By Yaacov Sasson

This post continues from Part 1, here.

Another important file in Rav Herzog’s archive is his file on the renewal of Semicha and the Sanhedrin.[1] Among other letters, the file contains an unpublished letter from Rav Herzog to R’ Yehuda Leib Maimon regarding the issue. R’ Maimon was a well-known Mizrachi leader, the first Minister of Religion of the State of Israel, and the most vocal advocate of renewing the Sanhedrin. To that end, he wrote a series of articles on the topic in Ha-Tzofeh and Sinai, which he collected into a book in 1950, entitled Chidush Ha-Sanhedrin BeMedinateinu Hamechudeshet. Renewal of Semicha and Sanhedrin was of course not without opponents. Rav Herzog instructs R’ Maimon to proceed slowly and with caution, as there are a number of unresolved issues regarding renewal of Semicha which require great care and deliberation.

There were two main halachic objections to the renewal of Semicha. The first (not mentioned here by Rav Herzog) is based on the language of the Rambam in Sanhedrin 4:11, the very same halacha in which he suggests the possibility of the renewal of Semicha. The Rambam writes there:

נראין לי הדברים שאם הסכימו כל החכמים שבארץ ישראל למנות דיינין ולסמוך אותן הרי אלו סמוכין ויש להן לדון דיני קנסות ויש להן לסמוך לאחרים אם כן למה היו החכמים מצטערין על הסמיכה כדי שלא ייבטלו דיני קנסות מישראל לפי שישראל מפוזרין ואי אפשר שיסכימו כולן ואם היה שם סמוך מפי סמוך אינו צריך דעת כולן אלא דן דיני קנסות לכל שהרי נסמך מפי בית דין והדבר צריך הכרע.

The intention of the Rambam in his concluding words, Ve-hadavar tzarich hechrea, has been the subject of dispute for hundreds of years, going back to the dispute of the Mahari Beirav and the Ralbach, with some authorities believing that the Rambam was mesupak whether Semicha could in fact be renewed. A novel approach to the issue was suggested by Dr. Bernard Revel in an article in Chorev, Volume 5 (1939). Dr. Revel suggested the possibility that the final three words, Ve-hadavar tzarich hechrea, are not be the words of the Rambam himself, but were added later by another person who disagreed with the Rambam’s innovation.[2] Dr. Revel cited statements of other rishonim which he believed supported his theory. R’ Maimon addressed this issue in the introduction to his book, in the footnote, writing that the three words, Ve-hadavar tzarich hechrea, do not appear in “kama kitvei yad” (several manuscripts), thus supporting Dr. Revel’s hypothesis.

However, there is no evidence that any such manuscripts actually exist. The Frankel edition of the Rambam does not cite any alternate nusach that excludes these three words. Additionally, Professor Eliav Schochetman[3] wrote nearly 30 years ago that he found no evidence of any such manuscript in the numerous manuscripts that he consulted from across the world.

There are two potential explanations to what happened here. One potential explanation is that R’ Maimon simply lied about the existence of these kitvei yad in order to advance his agenda of renewing the Sanhedrin. Alternatively, Rabbi Eliyahu Krakowski has suggested a limud zchut – perhaps R’ Maimon forgot what Dr. Revel had written and mistakenly believed that Dr. Revel had uncovered manuscripts supporting his thesis[4], or he never saw it himself and was misinformed as to what Dr. Revel wrote, in which case R’ Maimon would be guilty of carelessness rather than dishonesty.

The second major halachic objection to the renewal of Semicha is the issue of the Samuch’s qualifications. The Rambam in Sanhedrin 4:8 writes that a Samuch must be rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula, capable of ruling on the entire Torah. Rav Herzog mentions in this letter to R’ Maimon that the Ralbach objected to renewal of Semicha on the grounds that no one is rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula. (This was also the position of the Radvaz, in his commentary on Sanhedrin 4:11.) Rav Herzog adds that if he said so in his generation, anan aniyey de-aniyey mah na’ane abatrei? Rav Herzog then makes a somewhat novel suggestion, one with halachic ramifications for the issue of renewal of Semicha. Rav Herzog suggests that rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula does not mean that the Samuch must literally know by heart all the relevant halachic sources. A similar approach was also suggested by the Rav[5] and the Steipler.[6] In the language of the Rav, the Samuch need not possess “universal knowledge”, rather a “universal orientation.” While this approach would certainly remove this barrier to renewal of Semicha, Rav Herzog concludes, however, that the matter requires extensive clarification and discussion, and as long as this point has not been clarified, there can be no possibility of renewing the Sanhedrin.

There are a number of talmidei chachamim in the last century who have deemed others to be rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula, in contrast to the position of the Ralbach and the Radvaz. For example, in his 1935 recommendation letter for the Rav regarding the Chief Rabbinate in Tel Aviv, publicized by Dr. Manfred Lehmann[7], Rav Moshe Soloveichik wrote that the Rav is rauy lehorot veladun be-chol dinei hatorah like the mufla on the Sanhedrin. In Rav Moshe Mordechai, the biography of Rav Moshe Mordechai Shulsinger (page 275), it is related that the Chazon Ish listed to his student Rav Shlomo Cohen (Rav Shulsinger’s father-in-law) the names of 32 Rabbis whom he believed to be rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula and worthy of sitting in the Sanhedrin, among them the Chafetz Chaim and Rav Meir Simcha. It would appear that Rav Moshe Soloveichik and the Chazon Ish also assumed the more lenient definition of rauy lehorot be-chol hatorah kula, in line with the position of Rav Herzog, the Rav and the Steipler.

The archive contains an entire file dedicated to the question of the Halachic Dateline.[8] Rav Herzog was of course involved in the Dateline controversy in 1941. At that time, some members of the Mir Yeshiva, among other Jews, were located in Japan for Yom Kippur and they sent a telegram to Rabbis Mishkovsky, Alter, Herzog, Soloveichik, Finkel and Meltzer asking for guidance. Rav Herzog convened a meeting of a number of Rabbis to decide how to proceed, and sent a telegram back to Japan with their instructions. The file contains copies of the telegrams, much of Rav Herzog’s correspondence on the issue, as well as a kuntres on the topic prepared by Rav Tukachinsky that was distributed in advance of the meeting. Most of the significant material in this file has already been published in Kovetz Chitzei Giborim – Pleitat Sofrim Volume 8, in an extensive article by Rav Avraham Yissachar Konig, which was previously reviewed on the Seforim Blog by Dr. Marc Shapiro.[9]

Rav Konig’s most significant contribution is showing that Rav Herzog’s letter as published in Rav Menachem Kasher’s Kav Ha-taarich Ha-yisraeli has been altered from Rav Herzog’s actual letter. Here is Rav Herzog’s letter to Rav Kasher as it appears in the archive:

And this is the letter as printed at the beginning of Rav Kasher’s Kav Ha-taarich Ha-yisraeli:

There are three sentences that have been omitted from Rav Herzog’s letter as presented at the beginning of Rav Kasher’s volume. (I would add the following point that Rav Konig failed to mention – Rav Kasher wrote explicitly on page 248 that he presented the letters at the beginning of the volume in full.) The following sentences have been omitted from Rav Herzog’s letter:

הנני להודיע עכשיו שבדיעה זו אני ממשיך ומחזיק היום. אני תפלה שיזכני הקב”ה לעיין בעצם שאלת קו התאריך ולבדוק את כל הדיעות ולהגיע לידי דיעה עצמית. אולם לעת עתה אינני נוקט שום עמדה בהן.

This omission creates the impression that Rav Herzog had a definitive position on the question of the Dateline. However, this is obviously not the case; Rav Herzog never came to any conclusion on the issue of the Dateline, as is clear from the omitted sentences, as well as from a number of other letters in the file. In fact, Rav Konig has shown that in Rav Kasher’s response to this letter, he actually complained to Rav Herzog about these specific sentences for this reason. From Rav Herzog’s original letters, it appears that his position on the question of Japan was one of hanhaga bemakom safek (i.e. instruction on how to act in absence of a clear conclusion on the location of the Dateline) not a definitive hachraa. (Rav Konig elaborates on Rav Herzog’s position at length.) The first sentence above, that Rav Herzog stands by the position of the Rabbinic meeting, in conjunction with Rav Herzog’s statement that he has no definitive opinion on the matter of the Dateline, also implies that the position of the Rabbinic meeting convened by Rav Herzog was also one of hanhaga bemakom safek. (This point is also clear from Rav Herzog’s letter to Dr. Yishurun, also in the file, that the Dateline matter remained unresolved, and the meeting of Rabbis came to no definitive conclusion on the location of the Dateline. They issued their instructions to Japan based on the majority of opinions regarding location of the Dateline, with no consensus on the issue itself.) The altered version of Rav Herzog’s letter creates the false impression that Rav Herzog had a definitive opinion on the Dateline question.

However, I must take issue with one point made by Rav Konig. In his footnote 54, he criticizes Rav Herzog for his language in the telegram sent to Japan. Rav Konig writes that the language of the telegram is misleading, and creates the false impression that the telegram represents the position of the six rabbis (Rabbis Mishkovsky, Alter, Herzog, Soloveichik, Finkel and Meltzer) to whom the telegram from Japan was addressed. This is Rav Konig’s critique, in footnote 54:

Unfortunately, Rav Konig has been misled by an inaccurate translation of Rav Herzog’s telegram. Rav Herzog’s original telegram was written in English, and Rav Konig tells us (footnote 55) that he has relied on the translation to Hebrew as it appears in the Encyclopeida Talmudit, in the addendum to the entry on “Yom”, (coincidentally also in footnote 55.) That translation is taken from Rav Kasher’s Kav Ha-taarich Ha-yisraeli on page 246. This is the telegram sent by Rav Herzog, as it appears in the archive:

An accurate translation to Hebrew would be as follows:

בתשובה למברק שלכם מיום 12.9, אספת רבנים בנשיאותי החליטה שתצומו ליום כיפור ביום רביעי לפי חשבון הנהוג ביפן וכו’

This is the mistranslation in Rav Kasher’s Kav Ha-taarich Ha-yisraeli:

Translated accurately, Rav Herzog’s telegram does not imply that the six Rabbis to whom the question was addressed are providing the answer. The main difference is a subtle, but significant one. Rav Herzog wrote “meeting rabbis my presidency”, which Rav Kasher mistranslated to Asifat Ha-rabbanim, “meeting of the rabbis”, and he neglected to translate “my presidency” at all. As noted by Rav Konig, Asifat Ha-rabbanim (with the hey ha-yedia) implies the known Rabbis, i.e. the Rabbis to whom the question was addressed. Correctly translated, however, Asifat Rabbanim be-nesiuti, “a meeting of Rabbis under my presidency” (without the hey ha-yedia) does not imply that Rabbis Mishkovsky, Alter, Soloveichik, Finkel and Meltzer were involved in the decision. Rav Konig was unfortunately misled by Rav Kasher’s mistranslation, which was also repeated by Encyclopeida Talmudit. The attack on Rav Herzog’s integrity is entirely unwarranted.

There appears to be a second very subtle error in Rav Kasher’s translation. Rav Kasher’s translation states flatly that the Taanit of Yom Kippur is on Wednesday, implying a definitive hachraa. Rav Herzog’s telegram actually says that the decision was that they should fast on Wednesday for Yom Kippur, language which is consistent with a hanhaga bemakom safek. This would also fit with Rav Herzog’s personal addendum, that the Jews in Japan ought to keep Thursday as a fast day as well while eating leshiurim. Given Rav Kasher’s apparently less-than-honest presentation of Rav Herzog’s letter, as noted above, one might surmise that this “error” was also a willfull misrepresentation of the contents of the telegram, intended to advance Rav Kasher’s preferred narrative of a definitive hachraa, in accordance with his own position.

