New Books from Kodesh Press

By Eliezer Brodt

The Seforim Blog is proud to announce the publication of our frequent contributor Mitchell First’s newest book From Eden to Exodus: A Journey into Hebrew Words in Bereshit and Shemot. It comprises short essays on the parshas in Bereshit and Shemot, mostly related to words.

Here is the table of contents:

Available for purchase from Kodesh Press here

I would also like to point out two other special recent new books from Kodesh Press:

1. Rabbi Gil Student’s Articles of Faith: Traditional Jewish Belief in the Internet Era.

Here is the table of contents:

Available for purchase from Kodesh Press here

2. Dr. Moshe Sokolow’s Pursuing Peshat:

Here is the table of contents:

Available for purchase from Kodesh Press here

Half Faith, Half Heresy: Between S.Y. Agnon and Gershom Scholem

Jeffrey Saks

The bonds of friendship between S.Y. Agnon and Gershom Scholom are well documented in their writings and in the copious scholarship on the celebrated Nobel laureate and the revered professor of Jewish mysticism. In this context, the interview that Dan Miron conducted with Scholem about Agnon (broadcast on Israeli television in February 1981, a year before Scholem’s death) is noteworthy. The recording (part 1 not preserved; part 2 and 3 available) and the transcript of the interview (in Hebrew or translation) are available online.

Agnon and Scholem met during the First World War, in the reading room of the Jewish Community Library in Berlin. Last summer, we marked the centennial of the burning of Agnon’s house in Bad Homburg, an event that brought the writer’s fruitful stay in Germany to an end. On the night of June 4-5, 1924, Agnon’s fellow tenant set fire to his apartment in the shared building in an act of arson and insurance fraud, thus proving the Sages’ adage, “Woe to the wicked, woe to his neighbor” (M. Negaim, 12:6). The Agnon family lost almost all of their possessions in this fire. In addition to the manuscripts of two almost-finished books, “four thousand Hebrew books, most of which I inherited from my ancestors and some of which I bought with money I scrimped from my daily bread,” went up in flames, as Agnon later recounted in his speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1966. Among these 4,000 books was at least one that Agnon had received as a gift from Scholem: the young scholar’s first publication, Das Buch Bahir, a product of Scholem’s doctoral dissertation. It was an annotated German translation of a Hebrew manuscript from 1298 of that ancient Kabbalistic text. The book was published by Druglin in Leipzig in 1923, and subtitled Ein Schriftdenkmal aus der Frühzeit der Kabbala auf Grund der kritischen Neuausgabe, which means: “A written monument from the early days of Kabbalah based on a new critical edition.” It appeared in a series called Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Jüdischen Mystik (Sources and Researches on the History of Jewish Mysticism). On the cover, decorated with a woodcut image of a Kabbalist next to a diagram of the Ten Sefirot, is the title “Qabbala.” The backstory of the publication of this dissertation—published at the height of the German inflationary period on a rather esoteric subject—is told by Scholem in From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (Schocken Books, 1980), 142-143.

In the same year that he published his edition of the Bahir, Scholem left Germany for the Land of Israel, arriving on Yom Kippur 1923. A little over a year later, Agnon also left Germany and returned to Jerusalem on Friday, erev Shabbat Parashat Noah 1925. Upon renewing their relationship, Scholem gave Agnon another copy of his book in place of the original, which had been consumed by the flames in Bad Homburg. As an inscription Scholem wrote:

Scholem inscription to Agnon on Das Buch Bahir (Agnon House Library, #2473).

A gift to my friend S.Y. Agnon
May this enter the treasury of his books
Instead of Replacing the first one that was burned
From me, his faithful loving [friend]
Gershom Scholem

Like many new arrivals he was self-conscious of his Hebrew, making occasional errors in his speech (less so in writing). The inscription shows that Scholem had written and crossed out the word bimkom, replacing it with the more poetic tahat. Is there a hint in this edit (on a note to one he considered master of the Hebrew language) to this self-consciousness on the part of the new immigrant to the Hebrew Republic? Upon his arrival in Jerusalem, Scholem deliberated between two job offers: teaching mathematics in a high school or working in the National Library. It was clear that librarianship was a better fit for his personality and interests, but he himself admitted that he was afraid that in school “who could say whether my pupils would not laugh at my Berlin-accented Hebrew?” (From Berlin to Jerusalem, 163).

The Agnon House library in Jerusalem preserves dozens of books, booklets, and offprints by Scholem, many of which bear dedications from the author to Agnon. Agnon, for his part, paid tribute to Scholem and he too inscribed books in exchange (see, for example, an enigmatic dedication from 1952 to his book Ad Henah, published by David Assaf on the Oneg Shabbat website).

One of the most interesting dedications is written on an offprint of Schalom’s well-known article “Mitzvah Ha-ba’ah be-Aveirah,” which was first printed in Knesset: Divrei Sofrim in Memory of H.N. Bialik, vol. 2, edited by Fischel Lachower (Bialik Institute, 1937), 347-392.

The article appears in English as “Redemption Through Sin,” translated by Hillel Halkin, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (Schocken Books, 1971), 78-141 (the acknowledgment on p. 365 misstates the publication date as 1937 rather than the correct December 1936).

This is one of Scholem’s most important studies that broke new ground in understanding Sabbateanism, and it shaped all subsequent research on the subject. Later, the article was republished at the beginning of his collection Mehkarim u-Mekorot le-Toldot ha-Shabtaut (Bialik Institute, 1974), and just last year in a new edition edited by Yonatan Meir, supplemented with an introduction, a comparison of the article’s manuscripts and published versions, notes, and appendices (Blima Books, 2024).

