Elliott Horowitz – “”Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids…’ Reading Esther before Bed”

Elliott Horowitz teaches at Bar Ilan University and is co-editor of Jewish Quarterly Review.

This is his fourth contribution to the Seforim blog. We hope that you enjoy.

“”Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids…’:

Reading Esther before Bed”

Elliott Horowitz

“The problem of selecting Bible stories for the early grades is an especially difficult one,” wrote Emanuel Gamoran in his introduction to the first volume of Lenore Cohen’s Bible Tales for Very Young Children (2 vols, 1934-36), of which he was the editor. “Not all stories of the Bible are suited to the needs of little children,” continued Gamoran, who was an American Reform rabbi, and a disciple of the pioneer Jewish educator Samson Benderly,[1] “nor should all those children be told them in their entirety. In some instances certain details should be omitted.” In comes as little surprise, then, that in the second volume of Cohen’s Bible Tales the book of Esther contains only a single casualty – the evil Haman, who by the king’s order is hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. No mention is made of the death by hanging of Haman’s ten sons, or of the more than 75,000 non-Jews killed, with the king’s permission, by Mordecai’s coreligionists. This was clearly one of those instances in which, according to Rabbi Gamoran, “certain details should be omitted.”

The identical omissions had been made three years earlier in a biblical anthology for children (The Children’s Bible: Selections from the Old and New Testaments) whose contents were “translated and arranged” by two distinguished non-Jews: Henry Sherman, who headed the “department of religious literature” at Charles Scribner’s Sons, which published the book, and Charles Foster Kent, who, as indicated on the frontispiece, was “Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature in Yale University.”[2] The same editorial policy had earlier been followed by the American children’s writer Frances Jenkins Olcott (1873-1967) in her delightful Bible Stories to Read and Tell, published by Blue Ribbon Books in 1916.

Cohen and Gamoran, then, followed a venerable tradition in saving their “very young” readers from any knowledge of the sad fate of Haman’s sons. Yet they could arguably have followed the model of their British coreligionist Mrs. Philip Cohen in her two-volume Bible Readings with My Children (2nd ed., 1899). In her retelling of the book of Esther she acknowledged that not only Haman, but also his “ten sons were hanged on the gallows which their father had set up for Mordecai.”[3] Moreover, unlike Frances Olcott, who omitted mention of the permission given the Jews by Ahasuerus to defend themselves, and Messrs. Sherman and Kent, who included “the king’s “command that the Jews who were in every city should gather together and protect their lives,” but said nothing about the consequences thereof, Mrs. Cohen felt that it was safe to tell children that “the Jews, in defending themselves, killed numbers of their enemies.”

Mrs. Cohen’s justly popular anthology went through several editions, the fourth of which appeared in London in 1923. In that same year the future (but now lamented) Bible scholar Nahum Sarna was born in London. Not surprisingly, it was from that anthology that he acquired his earliest knowledge of Scripture. Reminiscing decades later about how he came to devote his life “to the study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible,” Sarna, then recently retired from Brandeis University, recalled that among his “earliest and most agreeable recollections is my father reading to me every Shabbat, with unfailing regularity from a little two-volumed work entitled Bible Readings with my Children by a Mrs. Philip Cohen. I am not certain, but I believe I was about three years old when the regimen began.”[4]

Bible Readings with my Children was not the first such anthology produced for Jewish children in Victorian England. Already in 1877 Ellis Davidson had published The Bible Reader under the explicit “sanction” of Britain’s Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler.[5] It was intended, as its subtitle indicated for the Use of Jewish Schools and Families, With the Addition of Questions on the Text, and Moral Reflections on Each Chapter. Davidson’s Bible Reader contained material from the popular book of Esther, but not much from the book’s brutal ending. Thus, anticipating Sherman and Kent’s Children’s Bible of 1930 readers were informed of the permission granted the Jews by Ahasuerus “to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate any armed force…that might attack them, with their children and their women,” but learned nothing of the consequences of that permission. Davidson did find a way to include the deaths of Haman’s sons, which both the Children’s Bible and Frances Olcott’s earlier Bible Stories later chose to omit, but he did so at the cost of changing the biblical story. They “were slain in battle,” and only afterwards hanged, wrote Davidson, “to show the people how utterly the whole house of Haman was degraded, and in order that future assaults might be prevented.”[6]

During the 1890’s two graduates of Oxford, each of whom had been at Balliol College when it was headed by the legendary Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), brought out their own biblical anthologies intended – at least in part – for young readers. The first of these to appear was John William Mackail’s Biblia Innocentium: Being the Story of God’s Chosen People Before the Coming of Our Lord…upon Earth, Written Anew for Children (1892). Mackail (1859-1945), who was born on the Isle of Bute and whose father was a minister of the Scottish Free Church, had overlapped as an undergraduate at Balliol with Claude Montefiore (1858-1938), who was a great nephew of the renowned Sir Moses. It is likely that they knew each other, since neither – unlike the bulk of their classmates – was an Anglican product of a posh “public school.” Both were also among the college’s most distinguished students; achieving “firsts” in the demanding course of study known as Greats (Literae Humaniores) in which their classmate George Nathaniel Curzon (a former Etonian and future viceroy of India) received only a “second.”[7]

