Celebrating
the Triumph of the Books of the People of the Book
By
Rabbi Norbert Weinberg,
Feb.
23,2013
[Rabbi
Weinberg recently donated books of archival value to the Leo Baeck Institute.
On the occasion of the yahrzeit, on Shushan Purim, of his father, Rabbi Dr.
William Weinberg, he penned this account of the story of the Jewish people as
reflected in the books from his collection. He is the author of a blog on 20 th
Century Jewish history, Courage of
the Spirit( www.Courageofspirit.com
). He and his wife operate Huntington Learning Center School Services in the
central and eastern SFV and is advisor to a new social media network to assist
family caregivers of elderly relatives, www.celsyalife.com
.]
The medieval Jewish translator, Ibn Tibbon, expressed the Jewish
relationship to books when he commanded his sons, ”Make your books your companions, let your
cases and shelves be your pleasure grounds and gardens.”
. We
render special treatment to books of
religious content, as if they were elderly parents--kiss them when they fall,
never place them in a disrespectful position, and when no longer viable, give
them an honorable burial.
It was with this regard that I had
treated books that had been in my father's collection.
Rabbi Dr. William
Weinberg had served as Rabbi to the survivors of the Shoah and was the first
State Rabbi of Hesse (Frankfurt and environs), Germany and these been part of
his library. He passed it on to me; with time I had augmented it as well. Many of these books had
survived both World Wars, travelled the ocean twice, been moved and packed
countless times.
Over the years, I had begun to
donate books that I no longer could use or store; some had gone to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, others to a scholar at a Yeshiva. I had hoped
to keep the one's I felt were most precious. Finally, it had come to the point
that I saw these books become ever more fragile and vulnerable to the dangers
of moisture and parasites. As time would go on, they would lose all value as
historical texts unless transferred to an academic institute where they would
be properly cared for.
A few weeks ago, these books made their way to
the Leo Baeck Institute. It was a very fitting place for these texts, as most
of them were the fruit of German Jewry, which is the focus of the Institute.
Even more appropriate , from a personal perspective, the Institute is named
after Rabbi Leo Baeck, the Chancellor of my father's Rabbinical school in
Berlin( Hochschule füer die Wissenschaft des Judentums) .Furthermore, the
President of the Institute , Professor Ismar Schorsch, had been Chancellor of
my Rabbinical alma mater (Jewish Theological Seminary of America). (Note: If readers
have any manuscripts or documents from the period before, during or after the
Holocaust, please contact Dr. Frank Mecklenburg, the director, about donating
them to the Institute for safe keeping for future generations, email : fmecklenburg@lbi.cjh.org. Their website is
www.lbi.org .)
A glance at some of the books that had been in
my collection serves as a walk through the woods of Jewish religious, intellectual and political history .It reminds us of the vitality and creativity of the
Jewish spirit.
We can start from Bereshit, the
Beginning, a Yemenite manuscript of the Chumash, Pentateuch, with Aramaic
translation, written in the 19th century.
( Yemenite Genesis manuscript,c 19th c)
Printing
was rare in much of the Moslem world till modern times , as the Ottoman Sultans
feared the corrupting power of the press in spreading ideas dangerous to the
faith. Jews in far flung realms like Yemen had to
count on hand-written texts. Jews who grew up in Yemen were renowned for being
able to read upside down or side-ways with ease because the
"Mori",the teacher could get hold of only one book to put on the
table . The child at the end of the table that day read an upside down text!
In the 17th and 18th century east
Europe, the Chumash served as the springboard for Yiddish as a language of
literature. Jewish women, while not schooled formally as were the men,
nevertheless were often taught to read and there was a need to provide edifying
religious texts. The classic case was the Tsena Rena, a paraphrase in
Yiddish, of the Chumash, written by one Yaakov ben Yitzhak of Janow in the
early 17th century. Herein
was an amalgamation of the narrative of the Chumash with moral comments drawn
from Rashi and Rabbinic lore.
(excerpt from Tsena Rena, circa 1700's).
We Jews never had an exclusive lock on
the Bible. There is an extensive history of Bible study, of course, by Christians
who had just as great a need to understand the sacred words as we did. To do so they needed access to our
manuscripts of the Bible and printed the text reflecting
the variations in these manuscripts
, such as this 1839, Leipzig edition of Biblia Hebraica
.
