Unsettling Jewish Knowledge: Text, Contingency, Desire 9781512824315

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s “Holocaust Fiction”
Chapter 2. Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day”: Body, Text, Interpretation
Chapter 3. Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past
Chapter 4. Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination
Chapter 5. Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose
Chapter 6. Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation
Chapter 7. Beyond Faith and Reason: R. Avraham Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish) on Certainty and Doubt, Love of the Law, and Constructing the Halakhic Self
Chapter 8. Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus)
Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Unsettling Jewish Knowledge

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania Series Editors Shaul Magid Francesca Trivellato Steven Weitzman A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

UNSETTLING JEWISH KNOWLEDGE Text, Contingency, Desire

Edited by Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

U n i v e r s i t y o f P e n n s y lva n i a P r e s s Philadelphia

Copyright © 2023 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5128-2430-8 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5128-2431-5 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

Contents

Introduction Anne C. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

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Chapter 1. The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s “Holocaust Fiction” Yael S. Feldman

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Chapter 2. Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day”: Body, Text, Interpretation Shira Stav

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Chapter 3. Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past Eva Mroczek

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Chapter 4. Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination John Efron

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Chapter 5. Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose Galit Hasan-Rokem

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Chapter 6. Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation Eli Schonfeld

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Chapter 7. Beyond Faith and Reason: R. Avraham Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish) on Certainty and Doubt, Love of the Law, and Constructing the Halakhic Self Shaul Magid

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Chapter 8. Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus) Paul E. Nahme

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Notes

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List of Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Anne c. Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy

Dirty books. The Wandering Jew. “Smelly Jews.” A naked girl in a synagogue. Self-sacrifice. Lamentation as consolation. Law as love. The enchanted yeshivah. In and of themselves, these ideas, themes, and signifiers have little in common. But in the discursive contexts of this book’s eight chapters, these images and ideas represent counterintuitive ways of knowing and understanding that emerge when we turn our critical attention to fantasy, emotions, the senses, and the body. The authors in this volume explore these realms and affects, opening up new ways of knowing that deepen and sometimes subvert traditional modes of scholarly inquiry. The essays in Unsettling Jewish Knowledge—which span the fields of literature, history, philosophy, and theology—all make important contributions in their respective fields, but they also speak to one another across disciplinary boundaries. Their shared attention to arenas of human experience outside the realm of conscious reasoned thought provides the unifying structure of this book. Some extol the virtues of the emotions, the senses, and the imagination, whereas others draw our attention to the darker significance of the nonrational. Taken together, they grapple with themes of conflict, suffering, and consolation prompted by widening the lens of Jewish inquiry to encompass aspects of human experience that too often escape traditional modes of inquiry. In so doing, they demonstrate how foregrounding the nonrational elements of Jewish life and experience can elicit a more embodied, self-reflective, and capacious Jewish studies. Despite a shared interest in the nonrational, this collection does not give us a settled blueprint for studying or understanding the place of the imagination, emotions, and senses in Jewish art, literature, or religious life. To

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the contrary, the effect of this book is to unsettle scholarly wisdoms and selfunderstandings in novel and intellectually productive ways. The subjects under study are themselves unsettling; many elicit strong and uncomfortable emotions in readers as they take up complex Jewish questions. John Efron’s chapter on the place of the “smelly Jew” in Christian folklore and art prompts disgust with its graphic depictions of Jews in relation to excrement and bestiality. Eva Mroczek’s examination of textual decay generates deep anxiety over the loss and contamination of precious historical texts. And Shira Stav’s study of the naked girl in the synagogue in S. Y. Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” reorients the story away from religious allegory toward a more concrete and painful incestuous tension. Attention to these unsettling issues raises important questions about the nature of knowledge, be it self-knowledge, knowledge of God, knowledge of the Other, or knowledge of scholarly traditions such as law or literature. By what channels do we come to know what we know, and what perspectives have been left out? Reason and science have long laid claim to being the most objective modes of academic inquiry, but this book’s essays prompt us to ask what goes missing when emotions, imagination, and the bodily senses are sidelined. An unsettling openness to new ways of knowing permeates the entire volume as the reader confronts recurring motifs of love, suffering, selfsacrifice, and compassion—not only as themes and experiences but also as drivers of knowledge. In bringing nonrational aspects into focus, the essays expand and complicate our knowledge of the subjects and texts under study, often challenging standard divides between law and love, self-preservation and self-destruction, freedom and constraint, reality and imagination, and punishment and consolation. Galit Hasan-Rokem, for example, explores the role of the imagination in autobiographical narratives in her study of the complicated and ambivalent desire to belong and its rendering in the figure of the Wandering Jew in works by Serbian author Danilo Kiš. Her chapter gives us insights into how unconscious fantasy shapes and informs what we think we know of the world and our own lives. In emphasizing the place of imagination in self-narratives, Hasan-Rokem points toward an understanding of Jewish experience that encompasses unconscious factors—an approach that resonates with psychoanalytic insights into the place of fantasy in shaping the stories we tell about ourselves and raises questions about whether it is possible to separate fact from fantasy in the pursuit of self-understanding.

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Similarly, several chapters take up the question of an encounter that breaks down the distinction between mind and body. We see this, for example, in Stav’s aforementioned contribution on Agnon’s reader encountering a young girl’s naked body, Eli Schonfeld’s chapter on Jews encountering God’s comforting presence in liturgical settings, and Mroczek’s reader encountering the (often dirty) physicality of the text. In drawing attention to the physical body, these authors expose issues overlooked or repressed in most standard accounts. For Stav, it is the possibility of incestuous desire, a repressed desire brought to the surface by attention to the actual physical interaction of father and daughter. For Schonfeld, the body brings into focus the experience of God as a comforting presence, a perspective gained by imagining one’s physical proximity to God even amid such overwhelming suffering. And for Mroczek, the focus on the physicality of the texts and the human beings who take care of them opens up whole new ways of understanding both the science and literature of textual discovery and degradation. Many of these essays center on the emotions as well. Shaul Magid teaches us that it is love—not of God but of the law itself—that might be seen as governing Jewish ritual observance; his meditation on love and law helps us see how adherence to Jewish law engages a complex interplay of emotional and intellectual forces. As mentioned, Efron’s chapter on the “smelly Jew” posits disgust as a driving feature in Christian depictions of Jews and a key to understanding the antisemitism in Christian folklore and art. Almost every contribution to this volume uses emotion as a guide to broaden our understanding of Jewish experience, history, theology, and literature. Taken together, the essays thus press us to seriously consider what it means for Jewish identity and experience to be constituted, at least in part, outside the frameworks of reasoned thought and inquiry. But as the contributions by Hasan-Rokem and Efron make clear, the association of Jews with emotions or irrationality has a long history in antisemitic literature, which often depicts Jews as dwelling in a world of debased affects and bodily senses. Going “beyond reason” therefore forces the reader to confront traditional antisemitic stereotypes about the irrational, emotional, or sensual Jew. The focus on issues such as bestiality, incest, and martyrdom in these essays heightens the tensions around acknowledging these disturbing aspects of Jewish experience, given the forms antisemitism can take. It is important to note how such unsettling not only departs from prior scholarly contributions but also builds on them. Indeed, unsettling claims

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to knowledge is what modern Jewish studies, like other fields of scholarly inquiry, has always done. Often, when contributing new ideas to scholarship, we argue that past claims and approaches in a tradition of inquiry have become outmoded. As one form of unsettling, this kind of scholarly revision aims to replace one set of knowledge-claims with a better or truer understanding. Consider Susannah Heschel’s classic work on the Reform Jewish thinker Abraham Geiger (1810–74) and his account of early Christianity, which had emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus. When Heschel published her work, Geiger was seen primarily as a thinker of Reform Jewish identity and practice. In calling her readers to attend also to Geiger’s account of Christian origins, Heschel gave a fuller picture of him as a thinker. Her work showed how Geiger exposed the falseness of Protestant biblical criticism, which was constituted by its anti-Jewishness. As she demonstrated, his argument that Jesus “said and did nothing new” (as Heschel summarized it) made a forceful intervention that unsettled Christian claims to supremacy and amounted to an “overthrow of Christian hegemony.”1 Similarly, Naomi Seidman’s recent book on Sarah Schenirer (1883–1935), who founded the Bais Yaakov movement of schools for Orthodox girls in 1917, seeks to provide a more nuanced portrayal of Schenirer’s role in twentieth-century Orthodox culture. Seidman’s account emphasizes “the interplay and tensions . . . ​between tradition and innovation, radicalism and piety” in opposition to prior accounts that emphasized either one or the other, marginalized Schenirer’s role, or even erased Schenirer from the movement that she inaugurated.2 Such classic scholarly unsettling rightly values knowledge as a good; it sees academic labor as oriented toward the acquisition of deeper, fuller, or more accurate knowledge, giving the reader evidence that one’s approach is the best reading of the text or of the historical facts. Yet Heschel and Seidman also unsettle through their realization that the pursuit of knowledge cannot be separated from its performance. Seidman knows that it is not just scholarship that can rightly recenter Schenirer in the story of Jewish Orthodoxy but also the pilgrimages that contemporary Bais Yaakov women take to Schenirer’s grave.3 Heschel depicts Geiger not merely as a better scholar than his Christian interlocutors but also as a man who is “defiant, disruptive,” and characterized by “ferocity.”4 At these moments, when Heschel and Seidman turn to aspects of human experience that show that knowing is not something calmly done at a desk or in an archive—that it can occur on sacred journeys and be accompanied by emotional displays—it becomes clear that the scholarly enterprise is not simply an abstract and disinterested one.

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By attending to the nonrational elements in human experience as sites of knowledge, the essays in this volume unsettle any depoliticized or abstract account of the scholarly enterprise. They offer innovative and provocative readings of Jewish texts and histories that help us see aspects of human experience left unexamined by more orthodox interpretations. In so doing, they unsettle the institutional story of an uncontaminated scientific scholarship to which the discipline of Jewish studies has sought claim. In each chapter, we see a double movement similar to what we find in the work of Heschel and Seidman: the essays not only unsettle, but also move toward an understanding of affect, emotion, or the senses as the center of knowledge and understanding. Each chapter in this book shows the limits of past readings of a corpus of knowledge and gives us a more finely attuned account incorporating the nonrational. But at the same time, each also raises the question of whether these new accounts give us any greater truth at all, be it divine revelation, or a truth that is beyond history, or an unmediated access to ideas that have fallen prey to the ravages of time and nature. Together, the essays offer a self-awareness of individual scholarly mediation that can be liberating in the face of scholarly “universalism.” As David Myers writes, recognizing that knowledge is “simply a construct of the individual historian’s mind” need not consign us to an incapacitating relativism, because “someone who engages in an ‘act of knowing’ can both do that and be aware that he or she is performing that act.”5 In these literary, philosophical, theological, and historical contributions, we find that the awareness of that performance is at the heart of the work of unsettling. For what is more familiar to scholars than the expectation of critique from other researchers and dominant models? At the same time, what is more alien than the right to infer from the constant possibility of critique and being critiqued that all such accounts, including our own, are transitory? After all, who can say in advance that their scholarship, at the moment it triumphs, has cut off the possibility of further criticism? The book’s eight chapters hold onto the contingency of knowledge-claims while affirming the central importance of the nonrational to our understanding of ourselves and the world. In other words, in their unsettling work and in their exposure of other drivers of knowledge-claims and understanding, these projects draw our attention to contingency as an inherent aspect of the production of new knowledge. As we discuss later, they also attune us to the importance of desire as a key motivational force in the pursuit of knowledge. In them, we see how scholarly desire drives inquiry and how collective “truth” is produced

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under compulsion from the desires of others and, in both cases, how fragile the act of truth making really is.