In 1896 Montefiore, who was presumably familiar with Mackail’s Biblia Innocentium (which had appeared in a second edition in 1893) brought his Bible for Home Reading (1896), a two-volume anthology “with comments and reflections for the use of Jewish parents and their children. ” In certain respects Montefiore’s anthology followed the limitations that both his coreligionist Davidson and his former classmate Mackail had imposed upon themselves. No mention was made, for example, of the rape of Dinah in Genesis 34 or the subsequent massacre perpetrated by her brothers in Shechem. Yet with regard to the book of Esther Montefiore took a diametrically different approach. Whereas both previous Victorian anthologies, the one Jewish and the other Christian, had informed their readers of the permission granted the Jews to defend themselves but not of the bloody consequences thereof, Montefiore decided to include all the chpaters of Esther in their entirety despite what he acknowledged as the “religious and moral deficiencies.” These, he claimed, had been “ignored or explained away” by some, but also “exaggerated and falsely labelled” by others.” The best solution, he believed was to let readers, young and old, judge for themselves.

There were other ways of dealing with the book’s “religious and moral deficiencies” when presenting its contents to young readers. In his Story of the Bible: first published in 1904, Jesse Lyman Hurlbut (1843-1930), a Methodist Episcopal clergyman, reported not only that “Haman died upon the gallows that he made for Mordecai, but also that his sons “were put to death for their father’s evildoing.” He added, however, that this had been done “according to the cruel usage of those times.”[8] In contrast to Ellis Davidson’s clumsy attempt, in 1877, to make the hanging of Haman’s sons more palatable to his younger readers, Hurlbut, a native of New York, showed that it was possible to add without detracting.

Notes:

[1] On both Gamoran and Benderly, see Penny Schine Gold, Making the Bible Modern: Children’s Bibles and Jewish Education in Twentieth-Century America (Ithaca, 2004).

[2] H. A. Sherman and and C. F. Kent, The Children’s Bible (New York, 1933), 223-25.

[3] Mrs. Philip Cohen, Bible Readings with my Children, two volumes (rev. ed. London, 1899), II, 336.

[4] Nahum Sarna, “Ruminations of a Jewish Bible Scholar,” Bible Review 4:3 (June 1988). See also the obituary by Tom Long in the Boston Globe (25 June 2005).

[5] On Davidson, see Geoffrey Cantor, “‘From nature to nature’s God’: Ellis A. Davidson—mid-Victorian educator, moralist, and consummate Designer,” Jewish History 23:4 (December 2009): 263-388.

[6] On Davidson’s work and its treatment of the book of Esther, see Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (2nd ed., Princeton, 2008), 24.

[7] On Montefiore at Balliol and the impact on the college of Jowett, see Horowitz, Reckless Rites, 25, and the sources cited there.

[8] Hurlbut, Story of the Bible: For Young and Old (Philadelphia, 1952).

Elliott Horowitz responds to David Kaufmann on Bugs Bunny

In response to the recent article by Dr. David Kaufmann in The Forward questioning Bugs Bunny’s purported Jewish identity, Bar Ilan University professor and Jewish Studies Quarterly (new series) co-editor Dr. Elliott Horowitz has written a letter to The Forward, available below to readers of the Seforim blog. (It has not yet appeared in The Forward.)

As noted in the letter below, Prof. Elliott Horowitz has written two articles on the very question that Kaufmann discusses. See his “Odd Couples: The Eagle and the Hare, the Lion and the Unicorn” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11:3 (August 2004): 243-258, and “The People of the Image,” The New Republic 223:13 (September 25, 2000): 41-49.

This is Prof. Horowitz’s first contribution to the Seforim blog. We hope that you enjoy.

Dear Sirs:

The subtitle of David Kaufmann’s entertaining essay (“Carrot and Shtick,” Aug, 10, 2007) provocatively asks: “Can we claim Bugs Bunny as Jewish?” I would like to point out that I have already made that claim more than once; first in a review essay in The New Republic (“The People of the Image,” Sept. 25, 2000), and more recently, fortified with footnotes, in the Jewish Studies Quarterly (vol. 11, 2004). In both essays I sought to trace the Bugs vs. Elmer rivalry, reminiscent of that in the Bible between wily Jacob and Esau the hunter, visually back to the hares pursued by hounds in sixteenth-century Ashkenazi illustrated Hagadot, such as those of Prague and Augsburg.

Kaufmann is correct to stress that “the ‘Looney Tunes’ shorts in which Bugs appears are always structured around extinction and endurance, the two great poles of Jewish thought and dream,” but he might have done a bit more with the Holocaust and post-Holocaust context of Bugs Bunny, who premiered in the 1940 animated film Wild Hare. Five years later Warner Brothers released Herr Meets Hare, in which “Buggsenheimer Rabbit” is pitted against Herr Hermann Goering, and in 1946 they brought out Hare Remover (my personal favorite), in which Elmer Fudd is cast as a chemist seeking (unsuccessfully) to perform scientific experiments on Bugs. Soon afterwards, like other American survivors, Bugs began to speak more candidly about his origins and childhood. In a Hare Grows in Manhattan (1947), he returned to his childhood on the Lower East Side, where constant hounding by the neighborhood dogs sharpened his survival instincts, and in What’s Up, Doc (1950), he talked about the piano and music lessons he took as a youngster, and the bit parts he played on Broadway until he was discovered by Warner Brothers.

