There is no interest in precious stones in a vegetable market: the life and sermons of Rabbi Jacob Gordon of Toronto

A preliminary examination of Rabbi Jacob Gordon’s sermons within their biographical, communal, religious, historical, social, and cultural contexts, offers insight into the challenges Jewish immigrants faced in early twentieth century Toronto—as this Orthodox immigrant rabbi perceived them. These sermons provide details and perspectives, and they particularly illuminate doings within Toronto’s Orthodox-immigrant Jewish community. Gordon’s East-European background did not hold him back from remolding his style, as well as the content of his sermons, fully aware as he was of the need to modify his sermonic approach to respond to the novelties of Toronto’s immigrant world. Gordon’s sermons may also be compared to those of other North American contemporaries, again signaling the unique aspects of the Canadian Jewish religious experience at a critical moment. I am grateful to those who assisted in clarifying certain details and issues, as well as offered comments and criticism on early versions of this article: Michael Brown, Marilyn Budd, Richelle Budd Caplan, Avraham A. Greenbaum, Richard Menkis, Ira Robinson, Marc Saperstein, and Mordechai Zalkin. Valuable archival sources are located at the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives, Montreal (CJC), and at the Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA), both of which I thank for their permission to cite documents in their possession, and I am especially indebted to Donna Bernardo-Ceriz and Janice Rosen for their assistance. Three technical notes are in order: 1) Books, articles or other sources in Hebrew or Yiddish which include an English title are cited in English, and those which do not have an English title were transliterated; 2) All the right pages in Gordon’s book are numbered and all the left pages are marked by Hebrew letters, both sequentially. The Hebrew letters and numbers are identical to the facing English ones. Therefore, whenever referring to the Hebrew letter pagination, I added HP—Hebrew pagination—in brackets; 3) The names of the following archival files in the Jacob Gordon Papers collection, CJC, are abbreviated as indicated in the brackets: Articles File (AF); Correspondence File (CF); and Press Clippings File (PCF).     

JEWISH NATIONALISM AND THE ENCYCLOPAEDIC IMAGINATION

This article examines Ahad Ha'am's attempt to create a Hebrew compendium of Jewish knowledge, Otsar hayahadut belashon'ivrit (A Treasury of Judaism in the Hebrew Language), at the end of the nineteenth century. Although his proposal was never realized, it represents an important moment in the history of Jewish nationalism, both because of the influence it exerted on Hebrew writers and scholars active in the Zionist movement and, eventually, on the political culture of the yishuv. Ahad Ha'am's effort to publish a Hebrew encyclopedia reveals his faith in the power of books to spark a national revival; he believed that the entire Jewish heritage could be contained within one authoritative book or set of books, and that such a project had the power to rehabilitate and preserve a weak, divided and scattered people, and to provide it with a unified, homogenous national identity. His vision was later modified and transformed by the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik and survived in altered form as the primary impulse behind Bialik's ambitious attempt to gather, translate and edit the classical works of Judaism into modern anthologies, and after Bialik's death in 1934 as one of the organizing principals of the Zionist movement during the period of the British Mandate.     

Crisis and lachrymosity: on Salo Baron, Neobaronianism, and the study of modern European Jewish history

Salo Baron (1895–1989) remains an iconic figure among historians of the Jews, who routinely cite his dissent from the ‘lachrymose conception of Jewish history’ as a ideal to be upheld. Contemporary historians have generally understood the Baronian imperative to favor a historiography that seeks continuities instead of ruptures, deemphasizes Jews’ victimhood in favor of their achievements and successful integration, and affirms diaspora creativity in opposition to Zionist disparagement of exile. They have also affirmed that imperative equally for all periods and places in Jewish history. Close analysis of Baron’s corpus suggests that such a reading is better termed ‘neo-Baronian,’ for Baron himself employed his injunction against lachrymosity in reference to the middle ages only, whereas his depiction of the modern era stressed sustained crisis, conflict, and insecurity throughout the Jewish world. Such a depiction is fully consistent with his conception of the conditions under which Jews were most likely to find safety and prosperity. That conception, which posited the preferability of ‘states of nationalities’ to ‘nation-states’ and stressed the need for a strong international order capable of checking unrestrained state sovereignty, was evidently born out of Baron’s own experience as a refugee in Vienna during and after the First World War.     