A Christian scholar would need a
good dictionary as well for the Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, such as this one
by Johannis Cocceis. He was
a noted early Protestant theologian, who, in 1669, defined the entries in Latin, Greek, Belgian and German
with explanations drawn from Rashi and the Talmud in his Lexicon et
Commentarius Sermonis Hebraici.
The
period of the Second Temple and the centuries that followed saw the formulation
of classical Judaism in the works of the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash. Original
texts of the period were rare finds, save for the famous scrolls at Qumran or
the later Genizah in Cairo. As a result of medieval persecutions and burnings
of the Talmud, very few texts of the core document of Judaism survived. One
exception was a manuscript of the Babylonian Talmud, transcribed in 1342 and preserved
in the Royal Library of Bavaria and made public by the publication of a
facsimile copy in 1912 by Christian
scholar of Judaism, Herman Strack, Talmud Babylonicum Codicis Hebraici
Monisenis 95
(Talmud
Babylonicum Codicis Hebraici Monisenis 95)
The Middle Ages was also a period of
Jewish creativity in the realm of Jewish law, philosophy and thought.
The paramount guide to Jewish law,
coming towards the end of the Middle Ages, was the Shulkhan Arukh, of
Rabbi Josef Karo in 16th century Safed. This was an abridgement of
his master work, the commentary on the earlier code, The Tur. It was intended
as a guide to help Rabbinic students determine what had become accepted
practice, so that one could come to his work and feast as at a set dinner
table, hence, Shulkhan Arukh ; in Poland, an equally great scholar,
Rabbi Moshe Isserles, decided that the banquet table was missing one element, a
tablecloth, Mapah , of the customs and practices of Ashkenazic Jewry.
From then on, the Table and its Tablecloth set the standards for European
Jewry.
(1795 edition, printed in Amsterdam).
Back in Yemen, where , as I
mentioned, printed books were a rarity , Jewish texts were hand written with
painstaking exactness ( some of the oldest texts of Midrash were preserved by
the scribes of Yemen). One of the greatest leaders of Yemenite Jewry was 18th
century R. Yichyeh Tzalach ( Maharitz), who was the authority in his days of
Jews from Ethiopia to India. When,
centuries later, another scholar,
R.Yihyeh ben Yakov, wanted to write a text on Kashrut, Zivchey Shelamim, he wrote it, in classical medieval style,
around the text of Makor Chayim of Rabbi Tzalach.
( manuscript
of Zivchey Shelamim in
my possession, c 1880)
By the end of the Renaissance, the
new trends of critical thinking among Christian Europeans were
beginning to make headway into Jewish circles, so that
Azariah dei Rossi, an Italian Jewish physician in the 1500’s, began to apply
these critical methods to question the historicity of the “aggadah”, the traditions of events that appeared in the
Talmud and other early Rabbinic literature. For this, he was almost
excommunicated and his work, “Maor Eynaim “,( A Light for the Eyes) almost
burned by instruction of the famous Rabbi Karo, author of the Shulkhan Arukh.
His work was reprinted two centuries
later by the students of the new perspective on the world, The Enlightenment.
( 1794 Berlin edition).
This brings
us to a scholar from Desau who folowed his teacher to Berlin to continue his
Rabbinic studies and then became one of the most celebrated philosphers, both
German and Jewish, of his day, Moses
Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn, with his keen intellect, was soon admitted to the
highest intellectual circles in Berlin.He became the inspiration for a play by
a German Christian author, Lessing, called Nathan the Wise and was the
inspiration for the acceptance of Jews into German society. At the same time,
Mendelssohn was concerned with the challenges that a newer, more embracing
German culture, with its emphasis on reason, presented. He felt the need to
bring German culture to his fellow Jews by translating the Bible into German as a vehicle tol lead them to a literary German. On the other
hand,he defended Judaism to German society. Jerusalem, or
Religious Power and Judaism was his
most noted work, presenting Judaism as based on a system of revealed laws but
not on dogma,
in contrast to Christianity, based entirely on dogma;Judaism
in this new Age of Reason was therefore the true religion. In this new and liberal Europe,a Jew could openly challenge Christianity and then be a
cultural hero to boot.