As Kaufmann points out, neither Chuck Jones nor Tex Avery or any of the other writers or directors who created the Bugs Bunny cartoons were themselves Jewish, but as their contemporary Claude Levi-Strauss, who himself only narrowly escaped the fate of Buggsenheimer Rabbit, might have said, Jews were “good to think with.” Not only was the rabbit’s voice assigned to Mel Blanc, who combined, as he later explained, equal parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, but by making Bugs a New York native who toiled in obscurity until he was discovered by the Warner Brothers, those sly gentiles may have poked fun at their famously self-hating employers, who had earlier rejected George Jessel for the lead role in The Jazz Singer (1927) on the grounds that he was “too Jewish.”

Elliott Horowitz
New York

Elliott Horowitz — ‘The Howling Place of the Jews’

“The Howling Place of the Jews” in the Nineteenth Century: From William Wilde to Ahad Ha’am

by Elliott Horowitz

In previous posts at the Seforim blog, Elliott Horowitz of Bar Ilan University, co-editor of Jewish Quarterly Review, and author of Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), has described Modern Amalekites [here], Isaiah Berlin on Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan) and Saul Lieberman [here], Edmund Wilson, Hebrew, Christmas, and the Talmud [here], and Bugs Bunny [here]. This is his fifth contribution to the Seforim blog. We hope that you enjoy.

