Category Archives: Jewish Books

“the ים של שלמה was the greatest intellectual endeavor in Jewish history”

Probably, the ים של שלמה was the greatest intellectual endeavor in Jewish history; meaning: what he tried to do was kind of more courageous than any book in Jewish history. He wanted to review all halakhic literature up to the year 1550 – that’s what he wanted to do. No one’s ever tried to do anything like that, but, sometimes, we say in English, “you bite off more than you can chew.” He bit off more than he could chew and, therefore, מהרש”ל is interesting to study, historically; practically, he’s not really relevant.

Rabbi Adam Mintz, “The Battles Of The Polish Rabbis Regarding The Methods Of Codification”, RabbiMintz.com (31 January 2012) {http://www.rabbimintz.com/audio/the-battles-of-the-polish-rabbis-regarding-the-methods-of-codification/}

Rashi Does Not Simply Dump Midrashim Into His Biblical Commentary

If anybody ever learned רש”י and compared it to the מדרשים on many of the פסוקים, you see how careful רש”י was in what to cite and what not to cite. Often, there are three or four or five interpretations and he only quotes one! So, clearly, רש”י does not simply download – it’s not a מדרש-dump into רש”י. So, clearly, רש”י left a lot out.

Rabbi Nathaniel Helfgot, “What is פשוטו של מקרא?” YCT Yom Iyun (New York City: 13 January 2014).

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“Meiri is the only medieval Talmudist (rishon) whose works can be read almost independently of the Talmudic text”

The current popularity of the Beit ha-Behirah of R. Menahem ha-Meiri reflects this change in modes of learning. Meiri is the only medieval Talmudist (rishon) whose works can be read almost independently of the Talmudic text, upon which it ostensibly comments. The Beit ha-Behirah is not a running commentary on the Talmud. Meiri, in quasi-Maimonidean fashion, intentionally omits the give and take of the sugya, he focuses, rather, on the final upshot of the discussion and presents the differing views of that upshot and conclusion. Also, he alone, and again intentionally, provides the reader with background information. His writings are the closest thing to a secondary source in the library of rishonim. This trait coupled with the remarkably modern syntax of Meiri’s Hebrew prose have won for his works their current widespread use. It is not, as commonly thought, because the Beit ha-Behirah has been recently discovered. True, the massive Parma manuscript has been in employ only for some seventy years. However, even a glance at any Hebrew bibliography will show that much of the Beit ha-Behirah on sefer mo’ed, for example, had been published long before Avraham Sofer began his transcriptions of the Parma manuscript in the nineteen twenties. (E. g. Megillah Amsterdam, 1759; Sukkah Berlin, 1859; Shabbat Vienna, 1864.) Rather, Meiri’s works had previously fallen stillborn from the press. Sensing its alien character, most scholars simply ignored them, and, judging by the infrequent reprintings, if any, they also appear not to have found a popular audience. They have come into their own only in the past half century. (On Meiri’s quasi-Maimonidean intentions, see Beit ha-Behirah, Berakhot, ed. Y. Dickman [Jerusalem, 1965], introduction, pp. 25-32. Meiri consciously follows Maimonides in addressing the halakhic dicta rather than the Talmudic discussion, in gathering scattered halakhic dicta under one roof, and in writing in neo-Mishnaic rather than Rabbinic Hebrew. He parts company with Maimonides and follows R. Judah ha-Nassi in writing not topically but tractatewise, and in registering multiple views. Indeed, no one writing after the dialectical revolution of the Tosafists could entertain again the Maimonidean notion of halakhic univocality.)

Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy“, Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994), 120-121, n. 54.

The 15th-16th and 19th-20th centuries were popular times of editing Jewish texts

A fertile boom in editing Jewish texts is seen in the 15th and 16th centuries in various centres of learning, above all Italy. Basically, the nature of such editions is the attempt to offer a vulgata – a common readable text – of some manuscripts, mostly by an eclectic method. Not until the 19th century, and following the major trends of the new academic sciences, did the scholars developing the Wissenschaft des Judentums consider it of utmost importance to reach standards in editing texts of rabbinic and medieval literature. Leopold Zunz, the “founder” of the science of Judaism, critically noted that the “so-called editiones principes, as soon as they accomplish more than a reproduction of manuscripts, (. . .) can rightly make the claim of being preliminary literary studies.” A significant number of editions were completed in this key period and remain an indispensable tool on the desk of every scholar of rabbinic, medieval and early modern literature.

Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 63-64.

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Some issues with considering versions of rabbinic texts

If accepted, the new version or publication crystallizes a fleeting moment in the tradition and, in so doing, makes further commentaries possible. It depends on the authority of the writer if his composition is to be considered a step forward in the tradition. If we consider a piece of tradition literature like the Mishnah, the situation is similar but not precisely the same. For we can imagine various attempts to publish Mishnayot, orally or in writing, to canonize a particular school’s tradition. That is, in my view, the main reason for the differences between the Mishnayot of the corpus of the Mishnah, the Tosefta and the Halakhic Midrashim, as well as the Mishnayot presupposed in Yerushalmi and Bavli. However, we have to be careful because ancient and medieval manuscript composers and writers could have had different “quotations” of the Mishnah before them, and the successive copyists could have harmonized their quotations according to the “vulgate”, namely according to the commonly used text in the academies.