In this broad-ranging article, Scholem sets Sabbateanism as a touchstone through which the continuity of Israel’s history should be reassessed. In his opinion, that false messianic movement led to a disconnect between Halakha and Rabbinic Judaism, on one side, and Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism on the other. The vacuum created in the space in between allowed the rise of modern movements such as the Jewish Enlightenment, secularism, and Zionism. One of Scholem’s well-known assertions in this article is that Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz was a believer in Shabbtai Zvi, as his contemporary Rabbi Yaakov Emden had claimed (see the Y. Meir edition, p. 52 and especially in n. 15). This claim provoked the ire of scholars from the rabbinical world, which may explain the Hebrew rhyme that Scholem wrote on the offprint he gifted to Agnon:

Scholem inscription to Agnon on “Mitzvah Ha-ba’ah be-Aveira” (Agnon House Library).

Half-faith and half-heresy
Almost completely undisguised
To S.Y. Agnon, with friendships’ blessing
From me, Gershom Scholem

In the 1981 interview with Dan Miron, Scholem mentioned the fact that Agnon stood by him when he was attacked by religious and Haredi scholars who were upset by what he wrote in “Mitzvah Ha-ba’ah be-Aveirah” and in subsequent articles. Miron asked about this and the extent of Agnon’s interest in academic research in Jewish studies in general. Scholem replied:

He was interested, he wanted to hear details, understand my grounds for saying what I did. The details were what interested him, the research. He stood up for me when rabbis came and said to him: He’s such an aberration, that Scholem—a perfect ignoramus where the Torah is concerned, Talmud he knows nothing of—and he says the most outrageous things about Sabbetaians, and so on and so forth. Because so long as I wrote about the Zohar, nobody cared a bit, you see, but when I happened to mention in one line—after being convinced of the truth of it—that Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz had been a Sabbetaian—Heaven help me! Agnon’s friends from Poalei Agudat Yisrael—that was a large part of Agnon’s theatrics, his friendship with the Poalei Agudat Yisrael people—well, their rabbis called on him and they said whatever it was, and Agnon told them: “You don’t understand what it’s all about, you don’t understand what Scholem is doing.” So when I came to see him, he told me: “Rabbi So-and-So just left here ten minutes ago, and he called you a…” And he told me what his answer to the rabbi had been too. In a word, Agnon could have regard for a scholar when he considered there was some point to his work. And in all, it was a matter of individuals—respecting some, and some not—because research as such didn’t frighten him, because what did he care whether the Zohar was written at the time of the Tannaim so and so many centuries later. Agnon would have been the first to understand a thing like that. But the world of research in general—that, I think, did not exist for Agnon.

“Gershom Scholem on Agnon: Interview by Dan Miron—Part Two,” Ariel 53 (1983), 62-63.

It is unclear who Agnon’s Haredi “friends from Poelei Agudat Yisrael” were. It is possible that at the time of the interview, 45 years after the publication of “Mitzvah Ha-ba’ah be-Aveirah,” Scholem confused them with members of Mizrachi and the Religious Zionist Community, since among his staunch critics were Yitzhak Werfel (later Yitzhak Raphael, who also went under the penname A. Hashiloni) and Rabbi Reuven Margolies (1889-1971), both of whom were identified with Religious Zionism.

After Scholem deepened and substantiated his assertion regarding R. Eybeschutz’s Sabbatean beliefs (in a critical review of a psychoanalytic biography of R. Emden written in English by Mortimer Cohen), Margolies published a harsh response against Scholem. Margolies, who authored dozens of Torah books, was then the chief librarian of the Maimonides Library in Tel Aviv (now part of Beit Ariella) and was a distinguished Torah scholar. The current librarian, R. Avishai Elbom, published a column “Rabbi Reuven Margolies vs. Professor Gershom Scholem” (Am HaSefer Blog, 2021) reviewing the controversy that spilled over into adjacent topics in Zohar research.

Rabbi Reuven Margolies (1967)

Scholem, for his part, authored a twenty-page pamphlet published by Schocken in 1941 and titled Leket Margaliot (whose English subtitle would be: Assessing the New Defense of Rabbi Yonatan Eybeschutz). It is reprinted in his Mehkarei Shabtaut, edited by Yehuda Liebes (Am Oved, 1991), 686-706, with a bibliographical appendix reviewing the substance and stages of the debate. The pamphlet was a sharply worded response to Margolies’ criticisms.

A copy of the pamphlet with an inscription from Scholem to Agnon survives in the Agnon House collection:

Scholem inscription to Agnon on Leket Margaliot (Agnon House Library, #2839).

To S.Y. Agnon, my friend and comrade in the war against the ignoramuses (amei ha’aretz).
With blessings, Gershom Scholem

Agnon appreciated Scholem’s dual personality: an open faith and an almost undisguised heresy. As far as we know, he had little or no relationship with R. Reuven Margolies, who was also a native of Galicia, despite their common affinities. The years of Agnon’s and Margolies’ lives overlapped almost entirely. Margolies, a Lviv native studied in Agnon’s hometown of Buchach, receiving semikha from Rabbi Meir Arik (1855-1925), the town’s dayyan and posek, who appears a number of times in Agnon’s ‘Ir u-Meloah (A City in Its Fullness), a collection of his tales of Buchach. The Agnon House library has thirteen of Margolies’ books in its collection, but unlike the inscriptions that memorialize the warm friendship between Agnon and Scholem, there is not a single dedication to Agnon in Margolies’ books.

Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, Director of ATID and its WebYeshiva.org program, is Director of Research at Agnon House in Jerusalem and editor of the journal Tradition. Thanks to Profs. David Assaf and Yonatan Meir for their assistance.

‘And Moses Hid His Face’: Isaac Abarbanel and Maimonides on the Nature of Prophecy
Eric Lawee

Eric Lawee is a full professor in the Department of Bible at Bar-Ilan University, where he teaches the history of Jewish biblical scholarship. His *Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic* (2019), published by OUP, won the 2019 Jewish Book Award in the category of Scholarship of the Jewish Book Council (Judges’ Remarks below) and was finalist for a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies in 2021. He holds the Rabbi Asher Weiser Chair for Medieval Biblical Commentary Research and directs Bar-Ilan’s Institute for Jewish Bible Interpretation.

Throughout his life, the great commentator on the Torah of the “generation of the expulsion,” Isaac Abarbanel, engaged in a searching, fruitful, and at times highly conflicted dialogue with Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), the medieval predecessor whom he most admired. Some elements of the Maimonidean legacy Abarbanel greatly esteemed but others he strongly rejected. One teaching of Maimonides on a fundamental issue that Abarbanel considered dangerously wrongheaded lay in the sphere of prophetology. Maimonides understood prophecy as a natural occurrence. On this view, anyone who fulfilled the necessary conditions for prophecy would prophesy. Concomitant with this approach was Maimonides’ notion that a prophet had to engage in “preparations,” moral and especially intellectual, to attain prophecy, which Maimonides viewed as the highest form of human perfection.[1]

In discussing the nature of prophecy, Maimonides outlines three positions. The first is the belief held by the vulgar (pagan as well as some simpler adherents of the Torah) that God can transform whomsoever God chooses into a prophet. On this view, prophecy is a miraculous phenomenon and an expression of the sovereign will of God. Since the prophet is chosen by God’s will without precondition, there is no need for “preparations” to become a prophet. By contrast, Maimonides claims that there is consensus between the philosophers and the Torah that prophecy is a natural phenomenon. Those who, over the course of their lifetimes, attained the requisite moral perfection and, above all, intellectual perfection, would necessarily achieve prophecy, as it was not contingent in any way on the volitional intervention of God. From this understanding, it followed that prophecy demands arduous preparation.[2]

In responding to this presentation of the matter in his commentary on The Guide of the Perplexed, Isaac Abarbanel departed from the role he assigned to himself exclusively as an expositor of Maimonides. Unable to hold back, he sharply criticized Maimonides’ positions on the subject:

I say that the first principle upon which the Rabbi built his “line of confusion and a plummet of emptiness” (cf. Isa. 34:11)—that is, that prophecy is a natural perfection that comes to one prepared for it […]—is false.” Prophecy is a miraculous occurrence, contends Abarbanel, “that comes directly from God.”[3]

Put otherwise, Abarbanel’s view aligns with that of “the multitude of ignorant individuals among those who believe in prophecy,” whom Maimonides dismissed with derision. Since, according to Abarbanel, prophecy is a supernatural occurrence, it does not require preparation on the part of its recipient, though it does require moral rectitude on the part of the prophet.[4]

While, however, vehemently rejecting Maimonides’ understanding of prophecy in his commentary on The Guide of the Perplexed, Abarbanel strikes a different note in his commentary on Exodus in the course of explaining a midrashic debate concerning Moses’ behavior at the burning bush: “And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God” (Exod 3:6). Abarbanel quotes a disagreement between R. Joshua ben Korḥah and R. Hoshaya:

One [R. Joshua ben Korhah] said: Moses did not act properly when he hid his face, for had he not hidden his face, the Holy One, blessed be He, would have revealed to him what is above and what is below, what was and what is to come. Later, Moses requested to see, as it is stated: “Show me, I pray, Your glory” (Exod 33:18). The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: “When I wished [to show you], you did not wish [to see]; now that you wish [to see], I do not wish [to show you],” as it is stated: “For no man shall see Me and live” (Exod. 33:20). And R. Hoshaya said: Moses acted properly when he hid his face. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to him: “I came to show you My face, and you honored Me by hiding your face. By your life, as a reward for this, you shall sit on the mountain for forty days and forty nights and enjoy the radiance of the Divine Presence,” as it is stated: “And Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone” (Exod. 34:29).[5]

At this point, in a pattern widely attested in his biblical commentaries, Abarbanel diverges from his task of engaging in running exposition of the Torah to offer a detailed interpretation of the midrash that he cites, stating: “It is fitting that we understand in what these sages disagreed and what the intention of each of them was.”

Beginning with Joshua ben Korḥah, Abarbanel explains the somewhat elusive dispute in terms of the debate over the nature of prophecy that so sharply divided him from Maimonides:

It seems that the dispute between these two perfect ones was about whether prophecy requires some sort of prior natural educational preparation or does not, it being from the divine will alone, [these two views being] in accordance with those opinions mentioned by the master and guide in chapter thirty-two of part two [of the Guide]. R. Joshua ben Korhah would then be saying that training is not a necessary precondition for [achieving[ prophecy since it is by the will of God that the prophet prophesies.[6]

Abarbanel attributes the opposing view to R. Hoshaya:

However, R. Hoshaya praised Moses for what he did, for he held the view that prophecy requires prior preparation in the prophet […] as the master and guide [Maimonides] wrote. Therefore, Moses, being at the beginning of his prophetic journey, hid his face because he was not yet prepared for the great perfection he would later attain.[7]