Late in the first half of the nineteenth century Jewish prayer and mourning at the Western Wall began to attract the interest of Christian visitors to Jerusalem, many of whom imposed upon it their own theological interpretations. In the Memorandum on the Western Wall (1930) that he prepared on behalf of the League of Nations Dr. Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), the recently elected President of the American Jewish Committee, included a list of modern travel accounts in which Jewish prayer at the Wall was described (pp. 44-67). Due presumably to Adler’s many responsibilities (he was also editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review as well as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary) the list was far from complete.One of the important accounts he missed was Dr. William Wilde’s Narrative of Journey…along the Shores of the Mediterranean (1840). The young Irish physician singled out Jewish prayer at the Western Wall as one of the scenes that had most moved him during his extensive journey. “Were I asked what was the object of the greatest interest that I had seen, and the scene that made the deepest impression on me, during my sojourn in other lands,” wrote Dr. Wilde (father of the future playwright Oscar), “I would say that it was a Jew mourning over the stones of Jerusalem.”[1] Shortly afterwards the Anglican minister George Fisk of Lichfield (England) who had visited Jerusalem in 1842, provided his own comments on the weekly spectacle, which he described as “humiliation and supplication.” The Jews, he reported, “are said to have a persuasion that their prayers will find especial acceptance when breathed through the crevices of that building of which Jehovah said ‘Mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually’ (II Chron. 7:16).” Although among the “aged Jews sitting in the dust” Fisk saw no signs of the “outward manifestation of strong emotion” there were also present “several Jewesses, enveloped from head to foot in ample white veils,” who “stepped forward to various parts of the ancient wall,” and kissed them with great fervency.”[2]Fisk’s comments about prayer at the Wall, also unnoticed by Adler, were soon echoed by the children’s writer Favell Lee Mortimer (1802-1878), in the second part of her Far Off (1852), devoted to Asia and Australia – neither of which she had visited. Addressing her “little readers,” Mrs. Mortimer (a daughter of Barclay’s bank cofounder David Bevan and wife of London minister Thomas Mortimer) informed them that “every Friday evening a very touching scene takes place” in Jerusalem, near the Mosque of Omar. “There are some large old stones there,” wrote Mrs. Mortimer, “and the Jews say that they are part of their old temple wall, so they come at the beginning of their Sabbath…and sit in a row opposite the stones.” Upon arriving, the Jews “read their Hebrew Old Testaments, then kneel low in the dust, and repeat their prayers with their mouths close to the old stones; because they think that all prayers whispered between the cracks and crevices of these stones will be heard by God. Some Jewesses come, wrapped from head to foot in long white veils, and they gently moan and softly sigh over Jerusalem in ruins.”[3] Her “little readers” were likely to think of Jerusalem’s Jews as involved in the cultic worship of large “stones” (a word used no fewer than four times in the brief passage), which served as intermediaries between them and God.Some two decades later James Creagh (1836-1910), a native of Ireland who had studied at Sandhurst, wrote of his own visit to what he called “the Howling-place of the Jews at Jerusalem.” Unlike Dr. Wilde and Rev. Fisk before him, Captain Creagh, in his colorfully titled Scamper to Sebastopol and Jerusalem, described not only the local Jews (and Jewesses) who participated in the weekly event, but also “whole families of Jews, some dark and some fair, some wearing the English and some the Asiatic costume, and coming from every part of the world.” In a remark that would have appealed to some of the Hebrew poets of medieval Spain, Creagh reported that among those who were “crying and wailing in the most bitter accents” were some “lovely Jewish girls, who wept and sobbed with an appearance of real grief that would appear more natural for the loss of a lover than for the misfortune of their nation in the remotest times.” And although he, unlike Fisk, was evidently a Catholic, Creagh (perhaps under the influence of the latter) was also critical of the “vain hope” on the part of those praying “praying fervently through the crevices…that their earnest supplications, by penetrating to the inside and ascending to heaven from that hallowed spot, would be received more favourably at the throne of grace.[4]Creagh arrived in Jerusalem shortly after the departure of Albert Rhodes, who was born in Pittsburgh in 1840 and who had served as US consul in Jerusalem between 1863-65.[5] In his appropriately titled Jerusalem As It Is (1865) Rhodes presented a penetrating (and perhaps still relevant) comparison of the Holy City’s Sephardim and Ashkenazim, [6]and also described the weekly prayers at “the wailing-place of the Jews…a spot of interest to every traveler,” focusing particularly on what today might be called “women who weep.” On Fridays afternoons, he wrote, “every available spot along the foot of this wall is occupied by weeping Jews,” adding that “the greater part of these are women, who often sit in little circles around a Talmud-learned Jew, who reads to them – for a consideration… – portions of the Jewish chronicles.” Rhodes also reported that ‘those who arrive early, particularly the women, commence at one end of the wall and kiss and touch every stone within reach, from one end of the wall to the other.” Like Fisk and Creagh, the former US consul also stressed the importance to many of physical contact with the Wall, adding that some of the Jews “almost hide their heads in the fissures, and remain for some time in this position, sobbing in the most affecting manner.”[7]A decade after the appearance of Rhodes’s book his fellow Pennsylvanian Richard Newton (1812-87), who had studied at New York’s (Episcopal) General Theological Seminary after graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, published his Illustrated Rambles in Bible Lands (1875), in which he too offered his critical comments on the Jews’ weekly wailing at the Western Wall. Like his (by then) late colleague in Christ the Rev. Fisk, Dr. Newton, criticized the Jews for thinking that prayers offered at the Wall “would be more acceptable to God…than if offered in any other place,” but he was more blatant in his attempt to utilize this “mistake” as a means of saving fellow Christians from similar error: Some people think that part of a church where the minister stands or kneels…is more holy than the pews where the people sit. But this is a mistake. God is no more present in one place than he is in another. Prayers offered in the city of Jerusalem will not be heard any sooner by God than prayers offered in the city of London, or New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia.[8] Dr. Newman, who was then serving as rector of the Epiphany Church in Philadelphia, carried away with him, and imparted to his readers, two lessons that he learned from his visit. One was “the sin of the Jews which brought upon them all the evil that they are suffering now,’ and “which has caused them to be despised and persecuted in every nation.” The second lesson, of course, was the nature of the “great sin of the Jewish people” – namely, that “they neglected Jesus.”[9] Another late nineteenth-century visitor to the Western Wall who was concerned with the question of what had caused the Jews “to be despised and persecuted in every nation” was Asher Zvi (Hirsh) Ginsberg (1856-1927), by then known as Ahad Ha’am. The leading ideologist of Cultural Zionism, who had been born to a Hasidic family in the Russian Ukraine, was quite critical of much that he saw during his first tour, in 1891, among the Jewish colonies in land of Israel. As Ginsberg later wrote in his controversial essay Emet me-Erez Yisrael “filled with melancholy thoughts,” he “arrived on the eve of Passover in Jerusalem, there to pour forth my sorrow and rage before the…remnants of our former glory.” Although he clearly knew what to expect at the Wall, the visit nevertheless affected him greatly, provoking painful questions that remain largely unanswered: There I found many of our Jerusalem brethren standing and praying in loud voices. Their haggard faces, their strange gestures, and their odd clothes – all this merged with the ghastly picture of the Wall itself. Looking at them and at the Wall, one thought filled my mind. These stones testify to the desolation of our land; these men testify to the desolation of our people. Which of these desolations is worse? For which should we lament more bitterly? [10]

[1] William R. Wilde, Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Tenerife and along the Shores of the Mediterranean (Dublin, 1840), quoted in Linda Osband, ed., Famous Travellers to the Holy Land (London,1989), 155. Osband’s book includes an introduction by the distinguished British travel writer Jan Morris, who has also written under the name James Morris. On the remarks by modern travelers about the Jews of Jerusalem see also Elliott Horowitz, “As Others See Jews,” in Nicholas de Lange & Miri Freud-Kandel, eds., Modern Judaism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford, 2005), 415-425, esp. 415-419.

[2] George Fisk, A Pastor’s Memorial, Of Egypt, The Red Sea… Jerusalem, and Other Principal Localities of the Holy Land, Visited in 1842 (third edition, London, 1845), 290-91. In a later edition (1865) the pious pastor wrote less cautiously that “the Jews have a persuasion…” (ibid., 199). For an annotated Hebrew translation of Fisk’s comments on Jerusalem and its Jews see Michael Ish-Shalom, Christian Travels in the Holy Land (second ed., Jerusalem, 1979), 539-43.