Giuseppe Veltri, “From The Best Text To The Pragmatic Edition: On Editing Rabbinic Texts”, in The New Testament and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Reimund Bieringer, Florentino García Martínez, Didier Pollefeyt, Peter Tomson (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 68-69.

Relationship between print and manuscript was a long divorce, but never finalized for the Jews

In his Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, David McKitterick characterizes the relationship between print and manuscript in the early modern period as a long divorce. For Jews, one might posit that the divorce was never finalized: The composition of texts in manuscript never disappeared from Jewish culture. The writing of a Torah scroll, the composition of a mezuzah, and other such sacred objects continues uninterrupted. Even beyond these basic ritual functions, manuscript writing continued to play a crucial role in Jewish societies for centuries after the invention of printing, and manuscripts continue to exist in persistent tension with printed books. One could write an entire work on manuscript culture among early modern Jewry along the lines of Brian Richardson’s recent study. Such a book would unearth a range of intellectual activities that have either been studied in isolation from one another or not studied at all. Here, too, the history of the Shulhan ‘arukh proves particularly instructive. In his discussion of the Ashkenazic tradition of glossing the Shulhan ‘arukh, Elchanan Reiner concluded: “The Ashkenazi halakhic book at the beginning of the modern era retained certain features inherited from the medieval scribal tradition of knowledge transmission. In certain respects it was a kind of printed manuscript, that is, a text which, in the way it took shape, rejected the new communicative values of print culture and created a text with esoteric components, thus protecting its elitist position.” Reiner’s concept of a “printed manuscript” neatly dissolves the distinction between print and manuscript so beloved by historians fixated on rupture. It should also serve as the point of departure for the study of several aspects of early modern Jewish culture: the spread of kabbalistic books, the development of Jewish reference works, the study of marginal annotations, and the history of collections to name only a few.

Yaacob Dweck, “What is a Jewish Book?”, AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 371-372.

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An irony is that the halakhic textbook written by the most distinguished of these yoatzot turns out to be more stringent, and requires consultation with rabbis more often, than halakhic texts written by men

Another irony is that the halakhic textbook written by the most distinguished of these yoatzot turns out to be more stringent, and requires consultation with rabbis more often, than halakhic texts written by men. See Aviad Stollman’s review of Deena R. Zimmerman’s A Lifetime Companion to the Laws of Jewish Family Life in Meorot 6 (2007), p. 5. I can’t imagine that women think that there is an advantage in having halakhic works written by other women if these works actually reduce female autonomy in intimate hilkhot niddah matters and require more consultation with male rabbis.

Marc B. Shapiro, “Answers to Quiz Questions and Other Comments, part 2”, The Seforim Blog (25 March 2012) {http://seforim.blogspot.com/2012/03/answers-to-quiz-questions-and-other.html}

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The Considerable Importance of the Effect of the Extensive Commentary Tradition on the Shulhan Arukh

This extensive commentary tradition had a further effect of considerable import: By and large, the commentaries to Karo’s Shulhan ‘arukh that appeared on the printed page were written by Ashkenazic rabbis; the Sephardic commentaries did not usually appear alongside the text. In this intensified Ashkenization of a Sephardic text, one can find a larger trace of one of the central shifts from the early modern to the modern in Jewish history, a shift that has parallels in the transformation of Lurianic Kabbalah by the founders of Hasidism in the eighteenth century and one that is undergirded by a massive demographic transformation of Jewish populations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Karo wrote the Shulhan ‘arukh, the Jews of the Ottoman Empire were among the largest Jewish communities in the early modern world. When Gombiner wrote his commentary a century later, this demographic profile was beginning to change; and when Israel Meir ha-Kohen composed his in the nineteenth century, the Jews of the Levant were but a small minority of the world’s Jewish population.

Yaacob Dweck, “What is a Jewish Book?” AJS Review 34:2 (November 2010), 371.

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The Hafetz Hayyim oddly does not have challenged ideas

R. Yisrael Meir Ha-Cohen’s Sefer Chafetz Chayim is the only major work that touches on these issues, though it does not, to my knowledge, discuss newspapers explicitly. There has not been much debate concerning the arguments made by R. Yisrael Meir Ha-Cohen in his classic work, which surprises me. That is not to denigrate, Heaven forbid, the scholarship of the Chafetz Chayim; but, in Halakhah, all the great works are debated and challenged. Challenging the arguments made in a halakhic work is often a sure sign of its enduring relevance.

Michael Pershan, “Halakhic Values of Journalism,” Responsibility Inscribed, vol. 1 (2012), 34.