Edmund Wilson, Hebrew, Christmas, and the Talmud
by Elliott Horowitz

As is well known, during the 1950’s Edmund Wilson, the great (and perhaps greatest) American man of letters, began studying Hebrew, both in order to read the Hebrew Bible on his own, and in order to write in an informed manner about the controversies surrounding the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. As Shalom Goldman noted in his excellent chapter on Wilson in God’s Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (Chapel Hill, 2004), Wilson “delighted in teasing his Jewish friends” about their having jettisoned their (usually limited) Hebraic learning while he was steadily increasing his. As an example, Goldman cites the Christmas card Wilson sent to Alfred Kazin in 1952, which included (in Hebrew) the words “I shall learn Hebrew,” followed by the Wilsonian barb: “I’ll bet you can’t read this.”

If one consults the card itself, reproduced in Edmund Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 ed., Elena Wilson (New York, 1977), it may be seen that before the oddly vocalized words “elmod lashon yisrael,” Wilson added, in the same square script, the blessing “barukh ata la-shem” – probably the first time these words (with the actual tetragrammaton) were used in a Christmas greeting.

Readers of the Seforim blog may also be interested in a subsequent letter of Wilson’s to the Brooklyn-born Kazin, written from the New Yorker office in October 1954, shortly after the article on the Dead Sea Scrolls was completed.

Of course, daf yomi tapes were not yet available…

There are three books devoted to the topic of Nitel.

Mordechai Menachem Goren, Hefaru Torasecha, Ma’amar Makif miMinhag Avosanu b’Yadanu Odos Lil haAfel Nitel Nacht UMinhag Yisrael l’Vatel meEsek haTorah,[4],52, [10] pages, 2004.

This first contains a two page introduction and the next 52 pages discuss the custom, its sources, and the various opinions. The final 10 pages are some sources that are quoted in full.

[Mordechai Menachem Goren], Hefaru Torasecha, (helek bet, b’inyanei haTekufa) . . . u’Migilas Nitel, [40] pages, 2005. This is the last chapter from the prior book and discusses the tefkufa. Additionally, it includes some additional sources about nitel, quoted in their enterity and some Rabbinic statements about Jesus. The work “Megilat Nitel” is also included. This Megilah comes from the work Iggeret R. Yochonon ben Zackai, that work is discussed by Prof. Meir Bar-Ilan in an article here, where he provides, as well, a bibliography of the various editions of Iggeret R. Yochonon ben Zackai.

Yisrael Barukh Messinger, Nitel uMerosroso, Union City, NJ, 251, [4] pages, 1999.
This work is similar to the above and based substantially on Marc B. Shapiro, “Torah Study on Christmas Eve,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 319-353. At the end there is a highly charged discussion about R. Kook and Jesus in note 137 [for more on R. Kook and other controversial statements regarding Jesus, Shabbetai Zevi and others, see Bezalel Naor, Post-Sabbatian Sabbatianism (Spring Valley, NY, 1999), pp.109-13, 203-05].

In Messinger’s book he provides a bibliography of other articles that discuss the topic. One final article that is not mentioned as it came out after Messinger’s book is the chapter in R. Freund’s Moadim l’Simcha, vol. 2, pp. 397-427.

I recently had an enjoyable conversation with a former roommate and friend, back from our days at Yeshivat Kerem B’Yavneh, who is currently nearing completion of a doctorate at the graduate school of an Ivy League institution in computer science, about his views on using print vs. electronic journals. Our discussion centered on the notion that a journal Tradition, published by the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a leading institution of American Modern Orthodox Judaism, charges a fee of $25.00 per year (or $15.00 to students) for non-Tradition subscribers. Parallel journals from within the Modern Orthodox community, like The Meorot Journal (formerly The Edah Journal), published by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the Torah u-Madda Journal, published by the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) of Yeshiva University, are published in both print and electronic formats, thus allowing their publications to be read by individuals from throughout and beyond the geographic and ideological world of Orthodox Judaism.

Below is a lightly-edited version of a letter that I received from my roommate and friend C.G., posted at the Seforim blog with his express permission.