In addition to the documents related to Rav Herzog’s tenure as Chief Rabbi of Israel, there are also a number of files from his tenure as Chief Rabbi of Ireland. Among his correspondence from his time is Ireland is a fascinating teshuva, written by Rav Kasher in 1936, regarding the issue of Yibum B’zman Hazeh.[10] The background to the question: an Ashkenazi Yavam and Yevama living in Israel want to marry via Yibum, rather than doing Chalitza. Must the beit din protest, or can the beit din allow the Yibum? This teshuva was printed by Rav Kasher in the inaugural volume of Talpiot[11] (1944), and also appears in his Divrei Menachem Volume 1, Teshuva 31. Interestingly, Rav Kasher’s conclusion in the original teshuva differs significantly from the conclusion in the teshuva that he eventually published in Talpiot and Divrei Menachem.

Here is the conclusion of the teshuva as it appears in Rav Herzog’s archive, at the end of page 11 continuing to page 12:

Here is the conclusion of the teshuva as it appears in Divrei Menachem:

Originally, Rav Kasher concluded that the beit din should try to convince the couple to do chalitza, but if beit din is unsuccessful, and if the couple is religious, then beit din should teach them to have kavana l’shem mitzvah and need not protest the yibum. The concluding sentences were removed from Rav Kasher’s published teshuva, and the ending simply states that beit din try to convince them to do chalitza. (The teshuva as published is actually quite awkward, as it is clearly building towards the conclusion that they may do yibum, yet ends abruptly without stating this conclusion.) Apparently, Rav Kasher censored his own conclusion. He does stipulate at the end of the original teshuva that he is writing le-halacha ve-lo le-maase until the Gedolei Ha-Rabbanim in Israel agree to permit the yibum. It is possible that Rav Kasher did not receive such approval, and subsequently decided to censor his own conclusion when he published the teshuva.

In addition to the archives of Chief Rabbi Herzog, the archives of his son, President Chaim Herzog, have also been scanned and are available. A very intriguing file in his archive is the file dedicated to Rabbi Meir Kahane.[12] A fascinating document in that file is a letter about Kahane written to Herzog by the Rav in the summer of 1984. The background to the letter: in 1984, Kahane became a member of the Knesset, representing the Kach party. Traditionally, during the process of building a coalition, the president would invite every party to take part in coalition negotiations. Herzog, however, snubbed Kahane and refused to invite him.[13] It was in response to this snub that the Rav wrote the letter below to Herzog, which is surprisingly supportive of Kahane:

The Rav starts by mentioning his close relationship with Rav Herzog, and that Chaim Herzog was actually named for his grandfather, the great Rav Chaim Soloveichik of Brisk.[14] The Rav says that he cannot understand how Herzog could invite the representatives of Arafat, but did not invite Kahane. The Rav adds that Kahane is “ktzat talmid chacham” despite his shigonot, and that he is a yarei shamayim who fights for the Torah and kvod shamayim. The Rav says that someone as energetic as Kahane should be moderated and he could contribute.

(Other sources have portrayed the Rav’s view of Kahane far more negatively, claiming that the Rav regarded Kahane’s “selective citation of Jewish sources as a distortion and desecration of Torah.”[15] Additionally, it is related that, at some point in the 1980s[16], the Rav told others that Kahane should not be given a platform to speak at YU.[17] I am not sure how to reconcile this portrayal of the Rav’s view of Kahane with the Rav’s own letter to Herzog that was rather supportive and praising of Kahane.)

The Rav then gives Herzog some gentle mussar for being irreligious and encourages him to keep mitzvot while in public as a Kiddush Hashem. Herzog’s response to the Rav also appears in the same file.

Kahane and Herzog had quite a contentious (non-)relationship, extending far beyond the coalition snub, as is evidenced by the rest of Herzog’s file on Kahane. This is a scathing column that Kahane wrote for the Jewish Press, also found in Herzog’s archive, in which Kahane dubs Herzog “vinegar son of wine”, among other insults:

Additionally, Kahane’s Kach party presented Herzog with the inaugural Pras Idud Ha-hitbolelut – “Award for the Encouragement of Assimilation” 5745, as appears below:

The above is a sampling of the important and interesting documents contained in the archives. As mentioned, there is certainly much more fascinating material to be found. In the meanwhile, אנו יושבים ומצפים לגאולה שלמה, ייתי ונחמיניה.

The First Artichoke Controversy of 2012

By Leor Jacobi

Recently a kashrut controversy surrounding traditional Italian fried artichokes has received major media coverage in the New York Times and the Seforim Blog (twice, in chronological order, not order of importance).  In order to prove the antiquity of Jewish artichoke consumption, depictions of artichokes in medieval illuminated haggadot have been adduced. These were the topic of a lesser-known artichoke controversy in 2012 here in the comments section of the Seforim Blog, which can be as nasty and difficult to find as artichoke bugs.

The Controversy: Do Catalonian medieval Haggadot portray maror as an artichoke? Were artichokes actually consumed in fulfillment of the rabbinic requirement to consume bitter herbs found in the Mishnah and Tosefta?

“Brother Haggadah”, BL Oriental 1404, f. 18

Here’s the story behind the scenes as it occurred in real time, during the Pessah season of 2012. I was scheduled to deliver a talk on chrayn at a rabbinic conference on the Hebrew language organized by Yitzhak Frank on April 10, Chol ha-Moed Pessah. In the course of some late preparatory research (= Googling) on April 5 (13 Nissan, the day of bedikat chametz) I came across a fascinating responsum on maror by David Golinkin that had just been published on April 2, 2012.  Struck by the reliance on visual evidence from illustrated manuscripts in establishing a medieval custom to consume artichokes as maror, I sent the post to Marc Michael Epstein of Vassar College for comment. Within an hour he replied:

I don’t believe the Sephardic mss show an artichoke, rather they depict an entire head of romaine lettuce. The way to prove or disprove this would be to compare contemporary or roughly contemporary botanical mss.

I immediately began “intensive research” (= more Googling) and discovered that the artichoke question was (probably first) posed by Yoel Finkelman and his parents in 2005. Significantly, they already collected the three examples cited by Golinkin: the Rylands, Brother, and Sarajevo Haggadot. Finkelman states that his father circulated the query widely.

Rylands Haggadah, 1988 facsimile edition, f. 31v

The next day, April 6, Erev Pessah, I emailed Golinkin directly, requesting sources for his identifications. He replied on the same day that artichokes are definitely depicted in the three illuminated haggadot and that artichokes were probably identified as one of the five plant species mentioned in the Mishnah (Pesahim 2:6). Indeed, in Golinkin’s own post of April 2:

Rabbi Natan ben Yehiel of Rome (1035-ca. 1110) says in his Talmudic dictionary  (ed. Kohut, Vol. 8, p. 245) that tamkha is cardo, which is cardoon. Prof. Feliks says that this is carduus argentatus or silver thistle, while Dr. Schaffer says that it is cynara cardunculus or artichoke thistle.

Cardoon Artichoke Thistle. a painting by Elizabeth H Tudor

So, textual and visual evidence interlock to support the conclusion that artichokes were used as Maror. However, the textual evidence is weak. Sefer Ha’arukh is a dictionary, not a responsum, a legal code or a gloss to one, like Hagahot Maimoniyot which identifies tamkha as horseradish – chrayn, associated with an actual custom. The definition of Ha’arukh is not a singular, definitive identification  (yesh ‘omrim: marrobio, another species, also Rashi’s identification), and according to Prof. Jehudah Feliks cardo does not describe artichokes at all.

Opposite this scanty textual evidence stands a mountain of Rabbinic silence. As far as I am aware, nowhere in any codes, Haggadas, commentaries, or anywhere else do we find even a hint that artichokes were ever used as maror. There are limits to what can be learned ex silentio but we are discussing thousands of sources. If artichokes were used, we would expect a mention somewhere.

As for the visual information, we have “two witnesses and three witnesses”: The Rylands and Brother Haggadahs should be considered one witness because one is copied from the other. Bezalel Narkiss designated the name “The Brother Haggadah” (along with a lot of other names of Haggadah, most of which have stuck, for better or worse) because it is the “brother” copied from the Rylands Haggadah. According to Katrin Kogman-Appel, the Brother was more likely the original from which the Rylands was copied. For our purposes, the direction of the copying makes no difference. Just as the Rosh and Tur can’t really be counted as two legal authorities, these two sources are reflections of one another. What about the other witness, the Sarajevo Haggadah?

I do not think that there is even a remote possibility that the Sarajevo Haggadah depicts an artichoke:

The leaves are ridged but all species of artichoke leaves are smooth save for the thorn in the middle. An artist whose intention was to depict artichokes would not draw them in this manner. Moreover, Epstein, (in personal correspondence) adds that the “artichoke” leaves are “veined” like lettuce leaves, and bound together with a cord at the base.

Israeli Artichoke, Photo: Leor Jacobi, April 20, 2012

The same day, April 6, Erev Pessah, I communicated my skepticism back to Golinkin, especially regarding the depiction in the Sarajevo Haggadah.  Golinkin’s April 2 post had already inspired creative contemporary midrash by April 9 (the truth of which in revealing hidden aspects of the divine plan should be judged independently of the historical claims.) Clearly these progressive folk placed artichokes on their seder plate on seder night, April 6 or 7, 2012, and were already expounding homiletically on the custom they had only learned about on April 2 at the earliest. Epstein notes that this an excellent example in “real time” of a minhag in development thanks to what he calls “the heter of the Internet.”

I gave the Chrayn talk on April 10 and the very next day, April 11, a long and fascinating Seforim blog post by Dan Rabinowitz was published, wherein, inter alia, he stated:

In the Brother to the Rylands Haggadah, marror is depicted as an artichoke, as is in the case with the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Golinkin wasn’t cited but it’s doubtful that his April 2 post is the source —  perhaps serendipity. After some discussion in the comments, Marc Epstein wrote:

Rabbosai (and Marasai): A manuscript is NOT a mirror. Jews depict themselves in their art (or commission art that depicts them) not as they were, but as they desired to be seen. Please please please do not engage in the typical Wissenschaft strategy of looking at illuminated manuscripts for “clues to Jewish life in the Middle Ages” or even to Jewish history. What we can learn from them is histoire des Mentalites, but even that takes a lot of work to get to.

Re: the “artichoke”: I don’t believe the Sephardic mss show an artichoke, rather they depict an entire head of romaine lettuce. The way to prove or disprove this would be to compare contemporary or roughly contemporary botanical mss. It may have been “misunderstood” by some illuminators as an artichoke, but not corrected by the recipients of the manuscript because if you are not looking for an artichoke it seems totally absurd that an artichoke would be used as maror, You don’t SEE an artichoke, but a head of Romaine lettuce, no matter how “artichoke-like” it seems to us in 5772.

Also, because a head of Romaine is SHOWN in the haggadah it doesn’t mean that there a head of (possible unchecked-for-bugs) Romaine on the table. Every image is not a snapshot, but a representation — a combination of the real, the general, the ideal and the symbolic. Showing the head is a way of REPRESENTING Romaine — it says, “We use a type of lettuce that grows with leaves together in a head like this.” It does NOT necessarily mean “We use complete heads of Romaine at the Seder, like this.” Do you see the difference? A representation must shorthand its descriptions for clarity: If you showed individual artichoke leaves, for instance, it would be difficult to ascertain that the plant was an artichoke. Artichoke leaves are shaped like baby spinach leaves, though baby spinach is more pliable. If a leaf of that shape was shown, what would distinguish the artichoke leaves? Showing an artichoke in its entire, thistly configuration makes it indisputable that it is an artichoke.

