traditionalist chief rabbi of Breslau who tried his best first not to have Geiger appointed and then, when he was in post, to remove him. When Tiktin died in 1843, however, Geiger was appointed chief rabbi.

17
Frankel, 1997a.

18
Frankel, 1997a.

19
Frankel, 1997b.

20
The Times
, London, 25 June 1840.

21
Frankel, 1997a.

22
The leading lights of the
Wissenschaft
movement were not wholly impartial to religion. There was a connection to the Reform conception of a dynamic, historically evolving religion (Kohler, 2012).

23
Shapiro, 2006.

24
Shapiro, 2006. Pinele’s work,
Darkah
shel
Torah
was of course considered heretical by many traditionalists.

25
This is the origin of the phrase ‘beyond the pale’. It applied to those who tried to live outside the Pale of Settlement.

26
Kniesmeyer and Brecher, 1995.

27
Mintz, 2006.

28
For a comprehensive evaluation of missionary Protestantism’s engagement with Jewish studies see Gerdmar, 2009.

29
Levy, 2005.

30
Mintz, 2006.

31
Dawidowicz, 1967.

32
Gillman, 1993, p. 25.

33
Leviticus 11.10–12.

34
M. Hullin 8, 1.

35
Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995, p. 469.

36
Gillman, 1993.

37
The Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, 2002.

38
Jacobs, 1984.

39
Letter by R. Daniel Lowy in
Tradition
, 10(3) (Spring 1969), p. 114.

40
But see Marc Shapiro’s note 23 in (Shapiro, 2006) in which he points out that Meir Shapiro was not the first to have the idea.

41
Shapiro, 2006; Nadler, 1994.

15

A new world in the making

Hillel said: If I am not for me, who will be for me? When I am for me, what am I? And if not now, when?
1

Destruction

The problems began even before the Nazis came to power in 1933 but accelerated sharply thereafter. Nazi bans on the ritual slaughter of meat, the forcible closure of Jewish shops and other measures designed to deny the Jews a livelihood led to profound dilemmas for Talmudists whose entire world view was founded on strict religious observance. Could the laws restricting work on the Sabbath, or regarding the slaughter of meat be modified and, even if they could, would this be desirable, or would it lead to an unleashing of the flood gates, an increasing destruction of religious life, handing the Nazis the victory they wanted?

The Rabbinic Seminary in Berlin, which prided itself in producing Talmudic scholars who had also received a general education, was condemned when it made plans to relocate with its students to Tel Aviv. Esriel Hildesheimer, the inspiration behind the college, was accused of abandoning his people; the Seminary existed to produce rabbis for the German community, and now, in their darkest hour, it was threatening to leave. He was also strongly criticized by conservative eastern European rabbinic leaders. They had only tolerated the college’s embrace of secular studies as a bulwark against German Reform. They strongly disapproved of his taking what they saw as a fundamentally heretical curriculum to Israel, where there was no Reform presence. Hildesheimer,
although not answerable in any way to the conservatives, revoked his plans; the Talmud remained in Berlin.
2

As conditions worsened, Leo Baeck, the great philosophically minded leader of German Reform predicted the end of a thousand years of Jewish life on German soil. Nevertheless he refused to leave Germany, electing to stay with his people until at the last he was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The Talmudist Jehiel Jacob Weinberg didn’t agree with Baeck’s prediction.
3
The Talmud knows nothing of finality, there are many ways of addressing a problem. Seventy years on we can see they were both right. It was indeed the end of Jewish life on German soil. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of an astonishing revival.

The rise of Nazism led to a bout of soul searching for those who held firm to Samson Raphael Hirsch’s approach of including secular study alongside a Talmudic education. Many German Jews could no longer see anything of value in a culture which could spawn the evil of Nazism.

In the end events took control. On 7 November 1938, Herzl Grynspan, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, who had just heard that his parents had been expelled from Germany, shot a German diplomat in the Paris embassy. On 9 November a co-ordinated action by Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth across Germany destroyed close to three hundred synagogues, shattered the windows of seven and a half thousand Jewish commercial properties, looted the buildings, slaughtered ninety one people and transported thirty thousand people to concentration camps. It became known as
Kristellnacht, t
he night of broken glass. The Berlin Seminary never opened its doors again.