Elijah Levita: a Jewish Hebraist

Elijah Levita’s (c. 1469–1558) study of Hebrew was part of the longtime Jewish occupation with the language of Scripture. Yet much of Levita’s scholarship was at odds with prior Jewish approaches to Biblical language and the transmission of the Biblical text. In his many works, Levita provides a critical account of the development of Hebrew, Aramaic, and the masoretic scribal traditions. This article examines the relationship between Levita’s critical approach to the Bible and the Christian context within which he worked. With the rise of Christian Hebraism, an increasingly sophisticated and sustained discourse on Hebrew developed outside of Jewish circles. This created an alternative setting within which Levita could produce scholarship that challenged prior Jewish notions of language and the Bible. The viability of Levita’s scholarship was no longer contingent on Jewish reception alone, allowing him to express critical ideas without fear of internal censure and without assuming the hermeneutical posture typical of pre-modern Jewish scholarly expression. This article has benefited from conversations with advisors at Columbia University and with colleagues at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. In particular, I would like to thank Wim Smit (z”l) and Jennifer Greenfield for shaping my studies of early-modern European intellectual life and my colleague Naomi Seidman for helping me to better tell the story. Thanks to Kenneth Stow, Arthur Lesley, and unnamed third and fourth readers of this essay for their helpful suggestions.     

WRITING THE LAND: LANGUAGE AND TERRITORY IN MODERN HEBREW LITERATURE

This essay examines one of the greatest ambitions of the Hebrew cultural revival––the creation of a modern and distinct Hebrew national culture by rewinding history and reconnecting the indeterminate Jewish subject to a determinate Hebrew soil. The essay looks at three writers from three distinct periods in the last century, S. Yizhar, Amos Oz and Orly Castel-Bloom, whose works are deeply concerned with this connection between man and land, and who demonstrate that concern through a particular use of language. The essay shows how each of these writers uses the Hebrew language to comment on these relations in the last 50 or so years and tell us something about the state of Israeli Hebrew culture in the so-called post-national age. The article looks at Yizhar's careful creation of a language-land bond, at the way Amos Oz warns against the excesses of these bonds, and at Orly Castel-Bloom's critical attempt to undermine these bonds half a century after they have been created.     

Reading <Emphasis Type="Italic">Principia Iuris</Emphasis>

This paper illustrates the main features of Luigi Ferrajoli’s theoretical approach to law, as they are developed in his Principia Juris. These include his opposition to the traditional perspective of natural law; his anti-cognitivist orientation; and, finally, his fundamentally normative approach. Among the numerous problems discussed in Ferrajoli’s compendious book, the paper focuses on his definition of constitutional democracy. In particular, the paper discusses the way in which Ferrajoli defines the complementarity between democracy and rights; Ferrajoli’s own criticism of T. H. Marshall’s idea of citizenship; and the importance that the distinction between ‘decidable’ and ‘non-decidable’ rights have in Ferrajoli’s own system. Other issues of interests that are briefly discussed include the constitutionalisation of private law, and the defence of different kinds of liberty-rights.     

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,the Royal Alliance,and Jewish Political Theory

This article examines Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s views of the realities and myths of the “royal alliance” in medieval and modern Jewish history as a seminal contribution to Jewish political history and theory as well as a revealing entrée into his overall historiographical approach. Elaborating the ideas of his teacher Salo Baron and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s insights into the relationship between Jews and modern states, Yerushalmi ultimately used his own understanding of Jewish political experience to argue against her indictment of wartime Jewish leaders. For Yerushalmi, Jews’ awareness of their tendencies to forge vertical alliances with the highest authorities served to fortify and console them; he considered these perceptions generally realistic and, though at times tragically blinding, still ultimately anchored in historical experience. This essay situates the royal alliance within Yerushalmi’s broader conceptions of Jewish community, political agency, and domicile as diasporic survival strategies. It also views this concept as part of his post-Holocaust commitment to chart the paradoxes of Jewish hope and to regenerate Jewish hope, both collective and individual. Yerushalmi is often celebrated as a pioneering thinker who contrasted modern critical historiography to traditional collective memory and who explored the individual, existential, psychological, and skeptical dimensions of modern Jewish identity. Yet, this essay suggests, a traditionalist strain may be heard in his profound identification with the Jewish people and his deriving hope from their political and historical experience—in both its continuities and its ruptures.     

Interpreting Dreams: Joseph, Freud and the Judaic Tradition

This essay focuses upon the biblical texts concerning Joseph, in order to review the moral, cultural, and historical differences in approaches to dreams.     

How Hebrew were the Hebrew Christians?