Epstein’s points are compelling. How does one portray lettuce in an illustration? For example, this modern lettuce clip-art isn’t much more lettuce-like than the illustration in the Brother Haggadah:

After Pessah, on April 22, I received an additional reply from Golinkin with more sources. The entry for maror in the first edition of Encyclopedia Judaica was written by Jehudah Feliks (pp. 1014-5). The entry includes an image of the maror depiction from the Sarajevo Haggadah with a caption:

According to this astounding caption, lettuce is depicted in the Sarajevo Haggadah but the claim is that it can still be supposed that the artichoke-like shape of the lettuce reflects an old custom of eating artichokes as maror. This custom had already been lost in the 14th century, but was preserved in the form of illustrations of maror in haggadot! (We find something similar in the illustrations of maror in the Prague Haggadah. According to Rav Peles, the custom of pointing at the wife when stating “this bitter[ness/Bitter Herb]” had already disappeared, but was preserved in the caption to themaror illustration in the Haggadah; see also here). However, note that above, in Golinkin’s post, Feliks did not identify the Arukh’s cardo as artichokes. It is not entirely clear that Feliks composed this caption. Bezalel Narkiss served as IIlustrations Consultant on the first edition (sadly most illustrations were cut from the second edition, including this one and the caption).

As Narkiss was then the acknowledged expert in medieval illuminated manuscripts, it stands to reason that he may have either selected the illustration or wrote the caption, either alone or in consultaion with Feliks. In any case, the author(s) of the caption maintain that lettuce is depicted even if the rest of their proposal is extremely speculative.

For the Rylands Haggadah, Golinkin cited the Raphael Loewe facsimile, Steimatzky, 1988: “The bitter herb is intended to be lettuce, despite its artichoke-like compactness.”  This pithy source contradicts Golinkin’s identification, and suggests a practical explanation for this lettuce design.

As for the Brother Haggadah, Golinkin wrote that he learned about this from an expert on Jewish art. However, as far as I can tell this expert does not deal primarily with interpretation of medieval art. Theories are tested by evidence. Thus, it remains that if someone wishes to argue that these images depict artichokes the best way to advance the thesis would be by means of comparisons with contemporary illustrations of artichokes, as Marc Epstein advises.

Finally, an image of maror from the Barcelona Haggadah, folio 62, illustrates how creative illustrations of lettuce (?) could get and how dangerous it would be to try to learn history from them as if they were snapshots.

Adapted from Evelyn Cohen’s description in the facsimile volume:

Verso, The scribe left almost the whole of the page for a depiction of the bitter herbs, but the crude illustration we now see was not executed in the Middle Ages, although it may have been based on models from the fourteenth century. The vegetable, commonly portrayed in a highly stylized manner, was no longer understandable to the later artist, and the red holder with which it is sometimes shown seems to have been misunderstood by the artist, who interpreted it as a red crescent.

The post-medieval illustrator here may have utilized haggadah depictions of artichoky lettuce as a model and was probably as bewildered by them as we are.  In note 39 Cohen lists the Hispano-Moresque, Graziano, Golden, and Sister Haggadas as displaying maror holders. The matzot in these haggadot look nothing like real matzot, with elaborate color and geometric designs. The entire maror holder could be a design element in this vein, so that the maror is grounded and not floating in space.

Graziano Haggadah

Sister Haggadah

‘Hispano-Moresque’ Haggadah

Golden Haggadah

Epstein adds (personal correspondence) that we should be wary of concluding on the basis of these images that Jews of Medieval Spain had actual red maror holders. They may have developed from an earlier model like the Golden Haggadah, which only meant to portray a reddish-yellow color which develops towards the base:

I certainly hope enterprising Judaica forgers, the creators of “Marrano cups” and such don’t get wind of this, or appraisers, experts and curators will have a whole new wave of fake “authentic” pre-Expulsion Sephardi ritual items to deal with. Indeed Romaine lettuce is most suitable for maror because it generates increasing bitterness the longer one chews the leaves, and the closer one gets to that all-important base. Romaine is appropriate for maror in metaphoric terms: like the servitude in Egypt, which started out as a “public works” project with the full participation even of Pharaoh, and ended up as the most abject of slavery, a torture inflicted exclusively upon the Israelites. When one first begins to chew the leaves Romaine lettuce, one could think one was eating a lovely salad. More chewing, and getting eventually to the lower “spine,” however, makes the experience increasingly bitter. The rabbis understood that unlike the consistent blast of heat one experiences with horseradish and other truly bitter plants, it is in the initially non-bitter, even pleasant, but then the increasing nature of the bitterness of Romaine that the precise metaphor for the Egyptian servitude is experienced.

It is notable that per Kogman Appel’s dating, the Golden Haggadah is earlier (c. 1320) than some of the examples brought above (c. 1350-), and may have served as their model in some sense, including the fact that whatever we are seeing, (whether the “veins” in a single lettuce leaf, or the ruffled leaves in the head when cut open and depicted laterally, like the Chinese cabbage shown below,) gives the leaf/leaves a  “spiky” appearance. (If there is a lateral view here, the question, of course, is why such a view was taken. Most authorities prefer whole Romaine leaves for maror, so a view “cutting through” the head might be confusing, although some advocate the consumption of only, or primarily the spines.)

The more I think about it, although links and distinctions have been made between the opening sequence of biblical narrative illuminations in the Golden, Sister and Sarajevo Haggadot and the Rylands/Brother Haggadot, the TEXT illustrations (matzah, maror etc.) may have more mutual influence and cross-influence, and relate also to those in the Barcelona Haggadah and others. Since the GH was earlier than the Sarajevo, Rylands/Brother Haggadot, the image of the maror there, clearly— though stylized—Romaine may have influenced, been misunderstood by the artists of the later ms. In other words, the veiny (or the lateral, or side-viewed, rippling) leaves of Romaine could have been mistaken for the “spiky” leaves of an artichoke and thus been illustrated. (The Sarajevo artist, for instance, depicted the “artichoke” leaves not only as serrated but with “veins” more typical of lettuce.)

The Sarajevo, Rylands/Brother ARTISTS  misunderstanding the [veined single lettuce leaf or laterally viewed or cut head of] lettuce in the Golden Haggadah or a similar model, might have thought they were illustrating an artichoke. The PATRONS did not “correct” this because OBVIOUSLY the vegetable could not have been an artichoke as there was no massoret of the use of that vegetable for maror. There for they accepted the “artichoke” of the artists as the “lettuce” of halakhah.

While we can never recover the actual conversation that precipitated the visual result, both consideration of the near-instantaneous creation via “the heter of the Internet” of the minhag of placing artichokes on the seder plate, and the spinning of homiletics around that minhag;  and the invention of the “maror holder”are reflections—within our present conversation!—of the kinds of transmission problems ever present in such conversations in any time or place. This whole adventure has, for me, been very important in thinking about artist-patron relationships.

Cohen adds an interesting point (personal correspondence):

I found other manuscripts where there was a blank space where the image of the maror should have been placed, while all the other areas left blank by the scribe contained illustrations. This lead me to believe that the appearance of the maror was sometimes customized based on the minhag of the patron, who for whatever reason never had it added.

These are fascinating questions. The goal of the artists was to produce art which resonated with their patrons symbolically and aesthetically. By misinterpreting these images as snapshots of historical reality, we can invent artichokes and maror holders. One could just as well conclude that it was customary to only sit on one side of the Seder table!

Fast forward to May, 2018, we find ourselves embroiled in a new artichoke controversy and the Seforim Blog is back with artichokes in the Haggadah. This is a fascinating little post on kashrut and custom, but nothing about ancient or medieval practices can be proven from these sources. A follow-up post based on textual sources by Susan Weingarten, an expert on foods in antiquity (and incidentally, the sister of Elihu Shanun, who also spoke at the rabbinic conference on April 10, 2012 which started us off) provides a much more reliable textual path towards establishing the antiquity of artichoke consumption.

In summary, there is no evidence that Jews ever ate artichokes to fulfill the obligation of consuming maror on the Passover Eve. Maybe b’shas hadahak, but who knows? The textual evidence and visual evidence don’t support each other to advance a radical historical claim. However, artichokes are delicious and, if clean, Kosher for Pessah. Jews very likely did consume them historically wherever they were found.

Thanks to: Marc Epstein, David Golinkin, Evelyn Cohen, Sara Offenberg, Moshe Glass, and Jean Guetta. I also wish to acknowledge the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for their support.

Gems from Rav Herzog’s Archive (Part 1 of 2):

Giyus, Professor Lieberman and More

By Yaacov Sasson

A tremendous resource that will be of great interest to Seforim Blog’s readers has been made available to the public. The entire archive of the great Rav Yitzchak Eizik Halevi Herzog, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel, has been scanned and is now available online.[1] The archive contains hundreds of files on a wide range of topics, including Rav Herzog’s Piskei Halacha and Torah novellae, extensive correspondence on Israeli politics, Rav Herzog’s efforts to save Jews of Europe, and much more. Each file is dedicated to a specific topic, and many of these files contain upwards of a hundred pages of material. In short, the archive is a veritable treasure trove, and will be of great interest to those who are students of Torah, Halacha and Jewish history. Much of Rav Herzog’s Torah has been published in his numerous seforim; however, there is a significant amount of unpublished material in the archive. The purpose of this article is to make readers aware of some of the gems found in the archive, in particular the significant unpublished material. I have only begun to look through the vast amount of material that is available, and I am certain that there is much more to be found. The following are a select number of documents and files that I think will be of interest to the Seforim blog’s readers.

I Giyus Bnai Yeshivot

The archive contains an entire file dedicated to the always controversial issue of giyus bnai yeshivot, whether yeshiva students ought to be drafted to the army or exempted from the draft.[2] Within this file, there is an approximately 50-page kuntres written by Rav Herzog in 1948, dedicated to a halachic analysis of the topic. To the best of my knowledge, this very significant kuntres was never published, and it does not appear in any of Rav Herzog’s seforim.[3]

Rav Herzog addresses the issue in an extremely thorough manner, and deals with a wide variety of relevant sources and issues, such as the definition of milchemet mitzvah, and the words of the Rambam at the end of Hilchot Shemita VeYovel, among other issues. For example, on page 27, he discusses the possibility of milchemet mitzvah in the absence of a king, and concludes that milchemet mitzvah is still possible if the community of Jews living in Eretz Yisrael approves of the war. On page 12, Rav Herzog suggests, based on a diyuk, that the Rambam’s words at the end of Hilchot Shemita VeYovel exempting talmidei chachamim from waging war do not apply to a war of ezrat yisrael miyad tzar. (A similar reading of the Rambam was suggested by Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, in “The Ideology of Hesder” (Tradition Fall 1981), and was reprinted in Leaves of Faith Volume 1.) Rav Herzog also makes a fascinating contention (on page 2), that the British were the current-day manifestation of Esav, putting forward their split hoof and hypocritically claiming to seek justice, while quietly attempting to undermine the Jewish cause by supporting their enemies. It is obviously not feasible to summarize a 50 page kuntres in a single blog post; I will simply present Rav Herzog’s main conclusion. Rav Herzog suggests (pages 12 and 34) that yeshiva students should not be subject to giyus malei, full conscription, even during wartime. Rather, they should be subject to giyus chelki, partial conscription of a few hours a week, doing what Rav Herzog terms “hishtatfut” in the war effort, such as local shemira and the like.