Eleven million people were slaughtered by fanatic, ruthless Germanic efficiency. Six million of them were Jews, rounded up and herded into death camps. Their possessions, books and, in many cases, all records of their existence were destroyed along with them. Two thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe were slaughtered.

Amongst the most heart-rending accounts of Talmudic life from that time, one of the few textual witnesses to survive, is Rabbi Ephraim Oshry’s remarkable record. He was one of twenty five thousand souls who were driven into the tiny ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, when the Nazis invaded in 1941. The
ghetto was liquidated in 1944 when, with the advancing Russian army breathing down their necks, the fleeing Nazis transported as many of its inhabitants as they could to death camps, and murdered most of the remainder on the spot. Rabbi Oshry survived. His wife and children did not.

Oshry served as a spiritual guide to those in the ghetto. People would approach him daily with their problems, and questions. He tore scraps of paper from wherever he could to record everything they asked, and all his responses. He hid the scraps. Following the war he published five volumes of his record.
4
Among the questions he was asked was whether it was permissible to pressurize someone to try to save another person’s life, knowing that they may not succeed and may be risking their own life in doing so. He turned to a Talmudic discussion to help him formulate his answer. The Talmud had wanted to know how one should act if commanded by a tyrant to slay someone or be slain themselves. The Talmud asked ‘Who can say your blood is redder than his’?
5
In other words there is no way to value one life more highly than another. Saving life is the highest of all priorities, but not if it means taking another life.
6

Following the war, and the liberation of the death camps, Europe was studded with refugees, of every nationality, faith and political conviction. The victorious Allied Forces were overwhelmed, they had never confronted human suffering on such a scale before. Penniless, homeless and traumatized, the refugees were placed into displaced persons camps, whilst the authorities agonized over how to resettle them all. The DP camps, as they were called, were miserable places, often little better than the concentration camps. Some were even set up on the site of former Nazi camps.

The refugees incarcerated in the DP camps struggled to rebuild their lives. For the Jews, education, as ever, was a priority; the younger children had never been to school, their older siblings had been torn away from their studies. They needed books of all types. Including copies of the Talmud. There were none to be found.

A group of rabbis approached the Commander of the American Zone in Germany and asked for the US Army’s help in obtaining copies of the Talmud. A survivor of the Dachau Camp and former chief rabbi of the Lithuanian
Army, Rabbi Samuel E. Snaig, suggested that copies be printed in Germany. The American Joint Distribution Committee sent two copies from the USA and the US Army commandeered an old German printing plant in Heidelberg. One hundred copies of what became known as the Survivor’s Talmud were printed. On presses that the Nazis had used to print their propaganda. It was a small but welcome irony, the people of the Talmud printing their ancient tome on presses belonging to the villains who had tried to destroy them. It was a pity the architect of their destruction was no longer alive to witness the humiliation.

A new beginning

The Talmud hadn’t been destroyed but its environment would never be the same again. The European
yeshivot
and seminaries were gone. With eastern Europe under Soviet control there was neither the will nor the opportunity to rebuild them. The teachers and students who had survived were traumatized and broken, they could see no future.

From one tiny corner of the globe a ray of hope glimmered. The United Nations had voted to grant independence to the state of Israel. It wasn’t an easy birth, war broke out with its Arab neighbours on the day the state was founded, and a further population upheaval began as communities in the Arab-speaking world overnight found themselves unwelcome in the lands where their families had lived for generations.

In 1941, just before the Nazis arrived, students from the
yeshiva
in the Polish town of Mir had managed to obtain exit visas from the Soviet occupiers. Unable to flee westwards into Nazi-dominated Europe, they had enlisted the aid of the Japanese and Dutch consuls in Kovno, who managed to get them entry visas to the Caribbean island of Curacao. Four hundred of them travelled across Russian by the Trans-Siberian railway to Japan. They never made it to Curacao. The Japanese, who were fighting alongside the Germans, moved them to Shanghai and in 1943 forced them into a ghetto. But they did survive, unharmed. In 1946, when travel became possible again, they left, arriving first in the USA and finally re-establishing themselves in
Israel.
7

A few other old European
yeshivot
were also reincarnated in Israel or the USA. These countries became the centres of the new Talmudic universe; with a sprinkling of outposts in other English-speaking lands. Fortunately the Talmud was no stranger to the English language. Nor to the scholars who spoke it.