[3] . L. Mortimer, Far Off , or Asia and Australia Described (London, 1852), 21.

[4] James Creagh, A Scamper from Sebastopol to Jerusalem in 1867 (London, 1873), 405-06. On the participation of women in prayer at the Western Wall see Stuart Charmé, “The Political Transformation of Gender Traditions at the Western Wall in Jerusalem,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21:1 (Spring 2005): 5-34, who, relying on Adler’s outdated list, misses the testimonies of both Fisk and Creagh.

[5] Ruth Kark, American Consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914 (Jerusalem and Detroit, 1994), 314

[6] “There is no entente-cordiale,” wrote Rhodes, “between the Sephardim and Aschkenazim. The former are cleaner, more indolent, and ignorant than the latter. The Aschkenazim pride themselves on their Talmud learning, are dirty, and fond of dispute. From long residence in the East, the Sephardim have acquired something of the ease and dignity of its inhabitants…The Aschkenazim are often seen poring over the Talmud, and are consequently full of its traditionary (sic) lore, but know little of the Bible…The Sephardim, as a race are healthy-looking, and many of them are handsome…Of the two the Aschkenazim are more corrupt.” idem, Jerusalem As It Is (London, 1865), 363-64. Ish-Shalom, Christian Travels, contains no passages from Rhodes’s book.

[7] Rhodes, Jerusalem, 373-74. On Rhodes in Jerusalem see Lester I. Vogel, To See a Promised Land; Americans in the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Pennsylvania, 1993), 166, 172.

[8] Richard Newton, In Bible Lands (London, 1880), 60-61. I have quoted from the first British edition, published with a slightly different title.

[9] Ibid., 62.

[10] The translation I have provided is a composite of those by Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha’am and the Origins of Zionism (Berkeley, 1993), 62, and Reuven Hammer, ed., The Jerusalem Anthology: A Literary Guide (Philadelphia, 1995), 206.

Elliott Horowitz – Modern Amalekites From Adolf to Avigdor

In a previous post at the Seforim blog, Prof. Elliott Horowitz of Bar Ilan University and co-editor of Jewish Quarterly Review, described Isaiah Berlin on Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan) and Saul Lieberman [see here]. This is his fourth contribution to the Seforim blog. We hope that you enjoy.