* * * We turn here to the diverse ways in which the eight chapters use nonrational elements as the method or object of study, showing us lines of connection across disciplinary boundaries. The unsettling dynamic is powerfully clear in the two essays on the fiction of S. Y. Agnon. In some sense, Agnon serves as a standard-bearer for this volume, in that his fiction interferes in the scholar’s task of unveiling knowledge. In Chapter 1, “The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s ‘Holocaust Fiction,’ ” Yael Feldman notes the tension between the religious origins of martyric practices and their modern-day analogues within secular nationalist contexts. Her interest homes in on the evolution of the Jewish martyr tradition (epitomized by the ‘Akedah) in Palestine as self-sacrifice for the good of the nation. Through a reading of two works from the corpus of Agnon’s post-Holocaust fiction, she resituates Agnon as a harbinger of later Israeli Hebrew fiction from the late 1940s through the 1980s, which rejects martyric traditions in both their religious and secular forms. Feldman’s readings of Agnon are resolutely anti-redemptive. In her analysis of his 1947 story “Measuring Gain by Pain,” Feldman emphasizes the failure of its characters to defend an account of martyrdom as kiddush hashem, a sanctification of the divine name that would ascribe value to Jewish suffering and martyrdom. In addition, Feldman also emphasizes the inability of the characters in Agnon’s 1939 novel A Guest for the Night to access a Jewish past that might ennoble the suffering of secular martyrs, those who sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation, in the World War I generation. But if these failures raise the real possibility that the stakes of Jewish lives cannot be articulated with any clarity or coherence, why should Agnon or any other author write about Jewish lives out of anything more than an idiosyncratic obsession? And if it is only an idiosyncratic obsession, why publish that writing? In raising these issues, Feldman opens up intriguing hypotheses to explain Agnon’s refusal to publish the stories he wrote near the end of his life about the Jewish residents of his hometown of Buczacz, most of whom were murdered in the Shoah. Shira Stav’s chapter, titled “Agnon’s ‘At the Outset of the Day’: Body, Text, Interpretation,” avers that Agnon’s critics have long interpreted his work

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symbolically, privileging its “covert” meaning over its overt layer and the metaphysical over the physical. Stav shows how critical attention to the tangible and material elements in his work, such as the role of human bodies, interrupts allegorical readings that putatively descend into the truer depths of the story. In Agnon’s story “At the Outset of the Day,” originally published in 1951, a father and daughter seek refuge from enemies in a synagogue courtyard in the evening shortly before Yom Kippur begins. But while they are safe from outsiders, a memorial candle inside the courtyard falls and burns the daughter’s dress, leaving her naked. Critics typically interpret the daughter as a symbol for the soul of the modern Jew, alienated from both tradition and modernity. However, this hermeneutic decision overlooks the significance of how Agnon represents the daughter’s body in its materiality. It also fails to account for two important elements of Agnon’s story: the girl’s nakedness and the father’s bizarre behavior in neglecting to cover her, a failure that Stav reads as suggesting incestuous desire. As Stav points out, this is a story about desire and the impossibility of its fulfillment: “that which demands interpretation is left bare, without a stitch of clothing/solution.” For her, this is a structural impossibility. Desire arises in the body, and so it cannot leave the body behind without becoming detached from the source of its energy. As a result, this makes our desires for transcendence, for stability in the face of contingency, for safety from candles and fathers, particularly paradoxical ones. Such interventions and obstructions (be they playful or more serious) cannot but produce anxiety. That anxiety is especially apparent in Eva Mroczek’s “Dirty Books: Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past,” which traces the concern that texts from the Jewish past might become “mere materiality” rather than repositories of knowledge. Mroczek follows this concern in several historical and literary philological settings: Moshe Cordovero’s sixteenth-century account of the discovery of the Zohar, a prominent work of Jewish mysticism, and its recovery from a trash heap; the fictitious manuscript of the history of the city of Gumlidata, infected by the hands of leprous readers, in Agnon’s 1954 story “Forevermore”; and narratives both of the discovery and the preservation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mroczek’s turn from the history of the book to stories about the discovery of ancient manuscripts shows that, in all these contexts, an apparatus arises to battle this fear that contamination will lead to the degradation of knowledge. For the philologist, this apparatus might entail the perpetuation of Orientalist myths about Arabs who fail to see the value of

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the manuscripts that they possess. In “Forevermore,” it entails the protective wear and gloves that the historian Adiel Amzeh dons in the house of the lepers as he tries to complete his history of the city of Gumlidata. For manuscript conservators, it entails the sterilized environment that is necessary for their work. These apparatuses arise for the sake of the scholar’s belief that there is meaning to be handed down from the text to the scholar, that the past is one of “words, not things.” The fragmentariness of our knowledge of the past is repressed as the scholar works with the scroll or book to free its words from their material conveyance. Ideas of contamination and the body play determinative and extreme roles in John Efron’s “Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination,” which focuses on the discourse of the smelly Jew in Germany in the Middle Ages and early modern period, and also addresses how one reads the historical past. Efron follows how stench, as a theological representation of a people tainted by their rejection of Christ, morphed into cultural beliefs about Jewish uncleanliness; eventually, the dirty and smelly Jew became a core tenet of antisemitic dogma. In contrast to the other chapters, the discourse under inquiry here has nothing to do with the psychic mechanisms by which Jews claim to make true judgments of the world around them. Instead, the essay deals with the psychic mechanisms by which European Christians claim to make true judgments about Jews. Out of a desire to neutralize the alleged “olfactory threat” posed by Jews, the Christian imagination fixated on Jewish bodies, ghettos, and practices. This had the effect of essentializing Jews as “depraved and filthy,” fundamentally different from other humans in a way that no baptism or conversion could alter. In the context of this book, Efron’s contribution highlights the risk of claiming other paths to knowledge than those authorized by the canons of reason; being unsettled cannot make, or keep, one safe. Because the depths of meaning are not readily legible on the surface, it is always possible for narratives that gain power to cement hegemony and make possible the worst of evils. In this case, as Efron points out in the conclusion of his chapter, the long history of language about Jews as pollutants created a context that allowed Nazis to “make sure that representation became reality” in the Holocaust. Galit Hasan-Rokem’s account of the role of the Wandering Jew in the prose of the Serbian author Danilo Kiš echoes Efron’s account of the Jewish– Christian relationship in Europe as showing us the darkest sides of the nonrational. The legend of the Wandering Jew originated in the late antique Christian imagination as a figure for Jews, cursed to wander the world eter-

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nally for their unbelief in Jesus, yet the legend is also reclaimed in Jewish folklore and literature at various times. Here too, Hasan-Rokem notes that the Wandering Jew was unable to hide because “his stench gave him away.” But whereas Efron’s chapter takes up the myth of the smelly Jew as a destabilizing presence in medieval and early modern Christian Europe, HasanRokem addresses the liminality of Jewish identity in mid-twentieth-century Europe. In “Imagining a Father: The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose,” Hasan-Rokem traces how Kiš (1935–1989) confronted his inability to remember his father Eduard, who died in Auschwitz in 1944 or 1945, by assigning the traits of the Wandering Jew to the father characters in his fictional works. The inability to know his father as he really was drives Kiš into the territory of legend; by taking on the traits of a type, Kiš’s father regains presence in and through the son’s imaginative acts. Hasan-Rokem locates a synergy between the “open-ended and unstable” identities of both the father and the historical figure of the Wandering Jew in Kiš’s 1965 autobiographical novel garden, ashes and in his 1972 Hourglass, which reconstructs the final weeks of his father’s life before being murdered at Auschwitz. It is this entry into a realm on the borders of imagination and history, life and death, Jewishness and Christian culture that allowed Kiš to cope, to some extent, with loss and to reclaim a Jewish identity. Nevertheless, in Hasan-Rokem’s contribution, the imagination does not provide an avenue for transcending suffering and loss; its coping only allows for the development of a “liminal Jewish identity,” something that remains on the borders, never entering a territory of consolation. Questions of consolation and compensation return in Eli Schonfeld’s “Consolation Beyond Theodicy: A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation.” Schonfeld takes up the oddities of the Jewish liturgical calendar in the seven weeks after the holiday of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e. The passages from the prophetic texts of the Tanakh (haftarot) that are read in synagogue services on the Sabbath during these weeks seek to console the people of Israel in their suffering at the hands of others. In these haftarot, God is depicted in ways that diverge from the normative understandings of the divine found in the writings of Moses Maimonides and in various modern examples of Jewish theology, in which a depersonalized God exists outside the temporal flow of history. Schonfeld’s turn to liturgy shows us a more personal God who both enters history and consoles. However, given that these passages are read year after year, it cannot actually be the case

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that God has come into history and vanquished the enemies of Israel to end Israel’s suffering. So how, then, do these haftarot console? Schonfeld interprets the opening verses of Isaiah 52 to show that God consoles not through divine power (by vanquishing enemies, for example) but simply by expressing emotion upon witnessing the people of Israel’s suffering. Here, God’s empathy compensates for the collective suffering of Jewish experience. Compensatory work occurs not only in extreme experiences of trauma but also in more ordinary guises. That ordinariness appears in two accounts of modern Orthodox religious life in this volume. Shaul Magid’s “Beyond Faith and Reason” takes up the treatise Faith and Trust by R. Avraham Karelitz (1878–1953), an important rabbi known as the Hazon Ish. In his essay, Magid introduces us to a self that desires piety but does not know whether its desire can be fulfilled. This is in part because the halakhic life that constitutes piety often goes counter to human instinct, which is in part determined by the evil impulse (yetser ha-ra‘). In response to anxiety over whether Jews can fulfill the demands of halakhah, the Hazon Ish prescribes an attitude unique in the corpus of Jewish thought—ahavat ha-halakhah, or “love of the law.” This kind of love is strange within the Jewish tradition: it is not quite a love of God, nor does it suggest any kind of experiential relationship with the divine. Rather, love of the law is a willed emotion that allows submission to halakhah, enabling one to rise above the nagging question of whether one has been led astray by reason or by the yetser ha-ra‘. The claim that Jews are to love the law allows for a kind of certainty about their relationship with halakhah, a certainty that Magid associates with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “subjective certainty.” Magid also explores the law as a source of self-knowledge, suggesting the term “halakhic self ” and discussing it in the context of modern musar literature, where certainty and doubt take the place of faith versus reason. Uncertainty and doubt also play a role in Paul Nahme’s “Enchanted Thinking: Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus),” which traces a history of approaches to talmudic study and interpretation characteristic of the modern yeshivah in Lithuania and elsewhere. In that tradition, God’s transcendence shows us the limitation of human reasoning, denying us certainty about the correctness of human judgments. But as R. Aryeh Leib Ha-Kohen Keller (1745–1813) argued, that very limitation drives the yeshivah student’s pursuit of new interpretations of Torah, meant to bring the supernal Torah into the world so it can enchant that world through human acts of reasoning. Nahme’s reconceptual-

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izing of yeshivah study and its effects on the students sets its sights on the secularization theory of Max Weber, which assumes that rationalization necessarily disenchants and depersonalizes the world.6 Unlike much contemporary scholarship that takes the twenty-first-century “return of religion” as evidence of the failure of secularization theory, Nahme shows that the error of Weber’s readers (and possibly Weber himself) was the assumption that secularity was always and everywhere opposed to religion. In the nineteenthcentury yeshivah, halakhah was taken to be both enchanted and the product of reason. We cannot look at the texts of the Lithuanian yeshivah and determine whether they fall conclusively on the side of reason or tradition; of modernity or superstition; of human authority to interpret halakhah or divine authority to command halakhah.