Bearing in mind the implacable opposition that Abarbanel expresses in his commentary on the Guide to the claim that prophecy is a natural occurrence requiring “preparations” (“line of confusion and a plummet of emptiness”), it is nothing short of astonishing that Abarbanel utters no criticism of this view when explicating the midrashic controversy over Moses’ conduct at the burning bush.[8] Indeed, by ascribing what he considers Maimonides’ wholly deviant view to one of the “perfect” sages, Abarbanel gives the naturalistic understanding of prophecy that he finds so repellent a grounding in classical Jewish tradition. The result of such forays into interpretation of rabbinic sayings is twofold: a midrash whose meaning is unclear is made to speak to profound issues of theology and, as noted, by engaging in such interpretations, Abarbanel will at times give a home in the Jewish tradition to a philosophically informed position of Rambam that he otherwise strongly contests.[9]

Notes:

This essay is based on an article that appeared in Daf Shvui (Bar-Ilan University), no. 1602: Parashat Shemot (18 January 2025): 1-2 (Hebrew).

[1] Many have analyzed Maimonides’ teaching on prophecy. For a comprehensive discussion, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht, 2001), 148–315.
[2] Guide of the Perplexed, 2:32 (in the Hebrew translation of Michael Schwarz [Tel Aviv, 2003], vol. I, pp. 373–376). Maimonides does claim a second-order distinction between the philosophic teaching and that of the Torah, stating that according to the latter even one who has completed all the necessary preparations for prophecy might yet not attain prophecy due to divine intervention that prevents that person from prophesying. Most classical commentators on the Guide—Joseph Ibn Kaspi, Moses Narboni, Isaac ben Moses Halevi (Profeyt Duran / “Efodi”), and Shem Tov ben Joseph—argue that Maimonides’ esoteric opinion on the matter aligns with the philosophers. In contrast, Abarbanel claims that Maimonides’ view is the one he casts as “the opinion of our Torah.” See David Ben Zazon, Nevukhim hem: masa‘ be-be’uro shel don Yiṣḥaq ’Abravanel le-‘moreh ha-nevukhim’ (Jerusalem, 2015), 215–217; Kreisel, Prophecy, 227–229.
[3] Moreh nevukhim le-ha-rav Moshe ben Maimon… be-ha‘ataqat ha-rav Shemu’el ibn Tibbon ‘im ’arba‘ah perushim (1872; photo offset Jerusalem, 1961), part II, chapter 32, 69r.
[4] See Alvin J. Reines, Maimonides and Abrabanel on Prophecy (Cincinnati, 1970), lxxiv.
[5] Isaac Abarbanel, Perush ‘al ha-torah, 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1964), Shemot, 28. See Shemot Rabbah 3:1.
[6] Perush ‘al ha-torah, Shemot, 28. On Abarbanel’s tendency to interpret midrashim in his biblical commentaries, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance Toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany, 2001), 119–122.
[7] Perush ‘al ha-torah, Shemot, 29.
[8] This even-handedness may partially reflect Abarbanel’s dilution of Maimonides’ teaching: he ascribes to R. Hoshaya a weak version of the insistence that prophecy has preconditions that plays down the need for “preparations” of a specifically philosophic sort.
[9] For another example in which Abarbanel, in effect, projects a medieval controversy involving him and Maimonides onto a midrashic screen in a way that finds a home in classical tradition for a view of Maimonides that he rejects, see his interpretation of the maxims in the second chapter of tractate Avot, which he presents as a running dispute between sages over the crucial question of the path that leads a person to perfection. In particular, Abarbanel asserts that the issue at bar is whether Judaism’s approach to this question is enhanced by incorporating elements of philosophical ethics. See Perush ’Abarbanel ‘al mesekhta de-’avot (= Naḥalat -’avot), ed. Aron Golan (Ashkelon, 2012), 62–107.

A World War II Liberator’s Letter to his Hometown Rabbi

By Rabbi Akiva Males

I recently realized that this year, January 26th will correspond to the 26th of Teves. That date marks the tenth Yahrtzeit of a remarkable man — who lived through some extraordinary experiences exactly eighty years ago. I had the honor of knowing Mr. Charles Press (1920 – 2015) for the last eight years of his life. However, others in Harrisburg, PA (where I served as a pulpit Rabbi from 2007 – 2016) enjoyed his friendship for over nine decades. Over the course of those many years, Charlie (as he was lovingly known) was a very active member of his synagogue (Kesher Israel Congregation) and the Jewish community that had nurtured him. With his devoted wife Eunyce (1924 – 2023) at his side, Charlie was also among the most dedicated volunteers that his Shul ever knew.

Charlie was a member of the heroic cohort which journalist Tom Brokaw reverently labeled as “The Greatest Generation”. On several occasions, I had the opportunity to hear him speak about some of his World War II experiences. As the 80th anniversary of those events approaches, I believe some of what Charlie told me needs to be shared with a broader audience.

Measuring over six feet, Charlie was a very tall man — yet one of the gentlest people I ever met. As much as I try, it is hard for me to imagine him as a strapping young man in his early twenties, struggling to stay warm under his olive drab steel helmet, and spending sleepless nights in frigid fox holes, while slugging it out with the Nazis. However, that is exactly what the early months of 1945 were like for Charlie Press.