While this was Rav Herzog’s halachic conclusion in the kuntres, when the issue of forced conscription became a potential reality ten years later, Rav Herzog sent a heartfelt letter to Ben-Gurion, pleading for the exemption of bnai yeshivot, since they are already conscripted to the security of Torah and the heritage of Am Yisrael, and their Torah learning is a shield for Am Yisrael. This letter, which is found in the file of Rav Herzog’s correspondence with Ben-Gurion[4], appears below:

Another noteworthy document in the file on giyus bnai yeshivot is a 1948 telegram from the Roshei Yeshiva of the American yeshivot, expressing their shock at the possibility of giyus bnai yeshivot, and urging Rav Herzog and Rav Uziel to make sure that bnai yeshivot remain exempt from army service. The telegram appears below, as well as my transcription of the telegram into Hebrew:

נבהלנו מאד לשמוע שאומרים לבטל השחרור של בני ישיבות ולקחתם לצבא. הדבר נוגע לנפש ורוח חיי אומתנו ויגרום חילול השם בין הגויים המשחררים בני ישיבות מעבודת הצבא אפילו בשעת מלחמה. השתדלו בכל תוקף להעביר רוע הגזירה, ואין מעצר להש[ם] להושיע. בשם כל הישיבות,

Kotler Gordon Grosowski Zaks Joffen Levenstein Kalmanowitz Kamenetzki Bloch Belkin Shatz[k]es Soloveitchik Feinstein Ehrenfeld Hutner Lifshitz Leibowitz Korb Ruderman Rothenberg[5]

The telegram is especially noteworthy because of the appearance of the names of the Charedi Roshei Yeshiva, such as Rav Aharon Kotler, Rav Reuven Grozovsky, Rav Moshe Feinstein etc. together with the names of the more modern Roshei Yeshiva of RIETS: the Rav, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveichik, and Dr. Samuel Belkin. Such collaboration would seem to be almost impossible in later years.

II Professor Saul Lieberman on Rav Herzog’s Torat Ha-Ohel

Rav Herzog maintained a close relationship with Professor Saul Lieberman, as Dr. Marc Shapiro has mentioned previously on the Seforim blog[6], and noted in his “Saul Lieberman and the Orthodox”, page 22.[7] It should therefore come as no surprise that Rav Herzog’s archive contains correspondence between him and Lieberman. The letter that appears below was sent by Lieberman to Rav Herzog, and contains Lieberman’s haarot on Rav Herzog’s Torat Ha-Ohel, his sefer on the Rambam’s Hilchot Sanhedrin.[8] In this letter, Lieberman first discusses the proper girsaot in the relevant Rambam and the gemara in Makot regarding minuy dayanim. He then addresses Rav Herzog’s question of how it could be possible that bnai noach have a more extensive obligation of dinim than do Yisrael,[9] and Lieberman offers an elegant yeshiva-style distinction between dinei yisrael and dinei bnai noach to answer the problem. (A similar distinction was offered by Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, in Beit Yitzchak 8, page 89, and reprinted in his Minchat Aviv.) He offhandedly mentions that Rav Menachem Kasher had recently “acquired” some of his material, and then bemoans the fact that RY”D is too involved in the ol ha-tzibur and is not dedicating himself sufficiently to his Torah study, although he has the potential to become the Gaon Ha-Dor.

Lieberman’s letter appears below, and a transcription appears in Appendix A.

It is most likely that the RY”D to whom Lieberman referred was Rav Yaakov David Herzog, Rav Herzog’s son, as the context within the letter is dealing with Rav Herzog’s family. Rav Yaakov David had already published a scientific/critical edition of Mishnayot Brachot/Peah/Demai in 1945, at the young age of 24, and Lieberman wrote a Foreword to the volume.[10] Rav Yaakov David Herzog was eventually selected as Chief Rabbi of Great Britain in the 1960s, but declined the post due to his ill health.[11]

I also entertained the possibility that the RY”D to whom Lieberman referred is the Rav, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveichik. While this seems unlikely, it would fit nicely with the comments made by Rabbi Jacob Radin, as quoted by Rav Aaron Rakeffet[12], contrasting the Rav and Lieberman:

You know that I have attended classes in both the Seminary and the Yeshiva. I have studied with Professor Lieberman and the Rav. The Professor lectures a few times a week. He hurriedly finishes and rushes back to his research. Outside of his formal lectures, he is barely available to the students. On the other hand, the Rav is never alone. He has never finished a lecture on time. He always goes overtime. He remains in the classroom afterwards to carry on the Talmudic give and take with the students who cannot part from him. Even when he rises to leave, his disciples surround him and the discussion continues…This is the basic manifest difference between these two prodigious scholars.[13]

On Lieberman’s mention of Rav Kasher, this is the page that Lieberman referenced from Tosefet Rishonim:

And the page from Rav Kasher’s article in Sinai, Volume 18:

A number of the rather obscure sources in Rav Kasher’s lengthy footnote 2 appear to be taken from Lieberman’s Tosefet Rishonim.

III The Lieberman Ketuba

As is well-known, Lieberman introduced a new clause into the ketuba in the early 1950s in order to alleviate the aguna problem. The clause stipulated that the couple recognizes the authority of the beit din of the Rabbinical Assembly, and that upon dissolution of the marriage, the beit din would be empowered to administer penalties as it sees fit. The aim of these penalties would be to pressure the husband to give a get. In a number of letters from the 1950s (in a file regarding Even HaEzer issues[14]), Rav Herzog mentions that he himself came up with such an idea many years earlier when he was still Chief Rabbi of Ireland. He envisioned a separate document which would empower the beit din of London to administer financial penalties on a husband withholding a get. He mentions that he is unsure of Professor Lieberman came up with this idea himself, or if Lieberman actually got the idea from Rav Herzog.

Rabbi Emanuel Rackman wrote that it was widely believed that the Lieberman clause was examined by Rav Herzog, and that he had no objections.[15] This belief is certainly false, as Rav Herzog penned a strong protest to the proposed addition to the ketuba.[16] Rav Herzog’s main protest was due to the authority granted to the Conservative beit din. It is possible that the root of this misconception (that Rav Herzog approved of the Lieberman clause) is the fact that Rav Herzog independently envisioned a similar document or agreement, and that he entertained the possibility that Lieberman actually got the idea from him.

IV The Epstein Proposal

Another fascinating exchange between Rav Herzog and Lieberman is found in Rav Herzog’s file dedicated to Reform[[17] and Conservative Jewry[18], and relates to the Rabbinical Assembly’s 1957 attempt to resuscitate the Epstein proposal. Rabbi Louis Epstein had proposed, in his 1930 book Hatzaa Lemaan Takanat Agunot, that every husband, at the time of marriage, ought to designate his wife as a shliach to deliver her own get, in order to eliminate the aguna problem in the case of a missing husband or a get-refuser. The proposal was never implemented, in large part due to Orthodox opposition. In May of 1957, the Rabbinical Assembly attempted to resuscitate the Epstein Proposal at their Annual Convention at the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, New York. However, this attempt to revive the Epstein proposal must be viewed in light of the politics within the Conservative movement at that time. The following is an excerpt from the Presidential Report of Rabbi Aaron Blumenthal at the Rabbinical Assembly Convention[19]:

Note in particular Rabbi Blumenthal’s comments that the Seminary is an Orthodox institution, that its synagogue has separate seating and does not use the Rabbinical Assembly siddur, and that practically every faculty member added to the Talmud faculty in the last 15 to 20 years thinks of himself as an Orthodox Jew and has little regard for the Conservative movement. Given that Lieberman was the de-facto Rabbi of this synagogue, and that Lieberman ensured that the synagogue did not use the Rabbinical Assembly siddur, and that the synagogue maintained separate seating until Lieberman’s death[20], it would seem that Rabbi Blumenthal’s words were directed primarily at Lieberman, who arrived at the Seminary some 17 years prior.

It is against this backdrop that the Rabbinical Assembly passed a Resolution that the Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards review the Epstein proposal and submit a plan for its implementation.

The report below from the National Jewish Post and Opinion makes clear that the left wing of Conservative Judaism felt that the Lieberman ketuba did not go far enough in addressing the aguna problem and therefore sought to institute the Epstein proposal. On the other hand, the more traditional wing of Conservative Judaism, led by Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, Chancellor of JTS, wanted the proposal referred to a joint committee made up of JTS faculty and RA members. Rabbi Blumenthal’s complaint about the Orthodox character of the Seminary faculty was not just an observation, but also a charge to the RA regarding the Epstein proposal, that they not allow the Seminary faculty to torpedo the proposal. Rabbi Finkelstein’s group lost the vote 92-88, in what was, in a sense, a repudiation of Lieberman’s Orthodox influence, and a rejection of his ketuba as too Orthodox and not impactful enough.[21] The majority of the RA membership was prepared to head in a more liberal direction.

After the passage of the Rabbinical Assembly resolution, the Agudat HaRabbanim turned to Rav Herzog in the letter below, asking him to intervene and prevent this breach of kedushat hamishpacha beyisrael.[22] (It is not clear to me why they termed the Epstein proposal nisuin al tnay, or conditional marriage, which is a different attempted mechanism to prevent aguna situations.)

In response to the request of Agudat HaRabbanim, Rav Herzog turned to Lieberman in the letter below, asking him to intervene and prevent the implementation of the proposed nisuin al tnay.[23] (Rav Herzog apparently understood the proposal to be literally one of conditional marriage, and thus referred Lieberman to the book Ain Tnay Benisuin, rather than the book LeDor Acharon, mentioned in the Agudat HaRabbanim letter, which deals with the Epstein proposal.)

In response to Rav Herzog’s letter, Lieberman sent Rav Herzog the very fascinating letter below. (A transcription of this letter appears in Appendix B.) Lieberman tells Rav Herzog that the Orthodox Rabbis are simply looking for excuses to make machloket, that Rabbi Finkelstein strongly protested the re-introduction of the Epstein proposal (as we noted was reported in the National Jewish Post), and that the President of the Assembly (Rabbi Blumenthal) also denied the claim of the Agudat HaRabbanim. He then says that the entire purpose of his revised ketuba was to bury the possibility of the Epstein proposal! He also mentions that some Orthodox Rabbis have claimed that any wedding which uses the new ketuba is invalid, and the kiddushin are not tofsin. (I have been unable to find any documented source of a Rabbi who made such a claim. I would be indebted to any of the readers who could provide such a source.) Lieberman concludes by assuring Rav Herzog that he would be the first to protest the implementation of the Epstein proposal, and that such a nevala could never happen while he is at the Seminary.

Rabbi Blumenthal’s denial was in fact reported by the JTA.[24] He said that the Assembly only authorized a committee to re-study the problem.

Some points remain unclear to me, as Rabbi Finkelstein’s group did indeed lose the vote, and the RA did pass a resolution that the Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards submit a plan for the implementation of the Epstein proposal. I find it hard to understand Rabbi Blumenthal’s denial, or how Lieberman could claim that the Orthodox Rabbis were simply seeking machloket, when the RA passed a resolution for implementation (even documented in the RA Proceedings), with the left-wing defeating the traditional wing.

(to be continued)

Appendix A

Letter from Lieberman to Rav Herzog about Torat Ha-Ohel

בע”ה אור ליום ד’ פרש’ לך תש”ט

לידידי הגאון הגדול האמתי מרן רי”א הלוי הירצוג, לב”ב ולכל הנלוים עליו שלום רב.

היום קבלתי את יקרת כ”ג ואעשה כמובן כבקשתו. והנה נזכרתי שאני חייב התנצלות לכ”ג על שתיקתי הממושכה. היו כמה סיבות וטעמים לדבר. את ספרו היקר קבלתי בזמנו ונהניתי מאד מחידושיו הנפלאים ובקיאותו המפליאה. לא רציתי להטריד אותו בהערותי שמא יראה נחיצות נמוסית להשיב, והרי מכיר אני את טרדותיו המרובות, ולמה להעמיס עליו עוד משא? כדי שלא יהי’ מכתבי כשטר הדיוטות ארשום לו כמה דברים קלים שאינם צריכים עיון ומו”מ. דברי הר”מ בפ”א מהל’ סנהדרין ה”ב קשה להגיה, וכנראה שלדעת הר”מ אין כלל מצוה למנות דיינים בחו”ל, כפי שהבין בו הרמב”ן בפרש’ שופטים, וכן משמע מלשונו של הר”מ בסה”מ עשין קע”ו ומקורו הוא הבבלי במכות ספ”א[25] לפי גירסת המאירי שם: “אבל בחו”ל אי אתה מושיב בכל פלך ופלך ובכל עיר ועיר.” והוא מביא שם את גירסת התלמוד שלנו בשם “ויש גורסים” ומסיים: ולא נראה כן. ואשר לפסק הר”מ בספ”ט מה’ מלכים נראה שהוא חלק בין ב”נ ובין ישראל. שהרי ישראל מצווים למנות שופטים כמ”ע של שופטים ושוטרים תתן לך, ואפילו יצוייר שנהיה בטוחים שישראל לא יעברו על שום עברה ג”כ מצוה למנות שופטים. ברם ב”נ מחוייב למנות שופטים רק מפני שהוא מצווה על הדינין, כלומר שישגיח שלא יעברו על מצות ב”נ. ואם לא מנה שופטים בפלך ועבר אחד מהם עברה ולא דנו אותו כלם חייבים מיתה (שהרי כל אחד ראוי לדון יחידי), אבל כ”ז שלא עברו עברה אינם חייבים מיתה על מינוי דיינים אפילו לשיטת הר”מ.[26] ועיין ביד רמה נו ע”ב וברש”י ד”ה כך נצטוו, ומלשונו של הרמ”ה משמע שכן היה לפניו מפורש בגמרא שבני נח הוזהרו מחמת “ושפטו.”