* * * In these chapters, it is contingency that emerges as the ever-present gadfly that cannot be conquered by the quest for knowledge. Often, the confrontation with contingent existence arises in the experiences of war and murder. In Agnon’s A Guest for the Night, as analyzed by Feldman, the character of Daniel Bach is scarred by witnessing the horrors of World War I; he is driven to heresy by the world around him. In Shira Stav’s discussion of “At the Outset of the Day,” the father and daughter only find themselves in the synagogue on Erev Yom Kippur because they are seeking refuge from their enemies. Similar themes of disrupted agency are present in Schonfeld’s analysis of the biblical book of Isaiah (and the post-Holocaust context in which he places it, with reference to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas) and in Hasan-Rokem’s treatment of Kiš’s garden, ashes. Magid’s and Nahme’s chapters admit from the outset that contingency is fundamental to the human experience. For the Hazon Ish, our individual situatedness in the world gives the yetser ha-ra‘ free rein, while for the mitnagdic authorities whom Nahme addresses, the uncertainty of existence stems from our limited reason. The compensatory moves described by Hasan-Rokem, Schonfeld, Magid, and Nahme are, from a certain angle, failures or at least incomplete. The fact that Sabbaths of consolation repeat from one year to the next suggests that Israel is not consoled. Danilo Kiš’s father remains hidden, even in the ink on the page. Love of the law does not erase the yetser ha-ra‘. Uncertainty remains constitutive of human reason for Heller; as Nahme points out, for Heller, even the Oral Torah “may very well be judged incorrect according

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to a divine reason.” Yet these moves compensate nonetheless. The person who hears Isaiah 52 is imagined to be consoled. The search for Eduard, Kiš’s father, continues with as much verve as ever. Love of the law brings about a certain kind of certainty. The act of interpreting Torah in a yeshivah brings about novelty in interpretation and its affective pleasures. It is not simply that the authors are showing a double movement of compensation and its failures; it is also that the subjects of these chapters, with one exception, are fully conscious of that double movement—what Hasan-Rokem calls the “hide and seek of known and unknown,” of the compensatory response to being unsettled and the anxious unsettling itself. The one clear exception in this book would be the scientists and the philologists in Mroczek’s chapter who are unconscious of the fear of materiality and decay that drives their research. Responding to contingency by introducing a grounding idea, the unified meaning of a plot, or a perfectly uncorrupted textual manuscript, is destined to fail. A rationalist response that assumes that a body’s unsettling power can be nullified by a transhistorical allegory, or that a theology can eliminate the possibility that others will commit evil acts (or that we will fall prey to our own evil impulses), or that words can resurrect the dead and make them flesh again, is simply an act of denial. These essays, in contrast, do not avoid the difficulty of staking knowledge-claims in a contingent world; they do not treat fantasy, emotions, and the senses as a way of resolving this contingency, but rather as a way of thinking both with and within it. While these essays turn to the nonrational, their goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. The emotions are surer paths to knowledge or judgment for the Hazon Ish, as well as for the characters in Agnon’s stories and for the nineteenthcentury yeshivah student who uses his creativity to interpret Torah for the joy of enchantment. In Mroczek’s eyes, the study of many ancient texts cannot be detached from the study of agents of decomposition (time, animals, nature) and their effects, a claim that resists the common scholarly belief that knowledge is immortal. So, if these essays eschew claims to definitive and timeless knowledge, what is it that motivates their authors to turn to the realms of the imagination, emotions, and senses as sources of knowledge? If truth is not the aspiration, what is? Hasan-Rokem’s meditation on the Wandering Jew gives us the clearest exposition of the role of desire as the motivation for scholarly inquiry. In her reading of Kiš, Hasan-Rokem models the scholarly enterprise as a normative effort to bring about a new and different world in which human suffer-

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ing and anxiety are allayed. Even at the darkest moments in these chapters, many of the authors hold out hope for redemption: Mroczek imagines possibilities for saving her ancient texts; Schonfeld finds consolation for the trauma of human suffering; Magid animates the trials of the law with love; HasanRokem sees the healing power of the imagination; Nahme finds enchantment in the lines of the Torah. To focus on the desire that pain produces is to recognize that such pain inevitably stimulates a demand for a different future. This desire for a different world is what the legal theorist Robert Cover has described as the law’s “alternity”; that is, the law’s desire to make ideal worlds actual.7 These chapters exhibit the force of such desire and the unsettling effort to bring into being worlds in which the imagination, emotions, and the senses help explain and define human experience. As a collection, this volume suggests two important methodological cues. The first is simply that we should read for desire. As Stav states in her chapter, “The story’s focal point is not its meaning but its desire for meaning.” We take this as a distinction between a search for the very kinds of settled meaning these chapters eschew and a desire for meaning that is open, unresolved, labile, and nonetheless conducive to the hope for redemption.8 To view desire as a methodological focal point is to acknowledge that desire plays a key role in making and shaping identity and collective thought. If we want to better understand the persons and communities we study, we should ask about their desires: what they want, how they want it, how they are sustained by those desires, how desires spread within a community. And the sites where scholars should go to ask those questions are places where we might not immediately go: the body and the inner life. There, we find clues for what motivates the person who seeks some structure for retaining an attachment to a lost parent, or the person who lands on an object of love (halakhah) when God is not present on the scene, or the person whose investment in a text extends to the decaying parchment on which it is written. Second, we might see how understanding desire as the missing link between identity (or being) and thought also opens the space for other kinds of scholarly engagements with the text, sometimes moving beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion toward approaches that openly embrace expressions of desire in the text as authentic and that also bring scholars’ desires onto the scene. In other words, we can embrace desire as a force that drives knowledge not only beneath the text but also, in many cases, quite openly. Being self-conscious about the loves and attachments that drive scholarship is a common attribute of these essays and of the books by Seidman

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and Heschel mentioned earlier. After all, the desires of those whom we study are not detached from our own. What are the worlds that scholars want to command? What areas of inquiry are most likely to create resonances with their readers? Where are they most likely to create tension? The wager of these chapters is that, in attending to bodies, the emotions, and the imagination, we come not only to the unsettling effect of the nonrational and to the possibility of new catalysts of knowledge. Along the way, we also expose the uncertainty of knowing and celebrate the inner forces that drive us to produce knowledge in the first place. Thus, unsettling, contingency, and desire: these are the rich payoffs of the interdisciplinary Jewish scholarship before you.

Chapter 1

The Unreasonable Economy of Martyrdom in S. Y. Agnon’s “Holocaust Fiction” Yael S. Feldman

Agnon is a writer who, for all his deep roots, is unmistakably ironic, unsettling, and thoroughly modern. —Adam Kirsch

How “reasonable” is martyrdom? Apparently highly so, to judge by a long Western tradition—from classical antiquity, Jewish Hellenism, and early Christianity through the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Middle Ages—that revered martyrdom, in practice and theory, as “noble” or “beautiful.” Indeed, the allure of this ideal has not lost its power in modern times. It has been kept alive in new forms, such as nationalized freedom fighters and devout suicide bombers of different creeds and colors, as well as in a vast corpus of scholarship that has closely studied the history and textual expression of “noble death” from antiquity to the present. One of the major issues preoccupying this scholarly literature is the link between the practice and theory of this concept in the religious past and its so-called secular phase in modern national cultures. Jewish tradition holds a special place within this field of inquiry because of its long history, its early literary expression of the martyric allure (predated only by classical Greek literature), and its recent ostensible transposition from a “religious” existence

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to a national, partly secular, political entity. Indeed, one of the major findings of my book Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative is the degree to which attitudes to heroism and death in battle within so-called modern, secular Hebrew culture are suffused with religious overtones, perceptions, and literary figures.1 Moreover, recent research has shown the influence of Christian art, from the Renaissance onward, on both visual and literary art production by secular Jews from pre-state Israel to the present time.2 This chapter extends my earlier inquiry by delving into the post-Holocaust literary work of Israel’s Nobel Prize-winning author, S. Y. Agnon (1887– 1970). Agnon’s work is an ideal test case for a literary inquiry into Jewish martyrdom both past and present because of the special position he occupies within the ostensible religious/secular rift of the modern Jewish experience. Growing up in an observant family in a Jewish shtetl in Central Europe (Galicia) but turning “secular” after emigrating to Ottoman Palestine as a pioneer in 1908, he changed his mind again in midlife (1924),3 when he returned fully to his roots and proceeded to observe the Jewish ritual commandments for the rest of his life. Yet this devout adherence to Jewish law did not prevent him from eventually becoming both Hebrew’s highly lauded arch-modernist author and the equally revered creator of “traditionalist” fiction. Add his personal losses in the Holocaust—not only his own family but also his entire hometown were decimated early on—and Agnon’s literary take on the meaning, value, or rationale of martyrdom gains on a profound significance. Yet before we decipher this significance, we must take a brief detour through the landscape of historical martyrdom, guided by this simple question: What is the source of the fascination that martyrdom has held over its practitioners since the dawn of culture? Is this fascination “reasonable”? In other words, what is the rationale or “economy” of martyrdom, past and present? Is it indeed a reasonably calculated system of reward and punishment, as defined and theorized by the French school of modern sociology since the dawn of the twentieth century?4 The basic answer to this question is quite straightforward. Martyrdom may be best understood as a deviation from the “normal” contract or “rules of exchange” between Man and God that the ancient Romans called do ut des: I give You so that You may give (me). Ordinarily, this law of economic exchange pertains to giving (something) of oneself and assumes that the “giver” would live on to benefit from this act. The ancients recognized, however, that under great duress such partial giving may not suffice. Extreme