After the US entered World War II in December of 1941, Charlie saw many of his childhood friends leave Harrisburg to join the fight in both the European and Pacific theaters of war. As an employee of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the powers-that-be saw Charlie’s role as essential to the US war effort. As much-needed personnel and war supplies were constantly being shipped through Pennsylvania from other states, he received a draft deferment. In fact, his superiors pleaded with Charlie to remain at his railroad position in the Keystone State. Nonetheless, as a proud Jewish-American, Charlie yearned to play a more direct role in the fight against the Nazis. Unable to continue observing from the sidelines, he quit his job, enlisted in the US Army, and left the safety of Pennsylvania behind.

Charlie trained to be part of a two-man bazooka team and was assigned to the 90th Infantry Division, 357th Battalion. The bazooka (a shoulder-fired rocket launcher) was a relatively new — and highly-appreciated — weapon which gave US soldiers the firepower they needed to attack the enemy’s tanks and fortifications. In addition to his rifle and personal gear, Charlie also carried the bazooka’s shells and loaded the weapon for his partner (another Jewish GI named Harvey Goldreyer from Queens, NY) who would carefully aim and fire it.

Charlie joined his unit as a replacement following the bloody ‘Battle of the Bulge’ (December 1944 – January 1945). In the months that followed, he and his bazooka partner’s skills were called upon numerous times.

On April 23, 1945, US forces liberated the Flossenburg Concentration Camp. Decades later, this is how Charlie described those events:

I was in the 90^th Infantry Division which liberated the Flossenburg Concentration Camp, located about six kilometers (about 3.5 miles) from the German-Czech border as the war in Europe drew to a close in 1945. We were not prepared for what we saw: Still smoldering crematoria and open gravesites of human ashes, piles of corpses and shoes stacked about 20 feet high. When we arrived there were about 70 men and women who survived. They were so emaciated; they were just skin and bones. Speaking with them we found out that this was a political camp as well as an exterminating camp for Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled. The camp guards and personnel had fled before our unit arrived.

In addition, there were [US] soldiers that were captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge and were forced to undergo long forced marches in the cold after being deprived of their overcoats and warm clothing. As the Americans began falling by the wayside the SS guards shot them. Many never made it to Flossenburg.

The German soldiers that were taken prisoners and returned to the camp as prisoners of war were very arrogant in defeat. They [repeated how they] were following orders and were proud that they were Germans.

For many years I never talked about what I saw. My granddaughter had to do a paper for school about who was her hero. That was the first time that I told her about what I experienced at Flossenburg.

Shockingly, in the years since WWII, the outlandish claims of Holocaust deniers have gained traction in some quarters. As a result, in his later years, Charlie became more open about what he had personally witnessed at Flossenburg. What follows is the text of a letter Charlie wrote in Flossenburg and sent to his beloved Rabbi back home — Rabbi David L. Silver (1907 – 2001).

Rabbi David L. Silver — the son of the famed Rabbi Eliezer Silver (1882 – 1968) — founded Harrisburg’s Jewish day school, and led Kesher Israel Congregation for more than 50 years. Charlie Press told me that he had one goal in publicizing this historic letter which contains his eye-witness account:

“Read the letter. Now tell me there was no Holocaust!”

____________________________________

Germany, July 3, 1945

Dear Rabbi,

At present my outfit is located at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp guarding Hitler’s elite. This camp was at one time a living hell for many Jewish, Polish, Czech, and German political prisoners. The atrocities which I have witnessed are uncountable. At this moment I am in a guard tower which is equipped with weapons to hinder any attempted break by the criminals. At one time though, this same tower was occupied by some of the criminals who are now inside the fence.

To the left of this tower is a crematorium where daily human beings were burned. In the rear of this crematorium is a room with small vases in which the ashes of only the German dead were placed and sent to their families. The other prisoners’ ashes and bones were piled in a small ravine and covered up. The rain washed all the dirt off and uncovered the hideous evidence. In another section of the field is where human bodies were stacked crosswise on top of wood, and oil was poured over and lighted. When one row would be burned, the next row would be started, and so they kept the fires burning continuously.

The past few Sundays I have been visiting in a small town called Floso, where there are about fifteen Jewish displaced persons who at one time have been in this camp. We go there and have services and sing songs and tell stories. It’s really wonderful to make them happy although in their hearts there is unrest from what they have gone through. They are having a synagogue rebuilt and as soon as it is finished I am going to try and have services there for all of the soldiers and civilians around. It will be great to go to Shul once more.

I thank you again for the holiday greetings, and hope next Pesach I can be home with the family in a civilian suit, and enjoying a good Pesach-dig Seder.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Press

____________________________________________

Young Israel of Memphis’ Rabbi Akiva Males can be reached at rabbi@yiom.org

Mr. Charles Press and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell at the Governor’s Civic Commemoration of the Holocaust in April 2009 (Photo taken by Rabbi Akiva Males)

WWII-era photo of Charlie Press in his US Army uniform — note the 90^th Infantry Division insignia

A plaque honoring the 90^th Infantry Division at Flossenburg

WWII-era US soldier aiming a bazooka

Kesher Israel Congregation’s 1953 dinner honoring Rabbi David L. Silver

Left to right: Rabbi David L. Silver; Samuel Brenner (President of Kesher Israel); Rabbi Eliezer Silver (father of Rabbi David L. Silver and former Rabbi of Kesher Israel); Rabbi Dr. Samuel Belkin (President of Yeshiva University)

Charlie Press in September of 2014 – just four months before his passing (Photo taken by Rabbi Akiva Males)

Announcement: Musings of a Book Collector podcast

Eliezer Brodt

As a curator of knowledge, I enjoy sharing content for people to read, learn, and enjoy. A few years ago, I was privileged to explore another avenue for sharing information by recording an experimental podcast with Rabbi Moshe Schwed on the All-Daf platform. I have come to realize that the podcast format helps me immensely, as it requires me to compile and organize my research, and it enables me to “test it out” before publication—a” Pilpul Chaverim” of sorts.