Modern Amalekites: From Adolf to Avigdor

by Elliott Horowitz

Well before the outbreak of World War II the Nazi regime in Germany came to be associated by many Jews with Israel’s ancient arch-enemy, Amalek. Perhaps the first to do so was the noted historian Simon Dubnow who in a 1935 (Hebrew) letter from Riga to his disciple Simon Rawidowicz bemoaned the recently promulgated Nuremberg Laws, and then prophetically exclaimed “We are at war with Amalek!” During that same decade some ultra-Orthodox European rabbis were using the epithet of “Amalek” with reference to their more secular coreligionists who adhered to such modern ideologies as Communism or Zionism. This was true, for example, of the great Talmudist R. Elhanan Wasserman, one of the leaders of Agudat Yisrael, who like Dubnow was to meet his death in 1941 at the hands of the Nazis. Wasserman, who had studied in Volozhin and Telz before joining the kollel of the Hafetz Hayyim (R. Israel Meir Ha-Kohen, 1838-1933), cited the latter’s confident opinion that the Soviet Jewish communists (known as the Yevsektzia) were “descendants of Amalek.” Ironically, his even more ultra-Orthodox Hungarian contemporary R. Hayyim Elazar Spira of Munkacz (1872-1937) included among the ranks of modern Amalekites not only the Zionists, but also the members and leadership of Agudat Yisrael.[1] In September of 1941 Joseph Hertz, the Chief Rabbi of (what was then still) the British Empire, delivered a thundering sermon at a public “intercession service” held on the ruins of London’s Great Synagogue, which had just been destroyed by German bombs. Drawing upon the previous week’s scriptural reading from Deuteronomy 25, which is also the “additional” reading for Shabbat Zakhor, Hertz referred to Nazi Germany as “Amalek’s latest spiritual descendant; he fears not God; he closes the gates of mercy on those who cannot resist his might.” The Chief Rabbi stressed that God’s war with Amalek was not to be left in divine hands, but was to be “carried out by…men and nations filled with an endless loathing of Amalek and all his works and ways.” He also praised those Jews who had shown support for “our beloved country in her struggle to blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens of the Lord.”[2] Hertz, who had studied at New York’s City College (where he received a gold medal for English composition) before attending the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (of which he was the first rabbinical graduate), was not the first British clergyman to portray the Germans as contemporary Amalekites. Early in October of 1939, shortly after his arrival in Jerusalem to serve as chaplain of St. Andrew’s Scottish Church (and a month after Germany’s invasion of Poland), Dr. Norman Maclean chose as the text for his Sunday sermon the account (in Exodus 17) of Amalek’s attack at Rephidim. The prayer by Moses on the adjacent hill-top, asserted Maclean (1869-1952), who had earlier served as minister of St. Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh, “described our duty in the grim conflict now being waged.” Then as now “the nations which abolished God or reduced Him to a tribal deity confronted the nations that held fast to the faith of their fathers.” In the balance, both at Rephidim and in the present, lay nothing less than “the fate of the world’s soul.”[3] The connection between the world’s soul and the Jewish people had concerned Rev. Maclean (to whom I hope to return in a future post) well before his arrival in Jerusalem, which he first visited in 1934. During the First World War, while still serving at St. Cuthbert’s he contributed a foreword to Leon Levison’s The Jew in History (1916) which opened with the words: “The world owes its soul to the Jews.” In consonance with that position Maclean shared the hope of Levison, his Safed-born brother in Christ,[4] that the war’s end “may be the restoration of the Jews to Palestine,” which Maclean saw as “the only lasting reparation that Christendom can make for centuries of wrong,” adding that “it was a disgrace that the holy places of Christianity should be in the hands of Mohammedans.” Not surprisingly, Rev. Maclean, whose views were not quite in consonance with those of Britain’s Mandatory representatives, did not last very long at St. Andrews in Jerusalem. Early in January of 1941 the Palestine Post laconically reported that “Dr. Norman Maclean and the Hon. Mrs. Maclean are planning to return to Britain shortly.” Several months later he completed his tenth book, His Terrible Swift Sword: On the Problem of Jewish Immigration to Palestine (1942), which he had begun writing “on the summit of one of the hills of Judah looking down on Ain Karem,” but completed in Portree on the Island of Skye. As the Palestine Post reported, it was prohibited for importation into Palestine by the High Commissioner (Harold MacMichael) who may not have approved of such passages as: “Nine months after we declared war on Hitlerism, victims of Hitlerism are still in Athlit (p. 16).” Shortly after the book’s publication Maclean spoke at an event sponsored by the Jewish National Fund at London’s Dorchester hotel.[5] At that event he may well have met Chief Rabbi Hertz, who was a fervent Zionist – a position of which not all prominent British Jews then approved. Had Maclean crossed the ocean to visit New York City he could, of course, have met many rabbis who shared his criticisms of British immigration policy, including Israel Levinthal of the Brooklyn Jewish Center. The Vilna-born and Columbia-educated Levinthal, like many of his coreligionists and fellow clergymen on both sides of the Atlantic, saw Hitler as a modern-day Haman and the Nazis as Amalekites, but by 1947 he was also willing to add others to the list. In a sermon delivered on Shabbat Zakhor of that year (and later published in his collection Judaism Speaks to the Modern World) he asserted that the British, who earlier “pretended to be friends of Jewish Palestine” now “suddenly reveal themselves as the modern Amalek,” and that Ernest Bevin, the Labour government’s foreign secretary, “is just like Haman himself.”[6] It is unlikely that such ardent religious Zionists as Hertz and Levinthal were able to imagine that in the Jewish state they hoped and prayed for chief rabbis would emerge who would hurl the epithet of “Amalek” at fellow Jews, including members of parliament. Yet as many readers will recall, less than a decade ago R. Ovadia Yosef compared then-education minister Yossi Sarid to Haman, adding that “he is wicked and satanic and must be erased like Amalek.” Although the office of then-attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein pursued a criminal investigation on grounds of possible incitement to violence the redoubtable Rishon le-Zion was never charged. He was thus understandably less reluctant to make use of the same rabbinical WMD during the recent elections, when many Shas supporters showed signs of leaving the Sephardi Sage of Har Nof for the Russian Rage of Nokdim. At the same Saturday night live broadcast at which R. Ovadiah had in 2000 asserted that Sarid “must be erased like Amalek” he turned his rhetorical rifle to the right and aimed it at MK Avigdor Lieberman, announcing that “a vote for Lieberman was a vote for Amalek.”

[1] See Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 140-41, and the sources cited there.

[2] See Joseph H. Hertz, Early and Late: Addresses, Messages, and Papers (Hindhead: The Soncino Press, 1943), 67-69.

[3] Palestine Post, 2 October 1939. Maclean’s imminent arrival, together with that of his wife, was reported in the same publication on 9 May of that year. The couple had previously been living on the Island of Skye.

[4] On Levison see Frederick Levison, Christian and Jew: The Life of Leon Levison, 1881-1936 (Edinburgh: The Pentland Press, 1989).

[5] idem., 4 June 1942, 17 September 1942.

[6] Israel H. Levinthal, Judaism Speaks to the Modern World (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1963), 77-84. On Levinthal see Kimmy Caplan, “The Life and Sermons of Israel Herbert Levinthal (1882-1982),” American Jewish History 87:1 (March 1999): 1-27.

Do We Cut Off or Bury One’s Head in the Sand?

Do We Cut Off or Bury One’s Head in the Sand?