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cases call for a total giving up of self—of life—to keep the bargain going. So, then, who would reap the benefit in this case? Obviously, the community (namely, “the common good”), the individual in the afterlife, or both. Herein lies the rationale or the “reasonable economy”—and hence the glorification— of martyrdom or noble death in all its varieties. The logic and efficacy of this “reasonable” exchange were put under strain, however, as early as in ancient Greece. The earliest “deconstruction” of the classical tradition of glorified military heroic death may belong to Euripides, especially in his play Iphigenia in Aulis (405 b.c.e).5 Against the background of ten thousand Hellenic soldiers impatiently waiting to cross the Euripus Strait for their moment of glory or heroic death (as immortalized by Homer several centuries earlier), the “modern” playwright of the time startlingly usurps that moment of glory for Iphigenia, who, by her sex/gender alone, would have habitually been considered fit only for the role of the sacrificial victim in classical Greece. By allowing her to exercise her free will and choose to die “for the good of the people” like any honorable (male) Greek citizen-soldier would do, Euripides erases a deeply entrenched cultural gender difference. At the same time, the lofty rhetoric of the long monologue he puts in Iphigenia’s mouth sounds somewhat hollow, at least to modern ears, thus raising doubts about the reasonableness of the whole endeavor: “The entire Greek army is dependent on me. . . . ​Only thus will barbarians never again steal Greek women from their homes. My death shall bring these things to pass. I shall be known as the woman who set Greece free. . . . ​I give my life for Greece. Sacrifice me and destroy Troy. That will be my epitaph for eternity. That will be my glory, my marriage, my children.”6 This early questioning notwithstanding, both Judaism and Christianity, and later Islam, enthusiastically adopted the Greek idea and practice of noble martyric death in both its active (military) and passive (martyric) forms.7 Yet despite this debt, it is not a Greek female trope that has come to symbolize the idea of martyrdom in the monotheistic West. This role was accorded to the biblical story of the ‘Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, as narrated in Genesis 22 and in its offshoots in Christianity and Islam. Remarkably, despite the differences in their interpretations of this archetypal martyric trope, all three monotheistic traditions share an insistence on the harmonious cooperation between father and son, thereby obliterating the violence and pain involved in ancient practices of human sacrifice and martyrdom. A challenge to this acceptance can be detected in the Renaissance, especially in the startlingly negative approach present in some of the visual

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imaginings of this emblematic scene. Beginning in the early 1400s and reaching an apex two centuries later in Caravaggio’s notable 1603 painting of this motif, the so-called sacrifice of Isaac slowly became the focal point for a debate over devotional pain.8 Calling attention both to the physicality of the son’s fear and pain—the biblical and kabbalistic concept of “paḥad Yitzḥak” (Isaac’s fear)9—and to the father’s violence, artists began to visualize the hurt and traumatized human body rather than the elation of the spirit. In subsequent centuries, this visual challenge, perhaps even denial, of the reasonable economy of the “noble death” attracted followers in both arts and letters— from Handel and Mozart to Kant and Kafka, not to mention post–World War II thinkers from Buber to Girard.10 Yet the economic exchange of martyrdom/self-sacrifice had its champions too, from Kierkegaard to Bataille and Derrida.11 More recently, the US scholar Geoffrey Harpham joined the fray in an article titled “Trading Pain for Knowledge, or: How the West Was Won.”12 This title seems to assume a causal relation contrary to the one suggested in Ecclesiastes 1:18: “For in the abundance of wisdom there is an abundance of vexation, so that he who increases knowledge increases pain.” According to Harpham, the reverse is true: he who increases pain increases knowledge. Not surprisingly, Harpham takes his cue from the realm of Christianity, citing its ascetic tradition from Saint Athanasius to the popularly canonized Simone Weil.13 Yet it is not this religious tradition per se that is at the center of his interest. Although he leans heavily on Christian martyrs of old, Harpham is concerned with the rise of the scholar as “Holy Man.”14 Arguing that “the West was won” by a (Foucauldian?) trinity of pain–knowledge–power that secularists seem to have inherited from Christianity,15 and flying in the face of recent detractors who denigrated the martyric economy, Harpham suggests that modern scientists and scholars inherited from Christian saints and martyrs an economy in which they trade pain for knowledge: “A generation ago, the subject was knowledge and power; today, the subject is knowledge and pain.”16 The Jewish world has been no less divided on this issue. Highly valued from antiquity on, kiddush ha-shem (literally, “Sanctification of the Name”; namely, Jewish martyrdom), was famously subjected to critique and rejection by the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, especially in the discourse of the emerging Jewish nationalisms and self-defense movements.17 Despite this rejection, the emblematic image of the martyric tradition, the ‘Akedah, was reinvented in Jewish Palestine as early as 1919 as the emblem of secular martyrdom; namely, of glorious death in battle for the sake of the



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nation.18 As such, it flew in the face of a Jewish interpretive tradition that reads Genesis 22 as a survival story—because Isaac is not actually sacrificed in the end—and hence as a principled denial of the necessity for an enacted human sacrifice.19 Thus, despite its well-known critique of medieval Jewry, early Zionism followed the martyric tradition of postbiblical Judaism by transforming Isaac into a fully enacted human self-sacrifice. However, during what may be called the first Zionist century (1880– 1980),20 attitudes toward Isaac and the ‘Akedah as representations of national self-sacrifice underwent a double transformation: from glory to agony to agon. It was during this period’s latter two stages—roughly from the mid-1940s to the 1980s—that the “unreasonable” economy of martyric pain in the ‘Akedah was often thematized, as authors and artists attempted to voice the excruciating bodily ravages of the “sacrificial victims” and the inglorious suffering of the dead and the drowned.21 In the wake of the Holocaust, both the historical kiddush ha-shem and the ‘Akedah became focal points of disagreement between traditional and secularist wings of Judaism, gaining praise or denigration accordingly.22 It is in the context of this disagreement that I read S. Y. Agnon’s take on classic Jewish martyrdom in his so-called Holocaust fiction, those works composed mostly during and after World War II that were inspired by or deal directly with the Holocaust (more about this later). I suggest that it was precisely the apparent continuity or equivalence between sacred and secular triads of “pain–knowledge–power” that Agnon, then the Hebrew Nobel laureate in the making, had difficulty with, especially after the Holocaust. As is well known, the inconceivable decimation of the Jewish people by this horrific catastrophe shook up the piety of many traditionally observant Jews. As mentioned previously, however, Agnon continued to live as a pious Jew and did not show outward signs of such a shakeup. Yet his post-Holocaust literary treatment of Jewish martyrdom clearly attests to his inner struggle with this difficult issue. This struggle compelled him to rein in his earlier (pre-Holocaust) fictional critique of the economy of “sacred” or “martyric” pain. This conflict may also explain his inability to complete his (post-Holocaust) novel Shirah, 23 in which the relations between pain and knowledge (both scholarly and carnal) play a major part. In what follows I offer an analysis of the early stages of this process in the 1939 novel Ore’aḥ nata lalun (A Guest for the Night) and the 1947 story “Lefi ha-tza`ar ha-sakhar” (Measuring Gain by Pain). I argue that in these works Agnon emerges as a pioneer of the later double turn in Israeli literature

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and art toward the embodiment of martyric pain and its analysis as “unreasonable.” Moreover, I wish to suggest that context of his endeavor is quite atypical: Agnon’s concern is not the new, militaristic, Zionist ‘Akedah; rather, it is the Jewish “Sanctification of the Name” of old, acts of kiddush ha-shem in which the ‘Akedah functioned as the perennial Jewish emblem of passive martyrdom in the face of persecutions.24 Agnon’s 1939 masterpiece A Guest for the Night was apparently inspired by his visit to his war-ravaged Galician hometown in 1930.25 Though no time marker is openly mentioned in the text, the “Great War” (World War I) is very palpable in the novel from its beginning. The narrator, who is the “Guest” from the Land of Israel arrives, symbolically enough, on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first local inhabitant whom he meets is a train dispatcher. During the war this dispatcher lost not only his arm but also his name and had since become known as “Rubberowitz,” after his rubber prosthetic. Nor are the dispatcher’s losses unique: every day the Guest encounters residents who were similarly maimed, missing a nose or a leg, not to mention families that were practically decimated, having lost their loved ones in the war and its no less violent aftermath. Amidst this setting of decline and destruction, Agnon has his nameless protagonist, who happens to be a professional author, engage in a nostalgic project of restoration. However, the townspeople have given up on their town’s future and hope to leave it for greener pastures, despite the Guest’s tireless efforts—through numerous conversations—to convince them otherwise. He also invests his energies in reopening the Old House of Study, the one he nostalgically remembers from childhood as a vibrant center of Jewish learning and the “heart” of the town’s life. This project succeeds for a while but is short-lived. The attempt to restore the town to its past glory fails, and the Guest returns to his home in the Land of Israel (as do several other inhabitants). The Guest’s failure to revive life in the Jewish diaspora is famously symbolized by a complicated and parodic plot involving the key to the Old House of Study. In keeping with Agnon’s consummate irony, he endows the key with two levels of meanings: while realistically the key stands for the old House of Study, seen here as the “heart” of the Jewish community, it also stands for the Guest’s ego, which is ironically subjected here to Freudian interpretation. Moreover, the Guest loses the original key early in the plot, using a substitute key through most of his visit, and finds the original



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key only on his return to Jerusalem: one can only imagine the wide array of interpretations elicited by this novel. In addition, given the timing of its publication, the novel was perceived as a profoundly prophetic depiction of the Holocaust; it is often even mistakenly thought of as a Holocaust novel. From today’s vantage point, however, a different foreshadowing emerges. Although mentioned only once, the ‘Akedah is critiqued here as an enacted sacrifice, thus anticipating by several decades the revolt against it by the so-called Isaac generation of Israeli writers and artists during the 1970s (and even earlier).26 Yet, it is not the novel’s first-person narrator, the Guest of the novel’s title, who is entrusted with this heretical approach; rather, Agnon frames this assessment within a disagreement between two of the Guest’s closest friends, the pious cantor Reb Shlomo Bach and his defiant son Daniel Bach, who has lost his faith in the trenches of World War I. The son is grudgingly willing to accept his father’s sanctioning of self-sacrifice on the altar of historical traditional Jewish martyrdom—the aforementioned kiddush ha-shem symbolized by the enacted ‘Akedah—but he adamantly rejects the mass victimization of his contemporaries during the recent war and its aftermath.27 Faced by the afflictions of the present, Daniel Bach offers a totally personal, embodied interpretation, arguing that the sheer burgeoning of suffering and pain is beyond the limits of human frailty and hence defies any reasonable justification: “ “One can bind himself on the altar and give up his life for the Sanctification of the Name until his soul departs while he recites the prayer of the Unification of the Name. However, to be bound every day, at any time, and at any hour on seven altars, and to have one limb burned today and a second on another day—this is beyond the power of human suffering. I am of a woman born, flesh and blood; when my flesh decays and my blood reeks, my lips cannot sing the praise of the Holy One Blessed Be He.”28 The arithmetic (seven altars, one limb) of Agnon’s young objector is reminiscent of the challenge to Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his “only son” posed by the mother of the seven martyred sons of Hanukah fame in Jewish tradition. This “mother of seven” appears multiple times throughout the Jewish corpus, not to mention in diverse incarnations in Christianity and Islam. She first appears, described only as “the mother,” in 2 and 4 Maccabees (from the late Hellenistic/Roman period). Later sources mentioning her story include the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 57b), midrash (Lamentations Rabbah), and the anonymous tenth-century Hebrew “history” of the Second Temple,