I would like to continue with this experiment and record additional episodes on various topics for my new podcast, Musings of a Book Collector. Below is a link to my recently launched website, which contains all the information about the Musings of a Book Collector podcast and the various subscription options. Please check out the website and feel free to share your thoughts with me:

https://eliezerbrodt.com/

The first free episode is available here, here and here. It is dedicated to R’ Shlomo Zalman Auerbach and his Halachic work on electricity, Meorei Eish. 

The second free episode, on new and old Seforim related to Chanukah, titled Sefer Makabi’im, Sdei Chemed and other Chanukah related seforim was just recorded and is available for listening here and here and here.

For information on how to sign up for the longer series about the Meorei Eish and more, please see the website. If you choose to subscribe, kindly send me an email so I can thank you personally and keep you updated with improvements. (Apple/Podbean do not provide me with this information.)

With immense gratitude, 

Eliezer

April Fools! Tracing the History of Dreidel Among Neo-Traditionalists and Neo-Hebraists

These explanations [for playing with the sevivon] are far from reality. Why do no sources dating from the Maccabean period, and only in the last few hundred years, mention playing sevivon? If “Hakhamim” decreed it, or it was the custom in ancient times, of if “Beis Din shel Hashmonaim” established it, why is it not mentioned for all these generations?

Yitzhak Tesler, “Ha-Dreidel (Sevivon) be-Chanukah: Mekoroseha, Ta’amyah, u-Minhagyah,” Or Yisrael, 14 (1999), 50.

I have seen a toy in London called a Teetotum. It is exactly like a Hanucah Trendel with English letters instead of Hebrew on it. But why it is called by its peculiar name, no one can tell me. Of course, the name comes from the letter T, which is inscribed on one of the four sides of the toy; thus T Totum or T takes all. This reminds me of the noted Latin epigram addressed by the boy to the twirling Teetotum Te, totum, amo, amo, te, Teetotum.

Leopold Dukes to Leopold Löw, September 1864.

Only two mitzvot of Chanukah are mentioned in Rabbinic sources: lighting candles and reciting the full Hallel. Over the centuries, many other practices came to be associated with Chanukah. Some are unique to specific geographic regions, while others saw universal adoption. One that is lesser-known today is the custom of Venetian Jews to travel on gondolas, rowing through the city, and greeting each house with a blessing and “a merry Hebrew” carol. Or the custom in Avignon, France, recorded in 1779, that women were permitted in the men’s section of the synagogue during the eight days of Chanukah.[1] Many Jews accept these as the evolution of Jewish practice without requiring any sacred reasons; others are unwilling to do so. These neo-traditionalists locate the practices within the rubric of Jewish ritual and even claim historical legitimacy when there is none. The dreidel is an example of this phenomenon.

The dreidel toy is not Jewish in origin. Instead, dreidel is the ancient game of teetotum that remained popular until at least the twentieth century. Teetotum, at its most basic, is a four-sided dice with a stick in the middle. While some versions use dots or numbers to denote players’ actions, letters are the most commonplace. The letters vary based upon the vernacular, with the name teetotum from the Latin version of T (totum-all), and the remaining letter instructions, A (aufer-take), N (nihil-nothing), D (depone-put down). Even the Hebrew letters are merely a transliteration of the German version: G (ganz-all), H (halb-half), N (nischt-nothing), and S (schict-put).

Figure 1 Detail: Pieter Bruegel, Children’s Games, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Teetotum is documented in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum displays Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s (1525/30-1569) masterpiece, “Children’s Games” (1560). Another of his works in the museum is the “Tower of Babel,” which is the subject of a forthcoming post. Children’s Games depicts over two hundred children playing eighty different games. Bruegel’s encyclopedic pictorial catalog of games is unique in the annals of art. A small child is at the bottom left corner, her arms raised, holding a teetotum. (See here for a detailed view and here for Amy Orrock’s excellent article, “Homo ludens: Pieter Bruegel’s Children’s Games and the Humanist Educators,” discussing the purpose and interpretation of the painting within Erasmus’s views on the benefits of play.) Teetotum also appears in the list of games of Bruegel’s near contemporary French author François Rabelais’s (d. 1553) satirical work, Gargantua. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies it as “a favorite Victorian toy.” It appears in well-known English literature such as Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, where the White Queen (then a white sheep) asks Alice, “Are you a child, or a teetotum.” Other examples are Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, Edgar Allen Poe’s The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as “finfoefom” (based on Joyce’s unique lettering system).[2]

Despite the widespread awareness of teetotum in Europe from at least the 1500s, the earliest Jewish sources connecting it with Chanukah date to the nineteenth century. Other Chanukah games boast much earlier recognition. For example, R Yosef Yuspa Nördlinger Hahn (1570-1637) mentions chess, tic-tac-toe, cards, and possibly backgammon.[3] Likewise, a 1638 herem banned cards and dice on Chanukah, although chess was excepted.[4] In subsequent Jewish literature, card playing has the most mentions, but that is due to their moral and ethical concerns rather than approval. None of these mention dreidel or any similar game.

The lack of historicity and mesorah was no barrier for 19^th-century rabbis, nearly all Hassdic, from asserting Jewish relevance and stating that it is among the customs that qualify as minhag Yisrael Torah. R. Tzvi Elimelech Spira of Dinov is perhaps the most well-known example. In his Bnei Yissaschar, he contrasts the operation of the dreidel with the other Jewish play toy, the Purim gragger. The dreidel is activated from the top, symbolic of the heavenly source of the Chanukah miracle. The gragger is turned from the bottom because the catalysts of the miracle were Mordechai and Ester.