בענין גר העמלקי (דף נ”ו) עיין מ”ש החיד”א ביעיר אוזן, עין זוכר מערכת ג’ אות א’ דברים מחוכמים מאד.

[בעני]ן מכת מרדות (צ”ט) עיין בשו”ת [הר]שב”ש סי’ תר”י וציינתי לו בתוספת ראשונים ח”ב צד 170 (עכשיו ראיתי שידידנו הרב כשר קנה במשיכה מספרי שם את כל החומר ופרסמם בסיני.)

כפי שאמרתי לא ארבה בדברים שצריכים לינה בעומקה של הלכה, ואני מקוה שנוכל לדבר ע”ז אי”ה פה אל פה.

על כמה דברים שנתחדשו אצל כ”ג באופן פרטי שמענו מאורחים וידידים היורדים מהתם להכא ושמחנו מאד לשמוע שכלתו הכבודה ב”ה נתרפאה לגמרי. מצטער אני מאד שרי”ד[27] שלנו נושא בעול הצבור ואינו מתפנה לגמרי לעולה של תורה. הרי עדיין הוא צעיר ויכול להיות לגאון הדור. ומדי דברי בו נזכרתי ששאל אותי מקום הירושלמי: התלמיד תוך ד’ אמות ברם הרב אפילו חוץ לד’ אמות והשבתי לו שירושלמי כזה אין לפנינו. ואעפ”י שכן הוא האמת בכ”ז שכחתי באותה שעה שכן מביא הריטב”א בסוכה כ”ח בשם הירושלמי.

אצלנו אין כל חדש. אנו יושבים ומצפים לגאולה שלמה, ייתי ונחמיניה.

בפ”ש מבית לבית

הנני מעריצו ומוקירו וידידו הנאמן

שאול ליברמן

הייתי מכיר טובה מאד לרבנית שתחי’ אם תודיע לנו בפרוטרוט על חיימקה שיחי’ ומשפחתו ועל רי”ד אהובנו.[28]

Appendix B

Letter from Lieberman to Rav Herzog about the Epstein Proposal

בעה”י יום ה’ פרש’ מטות תשי”ז

לכבוד ידידינו הגאון הגדול האמיתי מרן הרי”א הלוי הירצוג הרב הראשי לא”י ברכה ושלום רב.

יקרת כ”ג מי’ תמוז הועברה אלי לכרם מרתה[29], ומאד מאד התפלאתי שכ”ג האמין לדיבת הרבנים כאן. אמנם בכנסיית הרבנים השמרנים דברו על עיון מחדש בשאלת תנאי בקידושין, אבל ד”ר פינקלשטיין יצא בכל תוקף נגד חידוש העיון. ונשיא הכנסיה הנ”ל הכחיש בעצמו את דיבת הרבנים. אבל הללו מחפשים רק אמתלאות למחלוקת. כל עניין הכתובה היה כדי לקבור לגמרי את שאלת התנאי. הסברתי להם שאם ליחיד אפשר פעם לחשוב ע”ז הרי לרבים אין הדבר בא כלל בחשבון שהתנאי יעשה ע”פ דין, וישתקע הדבר ולא יעלה שוב על הפרק. וכולם הסכימו ל[י]. עכשיו יש מהם שבאים בטענות ואומרים: הרי הרבנים הארתודוכסים טוענין שאף הכתובה נעשתה שלא כדין, ויש מהם (כלומר מהרבנים הארתודוקסים) שאמרו שהמתחתן בכתובה החדשה אין הקידושין תופסין, והאשה מותרת בלי גט (ממש לא יאומן כי יסופר! אבל לצערי נאמרו הדברים), א”כ הרי מוטב לעשות תנאי בקידושין, ולהפטר מכל שאלת העגונה בבת אחת. והנני מבטיח את כב”ג שאין לשמועה שום יסוד, אחרת הייתי אני בין הראשונים למחות, וכל זמן שאני בסמינר לא יתכן שיעשו נבלה כזו.

בפ”ש ובברכה לכל המשפ[חה]

בהערצה ובידידות

שאול [ליברמן]

The
Not-So-Humble Artichoke in Ancient Jewish Sources

Susan
Weingarten

There
has been a lot of discussion of artichokes recently in the wake of
the ruling by the Israeli Rabbinate that they are not kosher. A
recent post on Seforim Blog traced their ancestry as a Jewish food
back to the 14th
century.
But we can go back further, to the talmudic literature, where
artichokes appear as qinras.
We
can identify many Greek (and fewer Latin) food-names in the Aramaic
and Hebrew of the written texts of the talmudic literature. The
rabbis sometimes use Greek terminology to explain food names. Thus,
for example, biblical regulations on agriculture include a ban on
growing two different kinds of crops together. Mishnah Kilayim
tells
us that thistles (qotzim)
are allowed in a vineyard, i.e. they are seen as wild growths, but
artichokes (qinras)
are not allowed, so that it is clear that artichokes are seen as
cultivated rather than wild growths.[1] Qotz,
the wild thistle, is a biblical Hebrew term, while the Aramaic qinras
appears
to be derived from the Greek for artichoke,
kinara
or
kynara.
Artichokes
were carefully cultivated in the Graeco-Roman world; presumably their
name came with the agricultural methods which turned wild thistles
into cultivated artichokes. It is still difficult to know whether the
artichoke proper is meant here, or rather the closely related
cardoon.[2] It is clear, however, that there were a number of edible
thistles which grew wild, and that the artichoke is a cultivated
variety. The medical writer Galen describes the artichoke as
‘overvalued.’[3] This was partly because of its negative health
properties, for he saw it as unwholesome, sometimes hard and woody,
with bitter juice. So he recommends boiling artichokes and adding
coriander if eating them with oil and garum;[4]
or frying them in a pan.

But
Galen’s objections to artichokes may not be merely medical. They
may also be an echo of the attitude we find in Pliny,[5] who tells us
that artichokes were exceptionally prized by the gourmets of Rome,
and that there was a roaring trade in them. Pliny disapproved:

Pliny,
writing in the first century, uses all the tricks of rhetoric to put
over his disapproval of this ridiculous fad of over-valuing
artichokes, and eating them out of season: note the alliteration and
assonance of carduos
with
Cartago and Corduba, which he presumably despised as far-away
provincial cities.[7] He is also indignant about the enormous prices
charged for them, satirising the rich who eat the artichokes as being
lower than the animals who despise them.[8] His diatribe does not
seem to have been generally successful. Artichokes were still clearly
prized in the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries: a mosaic
from the so-called ‘House of the Buffet Supper’ in Antioch shows
them on a silver tray as a first course for dinner.[9] And in a
Palestinian context, another mosaic with what look like two purplish
artichoke heads and a silver bowl, dated to the third century, has
been found recently in excavations of ancient Jerusalem – or rather
Aelia
Capitolina.[10]

The
classical picture of artichokes as food for the rich and upper
classes is confirmed by the talmudic literature. For example, Midrash
Esther Rabbah, writes:

S.
Klein in his article ‘Bar-Yohannis from Sepphoris at Rome,’
suggested
that this may be the first reference to the famous Roman Jewish
artichoke dish carciofi
alla giudia.[12]
(For a recipe see E. Servi Machlin The
Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews
[NY,1981,
1993] p. 180-1). Unfortunately there is no proof to confirm Klein’s
charming suggestion, since, as we have seen, artichokes seem to have
been famously popular among the Roman pagan nobility.[3] One of the
reasons for the perceived desirability of artichokes as food may also
have been the effort needed to prepare them – an effort usually
only available to the rich through their slaves – the poor would
have had little time for this. But one time when the poorer Jews
would have had time would be on a festival, when ordinary work was
not allowed, but food-preparation was permitted, as it contributed to
the enjoyment of the festival. The Tosefta specifically states that
while cutting vegetables was generally not allowed on a festival (in
case people actually went and cut them down in the fields), trimming
artichokes and ‘akavit/‘aqubit,
a wild thorny plant, was allowed, as this was part of the preparation
needed for cooking these prickly vegetables, which was allowed on a
festival:

Whether
poorer people actually ate artichokes as special festival food, or
rather only ate the wild ‘akavit/‘aqubit
is
unclear from this source. It is also unclear what the reason for
trimming was: to remove the thorny stems or to cut off the upper part
of the leaves and remove the inedible inner part known as the
‘choke’?

The
Babylonian Talmud records that artichokes were sent over long
distances to be eaten by Rabbi Judah haNasi. A rich man called Bonias
‘sent Rabbi a measure of artichokes from Nawsah, and Rabbi
estimated it at two hundred and seventeen eggs.’[15] The eggs here
are a measure of volume: clearly there were quite a lot of
artichokes. ‘Nawsah’ may refer to a settlement on an island in
the Euphrates River outside Babylonia.[16] It was a long way from
Galilee where Rabbi lived, and only the rich could afford to pay for
the transport of these luxuries. Some way of preserving the
artichokes, like keeping them in honey-vinegar as described by Pliny
above, must have been used.

Unlike
the classical sources, there is no moral condemnation here of
artichokes as symbols of conspicuous consumption, and tampering with
nature. The rabbis of the Talmudim are generally presented as
appreciative of good food, and as seeing feasting as desirable,
rather than to be condemned.[17] Eating good food, for example, is
one of the recommended ways of celebrating or ‘honouring’ Sabbath
and festival.[18] Indeed, Rabbi himself, when looking back
nostalgically to the time when the Temple still stood, represented
his longing for it in terms of desire for the wonderful foods that
would have been available in that now legendary time.[19]

How
did Rabbi eat his cucumbers and artichokes? Unfortunately the
talmudic literature does not tell us, but there are details in some
Roman authors which may give us some idea of the possibilities.
Athenaeus tells us artichokes must be well-seasoned, or they will be
inedible. The fourth-century Roman cookery book attributed to Apicius
recommends serving artichokes with liquamen
and
oil, and either chopped boiled egg; or cumin and pepper; or pounded
green herbs with pepper and honey.[20] We have already cited Rabbi’s
contemporary, the medical writer Galen, who visited Syria and other
parts of the Near East. He sometimes describes methods of cooking
similar to those found in the talmudic literature.[21] We saw that
Galen recommends eating artichokes boiled with the addition of
coriander, garum
and
oil. He also mentions frying them. Was this the origin of carciofi
alla giudia?

[1]
Mishnah Kilayim v 8.

[2]
The identification of the Latin term cardui
with
artichokes, rather than cardoons, has recently been questioned:C.A.
Wright ‘Did the ancients know the artichoke?’
Gastronomica
9/4
(2009) 21-27.

[3]
Galen On
the powers of foods ii.