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Sefer Yosippon. Although unnamed in Maccabees, she is known in Jewish tradition mostly as Hannah, a name given in one of the later versions of Sefer Yosippon.29 Despite some significant narrative differences, in all versions the mother is a model of courage and fortitude, stoically encouraging her sons to be killed one by one, rather than violate Jewish law and bow down to the foreign ruler, the ruthless “Greek” king Antiochus the IV. Only in one midrashic version of this tale, however, does the mother, named Miriam batTanhum rather than the popular Hannah, forcefully challenge the biblical Abraham, saying to her seventh (infant) son, “My son, go to Abraham our forefather and tell him: ‘Thus said my mother: Be not proud of yourself! You bound [your son] on one altar only, whereas I bound [my sons] on seven altars. Yours (was) a trial; but mine (is) an actual deed!’ ”30 In A Guest for the Night, Agnon apparently alludes to this story through the formulaic number “seven” but reverses its rationalization. Whereas the “one versus seven” calculation serves the midrashic mother in claiming her place of honor within the sanctified tradition of martyric self-denial, Agnon’s Jewish representative of the European generation of 1914 refuses to carry on that very tradition, the one that perceives martyric suffering as beautiful, ennobling, and the source of higher knowledge. Instead, he strips the hallowed institution of its sanctity and exposes the glorious self-sacrificers/martyrs as abject victims. This distinction can only be inferred, however, because in Hebrew the same word, korbanot, is used for both “sacrifices” and “victims,” thus effacing the semantic difference.31 Moreover, through this protesting character Agnon exposes the unreasonable economy of the endeavor, insisting that a spirit/body dialectics undermines the efficacy of any continually agonizing test because it is beyond people’s all-too-human corporeal weakness. Powerful as it is, Daniel Bach’s position is not supported by the novel as a whole. The ultimate thrust of the narrative is precisely the Guest’s attempt to resurrect the lost tradition of piety that upholds Jewish martyrdom and rationalizes self-sacrifice and suffering at any cost. Yet given Agnon’s deft irony, this endeavor is not the novel’s last word. Eventually, the key of the Old House of Study, the subject of an entangled parodic plot that intrigued critics soon after publication, turns out to be not a mafte’aḥ—literally, an “opener,” as indicated by the Hebrew semantics of the word—but rather a shlissl, literally a “locker,” as in the semantics of the Yiddish (and German) word for “key.” Though Agnon uses only the Hebrew word throughout, he deftly plays with the bilingual semantics of the referent by using the lexical



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combination of mafte’aḥ u-man’ul (“key and lock”) and by emphasizing the failure of the substitute key—as well as its user—to open the door. He no doubt expected his Hebrew readers not only to recall that his characters were probably speaking Yiddish but also to be fully aware of the symbolic valence that each of the languages held at the time and place of the novel’s publication, with Hebrew standing for the Zionist revival in the Land of Israel and Yiddish standing for the closure or endpoint of the diaspora.32 Accordingly, by the end of the novel, the narrating Guest, who, like the protesting son Daniel, is flesh and blood and hence human and frail,33 is forever locked out of the world of his fathers: the world of Torah study, piety, and devout martyrdom.34 Given that A Guest for the Night was written before 1939, we may ask what happened to Agnon’s critical impulse toward the martyric tradition after the war. This question is just one aspect of a larger issue that occupied Agnon’s critics early on. It was posed in different guises in Sidra Ezrahi’s “Agnon Before and After,” and more transparently (and in extensive detail) in Dan Laor’s “Did Agnon Write About the Shoah?”35 From my perspective, it seems that even if Agnon did not write directly about the Holocaust (an assumption that in any case has been challenged by recent scholars36), the reorientation of his post–World War II work must be understood as a slowly evolving response to its long shadow. Thus, both Ezrahi and Alan Mintz argue that already in the short story “Ha-siman” (The Sign),37 written during the war, Agnon exchanged the mantle of the modern ironist for that of the traditional elegist, invoking for this purpose Ibn Gabirol’s piyutim and the medieval liturgical tradition writ large. This valuation, however, has been critiqued adamantly: some critics suggest that “The Sign” is nothing less than Agnon’s “ironic gaze at God’s mercy” and at the Shoah experience in general.38 This later observation may be also applicable to the story Agnon published shortly after the war, “Lefi ha-tza’ar ha-sakhar” (Measuring Gain by Pain). This complex and ironic tale was published in the 1947 High Holidays issue of Ha’aretz39 and was later included as the first story in Agnon’s postHolocaust volume Ha-esh ve-ha-‘etzim (The Fire and the Wood, 1962),40 the last book he published in his lifetime (more volumes would appear posthumously). The book’s title visibly places its subject matter within the orbit of the classical figure of Jewish martyrdom, the ‘Akedah. Yet curiously, Agnon chose to introduce this material through a story that fully exposed what he no doubt found hard to acknowledge: the hunch that the exchange “economy” ostensibly at the heart of the martyric tradition may be in fact barely reasonable.

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In the following I suggest that although “Measuring Gain by Pain” was interpreted early on as Agnon’s “theological” response to the Holocaust,41 insufficient attention has been given to its uneasy representation of the “economic” rationale of martyric pain and suffering or to its link with the analogous economy set up in the novel A Guest for the Night. Moreover, to date no attention has been given to the intimate relation between this theme and the ostensibly contrasting economy of secular-scholarly pain and knowledge coursing through the veins of Agnon’s unfinished novel Shirah,42 nor to the related, highly enigmatic 1954 story “ ‘Ad ‘olam” (Forevermore)43 that closes Agnon’s “Holocaust volume,” The Fire and the Wood. In what follows, I attempt to close this gap. “Measuring Gain by Pain” is set in an undefined Jewish place and time. Its protagonist is Mar Tzidkiya (“Mr. Righteous” and perhaps also “Mr. Theodicy”44) a greatly learned teacher, liturgist, and cantor—a devout man who at a young age had been appointed to lead his small community that is currently under duress. (The backdrop is often read by critics as the Crusades,45 though nothing in the text indicates this, except for the general premodern atmosphere created, among other things, by the centrality of liturgy in the story.) It is not the community’s hard times, however, that is the focus of the narrative but rather Mar Tzidkiya’s artistic endeavors, which are his major preoccupation. Even though he is very distressed by the dangers threatening his fellow parishioners, he channels his energies into the composition of liturgy, perhaps as a potential defense against adversaries; fittingly, his compositions focus on the theme of martyrdom. A close reading of the story discloses, however, that the martyric economy debated in A Guest for the Night—namely, Daniel Bach’s daring dismissal of theodicy in the name of the wounded and pained body—did in fact survive Agnon’s personal war of loyalties, although in an altered fashion. Faithful to its title, the story is explicitly controlled by an uncanny double economy of pain and gain, which differs greatly from the exchange economy of sacrifice implied in the prewar novel. Whereas in A Guest for the Night the spirit/ body (or sacrifice/ victim) dialectic is questioned by a rebellious army veteran, after World War II and the Holocaust a similar dialectic is daringly planted at the heart of a traditional, pious setting. Here, the glorified textuality of an “ ‘Akedah”—a medieval-style liturgy about the martyrdom of Isaac—composed in praise of the “Holy One Blessed be He,” is undercut by the blasphemy of a toothless and deformed beggar, the victim of baffling existential suffering and visceral pain.46



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Most important, whereas Daniel Bach’s change of heart was provoked by his own personal corporeal experience of the agony of war, the righteous Mar Tzidkiya—ostensibly a selfless spiritual leader and an author of supremely evocative liturgy47—leads a life of relative comfort and safety. His notion of pain and suffering derives from his awareness of “the pain of others,” to paraphrase Susan Sontag.48 Being a man of character, however, he expects to have to pay for being so fortunate, trading not pain for knowledge but rather giving to the poor as a payment for his life of wholeness. Reflecting Agnon’s cool sense of irony, Mar Tzidkiya’s hidden cache of money for the poor grows in tandem with his increasing valuation of the worth of his own compositions. The reasonableness of this economy, articulated in a free indirect style to indicate the presumed agreement between narrator and hero, acknowledges that whether or not one experiences misfortune is totally arbitrary: “If you dwell in a house whereas the poor goes begging from door to door, if you do not lack for food while another must beg for bread, if you sleep on soft cushions when the poor must sleep on the dirt, it is not because you are better; it is only because Esau’s hands are still occupied with your brother and are not free to turn to you; one is therefore better off opening his hand to his brother rather than Esau breaking into his home.”49 Moreover, considering his poems in praise of the Almighty to be the crown of his own piety, Mar Tzidkiya measures their worth—the recognition or reward of his artistic creativity—by the quality of the poor person knocking on his door: the more learned and well-behaved the beggar, the better deserving the poem, and vice versa. An undeserving beggar would sentence his poem to the rubbish pit: “Thanks to his righteous giving to the poor for every poem he composed . . . ​he was shown by the beggars, as if by a finger,50 which of his poems is worthwhile, and which is not.”51 Yet this exchange economy—“measuring gain by pain”—suddenly comes to a screeching halt. After full immersion in and contemplation of the ubiquitous travails of the people of Israel and their loving acceptance of their daily ‘Akedot (martyric acts of kiddush ha-shem), of their being everywhere bound and slaughtered, Mar Tzidkiya invokes the postbiblical image of “Isaac’s ashes on the altar”—obviously indicating an enacted sacrifice, rather than a binding, as Shalom Spiegel would famously argue a few years later.52 He then produces the pinnacle of his creativity: what he judges to be the most exalted and eloquent ‘Akedah poem ever written. This liturgical poem, our protagonist reasons, based on an allusion to an enacted sacrifice rather than a last-minute deliverance, would be a perfect addition to the Yom Kippur

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minḥah (afternoon) service. Faithful to his deal with God, Mar Tzidikiya takes out the only golden coin in his possession, which he had stashed away for Yom Kippur expenses, and adds it to the treasure waiting for the daily beggar. But who shows up at the door that day if not the most decrepit and sacrilegious beggar, one who refuses both the liturgist’s words of consolation and his golden coin, offensively stating, “I have no strength for this man: my torments [yisuray] shriek out of my flesh and he says, God will help.”53 So, what is a tzaddik, a righteous and generous man, to do? Burn the pinnacle of his work? No, Mar Tzidkiya the tzaddik rationalizes, it is surely the beggar’s extreme pain and torment that confounded his reasoning (“shibshu et da’ato”)54 and, with it, the foolproof system of pain and gain. Yet this quite reasonable “economic” inference lasts only a moment, for the duration of a very brief sentence. Being as righteous as he is, Mar Tzidkiya soon finds fault with himself—or rather several kinds of faults, not least among them his neglect of his family for the sake of his creative ventures and the transformation of Isaac’s wholly burnt sacrifice of himself to God (“ ‘olato shel makom”) into “ke-min shir” (a kind of poem). Resigned to his punishment, the pious liturgist burns his glorious ‘Akedah poem to ashes and goes on to live a life of learning and good deeds without the reward of creative accomplishment. The economy intimated in the story’s title has come then to a screeching halt. Even a pious and righteous paytan (liturgist) cannot count on the reasonably calculated system of reward and punishment promised to the devout. Had this story been written earlier, I suspect Agnon might have stopped here. In 1947, however, he could not do so. Facing the horrific burden of millions of Holocaust martyrs, he must have felt compelled to restore redemptive power to the martyric tradition, as indeed he did in the second half of this story (though not without ironic reversals even here) and as he would continue to do throughout most of his later work. Thus, after years of an artistically barren life of devout service to God and the community, when he is nearly on his deathbed, Heaven finally responds to the righteous paytan’s unstated question, “Why was my beautiful ‘Akedah liturgy rejected?” Yet the response is just as enigmatic as his “test.” It consists only of the title of our story but is rendered in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew: “lefum tza’ara agra” (measuring gain by pain). So, what does this reply mean? Without any hesitation, our protagonist interprets the reply from Heaven in a manner that would not put any Apollonian Pythia to shame: “He immediately [lit. mainly, be-iḥud] understood