Others explain the symbolism of the dreidel’s letters, נ, ג, ה, ש. According to one explanation, these allude to the two rabbinically sanctioned mitzvot that we have on Chanukah, נרות שמונה (candles all eight nights) and הלל גמר (the complete Hallel). Others note the gematria (numerical value) of the letters, which correspond to the same gematria as משיח (the Messiah). Others still link the letters with גשנה the city Yosef secured for his family in Egypt that appears in the weekly Torah reading that coincides with Chanukah.[5]

None of these, however, locate the dreidel within the Chanukah story, and for that, we need to wait until the early twentieth century. According to this modern origin story, after the Greeks prohibited Torah study, Jewish teachers and students continued to do so surreptitiously in caves. When the authorities discovered these groups, they quickly switched from studying to playing dreidel.

The first appearance of this account appears in a collection of customs published in 1917 in Saint Louis. R. Avraham Eliezer Hirshovitz (1859-1924), originally from Kovno (today Kaunas), Lithuania, and in 1908 emigrated to the United States and was the preacher of Shaary Torah and taught children in Pittsburg, PA.[6] In 1892, he published the first edition of his book on Jewish customs, Minhagei Yeshurun, in Vilna. It includes three haskamos (approbations). The only discussion regarding Chanukah is the source of the name. Seven years later, he published an expanded second edition in Vilna, with 280 customs and now eight additional approbations (he omitted one from the first edition), most notably one from R Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor. R Spektor caveats that he only had time to read a few lines but that “it is a nice work.” Another approbation is from the maskil, Kalman Schulman.[7] We are unaware of any other religious book that bears his approbation. Hirshovitz provides that he obtained “many other approbations and letters of support” that he did not include. Neither of these editions discusses dreidel.

In 1899, Hirshovitz published a further expanded version in Yiddish in Vilna. By then, he had emigrated to the United States. He discusses game playing on Chanukah for the first time, although only cards. He explains that some play cards as it is like war, evoking the military victory over the Greeks. Nonetheless, he disapproves of playing cards, noting that cards are non-Jewish (he does not mention any halakhic reasons or the numerous Jewish sources that explicitly prohibit cards and other forms of gambling on Chanukah).

Finally, in the first American edition, published in Saint Louis in 1918, now with approximately 500 customs, Hirshovitz addresses the custom of playing dreidel. He does not mention any of the Hassidic explanations. Instead, he tells the story of the dreidel and how it was used to hoodwink the Greeks.[8] Despite the complete lack of evidence and the absurdity of the Greeks falling for such a simplistic and completely unrealistic ruse, Hirshovitz’s narrative quickly entered the Jewish collective consciousness. For example, in the collection of customs, Pardes Eliezer devotes an entire chapter to dreidel and explains “that despite the fact dreidel doesn’t appear in the sifrei ha-achronim it does not prove it is a recent custom.” Rather, “kama hokerim” (many scholars) describe it as “an ancient custom, dating to the Hasmonic period,” and then uses Hirshovitz’s story. Or, in the book Minhag Yisrael Torah, Hirshovitz’s narrative is “the simple” explanation.[9] Today, if one does a cursory search on the internet, there are articles from the Aish.com website regarding dreidel entitled “A Serious Game,” or on Chabad.org that describes Hirshovitz’s rationale as “the Classic” and “common” reason, and many others.

Not all were so taken with Hirshovitz’s work. R Shmuel Kraus published a highly critical article in Kiryat Sefer in 1933 that highlights numerous methodological issues with Hirshovitz’s work.[10] While Kraus notes the book was sloppily published with omissions and other defects, he reserves the bulk of his article is devoted to Hirshovitz’s hallucinatory customs and corresponding sources. While the article does not discuss the dreidel, it criticizes Hirshovitz for identifying sources for the “custom” to trick people on April 1, the word “daven” that is identified as either Aramaic or from the English word Dawn and provides a reason why in Europe a Bar Mitzvah boys give a “derasha,” but in the United States a “speech.” Hirshovitz sometimes tries to adopt a more substantive and historically defensible explanation, even citing an article from JQR regarding the Magen David.[11]

While Hirshovitz’s explanation is unsupportable, one hypothesis is worth mentioning. Israel Abrams, in an article that initially appeared in The American Hebrew and republished in his collection Festival Studies, posits that Teetotum:

It is a very ancient game, known to the Greeks and Romans. But why was it specially favoured on Hanucah? No answer has ever been given to this natural question. It may be that the Teetotum was regarded as a very innocent form of gambling, if that be not altogether too harsh a word to use. Many pious people never played cards or any other game of chance, but they may have felt that so simple a game as this was lawful enough. But I can now supplement this with a new suggestion. Teetotum is still in parts of Ireland the indoor recreation of the peasantry at Christmas tide. Now it is well known that such games seldom change their seasons. I should wonder if the Teetotum was a favourite toy elsewhere at Christmas. If so, the Jews may have transferred it to Hanucah. For they never invented their own games, except those of intellectual species such as Hanucah Ketowes [riddles]. The Ketowes even gave rise to a folk proverb: “Zechus Owes, Kein Ketowes,” i.e., I suppose merit of the fathers is not the solution of life’s riddle. Indeed, the moral of Hanucah, is after all, that Judaism must rely on present effort of the children as well as on the past merits of their sires, if it is to remain in any true sense a “Feast of Light.”[12]