[4]
Garum
was
the famous Graeco-Roman salty fermented fish-sauce, called liquamen
by
Apicius, used widely as a condiment. R.I. Curtis Garum
and salsamenta: production and commerce in materia medica (Leiden,
1991); M. Grant Roman
Cookery
(London,
1999); S. Grainger, C.Grocock Apicius:
a critical edition,
(Totnes, 2006)373-387:
Appendix
4: Excursus on garum and liquamen.
It is found in the talmudic literature under the name of muries:
S. Weingarten ‘Mouldy bread and rotten fish: delicacies in the
ancient world,’ Food
and History
3
(2005) 61-72. Sauces combined with garum are mentioned in eg Tos
Betsah ii, 16 and in BTYoma76a, but it is not clear that Babylonian
Jews were using this term to mean the same foodstuffs as were used by
the Jews of the Land of Israel.

[5]
Pliny : NH
19,
152f.

[6]
Pliny NH
19,
152-3: certum
est quippe carduos apud Carthaginem magnam Cordubamque praecipue
sestertium sena milia e parvis redderareis, quoniam portent quoque
terrarium in ganeam vertimus, serimusque etiam ea quae refugiunt
cunctae quadrupedes …condiuntur quoque aceto melle diluto addita
laseris radice et cumino, ne quis dies sine carduo sit.

[7]
On Pliny’s distrust of the ‘foreign’ taking over the Roman, an
old Roman literary trope, see T. Murphy Pliny
the Elder’s Natural
History:
the empire in the encyclopedia (Oxford,
2004) 68ff.

[8]
On Pliny’s hostility to luxury, a traditional theme of Latin
poetry: Murphy (above n.35) 71. See also M. Beagon Roman
Nature: the thought of Pliny the Elder
(Oxford,
1992)  190: ‘moral condemnation of luxuria
is
more than a commonplace to Pliny.’

[9]
F. Cimok (ed.) Antioch
Mosaics
 (Istanbul,
1995) 44-47.

[10]
The mosaic was excavated by Shlomit Wexler-Bdollach and has been
published by Rina Talgam Mosaics
of Faith (Jerusalem/Pennsylvania,
2014) p. 48 fig 70. I am grateful to both for allowing me to see
their pictures and text prior to publication.

[11]
The question of whether the midrash is to be seen as referring to a
Persian situation is beyond the scope of this paper.

[12]
BJPES
7
(1940) 47-51 (in Hebrew)

[13]
See also
I.
Löw Die
Flora
der Juden
vol
I, (Wien, 1924, repr Hildesheim, 1967) p.409.

[14]
Tosefta Beitzah [Yom Tov] iii,19 and cf BTBeitzah 34a. ‘Akavit/
‘aqubit
has
been identified with tumbleweed, Gundelia
Tourneforti,
which is a wild edible thistle still eaten in Galilee and Lebanon,
and known by its Arabic name, ‘aqub.
See
A. Shmida Mapa’s
dictionary of plants and flowers in Israel (Tel
Aviv, 2005, in Hebrew) 236; A. Helou ‘An edible wild thistle from
the Lebanese mountains’ in Susan Friedman (ed.) Vegetables:
proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2008 (Totnes,
2009) 83-4. ‘Aqub
can
still be bought in the present-day market in Tiberias in the spring,
its price depending on whether the vendor has removed the thorns or
left that pleasure to the buyer. Its taste when cooked is not unlike
artichoke.  

[15]
BT Eruvin 83a (my translation).

[16]
For the identification of Nawsah see A. Oppenheimer, Babylonia
Judaica in the Talmudic Period
(Wiesbaden,
1983) pp.266-7.

[17]
This point about the generally positive attitude of the rabbis (in
this case the Babylonian rabbis) to the good things in life is made
by I.M. Gafni The
Jews of Babylonia in the talmudic era: a social and cultural history
(Jerusalem,
1990) 130 citing M. Beer Amoraei
Bavel  – peraqim be-hayei ha-kalkalah
(Ramat
Gan תשל”ה
).
But having made his point, Gafni hedges here, warning against taking
a series of anecdotes from different periods as evidence. However, we
should note that this picture is consistent over both Palestinian and
Babylonian sources, and if we compare it to, say, the attitudes of
early Christian writers or Philo, we see that this trend is absent
there. See my paper ‘Magiros,
nahtom
and
women at home: cooks in the Talmud’ Journal
of Jewish Studies 56
(2005)
285-297.

[18]
For a discussion of the rabbinical requirement in both  Bavli
and Yerushalmi to honour the Sabbath by eating good food, see S.J.D.
Cohen,’Dancing, clapping, meditating: Jewish and Christian observance
of the Sabbath in pseudo-Ignatius’ in B. Isaac, Y. Shahar (eds)
Judaea-Palaestina,
Babylon and Rome: Jews in Antiquity
(Tübingen,
2012) 33-38.

[19]
Midrash Lamentations Rabbah iii, 6/17.  

[20]
Apicius
3.6.

[21]
See e.g.  S. Weingarten ‘Eggs in the Talmud’ in R. Hosking
(ed.) Eggs
in Cookery: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery,
2006
(Totnes,
2007) 274-276.

כּעומד
לפֿני השכינה בשעת ער לערנט:

Rabbi
Aharon Lichtenstein on the Divide Between Traditional and Academic
Jewish Studies

By
Shaul Seidler-Feller

Shaul
Seidler-Feller strives to be a
posheter yid
and an oved
Hashem;
the rest
is commentary. This is his third contribution to the
Seforim blog;
for his previous articles, see here
and here.

This
post has been generously sponsored le-illui
nishmat Sima Belah bat
Aryeh Leib, z”l.

Rabbi
Aharon Lichtenstein enthusiasts might be surprised to learn that
there was a time when the rosh
yeshivah,
zts”l,
lectured publicly in Yiddish. I myself had no idea that this was the
case until my dear friend, Reb Menachem Butler, who fulfills
be-hiddur
the prophetic pronouncement asof
asifem
(Jer. 8:13) in its most positive sense, forwarded me a link
containing a snippet from a talk Rav Lichtenstein had given at the
Yidisher
visnshaftlekher institut-YIVO
on May 12, 1968, as part of the Institute’s forty-second annual
conference. Feeling a sense of responsibility to help bring Rav
Lichtenstein’s insights to a broader audience, I quickly translated
that brief excerpt into English, and, with the assistance of YIVO’s
Senior Researcher and Director of Exhibitions Dr. Eddy Portnoy, my
translation was posted
on the YIVO website in early December 2017. Realizing, however, that
the original lecture had been much longer, Menachem and I made some
inquiries to see if we could locate the rest of the recording, only
to come up empty-handed.

As
hashgahah
would
have it, on the Friday night following the publication of the
translation, I was privileged to share a meal with another dear
friend, Rabbi Noach Goldstein, whose great beki’ut
in Rav Lichtenstein’s (written and oral) oeuvre was already
well-known to me. In the course of our conversation, Noach mentioned
that there was another Yiddish-language shi‘ur
by Rav Lichtenstein available on the YUTorah website. I was stunned:
could this be the missing part of the YIVO lecture? After Shabbat, I
followed up with Noach, who duly sent me the relevant link
– and lo and behold, here was the (incomplete) first part of the
speech Rav Lichtenstein had given at YIVO![1] I told myself at the
time that I would translate this as well; unfortunately, though, work
and other obligations prevented me from doing so…

But
then, in another twist of fate, one
of the orekhei/arkhei
dayyanim
at The
Lehrhaus,
Rabbi (soon-to-be Dayyan Dr.) Shlomo Zuckier, reached out to me at
the end of December in connection with a syllabus he was compiling
for a class he is teaching this semester at the Isaac Breuer College
of Yeshiva University on “The Thought of Rabbi Aharon
Lichtenstein.” I mentioned to him at the time that Noach had
recently referred me to the YUTorah recording and that I had hoped to
translate it. With his encouragement, the permission of YUTorah
(thank you, Rabbi Robert Shur!), and the magnanimous support of an
anonymous sponsor (Menachem Butler functioning as shaddekhan),
I present below a preliminary annotated English version of the
lecture, whose relevance to the current
debate
about Rav Lichtenstein’s attitude toward academic Jewish studies
should be clear. It is my hope to post my original Yiddish
transcription (which awaits proper vocalization), as well as any
refinements to the English, shortly after Pesah;
please check back then for an update.

[UPDATE
(June 15, 2018): My vocalized Yiddish transcription of both
recordings is now available as a PDF here. The text of the
translation below has also been improved accordingly.]

Note:
As was the case with my translation of the shorter recording
published previously, Romanization of Yiddish and loshn-koydesh
(Hebrew/Aramaic) terms attempts to follow the standards adopted by
YIVO,[2] and all bracketed (and footnoted) references were added by
me. It should also be borne in mind that the material that follows
was originally delivered as a lecture, and while the translation
tries to preserve the oral flavor of the presentation, certain
liberties have been taken with the elision of repetitions in order to
allow the text to flow more smoothly.

[A
Century of Traditional Jewish Higher Learning in America]

[Introduction]

I
beg your pardon for the slight delay. It was not on my own account;
rather, my wife is not able to attend, and I promised I would see to
it to set up a recording for her. In truth, I must not only ask your
indulgence; it may be that this behavior touches upon a halakhic
matter as well. After all, the gemore
says that “we do not roll Torah scrolls in public in order not to
burden the community” [see Yume
70a with Rambam, Hilkhes
tfile 12:23]. It is
for that reason that we sometimes take out two or three Torah
scrolls: so that those assembled need not wait as we roll from one
section to another. The gemore
did not speak of tape recorders, but presumably the same principle
obtains, and so I beg your pardon especially.

When
they originally asked me to speak on the topic of “A Century of
Traditional Higher Jewish Learning in America,” they presented it
to me as a counterbalance, so to speak, to a second talk, which, as I
understand it, had been assigned to Professor Rudavsky.[3] They told
me that since we are now marking the centennial of the founding of
Maimonides College, which, as Professor Rudavsky capably informed us,
was the first institution of higher Jewish scholarship in America,
perhaps it would be worthwhile to hear from an opposing view, so to
speak, from the yeshive
world, regarding another type, another model, of Jewish scholarship.
This was certainly entirely appropriate on their part – and perhaps
it was not only appropriate, but, in a certain sense, there was an
element of khesed
in their invitation to me to serve as such a counterbalance.

I
wish to say at the outset that what I plan to present here is not
meant to play devil’s advocate, contradicting what we heard
earlier; rather, just the opposite, I hope, in a certain sense, to
fill out the picture. However, as proper as the intention was, my
assignment has presented me with something of a problem. Plainly put:
my subject, as I understand it, does not exist. We simply do not have
a hundred years of so-called “traditional higher Jewish learning in
America” – at least, not in public. Privately, presumably there
were “one from a town and two from a clan” [Jer. 3:14], a Torah
scholar who sat and clenched the bench[4] here and there. But in
public, in the form of institutions, yeshives,
a hundred years have not yet passed, and for that centennial, I am
afraid, we must wait perhaps another ten to twenty years. At that
point – may we all, with God’s help, be strong and healthy –
they will have to invite a professor as a counterbalance to the
yeshive
world.

The
first yeshive,
which was a predecessor, in a certain sense, to our yeshive,
the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, a yeshive
known as Yeshiva University, was the Etz Chaim Yeshiva, founded in
1886. As a result, I find myself facing something of a dilemma here,
bound in – as it is known in the non-Jewish world – a Procrustean
bed, that same bed familiar to everyone from the gemore
in Sanhedrin.
The gemore
describes that when a guest arrived in Sodom, they had a
one-size-fits-all bed, and it seems that in Sodom they were not
particularly attentive to individual preferences. So they took each
guest and measured him against the bed: if he turned out too short,
they stationed one fellow at his head, another at his feet, and they
stretched him in both directions until he covered the bed; if he
turned out too tall, they would cut him down to size, sometimes at
his feet, sometimes at his head, so that, in any event, he would fit
[Sanhedrin
109b].