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that the ‘Akedah he had composed was wanted and welcome, and [therefore] he was sent a sickly beggar who suffered mightily in this world. But since his heart did not wholly accept that beggar, he was answered in Aramaic, because only if one’s heart is whole does the Holy One Blessed Be He entertain him in the holy tongue, but if his heart is not whole, he will be answered in Aramaic.”55 Thus, without any embarrassment, Mar Tzidkiya reverses his foolproof economy of old, now accepting the sickly and filthy beggar as the sign of the high quality of his composition. He therefore interprets the Aramaic reply as a punishment for his earlier failure to understand the logic of this economy and assumes that with this he has wiped his balance sheet clean and hence he is ready to finally commit his beautiful ‘Akedah poem to paper. But to no avail: “he failed to commit even one letter to paper.” Grief stricken, he wonders what is happening, but no answer is forthcoming. Instead, the narrator addresses the reader directly: “But you [m.] should not be surprised. Since his ‘Akedah was accepted on high there was no need of it down here.” This may be good news indeed, but one may wonder why it is not shared with our poor protagonist. Why has Agnon decided to leave him chagrined, hurt by the divine judgment passed on his greatest life creation? Moreover, why has Agnon left us, his readers, no clue about the great ironic game of reversal that is played out here not only at the expense of the protagonist but also of most of his readers? For what is left unexplored in the story is the fact that its Hebrew title— encompassing the moral and “economic” principle that has dictated the behavior under duress of our righteous protagonist—is itself derivative in that it is only a translation of the Aramaic. Indeed, it is precisely the Aramaic phrase, lefum tza’ara ‘agra, the one that the protagonist of the story had dismissed as secondary and hence punitive, that is the original, coming directly from the Mishnah. Moreover, this phrase is quite well known among traditionally educated Jews because it is apparently the briefest saying in the mishnaic corpus, consisting only of the enigmatic statement: “Ben Hah Hah used to say: lefum tza’ara ‘agra” (Avot 5:23). Was Agnon playing here again on Jewish bilingualism, replacing Yiddish with Aramaic? Perhaps. Indeed, he could have assumed that some of his Hebrew readers at the time of publication would see through his “joke,” but certainly not most of them; those raised in the new secular system of education run by the Labor movement in pre-state Palestine would be unfamiliar with the Mishnah and unversed in Aramaic. Yet once we are aware

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of this source, how can we take seriously the story’s presumption that a highly learned and righteous Jewish man, at any time and place, would not recognize this mishnaic phrase, famous for its oddity and lack of context? Indeed, we cannot. But perhaps this is precisely the point. Perhaps this is Agnon’s way of not only doubling his protagonist’s burden of failure but also of poking fun at his readers. In fact, the “mistaken assumption” of the pious Mar Tzidkiya only mirrors the sentiment of the majority of Agnon’s secular readers, who would have naturally assumed that Hebrew is necessarily the original language of grace, as opposed to all other “secondary” Jewish languages (from ancient Aramaic to medieval Yiddish and similar Jewish diasporic vernaculars).56 Yet I believe that this typically Agnonian jest camouflages a deeply serious matter. Perhaps the protagonist’s “logical lapse” is only meant to attract our attention, asking us to put ourselves in the place of “Mr. Righteous” (or even of his inventor), and imagine him (or them) struggling, not always successfully, to satisfy both their obligation to their beloved community under duress and their artistic or creative egos. Intriguingly, similar conflicts and ambiguities characterize much of Agnon’s later work. And just as intriguingly, most of this late-life work was relegated to the drawer and published only posthumously.57 This congruence between art and life may raise the following questions: Does the quasi-redemptive closure—of both the story and the author’s life work—mute the forcefulness of the agonistic voice of the beggar, of the story’s harsh denial of any redemptive value of physical torments, and, by extension, of the very “righteous yet creative” economy established by the devout liturgical poet in his earlier life? Moreover, given the time of publication, was Agnon admitting here to his own wrestling with the (in)adequacy of a long liturgical tradition that exalted martyric suffering and pain? Was this his version of Adorno’s famously (mis)quoted aphorism, “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”?58 Or was he maybe unknowingly writing a Hebrew version of The Plague, Camus’s parable about World War II /the Holocaust (published, perhaps not totally by chance, in the very same year as this story)?59 The import of The Plague, suggests Shoshana Felman, is that the only response matching a catastrophe like the Holocaust is personal involvement in it, witnessing the horror firsthand, in the living flesh, as did Camus’s reporter, Raymond Rambert, when he decided to stay and help fight the plague rather than escape it:



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The specific task of the literary testimony is . . . ​to open up in that belated witness, which the reader now historically becomes, the imaginative capability of perceiving history—what is happening to others—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded only by one’s own immediate physical involvement. . . . ​ Rambert has to learn on his body what a holocaust—a situation of total condemnation—is: a situation which does not—cannot—except the witness, an experience that requires one to live through one’s own death.60 In some sense, Agnon had anticipated Camus’s Rambert in A Guest for the Night by having Daniel Bach witness the horror “in the flesh” in the trenches of World War I. In the later story “Measuring Gain by Pain,” however, it is the beggar who is plagued by the most horrendous boils (sheḥin), open bloody wounds that soil his clothing. But it seems that Mar Tzidkiya, unlike Camus’s Rambert, fails his test—his encounter with the most emblematic of human bodily suffering—by shunning it and judging its bearer, instead of feeling empathy and volunteering to help.61 More intriguingly, can we see our way from the anonymous beggar’s skin disease to the leprosy plaguing Agnon’s 1930s novel Shirah and the story “Ad ‘olam” (Forevermore)? In those two “secular” works, the disease stands for the ultimate redemptive pain, perhaps a kind of secular martyrdom, traded for both erotic consummation and scholarly (rather than divine) knowledge qua power. This is not the place for a full answer to this question. Yet, although much ink has been spilled over these two interconnected works (which were apparently intended as parts of a larger narrative),62 no attention has been paid to the allusions they contain to the short story “Measuring Gain by Pain.” It seems however that, in some sense, Shirah and “Forevermore” may be considered contemporary “secular” mirror images of this ostensibly medieval “religious” story. Shirah in particular is peppered with straightforward critiques of the devotional life of characters who are contemporary iterations of Mar Tzidkiya.63 The skin disease that serves as the physical mark of the beggar who triggers the medieval scholar’s fall from divine grace is “upgraded,” so to speak, to leprosy in both Shirah and “Forevermore.” This ancient and asocial disease functions as a kind of secular martyrdom, allowing the protagonists—pace Geoffrey Harpham—to trade physical pain and suffering for scholarly or carnal knowledge or both.

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The interconnectedness among these very different literary works should come as no surprise once we consider the timing of their creation. The two short stories and early chapters of the unfinished novel were mostly published between 1947 and 1956, the years during which the magnitude of the trauma and catastrophe of the Holocaust was only beginning to be processed. Together, these works attest to Agnon’s struggle in the face of this catastrophe to hold on not only to the faith of his fathers but also to the secular alternatives for their world—whether scientific knowledge or erotic love. He seems to be asking whether self-sacrifice—for anything, sacred or profane— is worth its price. Moreover, if in the pre-Holocaust novel A Guest for the Night Agnon could still objectify the question and split the answer through a simplistic pious/secularist dichotomy (represented by Rabbi Bach the elder and his rebellious young son), his post-Holocaust work complicates the issue by bringing the question closer to home—to the creative impulse. It is not by chance that the major characters of the post-Holocaust works mentioned here are all driven by some sort of artistic or scholarly talent and ambition. Through them Agnon seems to be asking a crucial post-Holocaust question of personal import: Should he himself go about his creative business as usual, just as his fictional protagonists—from the devout Mar Tzidkiya to the secular historians Manfred Herbst (Shirah) and ‘Adiel ‘Amzeh (“Forevermore”)— try to do? Agnon’s practical answer is well known: he continued writing but stopped publishing. Moreover, he also changed his mode of writing. The great fabulist, the inventor of imaginative fictions past and present, turned into a documentarian of sorts, a writer of testimonies, erecting a written monument to his townspeople. He was “rebuilding a city”—his devastated hometown Buchach—and its people, not with blocks and mortar but in language and images, as he himself put it so well.64 Intriguingly, the focus of many of these stories is precisely the martyrdom/ kiddush ha-shem/ ‘Akedaic death during the Holocaust of Buchach’s Jewish residents. So why did Agnon refuse to have them published in his lifetime? Was he apprehensive about the apotheosis of martyrdom underlining some of these narratives? Conversely, was he embarrassed by his characteristically innate ironic impulse that made its way, perhaps against his better judgment, into the actions of others? Although these intriguing questions—among others—await further research, it seems fair to conclude for now that Agnon’s Holocaust fiction bears the marks of a profound crisis that expressed itself, inter alia, in an



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ironic attitude toward the hallowed martyric economy of old. In allowing his characters either to experience or openly express doubt about the reasonableness of this tradition, his corpus stands in stark contrast to the postHolocaust writings of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox thinkers, such as Rabbi Simha Elberg or Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, who continued the traditional sanctification of the ‘Akedah as an emblem of sanctified martyrdom.65 In so doing, Agnon may have paved the way—perhaps against his better judgment and intention—for the critique and revision of the “new secularist national martyrdom that was labeled “Osher ‘Akedah” (the joy or happiness or glory of martyrdom) as early as 1919 and that gained further momentum in the liberation discourse of Israel’s War of Independence.66

Chapter 2

Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” Body, Text, Interpretation Shira Stav

Historically, literary research on S. Y. Agnon, the renowned Hebrew writer and 1966 Nobel laureate, has been tightly interwoven with the question of the “overt and covert” in his works. The first generation of Agnon critics, which included leading, influential Hebrew literary scholars,1 perceived Agnon as a “master of disguise”2 who imposes on his readers the interpretive task of excavating and extracting the buried treasure of meaning. Theirs is a history of reading “layers,” almost always privileging the covert or hidden layer. Even scholars critical of overvaluing the covert layer, such as Dov Sadan3 or his disciple Gershon Shaked who claimed that interpretation must focus on the reciprocal relationship between the two layers,4 nonetheless subjugated the overt layer to the deciphered, covert one. Indeed, the covert can have multiple meanings. It can be romantic or modernist, national or psychoanalytic, and all that is up for discussion and debate, while the “overt” is left behind as secondary or unimportant. This type of reading seemingly extracts spiritual and metaphysical meanings concealed within the text, yet it is simultaneously occupied with covering and camouflaging the text’s tangible and material elements, which are pushed aside in favor of the hidden and abstract. This suppression attests to a preference for the metaphysical and the transcendental and has long been adopted as a core, practically selfevident interpretive approach to Agnon’s work. In this chapter, I outline a different relationship between the overt and the covert in Agnon’s work, especially regarding its allegorical manifesta-



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tions. My test case is Agnon’s wonderful short story “At the Outset of the Day” (1952). My reading foregrounds the overt layer to observe how the tangible and visible operate in Agnon’s allegorical work. However, I do not use a vertical, hierarchal model of the overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, nor do I give precedence to one over the other. Rather, I suggest an understanding of the abstract and the tangible not as layers but as continuous planes of similar value. Giving equal status to physical reality and to metaphysical symbols can deepen the allegorical meanings of the text and broaden its interpretive horizons. My reading does not reject an allegorical reading of the story or claim that the covert is irrelevant but shows how recognizing the overt tangible dimension offers new interpretations and brings new meanings to sight, meanings that cannot be explored by reading the covert dimension alone.