Dear Menachem,

Regarding our conversation about Tradition, we discussed whether graduate students use online journal access through their universities. In my experience, not only do they use the online access, they only use the online access. I know that in 4 years as a PhD student at Columbia I have looked up an article that wasn’t online exactly once. There is just too much material online and too many accessible journals for me to bother going to the library to photocopy a journal that is behind the times. (The one time I did go was for a seminal article from the 70’s that it is de rigueur in my field to cite.) If I had to pay for the article, even a few dollars, there is no way I would have done so. My experience is that other PhD students take the same approach – for all intents and purposes, an article that isn’t freely available to us online doesn’t exist. (By free, I mean “free to me,” as in either free or available through a University’s e-journals program.) Free abstracts isn’t much of a help either, if the article isn’t free. It isn’t even that I’m particularly cheap – it simply makes no economic sense for me to pay. There is always another article you can cite, and considering the hundreds of articles I read before each paper I write, the cost of a few dollars per article would add up pretty fast. It’s the equivalent of replacing a library with a bookstore – if I have to pay for every book I read, I’ll read a lot fewer books, and if most of the books I want are free but a few cost money, it would take a lot to interest me in the ones that I need to pay for.

The New York Times discovered this recently; charging even a small fee for their opinion pages drastically reduced the impact of their columnists on popular thought, which is part of the reason that they are suddenly free again. (Incidentally, they were smart enough to make themselves free to academics even when they were charging the general public). New York Times continues to charge (the general public) for archived articles and I guarantee that this has reduced the frequency that archived articles are cited by non-academic researchers. New York Times can afford to do this because the fact is that they were the paper of record for more than a century and if you are researching news from the 1930’s you don’t have a lot of other choices. However, a small journal that isn’t widely known outside of a relatively small circle doesn’t have the same power.

I will admit that $15 a year is a fairly nominal cost, and if I was planning on citing Tradition a lot I would pay it, much as I pay for various magazines. However, the key here is that I would only do that if I already knew that Tradition was full of material for me. If I came across a Tradition article and I wasn’t familiar with the journal or didn’t think I’d be citing many Tradition articles, I’d just click along to the next result on Google. This is the reason that it’s standard practice in my field to make your own articles available online for free – the easier it is for someone to get it, the more likely it will have an impact. I also concede that my field (computer science) is more “online” than other fields. However, a lot of my friends are in graduate programs and an informal straw poll says that the same is true for other fields. A friend in psychology told me that an article that isn’t free online “doesn’t exist” and a close friend who was researching a Jewish Studies topic in conjunction with the chair of a university department told me that anything he needed to pay for or even needed to go to the library for wasn’t worth his time when there were ten other articles that were free.

My opinion: Tradition’s current pricing is perfectly fine for a magazine. If that’s the model they are aiming for, it’s entirely sustainable, and it’s what most magazines do, as their goal is to maximize subscriptions and revenue. However, an academic journal usually has a different goal of having an impact on the currents of thought in the broader field, and in that respect, if even 25% of researchers are like me and my friends (though, to be honest, I suspect that 95% are) then Tradition is making a big mistake.

Just my opinion of course. Be well,

C.G.

After I posted the Table of Contents to the latest volume of the Torah u-Madda Journal, no. 14 (2006/2007), at the Michtavim blog last week — note, this post has been updated with the links to the PDFs, hosted at YUTorah.org — I received some very harsh criticisms for my laxity in providing links to the PDFs, including one noteworthy email.

To add insult to injury, the accuser sent me criticisms via an anonymous email address! See here [PDF].

ManuscriptBoy:

Moritz Steinschneider’s online presence has been significantly augmented by the Jewish National Library’s Digitized Book Repository. They seem to have scanned all of his German books, as well as the Hebrew translation of his general work ‘Sifrut Yisrael’.

And also includes an interesting anecdote that

someone once told me how Prof. Moshe Bar Asher shut himself in a room for a couple of days, and emerged having taught himself Ugaritic.

Published several weeks ago, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg, Executive Editor of both the Intermountain Jewish News and of Tradition, has written a ‘Review Essay‘ (“Discontinuities: The Case of Saul Lieberman,” reviewing Elijah J. Schochet and Solomon Spiro’s Saul Lieberman: The Man and His Work), in Tradition 40:3 (Fall 2007): 69-75. A PDF of this article is only available to subscribers to TraditionOnline and/or members of the Rabbinical Council of America.

While the aim of a “Review Essay” is usually focused on broadening the perspective of a particular topic with the author making use of the most recent contributions from within the extant scholarly literature, “Discontinuities: The Case of Saul Lieberman” lacks any such focus.

Continue reading this post (“Rabbi Hillel Goldberg on Prof. Saul Lieberman”) at the Michtavim blog.