(Berlin, 1783)
While
Mendelssohn wrote and the French filosof proposed, Napoleon smashed open the gates of
Europe’s ghettoes and promised Jews recognition as citizens of this new
enlightened world. No sooner, though, than Napoleon fell and the doors began to
close again;it took more years of struggle to give Jews their full place in
European society ( rescinded yet again in Germany under Hitler) .In 1831, a Jewish attorney, Dr. Gabriel Riesser, who had been barred from teaching at
the local University, published a
challenge to the government to give Jews
full rights as citizens:Uber die Stellung der Bekenner des Mosaischen
Glauabens in Deutschland ( On the Position of Confessors of the Jewish
Faith in Germany,1831 , Altoona edition). Sixteen years
later, he would become the first Jewish citizen of Hamburg and the first Jewish
judge in Germany
.
The new era
of Enlightenment created unprecedented shifts inside the Jewish communities of
western, central and later, eastern Europe.In an age in which faith itself was
challenged, many Jews had no compunction about converting to Christianity in
order to obtain a political or profesisonal appointment. For example, one of
the greatest of German poets, Heinrich Heine, went to the baptism font yet
openly regarded himself as a Jew and referred to Jewish themes repeatedly in
his works, such as his novel,”The Rabbi of Bacharach” about persecution of the
Jews.
(Heinrich Heines Werke, 1884).
More noble and courageous move was to incorporate the ideals of the Enligtenment as the
ideals of Judaism in
what became the Reform movement. The
Reform prayerbook, Olat Tamid, by Rabbi David Einhorn, was published it in 1858 in New York This was a creative work expressing Einhorn’s
Reform ideal of the universality of humanity with an anti-particularistic
strain. He removed the Kol Nidrei, the Musaf service, the blessings for the
blowing of shofar or the lighting of Chanukah lights. He de-emphasized Israel
as the Chosen People, and removed all
references to a personal Messiah, a return to Israel, or the resumption of the
sacrificial cult. The same Rabbi, infused with the ideals of German enlightenment,
was a champion abolitionist who was chased out of Baltimore
for hhis preaching. The prayerbook
itself was in German, as the Jews he preached to were all refugees of the reactionary crackdown on liberals
after the failed revolutions of 1848 in Germany.
( Gebetbuch-Prayerbook
Olat Tamid, 1858)
One young Jewish intellectual was dismayed at the attack
on faith from rationalists and reformers. This young scholar combined high
secular academic training with traditional Rabbinic studies and was determined
to show that would now be called “ Orthodox “ Judaism was compatible with
contemporary thought. He preached in German and even called for the removal of
the Kol Nidre ( just as his Reform contemporary above had done); on the other
hand, Halakhah in principal was immutable
and he saw no choice but to separate his community, legally, from the
civilly recognized community of Frankfurt,
Germany, now under the control of a Reform-minded majority. His first salvo in
defense of Orthodoxy is Neunzern
Briefe uber Judentum von Ben Uziel,
( Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel) written in 1836, when he was not yet 30
( Neunzehn
Briefe,1901 edition)
A third way arose, between,
rejection of all Jewish observance on the one hand, and unquestioning adherence
on the other hand, arose in the school of “ positive historical” Judaism, now
identified with the Conservative movement. This school of thought sought to defend
the validity and force of Jewish law in the light of a “scientific”
(Wissenschaft) examination of sources and then determine the original intention
and possible implications in applying ancient precepts to modern situations.
Rabbi Zecharia Frankel for example brought together the great researchers of
his day to shed new light on ancient themes in his journal, Monatschrift fur
die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, founded in 1851. The journal
continued publication until the Nazi regime. Almost all copies of the last
volume, 1939, were destroyed; my father had one of the only extant copies,
which is now in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
. ( 1939 issue, Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des
Judentums)
Yet another route opened to the
Jewish people—the route of Zionism, both in its religious and secular variation. The
only place for Jews in a Europe that was becoming increasingly nationalistic and
turning its back on the ideals of the Enlightenment was in the ancient Land of
Palestine—Eretz Yisrael. Before Herzl, there was Leo Pinsker, who called for
Jewish political resurgence in the Land of Israel in 1883, Auto-Emancipation
( 1936 edition).(No image).