Here
I face the same problem, and I have one of two ways to extricate
myself from my present impasse. On the one hand, I could, perhaps,
make a bit of a stretch and broaden the definition of “traditional
higher Jewish scholarship and learning,” so that my title, my
subject, would be accurate and so that I might, after all, be able to
identify a hundred years during which people sat and learned. But, on
the other hand, perhaps I should rather stay firm and close to the
title, maintaining the pure, unadulterated conception of what
constitutes “learning,” “Jewish learning,” “traditional
learning,” even if doing so would come at the expense of completely
fulfilling the task assigned to me: to speak not about a brief span
of years, but a full hundred. You yourselves understand very well
that, given these two options, it is certainly better to choose the
latter – perhaps abbreviating a bit chronologically – in order to
grasp, at least partially, the inner essence of traditional learning
as I understand it.

In
taking up the work of presenting an approach to traditional Jewish
learning here in America, I believe that, in truth, I have two tasks.
The first is to define, to a certain degree, how I conceive of
“traditional Jewish learning,” or, let us say, more or less,
yeshive
learning – what constitutes the idea in its purest manifestation? –
though I fear this might take us to an epoch, a period, that does not
fit the title as it stands, in its literal form.

Second,
having somewhat limited the definition, I wish to briefly introduce
the principal players and give a short report simply on the
historical development of this form of study in the course of the
last hundred, or, let us say, a bit less than a hundred, years.[5]

When
we speak of “traditional higher Jewish learning,” we must analyze
four different terms. And, in truth, one could – and perhaps should
– give a lengthy accounting of each of the four. However, I
mentioned earlier the concept of not burdening the community, so I
will not dwell at all on the latter two. Rather, I will speak about
the first two, “traditional” and “higher,”[6] and it will be
self-understood that my words relate to “Jewish learning.” I
especially wish to focus on the first term, “traditional.”

[Three
Definitions of “Traditional”]

What
does it mean? When we speak here of “traditional” learning – or
when we speak in general about some occurrence or phenomenon and wish
to describe it as “traditional” – I believe we could be
referring to three different definitions:

First,
learning can be “traditional” in the sense that it involves the
study of traditional texts – khumesh
or gemore
– in the same way that one could say about a given prayer, ballad,
or poem that it is “traditional,” and sometimes we speak of a
custom or even of a food as “traditional.” Here, the adjective
refers, simply, to a text that goes back hundreds or thousands of
years, that is rooted in the life of the nation, and that takes up
residence there – at least, so to speak, in a word.

Second,
we can speak of “traditional” learning and refer thereby to
learning that operates, methodologically, using concepts, tools, and
methods that are old. There were once yeshives…
– but this issue does not concern yeshives
only: whatever the discipline, the learning is “traditional” if
one is using methods that are not new, that do not seek to shake up
or revolutionize the field, that have already been trod by many in
the past, with which all are familiar, and that have been employed
for study by a long “golden chain of generations.”

Third,
though, and perhaps especially, when we describe learning as
“traditional,” we refer to a methodology that is not only old,
but that is rooted in – and, to a certain extent, implants within
the student – a particular relationship to the past, or to certain
facets thereof; in other words, an approach to learning through which
the student absorbs a certain attitude to the Jewish past.

Among
these three points, the first – studying traditional texts – is
the least important in establishing and defining what I mean, at
least, when I say that I will speak about “traditional” Jewish
learning. At the end of the day, one can take a gemore
or a khumesh,
study it in a way that is consistent with the spirit of the Jewish
past, and thereby strengthen one’s commitment to Judaism; or,
Heaven forbid, one can do the opposite, studying the same text in
such a way that it undermines that commitment. Khazal
say of Torah learning itself that it can sometimes be a medicine and
at other times, Heaven forbid, a poison [Shabes
88b]. Of course, if one is not dealing with “traditional” texts,
one cannot be engaged in “traditional Jewish learning;” but this
is nothing more than a prerequisite, so to speak, not a determining
factor in establishing what constitutes “traditional Jewish
learning.”

The
second sense – in which one follows a path one knows others have
trod in the past – is much more directly relevant. First of all, it
gives a person a sense of continuity: that he is not the first, that
he is not blazing a trail, that he is not entirely alone, and that
before him came a long chain, generation after generation of Torah
giants, or – excuse the comparison – in the case of another
discipline, of professors, thinkers, or philosophers, who established
a certain intellectual tradition to which he can feel a kind of
connection. This feeling is obviously important not only in relation
to an intellectual tradition; it is significant in general and is
relevant to a person’s approach to social questions writ large –
but perhaps especially to intellectual questions. Second, aside from
not feeling isolated and alone, the benefit is straightforwardly
intellectual: when working in a traditional manner, a person has at
his disposal certain tools that other specialists developed before
him. He also has a common language with others who are engaged in
study, so that it is simply easier for him to express himself,
understand what his fellow says, and communicate with others. For in
the ability to communicate, of course, lies much strength.

However,
I am especially interested in discussing and defining the third
sense: a “traditional” methodology which is not only inherited
from our ancestors, a kind of memento from the house of our
grandfathers and great-grandfathers, but which seeks to implant
within us, on the one hand, and is rooted in, on the other, a
particular relationship to those great-grandfathers. And here I wish
– and I hope you do not misunderstand me – especially to
distinguish and define the wall – and it is a wall – separating
what we conceive of as a yeshive
style of learning from what is considered a more or less academic
approach: that same Wissenschaft
des Judentums which
Professor Rudavsky mentioned earlier, which was identified with those
pioneers of the previous century – [Leopold] Zunz, [Abraham]
Geiger, and their associates – and which, of course, has many
exponents to this very day.

[Two
Differences Between Traditional and Academic Learning]

Where,
then, is the point of distinction dividing a yeshive
approach from a more academic one? I believe that there are two
points in particular upon which it would be worthwhile to focus
briefly.

[Historical
vs. Analytical Orientations in Studying the Text]

First,
the academic approach is more historically oriented. It is more
interested in collecting facts from the past; taking a particular
author or text – it makes no difference: it could be a popular
painter or poet, rishoynim,
Khazal,
even the Bible itself – placing it within the context of a
particular epoch; seeing to it to study, as much as possible, all the
minutiae of that period; and thereby attaining a clear understanding
of the nature, the essence, of the text, work, artist, or author. On
the other hand, the yeshive
or “traditional” approach – “traditional” at least in
yeshives,
and not only in yeshives
but in the study of halokhe
in general – is more analytical in its character. It does not seek
to expand upon a particular work in order to construct an entire
edifice, a whole framework of facts, that would help us understand
the circumstances under which it was written, or what sort of
intellectual or social currents acted upon a person, driving him to
work, paint, or portray one way and not the other. Rather, it is more
interested in exploring and delving deeply into the work itself.
Whatever was happening in the world outside the gemore
has a certain significance, but the main emphasis is not there. The
main emphasis is instead on understanding what the gemore
itself says, what kind of ideas are expressed therein, what sort of
concepts are defined therein, and what type of notions can be
extracted therefrom. In other words, the focus is not so much on
facts as it is on ideas; the approach is more philosophical than
historical; one is concerned more with the text than with the
context.

And
this point – the difference between a yeshive
or traditional approach, on the one hand, and a more academically
oriented one, on the other – is not limited to the walls of the
besmedresh;
it is not our concern alone. Those familiar with the various
approaches to and methods of treating and critiquing literature in
general know that the same argument rages in that field as well –
though perhaps not as sharply. For example, in 1950, during a session
of the Modern Language Association conference, two of the most
esteemed critics in the world of English literature spoke for a group
dealing specifically with [John] Milton. One of them, A.S.P. [Arthur
Sutherland Pigott] Woodhouse, then a professor at the University of
Toronto and a man with a truly incisive approach to literature, gave
a paper whose title – it was given in English – was “The
Historical Criticism of Milton.”[7] From the other side, Cleanth
Brooks, a professor at Yale and one of the “renewers,” so to
speak – or perhaps not a “renewer” but, at the very least, one
of the propagandists arguing on behalf of the so-called “New
Criticism” – gave a different paper entitled “Milton and
Critical Re-Estimates.”[8]

This
is nothing more than a single example – they were specifically
treating Milton in that case – of the aforementioned difference in
approach. On the one hand, Woodhouse argued consistently that in
order to understand Milton, one must delve deeply into the history of
the seventeenth century and of its various intellectual currents –
one of them was mentioned earlier by Professor Rudavsky: the great
interest in Hebrew studies that exerted its influence upon him –
and only once one has gathered together such information and is able,
as much as possible, to reconstitute the seventeenth century as it
was, can one properly understand Paradise
Lost or Samson
Agonistes. And Brooks,
who came from an entirely different school of thought – from I.A.
[Ivor Armstrong] Richards’ school and others’ – claimed that
certainly there is some value to that as well, but the main thing, at
the end of the day, is to understand the poem itself. To do so, one
needs to focus on addressing a different set of problems, problems of
form, and to grasp not so much the relationship of Milton to, let us
say, [Oliver] Cromwell, [Edmund] Spenser, or [John] Donne, but rather
the relationship of the first book of Paradise
Lost – or of
Paradise Regained
– to the second, and so on. And, of course, this difference in
approach, in the goal one wishes to accomplish, manifests as well at
the basic level of one’s work. According to one line of thinking,
one must busy oneself with many small minutiae; according to the
other, one can limit oneself and concentrate on the poem itself.

The
same question can be asked in regard to learning and understanding
Torah. And it is possible that this question presents itself more
sharply with respect to Torah learning than with respect to other
fields of study. In the editor’s introduction to Chaucer’s
poetry, F.N. [Fred Norris] Robinson, one of the most prominent
Chaucer scholars – forgive me, before I became a rosheshive
I studied English literature – mentions that a French professor had
once bemoaned the fact that we find ourselves now in, as he termed
it, l’âge des petits
papiers,[9] in a
period that busies itself with small scraps of paper. What he in fact
meant was that the aforementioned broadening required by the
historical approach – which was, of course, influenced by German
Wissenschaft,
especially in the last century – can at times simply overwhelm.
Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Berliner put it differently. Someone was once
speaking with him about Jewish Wissenschaft
and the like, so he said to him, “If you want to know what Rashi
looked like, what type of clothing he wore, and so on, go consult
Zunz.[10] But if you want to know who Rashi was, what he said, better
to study with me.”[11]

And
I wish to emphasize: when we speak here of a historical, academic
methodology, we refer not only to research. Those who adopt such an
approach certainly go much further, undertaking not only historical
research but also historical criticism. In other words, after having
studied all the minutiae through various investigations, one assesses
to what use they can be put and what light they can shine on some
dark corner of Jewish history. However, this form of criticism, which
is mainly rooted in a more historical approach, is different from the
yeshive
approach. The question turns mainly on what direction one is looking
in: from outside in, so to speak, or vice versa. Does one stand with
both feet in the gemore,
or does one stand outside and look in?

This
question is particularly important in regard to learning Torah. For,
at the end of the day, when we speak of “traditional learning,”
“yeshive
learning,” we are dealing not only with an intellectual activity
but a religious one as well. This means that learning is not only a
scholarly endeavor meant to inform a person of what once existed,
what Khazal
thought, what they transmitted to us, what the rishoynim
held, but is bound up in a personal encounter wherein the individual,
the student, is wholly attached and connected to what he learns and
feels that he is standing before the Divine Presence while he learns.
If one takes to learning in this way, one’s entire approach of
emphasizing the need to keep one’s head in the gemore
attains a special significance unto itself.

Lionel
Trilling once wrote about [William] Wordsworth and Khazal.[12]
There he tells us a bit about his youth – Trilling is, of course, a
Jew – going to synagogue with his father, perusing an English
translation of Pirkey
oves since he did not
know Hebrew, and years later realizing that the relationship of
Wordsworth to nature is the same as that of Khazal
to the Holy Scriptures and that of the rishoynim
to Khazal.
What they found therein he expresses by quoting the last line of
Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”: “Thoughts that do often lie
too deep for tears.”[13] Trilling recognized that for Khazal
or the rishoynim,
the Torah was not simply some sort of intellectual exercise. Rather,
it was something that penetrated into the depths of their souls. It
is to attain that feeling that every yeshive
student strives. Not all achieve it, but everyone does, and must,
aspire to it.