The Physical Reality of Allegory “At the Outset of the Day”5 takes place on the eve of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) and is narrated by a father fleeing his home with his young daughter to escape unspecified aggressors, “the enemies who have destroyed my house”; they end their travels, penniless, in the city where he grew up in as a boy. As the holy day begins, they enter the city’s Great Synagogue, which has two houses of study built beside it—a new one and an old one. In the synagogue, the father promises his daughter that “good people will soon come and give me a prayer shawl adorned with silver, just like the one the enemy tore apart . . . ​and for you, child of my soul, they will bring a little prayer book full of letters, full of all of the letters of the alphabet, and the vowel marks, too.”6 This analogy between the cloth and the book, between text and textile, continues throughout the enigmatic story, which seems to follow the sequencing of a nightmare. While the father is still speaking, his young daughter’s dress catches fire from a memorial candle burning in the courtyard; the father tears the burning garment off her and then looks for something to cover her with. He finds no clothes in the synagogue, not even in the archival storeroom (genizah), because “when books were read, books would tear; but now that books are not read, they do not tear” (in Hebrew, “read” and “tear” are homonyms—nikra and nikr’a).7 He seeks help from the adjacent house, that of the deceased rabbi, but discovers that the members of the household are as wretched as he is and that all their clothes are torn.

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When he returns to the synagogue, he finds his daughter naked and shivering, and he embraces her to keep her warm. Men entering the synagogue see the pair and mock the father, provoking his wrath. His daughter wants them to run away, but he manages to appease her by showing her the old study house and the Torah scroll wrapped in the lavishly adorned mantle, protected and held in place by a thick rope. At the end of the short story the father prays devoutly, and the sleepy child repeats his melodies in her sleep, “sweet melodies no ear has ever heard.”8 Previous readings of the story emphasized the metaphysical meaning of its allegorical dimension. These readings interpreted the father’s return to the scene of his past as his longing to return to the primordial and pure state of his soul, personified by his small, naked daughter.9 According to these interpretations, the father’s search for clothing for his daughter fails, because the clothes, symbolizing the holy scriptures, are torn and have been abandoned for some time: the Place (ha-makom) has been stripped of sanctity and all that remain are shallowness and spiritual poverty. Thus, the story expresses the desire for a new way of merging with one’s origins (including textual, personal, and spiritual origins), of renewing contact with the wholeness and purity of the soul, as innocent and free of sin as a child. For example, in his analysis of the story, Baruch Kurzweil writes about “a generation devoid of clothes and books” and reads the story as an allegory for the experience of “times of crisis” and the “solution” offered by Jewish tradition: There is but a single purpose to the escape and return of the prodigal son and his daughter: the world of the forefathers, the world of yesterday, the world of the divine. . . . ​However, the remnants of the civilized world cannot conceal the nakedness of the terrible present. Because the danger not only threatens from without, through external enemies that strive to physically annihilate us, the destruction is also internal. . . . ​A relic of the primordial experience of Light is what saves the father and his daughter here, a remnant of that same unity that ever since has been revealed and connected with the present time of this age of adversity, of the Day of Atonement, under the shadow of fear and the desperate escape. And thanks to the power of the Light, from the wellspring of the Day of Atonement back then and throughout the ages, the narrating-self finds its redemption in the most corrupted of times.10



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Kurzweil therefore reads “At the Outset of the Day” as an allegory for a spiritual crisis during a difficult time in history. The brokenness of the times is derived from the allegory. However, the story itself is not “broken” in such readings; rather, it leads us step by step, symbol by symbol, from the imagery to the underlying concepts. The ideas may be gloomy and pessimistic, especially from Kurzweil’s point of view,11 but the hermeneutic process he proposes is complete and organized and leads us safely toward healing and repair. Undoubtedly, the story, which was written only a few years after World War II, relates to a state of crisis. The readers, like the author, know that the European synagogues and houses of study were destroyed in the war and could therefore offer neither material refuge nor spiritual salvation. The story’s time is a retrospective gaze at the destruction of European Jewry from the perspective of its interim: the destruction has already begun, yet the desire for redemption still lingers. The retrospective gaze imbues this hope with irony while simultaneously charging it with the tangibility of perceptible structures that have not yet been destroyed; this tangibility connects not only the narrator’s devastated past with his present moment in the synagogue but also the lost and ruined historical past with the reader’s present moment. This temporal constellation implores us to be particularly sensitive to the possibility of rescue, specifically in its theological sense of revelation (implied by the vision of the Torah scroll and the daughter’s singing). Yet the prevailing criticism of the story strangely disregards the subversive physical presence placed at its center: a naked girl and her father in a synagogue on the Day of Atonement. As I show in this chapter, the overt situation presents a blatant provocation that points to sacrilege, heresy, and incestuous aspects, all of which are entwined with the desire for revelation. Earlier interpretations, which ignore the physical reality presented in the story, prefer to suppress the body in favor of a transcendental dimension. Here, I explore what happens to the daughter and father’s plot when their bodies are read as tangible and material. Obviously, this too will necessitate interpretation—but will it elicit a different meaning? After all, once the body is treated not merely as a symbol but also as a physical reality, one cannot escape the poignant heretical element of sacrilege embedded in the physical presence of the naked daughter. My reading foregrounds the tangibility of the images and the presence of bodies, objects, and linguistic signifiers. After all, the allegorical figure is always based on a material reality, its “base matter.” In his influential book on allegory, Angus Fletcher claims that “the

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whole point of allegory is that it does not need to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes good enough sense all by itself, even though it inevitably becomes richer with interpretation.”12 According an equal status to physical reality and metaphysical symbols can deepen our understanding of the allegory. In other words, my reading shows that attention to the tangible and the material elements of the story expands and complicates its allegorical meanings. In fact, Agnon’s story invites us to linger on bodily conditions, physical sensations, and various performative practices, which the text expresses in a sharp and excessive manner, beyond their function as references of abstract meanings. The story begins with an escape and proceeds with the great haste of the effort to find clothing before the outset of the holy day. Agnon repeatedly stresses the exceptional acceleration: “I fled in frenzied haste a night and a day”;13 “We have fled in terror, destruction at our heels”;14 “Night was drawing on”;15 and so on. The cold and chill, contrasted with the heat of the burning fire, are also mentioned repeatedly, emphasized by the little girl’s recurring shivering and by moments of physical contact between the father and the daughter: “Grasping her hand in mine”; “I ripped off the flaming garment, leaving the child naked”16; “With my body I covered my little girl, trembling from the cold, and I stroked her hair.”17 Caressing the hair, for example, is not an action of covering the body and indicates an affective deviation, which draws attention to the physicality of the event. The same goes for the father’s irrational quest for bits and pieces to cover his daughter’s body, which relies on the materiality of the scrolls’ shreds and his visit to the neighbor’s house, which turn out to be pointless. The encounter with the two worshippers who mock the father and the daughter also involves a detailed demonstration of bodies and bodily gestures—a potbelly; beard and hair; height differences; teeth probing; eyes shining; and glasses being removed, wiped, and worn again and then again—while dwelling on the intonation and the performative manners of the dialogue, as well as the physical fight and the horrible rage the father feels. All these attest to the central role of corporeality, continually affected by various touches and injuries— violence, chill, cold, fire, movement, time, and, above all, at the heart of the story, the vulnerable nakedness and the lack of clothing that motivate the plot. As we linger on the material reality of the text, we can find a reading of Agnon’s story in which the overt and covert refuse to synchronize, even though they are inextricably intertwined. The abstract and the tangible di-



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mensions of the text tell two different, even contradictory stories. The abstract level, in which the story’s protagonist is the soul, presents a “positive” plot of purification and access to the sublime through the stripping away of corporeality, even if this transcendental moment occurs at the height of destruction and loss. By contrast, the tangible dimension relays a negative or “immanent” progression: a story about a father who fails to protect his daughter and rescue them both from an improper and contemptible situation, a story in which the protagonist is acting either in a world that is clearly devoid of metaphysical providence or in one whose metaphysical aim leads him toward grave desecration. However, the gap between these two stories is not necessarily a schism but rather a space in which the body and desire thrive as an undeniable reality. The inability to reason and synchronize the story of the spirit with that of the body not only highlights the material dimension but also refuses a mode of interpretation that selectively chooses certain meanings while suppressing others, thereby encouraging multiplicity. In the reading I propose, the “meaning” cannot be summarized by deciphering the covert layer of the story. Here, meaning is located not in the outcome of that deciphering activity but in the very process of seeking meaning.

Spirit and Matter, Imagination and Reality Agnon begins his story thus: “After the enemies destroyed my home, I took my little daughter in my arms and fled with her to the city.” After fleeing for a night and a day, the father and his daughter arrive at the courtyard of the synagogue in the city where he was born and raised: “Out of the depths rose the Great Synagogue, to its left was the Old House of Study, and directly opposite, one doorway facing the other, stood the New House of Study. This was a House of Prayer and these were Houses of Torah that I had held in my mind’s eye for my entire life. If I chanced to forget them during the day, they would stir themselves and come to me at night in my dreams, just as they did during my waking hours.”18 The “depths” mentioned here are multivalent, referring to the theological “depths” in which redemption is sought, as in “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.”19 Other connotations include “depths” as the most dejected state of being, a low point that is also an opportunity for redemption, the psychoanalytic aspect of the hidden “depth psychology,” and the more straightforward temporal “depths”—the memory of bygone days.

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Out of which “depths” does this memory, which the narrator claims to have kept in his mind’s eye every day and night, arise? The elusive quality of the sentence calls on us not only to question the narrator’s credibility but also to notice the double dimension of the elements in the story, which exist both as overt and present and as covert and hidden in the depths. Moreover, the depths invite us to examine the story as a dreamscape, in which we witness the return of the repressed and the rise of hidden urges to the level of consciousness. As Ya’akov Bahat notes, it is no coincidence that the story’s elements are reminiscent of the stories in The Book of Deeds, 20 which are all written as an imagined reality; that is, as types of dreams.21 Several characteristics invite us to read the story as a dream. First and foremost, there is its episodic structure, characterized by fragmented shifts between events and spaces, each of which features a scene that seems to stand alone, irrespective of the others, and is a blend of memories and events. Another indication is the delayed and inexplicable behaviors and reactions of the characters populating the spaces, such as those congregating at the neighbors’ home or the two men with whom the narrator gets into a fight in the synagogue. The narrator’s strange justifications seem dreamlike, as does his own absurd behavior; for example, when he rummages through the old torn books in the storeroom, hoping to use them as clothing for his daughter, as if torn pieces of paper are appropriate covering for a naked girl (when he could have simply covered her with his own coat). At the same time, the boundaries of the dream as such are fuzzy and contain a dream within a dream. The dreamlike unfolding is presented as the physical realization and manifestation of an earlier dream. Near the end of the story the narrator repeats his dream about the synagogue and the Houses of Study: “I stood then with my daughter in the open courtyard of the Great Synagogue and the two Houses of Study, which all my life stirred themselves and came to me in my dreams and now stood before me, fully real.”22 Thus, Agnon blurs the distinction between an imagined state of being and a real one, between the concealed depths and the “full reality” on which the events take place. This very blending urges us not to rank the various levels as more or less important but rather to discuss them simultaneously. It is an entanglement that demands that we not ignore the physical and tangible aspect of things as we rush to uncover their meaning. Once the father and daughter find refuge in the synagogue, the father tells her about the prayer book: “And now child of my soul, tell me, an Alef and a Bet that come together with a kamatz beneath the Alef—how are they