Review: Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence

In 2017, the erudite and eclectic scholar Elliott Horowitz unexpectedly passed away. His oeuvre is exceptionally diverse, having authored more than seventy-five articles and reviews and five books, with topics ranging from studies on Italian art, Jews and coffee, the significance of the beard among Jews, comparing and contrasting Jewish and non-Jewish biblical exegesis, and Jewish violence (see his Academia page for most of them). Seven additional articles appeared on this site, in a similar vein as his others, covering Bugs Bunny, nude imagery in the Haggadah, Isaiah Berlin, Saul Lieberman, among others. He regularly used the “Molkho Institute for Absurdly Abstruse Research” to identify his affiliation in his email signature. Jewish violence was a long fascination of Horowitz. Beginning in 1994, with an article in the Hebrew journal Zion, he revisited the issue in no less than six articles that culminated in his 2006 book, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey). Horowitz documents how the conclusion of the Purim story, culminating in the Jews massacring 75,800 people over two days, was used as a justification for Jewish violence against non-Jews throughout history. Horowitz revisited this topic on this website, “Modern Amalekites from Adolf to Avigdor.” In a later article, he also identified the Biblical story of Dinah as another source for this type of violence.

While arguably, the violence at the end is only a minor part of the story, for some, that aspect has clouded everything about the Book of Esther and Purim. First, Horowitz looks at how non-Jews viewed the Book. Some had a very negative view due to the Jewish revenge. They considered that motif un-biblical (read non-Christian). Horowitz goes through each character and how first non-Jews interpreted their actions. For instance, Mordechai was treated rather harshly by many of these commentators, as was Esther, due to her passivity. What is especially fascinating is how these non-Jewish understandings sometimes crept into Jewish thought. Thus, Horowitz documents Jews parroting these rather un-Jewish, as it were, interpretations.

Horowitz then tackles the overarching theme of Amalek and how this has been understood throughout history. Some hold there is no obligation to destroy Amalek today, while others are willing to label any perceived enemy of Jews as deserving of the harsh consequences of Amalek. Some of these examples are rather disturbing.

After dealing with the Book of Esther specifically, Horowitz focuses on the Jewish practice of Purim. Specifically, he deals with Jewish violence or violent acts on Purim directed at non-Jews. He provides a discussion of the stereotype of the “mild” (read the wimp) Jew, including its origins and whether it is borne out by history. He then discusses numerous diverse examples spanning from the 5th century until today of Jewish violence. Some are not physical violence. Instead, it is host desecration or general enmity of non-Jewish symbols, while other, most recently Barukh Goldstein, is physical violence in its worst form.

Horowitz is compelling in the scope of this idea and how prevalent this is. It is especially telling when tracing and seeing how systematically Jews have decided to sweep these under the rug these examples; it demonstrates that censorship is not limited to any one group, and even amongst supposedly dispassionate scholars; they too can fall prey to their own biases.

To play down some of these incidents, we have Jewish historians who decided to avoid discussion of such matters or, at times, downplay their significance. However, in light of the many examples here, it is challenging to ignore such examples. Indeed, Shaul Magid noted in his review that Horowitz’s book “seems to elicit a kind of cognitive dissonance among peers, as if to say ‘this simply cannot be true’ even given the detailed evidence and argumentation to the contrary. This is often because of the audacity of the thesis and the way it challenges how we understand the present.” Hillel Halkin’s review of Commentary magazine is one example that fails to adequately address Horowitz’s thesis and his substantial evidence. Halkin claims that the book is a distortion of history and places too much emphasis on too few examples. In the next issue, Horowitz responded to Halkin’s criticism, noting Halkin’s misreading of some texts and inability to present any contrary evidence. In his inimical style, Horowitz invokes the Godfather to prove his point.

Halkin remained obsessed with Horowitz’s book and, a year later, returned to it and attempted to compare it and Michael Stanislawki’s book (A Murder in Lemberg), to Ariel Toaff’s Pasque di Sangue that seemingly argued Jews regularly killed non-Jewish children.”, which is riddled with methodological errors and has been entirely discredited (here). This time, not only Horowitz took issue with Halkin. Three scholars, Allan Nadler (who previously wrote a very positive review of Reckless Rites and presciently noted that Horowitz is a “scrupulously honest voice, dealing in exemplary fashion with an important subject that has been ignored by scholars precisely because of its extreme delicacy. In his execution of narrating the repercussions of Haman’s execution, Horowitz has enriched us with a model of historical scholarship. Anything but reckless, “Reckless Rites” is a rare gem of academic work that will make a real difference”), Elisheva Carlebach, and Naomi Gratz, derided Halkin’s attempt to tar Stanislawki and Horowitz. Perhaps it is best to view Halkin’s criticism through the prism of his long history of minimizing Israeli responsibility for violence, Horowitz being but one example. Indeed, Halkin himself seemingly accepted Yigal Amir’s murder of Yitzhak Rabin. Halkin claims that Amir’s error was not in the assassination itself; instead, “What made Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination exceptionally atrocious was not it’s being a murder, but it’s being a cataclysmic political blunder.” Hillel Halkin, “Israel & the Assassination: A Reckoning,” Commentary Magazine, January 1996. Halkin, however, was willing to criticize one person affected by Rabin’s murder, his son. Halkin, under the pseudonym Philologos, pokes fun at Rabin’s son’s pronunciation of the Kaddish he said on behalf of his father. See “On Language,” “Yuval Rabin’s Kaddish,” Forward, November 17, 1995. Perhaps if Amir had butchered a blessing rather than Rabin, Halkin would have found occasion to criticize.

