A Gemeinde Gemeinheit

by Shlomo and Mati Sprecher

We are delighted that the occasion of our son’s wedding (Uri Sprecher to Rivi Zand, 4 Kislev 5769) solved a 150-year-old bibliographic mystery. When we chose to provide our guests with the opportunity to engage in limmud Torah during the course of the wedding by reprinting and distributing “Tshuvah Be’Inyan Kriat HaKetubah,” we assumed that, just as the title page and the publisher’s introduction indicated, it represented an actual Halakhic Responsum issued in 1835 by the Chief Rabbi of Bialystok, Rabbi Nechemiah, to a query submitted to him by Rabbi Shalom, the Chief Rabbi of Novgorod. The Responsum had been brought to print, some 2 ½ decades later, by Rabbi Nechemiah’s devoted disciple, Nehorai Zechnech-Lefavitch, who had just taken up residence in Vienna, a city in which the necessity of the public reading of the Ketubah was coming under question.

Nehorai Zechnech-Lefavitch, informs us that he had long sought to share his teacher’s wisdom with the world at large, and so he seized this opportunity to enlighten his Viennese hosts with his Rebbi’s lengthy and learned psak, which after closely examining all the arguments ruled that such a public recitation of the Ketubah was entirely and appropriately dispensable. This Tshuvah (aside from its scarcity as an example of ephemera,[1] i.e., a solitary Responsum appearing in print) was taken at face value and duly registered as such in all the standard bibliographies of Hebrew printing and Responsa literature. Even A.H. Freimann, in his authoritative work, Seder Kiddushin VeNissu’in (Jerusalem, 1964) cites this work (on page 41) and Daniel Sperber, in his magisterial Minhagei Yisrael (Jerusalem 1995), 4:89, follows Freimann’s lead in referencing this Teshuvah. Further attestation of its acceptance as an authentic Responsum is its inclusion in an anthology of rare Halakhic material bearing on Kiddushin and Nissu’in issued by Rabbi Yitzchok Herskovitz, Mili deVei Hillulah, (Brooklyn, 1998), adorned with the Haskamah of his illustrious father, Rabbi Ephraim Fishel Herskovitz, the noted Hasidic Posek of the Klausenberger Kehillah (who is also an acclaimed expert on Seforim).

However, our close reading of this Tshuvah led us in an entirely different direction. To us, the work’s style manifested clear Maskilic echoes, and its arguments rejecting the binding nature of centuries-old Minhagim were clearly not in accord with 19th –century Halakhic thought. Our reaction was that the work must certainly be pseudepigraphical and could not have arisen from the pen of the Chief Rabbi of Bialystok. In fact, a quick perusal of the reference literature demonstrated that there never was any Chief Rabbi of Bialystok named Nechemiah, nor, for that matter, was there any Chief Rabbi Shalom of Novgorod. As for Nechemiah’s disciple, Nehorai Zechnech-Lefavitch, well, one didn’t need to do much research in order to recognize the pseudonymous nature of this publisher’s name.[2] But who was really behind this masterful forgery, which deceived so many discerning readers for a century and a half?[3] Our initial thought was to place the blame on the notorious Abraham Krochmal or his erstwhile partner in literary crime, Yehoshua Heschel Schorr. They certainly had the requisite Talmudic knowledge to perpetrate a learned forgery.[4] But the tone of the work did not reflect their slashing, acerbic style. Our Tshuvah evinced a genuine love for Talmudic learning, albeit with a clear intent to utilize earlier sources to eliminate the prevailing Minhag of Kriat HaKetubah and replace it with an edifying sermon.

At an impasse, we reached out to Professor Shnayer Z. Leiman, who suggested that the scholar most likely to solve the mystery would be the doyen of Israeli bibliographers, Rabbi Shmuel Ashkenazi.[5] We were rewarded thanks to the tireless efforts of Eliezer Brodt who, on our behalf, pestered the aged Jerusalem sage until he successfully unmasked the name, but not quite the identity, of the author. Rabbi Ashkenazi concluded that the first line of the introductory poem that prefaced the Halakhic query contained the acrostic – “Meir Ish-Shalom.” (His initial contention was that this could not be the noted 19th –century Viennese scholar, Meir Ish-Shalom, because his heretofore known literary output began only some five years later, with his publication of the Sifre in 1864.)

Once Rabbi Ashkenazi had provided the key to the author’s name via the acrostic, it became apparent that all along the title page had been proclaiming that very same message. Let us recall the passage in Bavli Eruvin 13b where it is recorded that the celebrated Tanna, known to us as Rabbi Meir, was actually named Nehorai, according to one opinion; or alternatively, that both Meir and Nehorai were laudatory appellations reflecting his enlightening wisdom, whereas his actual name was Nechemiah. Recall also that the query first originated with Rabbi “Shalom” of Novgorod, and the word “shalom” appears twice more on the title page and is highlighted by the placement of a circle above one of its appearances.