In 1933 the Reverend Herbert Danby, canon at the Anglican Cathedral of St George in Jerusalem, had published his translation of the Mishnah into English. He was the last big name in a short but notable line of English-speaking, Christian Hebraist clergymen. Whereas their sixteenth-century predecessors had ostensibly studied the Talmud to help them construct a better case against Judaism, or to gain a better understanding of Christianity, the twentieth-century scholars had no qualms about admitting their admiration for the Talmud, its sages and the rabbinic system that underpins it.

In his introduction Danby, who would end his career as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, noted that his translation and notes followed traditional Jewish interpretation. To neglect the centuries of extensive study of the Mishnah and Talmud would, he wrote, ‘be as presumptuous as it is precarious’.
8

Thirty years earlier R. Travers Herford, a Unitarian minister in Manchester had published
Christianity in Talmud and Midrash
. He judged the Talmud to be ‘a consistent and logical endeavour to work out a complete guide to the living of a perfect life’.
9
He trawled the Talmud and associated rabbinic literature, seeking out every reference to Jesus and Christianity and finding many more than there actually are. Although his work appears today to be a little over-eager and uncritical, the scholarship which he applied, in an age when a two-million-word text could not be searched digitally, is formidable.

Herford’s passion, and the subject of his major works, was the literature and outlook of the early Talmudic, Pharisaic period. His slightly older contemporary, George Foot Moore, a Presbyterian pastor and Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard concentrated on the Bible and on the origins and theology of religion. He wrote a three-volume work on Judaism during the period that the Talmud was gestating.
10
Many of his works are studded with Talmudic references.

In London, two years after Danby’s Mishnah appeared, a small group of Jewish scholars headed by Isidore Epstein undertook a project to translate the Talmud into English. The work was interrupted by the war and not completed until 1952. It wasn’t the first such project, a highly unsatisfactory, late nineteenth-century, English translation had been made by Michael Rodkinson who had moved to the USA after being accused of various misdemeanours, including support for the anti-Talmud polemicist August Rohling.
11
His translation leaves out passages that he felt were irrelevant or of no interest, and he failed to grasp the sense of much that he was translating.
12
This is not surprising since he spoke very little English, he translated the Talmud into Yiddish and then got schoolchildren to render it in English. Kauffmann Kohler, a leading Reform scholar complained that ‘the vandalism perpetrated against the text is unparalleled’.
13

Epstein and his team were of a far different calibre. Their scholarly translation appeared in thirty five volumes, each with an introduction and concise, explanatory notes. The translation was published by the Soncino Press, named after the famous fifteenth-century Italian family of printers.
14

Although its language appears a little archaic now, and its notes can sometimes be as impenetrable as the text they are trying to explain, the Soncino translation functioned for many years as the main study aid for English-speaking Talmud students.

The Westminster Talmud

Henry VIII’s Talmud had lain virtually untouched in Westminster Abbey for over four centuries. At lest that’s what the few who knew about it thought. In 1956 it was put on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Jack
Lunzer, a collector of ancient manuscripts saw it and tried to acquire it. But the Abbey would not sell.

Twenty five years later Lunzer managed to acquire a medieval copy of Westminster Abbey’s founding charter that was on sale in the USA. He had already agreed with the Abbey that if he could acquire the charter they would swap it for the Talmud. The nine-volume edition, printed by Daniel Bomberg between 1522 and 1538 is now in the Valmadonna collection in New York. But it now transpires the copy in the Abbey may not have belonged to Henry. Each volume has the owner’s initials, RB, stamped on it. It was assumed that this stood for either
Rex Brittanicus
, King of Britain or
Regio Bibliotheca
, the King’s Library. But a letter to
The Times
from the Reverend Edward Carpenter, Dean of Westminster poured cold water on this idea.
15
He pointed out that there was no surviving binding from the Royal Library that bore these initials. According to the Dean, Henry VIII’s copy was almost certainly donated by the Old Royal Library to the British Museum in 1757 and is now in the British Library.
16
Subsequent research, confirmed by the Valmadonna Trust catalogue, is that the volume acquired by Lunzer belonged to Richard Bruarne, who was Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford.
17

The new Rashi

The last few decades of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of an explosion in Talmud learning. More people now studying it than at any other time in history. But it didn’t happen overnight. Many reasons have been put forward for the phenomenon, but it wouldn’t have happened without a few key people and institutions that were instrumental in making the Talmud accessible to everyone. Adin Steinsaltz is one such man.