This article demonstrates how Hebrew Christians – or Jews who converted to Christianity but retained Jewish identity – resonated with the claims of the Zionist movement in its first decades, particularly with regard to its notion of Hebrew identity. In their espousal of Zionist ideals and their attempts to join Zionist efforts, Hebrew Christian notions of Hebrewness reflected the multivalence of Hebrew identity in the Zionist movement itself, and particularly the understanding of Hebrewness as racial, ethnic, and cultural. The influence of the Zionist movement upon Hebrew Christians was especially evident in Hebrew Christian attempts to form their own institutions. These organizations promoted Jewish national culture dissociated from Judaism, expressed assertive and even aggressive motivations (what I term “Muscle Hebrew Christianity”), and recognized the ineluctability of anti-Semitism regardless of Jewish religious beliefs. Examining the somewhat obscure movement of Hebrew Christianity can ultimately help us to better understand the ways Zionism was interpreted in its formative stages, especially in light of its own divisions and various emphases.     

BIBLICAL POETRY,SPINOZIST HERMENEUTICS,AND CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP

This article considers a little known chapter in the long history of the question of the nature of biblical poetry. The debate between the Jewish scholar Raffaele Rabeni and the Christian Hebraist Biagio Garofalo (1710–1714) exemplifies shifting attitudes and concerns of eighteenth century Jewish and Christian polemists. Ostensibly, the exchange concerned an apparently innocuous topic, the “Poetry of the Hebrews”, namely, whether Biblical poetry was rhymed or metrical. At a closer look, the two scholars, equally familiar with Spinoza’s biblical critique and the latest philological and critical scholarship, clashed over the textual authority of the Hebrew Bible.

This Italian polemical exchange not only foreshadows emerging developments in the field of biblical studies, but it also differs from previous examples because of its public ramifications. The debate was publicized by the Giornale de’ Letterati, Italy’s foremost scholarly journal of the time, which sided with Garofalo. For his part, Rabeni actively opposed the publication’s “modern” approach to sacred and profane history by supporting the Jesuit Father, Giovan Antonio Bernardi, in the course of a heated controversy over the journal’s historiographical stance and objectivity.

Unlike most cases of early modern Jewish–Christian polemics examined by researchers, the Rabeni–Garofalo affair and its ramifications reflect the birth pangs that accompanied the emergence of the modern study of sacred and diplomatic history in Italy, and is best understood within the context of historical and philological‐critical studies that characterized the early stages of the Italian Enlightenment.     

From “ghost in the machine” to “spiritual automaton”: Philosophical meditation in Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Levinas

This essay discusses Stanley Cavell’s remarkable interpretation of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought against the background of his own ongoing engagement with Wittgenstein, Austin, and the problem of other minds. This unlikely debate, the only extensive discussion of Levinas by Cavell in his long philosophical career sofar, focuses on their different reception of Descartes’s idea of the infinite. The essay proposes to read both thinkers against the background of Wittgenstein’s model of philosophical meditation and raises the question as to whether Cavell and Levinas do not indirectly shed light on the early modern motif of the spiritual automaton.     

Learning Hebrew by Writing in English

This essay explores a midrange teaching and learning issue regarding the teaching of biblical languages and one strategy for addressing the issue. Seminary students do not yield a great enough return in exchange for the investment they are required to make in learning biblical languages. Students invest great time and money, but they do not learn to use the biblical languages to think critically about the Bible. This essay argues that a fruitful strategy for addressing this midrange issue is to require students to write in English about the Hebrew language. This strategy fosters students' ability to think critically about the biblical text. It also fosters their ability to use their budding knowledge of a biblical language to engage questions of meaning and issues of interpretation.     

The Arts,Midrash, and Biblical Teaching

Abstract. Biblical texts have been handed on to us through a long history of interpretation. Awareness of this rich but complex process is one of the goals of biblical teaching. Since the earliest centuries of the church there has been a parallel history of artistic interaction with the biblical text. These artistic treatments of biblical subjects have had a great cultural impact and have deeply influenced public perceptions and understandings of the Bible. Unfortunately, seldom does this history of artistic interpretation become a part of Bible courses. In this paper, I reflect on learnings from a serious effort to take artistic resources and methodologies into account in teaching Hebrew Bible in a theological school. My most successful efforts have employed the ancient Jewish interpretive method of midrash. Use of midrash opens new, imaginative possibilities that can enliven and extend our usual exegesis of texts. More specifically, midrash provides the ideal category for understanding artistic interactions with biblical texts. Through midrash students can understand artists to be both profound respecters of the power and integrity of biblical texts, while at the same time extending and entering into imaginative encounter with those texts. This article will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming book Arts, Theology, and the Church: New Intersections.     