Forty years after Herzl’s call for a Jewish
state, Chaim Weizmann was pleading the case for Jewish immigration to Palestine
to the British government’s Peel Commission. Shown here is the German
translation of the text of Weizmann’s appeal, “The Right to the Homeland”,Das
Recht auf die Heimat 1936.
(Das Recht auf Die Heimat, 1936)
Zionism gave rise to a new living Hebrew;
my father’s uncle ,Jonah Gelernter, was editor of a Hebrew language journal in
Vienna. There arose, as well, another nationalist trend, focused in Europe,
that led to the flourishing of Yiddish
as a literary language of cultural value comparable to the other languages of
Europe. Could one think of a European
and American Jewish culture without the
works of a Sholem Aleichem or Yitzhak Leib Peretz?
(Alle Wereke fun Sholem Aleichem, 1944
ed.)
(Chasidish , Yitzhak Leib
Peretz)
The end of the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth century saw an intellectual world dominated by the
triumvirate of Jewish German-speakers- Marx in politics, Freud in psychology,
and Einstein in science. The “ Deutsche Kultur-Kreise”, the German cultural
sphere, gave rise to a unique flowering of Jewish creativity that expressed
itself secularly ( as in great writers, scientists, musician,poltical thinkers)
but also Jewishly. This continued unabated up to the eve of the Shoah, The
great spiritual and intellectual leaders in the Jewish world lived at one point
or another in German-speaking countries-
Rabbis Leo Baeck, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Soloveitchik, and
Menahem Mendel Schneerson ,philosophers of Judaism- Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig, or the psychologist, Alfred Adler, who served as mentor to young
Zionists in Vienna.
(Baeck,
Wege im Judentum, The Path of Judaism, 1933
(Buber, Hundert Chasidische Geschichte A
Hundred Chasidic Tales, 1935)
Popular German authors revealed
their Jewish side as well. Austrian
playwright, son of a Jewish father and a
French mother , popularly known as Ferdinand Bruckner, produced his own edition
of the Psalms of King David,in a numbered limited edition, published under his
real name of Theodor Tagger
(Psalmen
Davids, 19/50 numbered editon, 1918.illustration)
The cream of Jewish intellectual
production was surely the comprehensive Encyclopedia Judaica , published
in Berlin beginning in 1928. The editors succeeded published up to Volume 10. in
1934, the Nazi regime made further progress on this work impossible.
(Encyclopedia
Judaica, Berlin ,
1934, Vol 10)
Nazism sought to destroy not only
the Jewish people but every vestige of Jewish cultural, intellectual, spiritual
and moral teaching. This was at the heart and soul of the reign of terror that
befell the entire world. The dark night had set upon European Jewry and this
flourishing culture.
The will for decency ultimately
triumphed over the will to evil in 1945, with the defeat of the Third Reich by
the Allies.
In the aftermath of the Shoah, the
survivors in the DP camps picked themselves up to start life anew.
It was fitting then, that the United States Armed Forces, which did so much to
defeat Nazism, helped publish an edition of the Talmud for the benefit of the survivors of the holocaust. This set, which I donated to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is perhaps the only edition of the Talmud to
be dedicated to a gentile military! On
the cover page there is, at the bottom, the darkness
of a concentration camp, and at the top, the brightness of the sun
rising over the Land of Israel . Fittingly, it
was printed in Heidelberg, Germany —in 1948, the
year of Israel’s Independence!
(
Talmud, 1948)
I close this essay with a note on the triumph of the Books of the
People of the Book.
Die Juden in Deutschland, (The Jews in
Germany) is an almanac of the Jewish communities in Germany, printed in 1953. One page shows a photograph of the
rededication of the magnificent Westend Synagogue of Frankfurt in 1951.My
father, as presiding Rabbi, is holding the Torah scroll, the Book of Books of
the People of the Book, on the left, in front of the ark. What better way to
declare the triumph of the spirit of the Jewish people on a land soaked in
Jewish blood and the victory of human decency over nihilism and evil than to
stand under the inscription,” Ki
Mitziyon”—From out of Zion shall go forth the Torah and the word of the Lord from
Jerusalem.”!
(Die
Juden in Deutschland, 1953)
###