Although none of the biographies[6] and bibliographies[7] devoted to the life and works of Meir Ish-Shalom attributes the Tshuvah Be’Inyan Kriat HaKetubah to him, we believe that a re-examination of Meir Ish-Shalom’s life supplies overwhelming confirmation that he is indeed the actual author of this Tshuvah. Born, as Meir Friedmann, in 1831, to a simple village couple in Krasna, his formative years were strained by extreme material and spiritual deprivation. At the age of Bar Mitzvah, his great desire to study Torah was realized by his acceptance to the Yeshiva in Ungvar, which was led by a distant relative of his mother, Rabbi Meir Asch-Eisenstadter, a noted disciple of the Hatam Sofer. Meir’s brilliance was soon recognized by his teachers, and he made great strides in Torah scholarship and adopted many stringent ascetic practices such as prolonged fasting, ritual immersion in ice-covered rivers and hours of un-interrupted Torah study and prayer. At the age of 19, he was granted Rabbinic ordination. Unfortunately, this phase of his life was cut short by a spiritual crisis induced by his exposure to Mendelssohn’s Biur and Wessely’s Hebrew poetry.[8] After a decade of hardship and wandering through Hungary and Slovakia, his wanderlust brought him fortuitously to Vienna in late 1857. That summer, the newly hired assistant to Vienna’s Chief Rabbi Mannheimer, Adolf Jellinek, began officiating at marriages. Claiming that sitting through the recitation of the Ketubah was too burdensome for the assembled guests, Rabbi Jellinek substituted in its stead an edifying sermon in the German language.[9] This reform of the Chuppah ritual was not endorsed by his employers, the leadership of the Gemeinde, who at that time still favored the classical Viennese approach of caution and consensus in religious reform,[10] and letters of reprimand directed at Rabbi Jellinek for this innovation are extant.[11] Rabbi Jellinek’s angry retort to Josef von Wertheimer, the Gemeinde’s President is also preserved:

Tatsache ist es; dass kaum eine kleine Zahl unserer grossen Gemeinde sich mehr um die Ketuba kummert, da die Vorlesung derselben fur jeden Sachverstandigen, der niche in Zogling der Pressburger Rabbinatsschule ist, als nutzlos und storend erscheint. Tatsache ist es, dass man hier mit mir umspringt, als ware ich der unfahigste, geistloseste, taktloseste und unbrauchbarste Mensch. In Berlin sitzen Manner wie Fr. Veit, Magnus, Dr. Oesterreicher, Geheimrat Joel Meyer im Vorstande; aber wahrlich diese Manner werden es nich wagen, ihre Prediger so zu tyrannisieren, wie es hier in Wien beliebt wird, wo alle Urteile nach Horensagen under Einflusterungen gatallt warden.[12]

Apparently, the ex-Yeshiva prodigy, newly arrived from Hungary, aided Rabbi Jellinek in resisting his Governing Board’s demands to re-institute the recitation of the Ketubah by fabricating a learned Responsum from a distant (and fictional) Rabbi proving that reading the Ketubah was a practice that had no sound Halakhic basis. This fabricated Responsum relied heavily on the reasoning advanced by Rabbeinu Meshulam in his celebrated correspondence with Rabbeinu Tam, which had recently appeared in print when the Sefer HaYashar was published for the first time.[13] Meir Ish-Shalom was thus able to demonstrate that Rabbi Jellinek’s innovation, far from being a deviation from correct Halakhic practice predicated on a reformist basis, was in reality a restoration of the authentic ritual promoted by Rabbeinu Meshulam, whose arguments, in the opinion of the Responsum, clearly bested the counter-arguments of Rabbeinu Tam.[14] 

After surviving this rocky beginning, Rabbi Jellinek enjoyed a productive career that spanned the remaining four decades of the 19th Century. In 1864, Rabbi Jellinek established the Beth Midrash, an adult-education program, and Meir Ish-Shalom, our Hungarian prodigy, finally secured a steady income as a teacher at that institution. In 1893, the program was expanded to include a seminary for the training of Rabbis, and Meir Ish-Shalom was appointed Professor of Rabbinics, a job he held until his death in 1908. Among his students was a fellow Eastern European expatriate and ex-prodigy – Solomon Schechter.

Although he remained a devoted student of Torah and Rabbinics, Meir Ish-Shalom did display intentions to abrogate other time-honored practices as well. For example, he argued that it was entirely correct to accede to the expressed desires of a non-Jewish husband to be allowed to purchase a burial plot alongside that of his Jewish wife, who had been interred in the Gemeinde’s cemetery. This ruling proved too radical even for his colleague, Isaac Hirsch Weiss, who strongly protested this breach of Jewish law and custom.[15] One of the ironies of history is that Isaac Hirsch Weiss has high name recognition as a foe of traditional Orthodoxy, because of his authorship of the controversial Dor Dor VeDorshav, whereas Meir Ish-Shalom’s Midrashic editions enjoy a respected position in the typical Yeshiva library. This anomaly was first noted by an actual Bialystoker Talmid Chakham, Rabbi Eliezer HaBavli, writing in HaLevanon 8 (1872): 372, who considered Meir Ish-Shalom to be firmly in the camp of the Maskilim and thus deserving of opprobrium and censure.[16] Imagine what Rabbi Bavli would have said had he known the true iniquity of Meir Ish-Shalom – creating a forged Tshuvah that justified discarding an ancient and hallowed Ashkenazi Minhag and attributing it to the “chief rabbi” of his beloved Bialystok.[17]