Reading between the Strata: Teaching Rabbinic Literature with Material Culture

This article argues that attention to material culture can enhance teaching classical rabbinic literature (Talmud, Midrash, and related Jewish texts from the first seven centuries C.E.) at universities. Following an examination of broader scholarship on teaching and learning on using visuals, this article explores four ways in which material culture can help instructors teach rabbinics to students without background in Jewish studies or the relevant languages (Hebrew, Aramaic). It builds upon teaching other areas of biblical and religious studies (Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and teaching rabbinics at liberal seminaries), research methods, and broader scholarship on using visuals and material culture for pedagogical purposes. Contributing to these fields, this article addresses a lacuna in research on teaching rabbinic literature at secular institutions of higher learning and models ways to bring material culture into religious studies classrooms.     

"This Still Remarkable Book": Franz Joseph Molitor's Judaeo-Christian Synthesis

This essay explores a variety of elements of Russian literature and culture that permeate all of the ideational and formal aspects of Gnessin's Sideways. Subject matter, narrative techniques, imagery and intertextual references, as well as the linguistic make‐up, all reverberate with significant influences of Russian literature that are contemporaneous with the Hebrew era of Revival. This essay is an analysis of the diverse Russian literary scene and an examination of the blending of the broader European literary and intellectual trends with Russian‐Jewish sensibilities. The essay inquires into the precarious mentality of the acculturated Russian Jewry at the turn of the century and examines the small‐town Russian‐Jewish intelligentsia, embodied in the character of Nachum Hagzar. Understanding of the methods of Gnessin's incorporation of Russian linguistic and literary models, as well as of his desire to make modem Hebrew literature comparable to contemporary European “high” culture, allows a new reading of Sideways. When viewed in the context of Russian literature, Nachum Hagzar acquires a new richness and vitality. He is a person with a complex inner world who possesses an intricate combination of qualities informed not only by his socio‐historical circumstances, but also by the tension between the Russian and Jewish components of his psychological identity. Gnessin problematizes and negotiates this tension, highlighting the protagonist's existential dilemma and making Hagzar an archetype for the whole generation of provincial Jewish intellectuals.     

Another conversion. Stanisław Brzozowski’s ‘diary’ as an early instance of the post-secular turn to religion

This essay is an attempt to analyze an important decision Brzozowski took at the end of his life, i.e. his late turn towards Catholicism, which, despite his own objections, we should nonetheless call a religious conversion. The main reason why Brzozowski resisted the traditional rhetoric of conversion lies in his often repeated conviction that faith cannot invalidate life, because “what is not biographical, does not exist at all.” Brzozowski, therefore, rejects conversion understood as a radical and abrupt revolution of the soul, which annuls everything that happened before, and turns to a model of religiosity (“Catholicism, undoubtedly”) which preserves his entire biographical past. In this manner, Brzozowski seeks his own formula of faith, more adequate to the “situation” of the modern man who lives in and through History. I argue that the model of “conversion without conversion” Brzozowski chose as representative of modern man is typically, though avant la lettre, post-secular: closer to the Jewish sources of past-oriented tschuva than to the mystical timelessness of traditionally Christian metanoia. The idea that redemption consists not in a liberation of a pure spirit but in a patient working-through of the universal history of creation is an implicit credo of the whole modern age, first fully articulated by Brzozowski and only later in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin. Brzozowski emerges as a relatively early precursor of the future post-secular option whose advocates, like the author of The Diary, will not allow themselves to “lose a single moment,” either of their lives or the world’s history.     

Blond, tall, with honey-colored eyes: Jewish ownership of slaves in the Ottoman Empire

Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records (sijillat), and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding – particularly of females of slavic origin – in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modern period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways. I dealt with two of them: The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children; the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community. These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata. Research for this article was carried out during my postdoctoral fellowship as a Mandel Scholar at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center, the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The article is based on a lecture delivered at a conference in honor of Prof. Amnon Cohen in June 2005 at the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem; and in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2005. I thank Prof. Kenneth Stow for his kind and friendly guidance.     

Hercules furens and war: on Abravanel’s courtly context

Scholarship on Abravanel has largely ignored the courtly context and milieu to which Abravanel himself regularly draws attention. The logic seems to that the court is the contrary to the spiritual or simple life, and, indeed, the vast majority of the approximately two to three hundred essays and other works devoted to Abravanel concentrate almost exclusively on the intellectual themes found in Abravanel’s Hebrew writings. In his epistles, however, the courtly context is clearly evident, as this essay will now show, pointing to how this milieu affected, or intertwined with, Abravanel’s cultural outlook. It will also discuss the relationship between this context and ideas, as well as the forms Abravanel elected in which to present them in writing.