Commentary, however, wasn’t done with Horowitz. In 2010, Commentary published Abby Wisse Schachter’s essay, “The Problem with Purim,” which is generally about feminist views of Purim characters. As an aside, she claims that Horowitz’s book contains “the questionable claim” and the “bizarre thesis” that “Purim has long been the occasion for outbreaks of Jewish animosity and even violence toward Christians.” She asserts that Horowitz’s thesis is based solely on the example of Baruch Goldstein. This is incorrect. As Horowitz demonstrates in his letter to the editor, it is evident that she could not have spent more than ten minutes with the book to arrive at her conclusion. Horowitz shows that Schechter’s article contains other mistakes beyond her discussion of his book.

In the end, there is little doubt that he wrote a well-researched and thorough book that inevitably engenders discussion, whether or not readers agree with Horowitz, is less the point. (See, for example, Eliezer Brodt’s post, “The Origins of Hamenstashen in Jewish Literature (Revisited),” on this site. Brodt references Horowitz’s discussion regarding a Saudi scholar who alleges Jews use blood to make hamenstashen.) Instead, as with all groundbreaking scholarship, a Talmudic approach, one that values discussion over conclusion is the best one can hope for.

Elliott Horowitz — Isaiah Berlin on Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan) and Saul Lieberman

In a previous post at the Seforim blog, Prof. Elliott Horowitz of Bar Ilan University and co-editor of Jewish Quarterly Review, described Edmund Wilson’s unique Christmas card and some thoughts on the Talmud [see here].

This is his third contribution to the Seforim blog. We hope that you enjoy.

Isaiah Berlin on Meir Berlin (Bar-Ilan) and Saul Lieberman
Elliott Horowitz

Although there have been some fine reviews of the collection of letters by Isaiah Berlin published in England under the title Flourishing: Letters 1928-1946 (Chatto and Windus, 2004), and in the United Sates (by Cambridge University Press) under the subtitle of the British edition,[1] not much attention has been given to the candid comments included therein about some of the twentieth century’s leading rabbis and Jewish scholars. Moreover, although one of the reviewers (Ilan Stavans in Forward) commented on the “overzealousness of its editor” Henry Hardy in annotating and contextualizing Berlin’s letters “to the point of dizziness,” this zealousness is less than excessive in his annotations of the letter written by Berlin, who had recently become the first Jew to be elected to a fellowship at Oxford’s All-Souls College, from Jerusalem to his parents in London on the first day of Rosh Ha-Shana, 1934 (pp. 96-98). Among the Jerusalemites he mentions having met since arriving a week earlier are “Dr. Scholem the Kabbalist,” “Baneth of the University,” and “Meir Berlin” – all of whom are dutifully identified by Hardy. The Volozhin-born Berlin, who settled in Jerusalem in 1926 and later changed his name to Bar-Ilan, is described by Isaiah (to whom he was not related) as a “clever cunning man with an unpleasant son in law, who teaches the Yerushalmi at the University.” Hardy informs the reader that the Yerushalmi is “the Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud,” but he has not been as “overzealous” about identifying the “unpleasant son in law,” who, as most readers of the Seforim blog have already recognized, was Saul Lieberman, who completed his MA at the Hebrew University in 1931 and married the former Judith Berlin in the following year.

In April of 1943, while serving at the British Embassy in Washington, Isaiah dryly informed his parents that “there were some serious social complications about the Sedarim this year (428).” Among those who had invited him were Chaim Weizmann (sometimes referred to as “Charles” in Berlin’s letters), the latter’s “factotum, a certain Weisgal,” and “Meyer (sic) Berlin and his daughter Judith.” Hardy explains what “Sedarim” are, identifies “[Meyer Wolf] Weisgal,” and provides the information that Judith Berlin Lieberman was “married to talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman. (428-29)” Somehow, however, he fails to connect this son-in -law of Berlin’s, who by that time had become a professor at New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, with the “unpleasant” man who during the previous decade had taught Yerushalmi at the Hebrew University. One of the factors complicating Isaiah’s decision as to where to spend the Sedarim of 1943 was that three of his potential hosts – Meir Berlin, Vera Weizmann, and Tamar de Sola Pool (wife of Rabbi David de Sola Pool and president of Hadassah) – were “reciprocally not on speaking terms,” and thus “to go to one is to insult the other two automatically.” He spent the first Seder with the Weizmann’s and the second, which was “fantastic,” with Meyer Weisgal. Consequently, as he explained to his parents, he found himself in the position of having to “grovel to Rabbi Meyer Berlin…and Mrs Tamar de Sola Pool, great Zionist powers with whom diplomatic relations must be preserved. (430-31).”

In a subsequent letter to the British diplomat Angus Malcolm, however, Berlin referred the Mizrachi leader less charitably as “Rabbi M. Berlin of Palestine and Riverside Drive, an enemy of Weizmann and a clerical maximalist (438).” Although Weizmann (who died in 1952) and Bar-Ilan (who died three years earlier) had their differences, both now have universities named after them – in only one of which, it may be added, is the Yerushalmi taught.

Note:
[1] See, for example, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “The Book of Isaiah,” The New York Times (June 27, 2004): 11; Simon Schama, “Flourishing,” The New Republic (January 31, 2005): 23-30.