The Case of the Origin Story of the Creation of the Word Sevivon

Another mythical story associated with dreidel occurs with the origin of the modern Hebrew word for the toy, sevivon. The most well-known history is found in the autobiography of Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s son, Itamar ben Avi (1882-1943), Im Shahar Atzmotenu, published in 1961. Rochel Berlov, in her article “Me Hidush ha-milah ‘Sevivon’?”, however, demonstrated that the term long predated Itamar. (See also Ester Goldenberg’s article).  David Yeshayahu Silberbusch coined it and first appeared in Hayyim Zelig Slonimski’s journal Ha-Tzefirah on December 24, 1897 (See Zerachyah Lict’s comprehensive article regarding Slonimski’s challenge to the miracle of the oil and Marc Shapiro’s subsequent discussion). A week and a half later, Silberbusch used the word as the title of a satirical article, and it subsequently regularly appeared in the newspaper. In 1923, Levin Kipnis published his now famous song, sevivon, sov, sov, sov. Itamar wrote his autobiography when he was fifty, and it was published posthumously. He tells the story of how

one day, when he and his family were preparing to go on a trip outside the city, outside the wall, I suddenly jumped towards my parents: Mother! Mother! I found a sevivon for Chanukah. My mother hugged and kissed me with admiration. “How beautiful is the word you created, my son!” This is how the word sevivon was created and became standard for decades among all Jewish children. I, the writer of these memories and the one who created it when I was a child, among countless other words that are now incorporated into our language, but [not everyone] recognizes who created them.

Despite this story, the word does not appear in any newspapers his father, Eliezer Ben Yehudah, edited. Moreover, Ben Yehudah did not include it in his monumental dictionary of modern Hebrew. Nonetheless, Itamar’s story was retold countless times in children’s books and treatments of Itamar (and some still think the issue remains unsettled). Zohar Shavit’s assessment of Itamar’s book, which can be equally applied to Hirshovitz’s dreidel origin story, aptly sums up the willingness to accept such tall tales:

Above all, he understood the importance of creating an interesting and fascinating story, apparently even at the expense of historical credibility… It is quite clear that in some of his personal stories, Ben-Avi prefers the interesting story over fidelity to the facts.

Notes:

[1] Recorded in Israel Abrahams, “Hanucah in Olden Times,” in Festival Studies Being Thoughts on the Jewish Year (Philadelphia, 1906), 146, 152.

[2] Joseph Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 411; John P. Anderson, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: The Curse of Kabbalah (Universal Publishers, 2008), 211-12.

[3] Yosef Kosman, Noheg ka-Tzon Yosef, (Tel Aviv, 1979), 188 n.12; Herman Pollack, Jewish Folkways in Germanic Lands (1648-1806): Studies in Aspects of Daily Life (MIT Press, 1971) 181, 330n184.

[4] Minhagei DK”K Vermisia, Yitzhak Zimmer, ed., vol. 1 (Mefal Toras Hakhmei Ashkenaz, 1988), 238-39.

[5] See R. Yitzhak Tesler, “Ha-Dreidel (Sevivon) be-Chanukah: Mekoroseha, Ta’amyah, u-Minhagyah,” Or Yisrael, 14 (1999), 50-60 (collecting these and other sources).

[6] For biographical and complete bibliographical information, including a discussion of variant versions, see Yosef Goldman, Hebrew Printing in America 1735-1926: A History and Annotated Bibliography (Brooklyn, 2006) n583&622 (see here and here for our review of this work).

[7] For biographical information, see Hillel Noah Steinschneider, Ir Vilna, vol. 2, Mordechai Zalkin, ed. (Hebrew University Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 2002), 182-83.

[8] Avraham Hirshovitz, Otzar Kol Minhagei Yeshurun (St. Louis, 1918), 57. Hirshovitz cites “HaRav Ziv” as his source. But otherwise, it provides no information regarding this person. Two authors from that period use “Ziv,” Yehoshua ben Aba Ziv, who wrote a book of songs and a fictional work in Yiddish on the life of a Yeshiva student. The book of songs, Asifas Shirim: Al Mo’adei ha-Shana (Vilna, 1875), 13-15, includes a song for Chanukah but does not mention dreidel. The other possibility is Nehemiah Shmuel Libowitz, who used the pseudonym “Ziv.” Libowitz was a contemporary of Hirshovitz in America, and although we have not discovered any evidence, it’s possible they met in the United States. That may account for Hirshovitz’s inclusion of the dreidel story in his U.S. edition. Nonetheless, none of Libovitz’s published works include Hirshovitz’s Dreidel story, which includes the book Herod and Agrippa, which touches upon the Hashmonim.

[9] Kollel Damesek Eliezer, Pardes Eliezer, Hanukah, vol. 2 (Machon Damesek Eliezer, Brooklyn, 2004), 650-51; Yosef Lewy, Minhag Yisrael Torah, vol. 3 (Brooklyn, 1997), 216. Gavriel Zinner  however, in his extensive discussion of Chanukah customs and dreidel in his Neta Gavriel, does not mention Hirshovitz’s reason.

[10] Shmuel Kraus, “A.Y. Hirshovitz, Otzar kol Minhagei Yeshurun,” in Kiryat Sefer 11,3 (1934), 311-12.

[11] See Hirshovitz, Otzar Kol Minhagei Yeshurun, 4 (April fools), 28 (speech versus derasha), 88 (JQR).

[12] Abrahams, “Hanucah,” 154-55.