This
is one point distinguishing the method which emphasizes the text from
that which focuses on what surrounds it.

[Respect
vs. Reverence for the Text and the Jewish Past]

A
second difference between the yeshive
and academic approaches is their respective attitudes to the text. I
just mentioned this a moment ago: a benyeshive
approaches a gemore
and other traditional works with a certain reverence, each time with
a greater sense of “Remove your sandals from your feet” [Ex.
3:5], feeling that he is handling something holy, that he is standing
before a great, profound, and sacred text. And this goes hand-in-hand
with an approach not only to a specific text, but to the entire
Jewish past, a past which a benyeshive
not only respects – after all, academics respect it as well – but
toward which he displays a certain measure of submissiveness and
deference. He stands before it like a servant before his master
[Shabes
10a], like a student before his teacher.

If
we seek a parallel to this point in the world at large, we should not
look to modern literary criticism; I do not know whether such an
approach exists among today’s literary disciplines. Rather, we
should go back, perhaps, to the seventeenth century – Professor
Rudavsky mentioned this as well – and the whole question, the great
debate that raged within various circles in Europe, regarding what
sort of approach one should take to the classical world: the
so-called “battle of the books.” You know well that [Jonathan]
Swift, the English author, once wrote a small work – more his
best-known than his best – about a library whose various volumes
suddenly began fighting with one another, this one saying, “I am
better,” and the other saying, “I am better.” What was the
whole argument about? The debate turned on the issue of which
literature should be more highly esteemed: the ancient, classical
literature, or the new, modern literature?[14]

Once
upon a time, people assumed this was just a parody, a type of jeu
d’esprit; Swift was,
after all, a satirical writer, so he wrote it as a joke. However,
almost fifty years ago, an American scholar, R.F. [Richard Foster]
Jones, wrote a whole book about it, The
[Background of the] Battle
of the Books,[15] in which
he demonstrated that this was not merely a parody in Swift’s time.
Rather, he was treating an issue that, for some, actually occupied
the height of importance: the so-called querelle
des Anciens et des Modernes,
“the battle of the Ancients and the Moderns,” which manifests
itself in many, many literary works, especially in critical works of
the seventeenth century. For example, in [John] Dryden’s essay Of
Dramatick Poesie,[16]
there is an entire dialogue between four different speakers, each of
whom deals with the question: how should one relate to the classical
world? And let us recall that during the Renaissance and Reformation,
people related to the classical world differently than even a
professor of classical literature does nowadays. For example,
[Desiderius] Erasmus, one of the greatest figures of the European
Renaissance, made it a practice to pray, Sancte
Socrates, ora pro nobis,
“Holy Socrates, pray for us.”[17] By contrast, today, even in the
classical universities, I do not believe that they pray to Socrates
for help.

By
the seventeenth century, the feeling that was, for Erasmus, so
intense had somewhat weakened, but, nevertheless, the question was
still looming. For an academic today, in his approach to traditional
Jewish texts, “the Ancients”
– the classics, Khazal,
rishoynim
– are, in the words of the English poet Ben Johnson, “Guides, not
Commanders.”[18] A bentoyre,
by contrast, recognizes to a much sharper and greater degree the
authority of Khazal,
rishoynim,
Torah, and halokhe.
For him, texts are not only eminent or valuable, but holy. And this
is a basic difference in attitude which, perhaps, distinguishes the
two approaches and leaves a chasm between them.

Edmund
Wilson, writing one time in The
New Yorker magazine –
he is, of course, a non-Jew, but one who is greatly interested in the
Land of Israel and Jewish matters – mentioned that he believes that
a non-Jew cannot possibly grasp what an observant Jew feels when he
holds a Torah scroll, and not only when he is holding one; how he
thinks about khumesh,
about Torah. To a certain extent, it is difficult to convey to a
modern man who has no parallel in his own experience; perhaps it is
complicated to describe how a bentoyre
or benyeshive
approaches a gemore.
Of course, it is not the same way one approaches khumesh,
for khumesh
is, from a halakhic perspective, a kheftse
of Torah. Of what does Torah consist? Text. However, the kheftse,
the object, of the Oral Torah is not the text alone – which was
itself, after all, originally transmitted orally – but the ideas
contained therein and, in a certain sense, the human being, the mind,
the soul that is suffused with those ideas by a great mentor. Still,
while it may be that the relationship of a benyeshive
to a gemore
is difficult to convey, it is certainly, at the very least, sharply
divergent from the approach of an academic.

And
so, we have, for the time being, two points that distinguish the
traditional form of learning, yeshive
learning, from a more academic approach. But these two points, it
seems to me, are not entirely separate from one another; rather, just
the opposite, one is bound up in the other. At the end of the day,
why does a benyeshive
devote himself so fully specifically to text alone, to the arguments
of Abaye and Rove, and why is he not terribly interested in knowing
Jewish history and the like? Firstly, because he considers the text
so important; if one holds that a text is holy, one wishes to study
it. Secondly, because he believes that the text is not only holy, but
deep – there is what to study there! It contains one level on top
of a second level on top of a third. The more one delves into Torah,
the more one bores into its inner essence, the more distinctly one
senses the radiance and illumination that Khazal
tell us inhere within the Torah [Eykhe
rabe, psikhte
2].

In
order to establish the various levels of interpretation and maintain
that one can examine a particular nuance with great precision, one
must actually believe that a text is both holy and important and that
it stems from an awe-inspiring source. For example, in the Middle
Ages, in – excuse the comparison – the Christian world, people
were involved in all sorts of analysis, each person seeing from his
own perspective…

Notes:

*
I wish at the outset to express my appreciation to my dear friends,
Rabbis Daniel Tabak and Shlomo Zuckier, for their editorial
corrections and comments to earlier drafts of this piece which, taken
together, improved it considerably.

[1]
The date assigned to the
shi‘ur
on the YUTorah website is erroneous; it should read: “May 12,
1968.”

Those
who listen to the original audio will note that it begins to cut in
and out at about 42:40, thus effectively eliminating the direct
connection between the present recording and the one posted on YIVO’s
website. However, it is clear from the short snatches of Rav
Lichtenstein’s voice that have been preserved after 42:40 that the
recordings do in fact belong to one and the same talk (and not two
separate Yiddish lectures on the same topic). Incidentally, if any of
the
Seforim
blog’s
readers knows where the intervening audio can be found, please
contact the editors so that it, too, can be translated for the
benefit of the public.

For
other Seforim
blog
studies related to Rav Lichtenstein, see Aviad Hacohen, “Rav
Aharon Lichtenstein’s Minchat
Aviv:
A Review,”
the
Seforim blog
(September 8, 2014), and Elyakim Krumbein, “Kedushat
Aviv: Rav Aharon Lichtenstein zt”l on the Sanctity of Time and
Place,” trans. David Strauss, the
Seforim blog
(December 5, 2017) (both accessed March 25, 2018).

[2]
See
the YIVO website
(accessed March 25, 2018) for a guide to Yiddish Romanization, as
well as Uriel Weinreich, ModernEnglish-Yiddish, Yiddish-English Dictionary
(New York: Schocken Books, 1977) for his transcriptions of terms
deriving from the loshn-koydesh
component of Yiddish.

[3]
David
Rudavsky, research associate professor of education in New York
University’s Department of Hebrew Culture and Education, presented
before Rav Lichtenstein on “A Century of Jewish Higher Learning in
America – on the Centenary of Maimonides College.” See the
conference program in Yedies:
News
of the Yivo.
See also David Rudavsky, Emancipation
and Adjustment: Contemporary Jewish Religious Movements and Their
History and Thought
(New York: Diplomatic Press, 1967), 318-320, for a brief discussion
of Maimonides College.

For
a history of Maimonides College, founded in Philadelphia in 1867 by
Isaac Leeser – not to be confused with the
post-secondary school of the same name located today in Hamilton,
Ontario – see Bertram Wallace Korn, “The
First American Jewish Theological Seminary: Maimonides College,
1867–1873,” in Eventful
Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth Century American Jewish
History
(Cincinnati: The American Jewish Archives, 1954), 151-213. The
charter of Maimonides College was published in “A Hebrew College in
the United States,” The
Jewish Chronicle
(August 9, 1867): 7 (I thank Menachem Butler for this latter source).
See also Jonathan D. Sarna, American
Judaism: A History
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 80,
431.

[4]
Yiddish kvetshn
di bank/dos benkl is a
particularly evocative way of referring to someone putting in long
hours learning while sitting on a bench or chair in a besmedresh.

[5]
For this part of the
lecture, see my aforementioned, previous translation published on the
YIVO website.

[6]
It appears that the
section of the lecture relating to Rav Lichtenstein’s understanding
of “higher” learning has not been preserved in either of the two
parts of the recording available at present.

[7]
See A.S.P.
Woodhouse, “The HistoricalCriticism of Milton,” PMLA
66:6 (December 1951): 1033-1044.

[8]
See Cleanth
Brooks, “Milton and Critical
Re-Estimates,” PMLA
66:6 (December 1951): 1045-1054.

[9]
F.N.
Robinson, ed., The
Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
(Boston; New York; Chicago: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933), xv.

[10]
Leopold
Zunz, Toledot
morenu ge’on uzzenu rabbenu shelomoh yitshaki zts”l ha-mekhunneh
be-shem rashi,
trans. Samson Bloch ha-Levi (Lemberg: Löbl Balaban, 1840).

[11]
For a
survey and discussion of the various people to whom this critique of
Wissenschaft
has been attributed, see Shimon Steinmetz, “What
color was Rashi’s shirt? Who said it and why?” the
On the Main Line blog
(June 10, 2010) (accessed March 25, 2018). For a recent biography of
Zunz, see Ismar Schorsch, LeopoldZunz: Creativity in Adversity
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). It should be
noted that Zunz (1794–1886) had just turned six when Rabbi Berliner
(also known as Hirschel Levin or Hart Lyon; 1721–1800) passed away.

[12]
Lionel
Trilling, “Wordsworth
and the Rabbis: The Affinity Between His ‘Nature’ and Their
‘Law,’” Commentary
Magazine
20 (January 1955): 108-119, a revised version of his earlier
“Wordsworth and the Iron Time,”
The
Kenyon Review
12:3 (Summer 1950): 477-497. The essay, or a version thereof, also
appeared in a number of other forums.

[13]
William
Wordsworth, “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”
Wikisource,
l.
206 (accessed March 25, 2018). (The poem was first published under
the title “Ode” in Wordsworth’s Poems,
in Two Volumes,
vol. 2 [London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807], 147-158.) This
line does not actually appear in the aforementioned Trilling article.
The Ode itself was the subject of a different essay by Trilling
published under the title “The Immortality Ode” in Trilling’s
The
Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
(New York: The Viking Press, 1950), 129-159.

[14]
See
Jonathan Swift, An
Account of a Battel between the Antient and Modern Books in St.
James’s
Library
(London: John Nutt, 1704).

[15]
Jones’
monograph, The
Background of the Battle
of the Books (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1920), was
actually an offprint of an article by the same name that appeared in
Washington University Studies: Humanistic Series7:2
(April 1920): 99-162.

[16]
John
Dryden, Of
Dramatick Poeſie, an Essay
(London: Henry Herringman, 1668). See also the version reproduced
here
(accessed March 25, 2018).

[17]
Desiderius
Erasmus, The
Colloquies of Erasmus,
trans. N. Bailey, ed. E. Johnson, vol. 1 (London: Reeves &
Turner, 1878), 186.

[18]
Ben
Iohnson, Timber:
or, Discoveries…
(London, 1641), 89.