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read?” My daughter replied and said, “Av.” I said to her, “And what does it mean?” My daughter replied and said, “Father, the way you are my father.” I said to her, “You interpret so well, that’s right, an Alef with a kamatz and a soft Bet are av.”23 Here Agnon highlights the differences between the Hebrew words for “father” and “daughter”: the alef (the first letter in av, father) has a kamatz vowel, and the bet (the first letter in bat, daughter) is soft. This is not merely about the vowel marks: kamatz in Hebrew means “clenched,” reflecting the attributes of the closed and rigid father in the story, in contrast to his daughter who is soft: she is more gentle, dynamic, and open to the possibilities of interpretation and the shifting of meaning. In his article honoring Agnon’s receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gershom Scholem describes him as the only Hebrew writer who strives to express the holy aspect of Hebrew, even as it is secularized in his writings.24 Yaniv Hagbi also writes about the sanctification of the Hebrew language in Agnon’s work: “If the language includes within it even just shards of sacred being, then the whole matter relating to the materialism of the language becomes linked with transcendence.”25 Indeed, the brief Hebrew lesson the father gives his daughter leads to transcendent conclusions; yet, it also leads to their opposite. The letters are meant to connect to one another, ascend through prayer, and thereby reach God: And now, my daughter, tell me, what father is greater than all other fathers? It is our Father in Heaven, who is my father, your father, and the father of the whole world. You see, my daughter, two little letters stand there in the prayer book, as if they were all alone, then they come together and lo and behold, they are Av. And not only these letters, but all letters, all of them join together to make words and words make prayers and prayers rise up before our Father in Heaven who listens very, very carefully, to the voice of our prayers, if only our hearts cling to the light of on high as a flame clings to a candle.26 Seemingly, this segment is an ode to the transcendence reserved for the Holy Tongue, which is concerned with connections and conjunctions, a language in which the letters have a “soul” and they burn like a flame clinging to a candle, echoing the significance of fire in holy rituals of Jewish tradition. Yet immediately in the next sentence, out of nowhere comes a strong wind

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that blows through the courtyard, tipping the memorial candle onto the narrator’s daughter. Her dress catches fire, the father tears the burning garment off her, and she is left naked. Ironically, the flames clinging to the candle do not raise the father’s prayers to the Father up on high, but do much the opposite: it is as if the fire refuses to act in its symbolic dimension and instead insists on fulfilling its material role—to burn. The burned garment forces the believer to return to his corporeal, physical presence, as though refusing the offering of meaning that seeks to transcend the materialism of the language. Similarly, the father’s preoccupation with the letters and the modes in which they are joined emphasizes their separate and distinct existence. The aspiration evoked by the father, to “join together” and “cling” through words of prayer, highlights the manner in which things—the language, the text, the textile—become dismantled and disintegrate. The burning garment seems to foreground the tangible skin—the materiality of the language and the text.

The Interpretation Is the Meaning As noted, the allegorical approach that dominates interpretations of this story treats its material reality as a symbol of abstract and metaphysical meanings. In fact, Agnon directs his readers toward such a reading through his interpretation of the symbol of the little girl within the story. While the father looks in the genizah for something with which to cover his naked daughter, he remembers something he once found there: Again I looked in the storeroom where torn pages from books were kept, the room where in my youth I would find, among the fragments, terrible and wondrous things [dvarim]. I remember one of those things, it went something like this: At times she wears the form of an old woman and at times the form of a little girl. And when she takes the form of a little girl, do not say that your soul is as pure as a little girl; this is but an indication that she craves and yearns and longs to return to the purity of her infancy, free of sin. The fool substitutes need with form, the wise man substitutes need with will.27 The meaning of this passage is patently evident, and Agnon virtually hand delivers it to us. It is no coincidence that Samuel Leiter writes of the passage



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that “once the symbol is grasped it is quite clear, almost over-specified.”28 Similarly, Rachel Ofer argues that this is “a symbolic story that contains the keys to its [own] deciphering. The story itself contains both the riddle and its solution. . . . ​The naked daughter is the naked soul, and her predicament is that of modern man whose soul is torn.”29 Indeed, Agnon prompts his readers to see the daughter as a symbol rather than an actual girl: not only does the narrator refer to her as “child of my soul” (bat nafshi) but also she is overtly positioned as a simile several times throughout the text: “Growing aware of my eyes, she looked at me—like a frightened child, finding her father standing behind her,”30 or “I glanced at my daughter, the child of my soul, as a father glancing and looking at his little daughter.”31 However, I find that the path from the allegory to its meaning is more meandering and subtle than it first appears. The narrator’s words about the message hidden in the storeroom imply that part of the allegory deals with the act of interpretation itself. This is a moment in which the mechanisms of representation are revealed, in accordance with Walter Benjamin’s insight into the allegorical method.32 Agnon implies that, on the path from the covert to the overt, “interpretive errors” sometimes occur, namely: the “child” is understood as a personification of a pure soul, rather than as a representation of the actual desire to become pure. Later, the narrator returns to this matter and says to his daughter while she is naked and trembling: “I remember that I once found something grand here [in the genizah] about need and form and will. Were it not for our immediate needs I would give you a thorough interpretation of this matter, and you would see that this is no allegory, but a simple and straightforward affair.”33 Thus, Agnon complicates the interpretation of his story: on the one hand he alludes to interpretive errors and offers the “correct solution,” while on the other hand he claims that “this is no allegory, but a simple and straightforward affair.” Although we may read this claim as ironic, it does suggest that we should give the text a reading of a pshat rather than a drash, to use the traditional Jewish hermeneutic terms.34 But we can only arrive at the pshat once the matter has been thoroughly interpreted. The narrator’s words direct us to understand the daughter both as a symbol and as an actual child, thus merging an allegorical reading with a literal one, while simultaneously rejecting “incorrect” readings. This moment reveals the challenge Agnon poses to the exegetic and the hermeneutic methods, which seek to “translate” the text’s symbols. Along the vein of what Adorno had to say about Kafka, one could say that Agnon’s story seeks interpretation while simultaneously rejecting it.35

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According to the narrator, the appearance of the soul in the form of a little girl does not mean that the soul is as pure as a child, “but [is] an indication that she craves, yearns, and longs to return to the purity of her infancy, free of sin. The fool substitutes need with form, the wise man substitutes need with will.”36 At first it seems that Agnon is offering a Freudian interpretation here, given that his preference for “will” over “form” as the “correct” interpretation of the image of the little girl corresponds to Freud’s view of dreams: “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.”37 According to Freud, the dream makes our desires known to us: the dream images indicate the very existence of the desire. And yet, Agnon’s aim is not to “interpret the dream.” Rather, he directs us toward the longing itself, the very aspiration, placing the act of interpretation—that is, the desire for meaning— at the heart of the story. To represent the desire, Agnon chooses three words—“craves, yearns, and longs”—which, though intermingled here, are in fact three different modes of will that are hierarchically ranked in classical thought. Instinctual craving, supposedly the lowest form, is indicative of physiological needs; yearning alludes to the sexual and emotional dimension; and longing is a type of religious-spiritual wish for divine revelation. However, if the story’s focal point is not its meaning but the desire for meaning, it follows that the value of the overt is no less than the covert, because the overt is the tangible presence of yearning. Desire becomes tangible in the body and is connected both to the one who desires and to the object of desire, both in the state of lacking and in the “full,” desired state. Therefore, we cannot bypass the physical presence of the body in a direct quest for the story’s abstract meaning, which here is related to the soul. In Agnon’s words, the craving and longing and yearning are identified as a “need”: “The fool substitutes the need with form, the wise man substitutes the need with will.” By evoking need, he brings us back to the body, specifically the naked body of a destitute little girl, trembling with cold, in the synagogue on the eve of the Day of Atonement. The reading suggested by Agnon thus seems to make a contradictory request. It demands that we address intangible meaning even while emphasizing the material reality of the allegory: the naked body, the trembling, the need for clothing, the various materials sought as coverings, and so on. As noted, the dominant interpretation of the daughter is based on a dualism of body and spirit that, in asserting that the child is a metaphor for the soul, seemingly abandons her corporeal reality. However, the story complicates the



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distinction between the body and the soul, or between language and material reality. From a metapoetic perspective, returning to the body as “need” challenges the dualistic hermeneutic distinction between content and expression, message and idea. Eschewing the dualism of body and spirit, allegory and meaning, the text directs us toward interpretation as an act that carries its own tangible reality: interpretation is an investigation, a quest, and a passion that take precedence over the act of deciphering and arriving at the solution. This privileging of investigation is a prominent feature of much of Agnon’s work.38 In this manner, the failed search for clothing, which propels the story’s plot, relates to the hermeneutic search for the “appropriate interpretation”: one that can cover all of the cracks in the story and “complete” it. The failure to “cover up” the child, along with the torn fragments that used to fill the storeroom and the disintegrating clothing of the forlorn neighbors, portends the rejection of any “complete” interpretation. No longer does “this equal that,” with all the pieces fitting nicely into the work of art: something must remain indecipherable, especially in the presence of the “real” tangible body. Even at the end of the story, the child remains naked. Agnon thus leaves the desire exposed: in other words, that which demands interpretation is left bare, without a stitch of clothing/solution. Seemingly, the unresolved interpretive “chase” attests to an allegorical concept in the vein of De Man, who writes, “All allegories are always allegories . . . ​of the impossibility of writing.”39 In other words, they never produce knowledge about the physical or empirical world but instead detach from it, creating a spiraling chain of symbols that become increasingly distant from the meaning.40 However, it seems that Agnon does not actually seek to send us spiraling into a game-like ontological dead end, moving ever further away from the material world; quite the contrary, he aims to bring us back to the body’s place within the allegory. The “tearing” of the clothing is the reading of the text41: an activity that invades the raw materials of the story and blends in with them. Like any other form of desire, interpretation has a threatening and negative aspect, represented here by the two Jews who arrive at the synagogue near the start of the prayer service and who see the naked daughter and her father. Both are presented as antithetical to the lost, destitute father and his daughter: the two men are heavy-set, gluttonous, and arrogant. One is a “long man with a red beard, picking from his teeth the last remnants of the final meal, letting his big potbelly out”; the other is a “tall, hefty fellow who boasted

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of being one of my dearest friends.” The first, who is referred to as an enemy, and the second, who is referred to as a friend, can be seen as two modes of interpretation: the first mocks the father and his daughter and says “something with a double meaning,” whereas the other casually repeats the narrator’s words “as one who has heard a charming tale and repeats it. And as he repeated my words he turned his eyes away from me so that they might not see me and might imagine he had made up the story on his own.”42 These two types of interpreters observe the father and daughter’s calamity from a detached distance, turning it into “a story” while ignoring the reality of their distress: “I raised my voice and shouted, ‘A fire has sprung up and burned my daughter’s dress, and here she stands shivering from the cold. . . . ​It’s not enough that no one gives her any clothing, but they must abuse us, too!’ ”43 However, the father himself is also a type of “interpreter” who is concerned more with text than textile: although his failure to find clothing to cover up his daughter indicates a refusal to seal the interpretive process, it is also, quite simply, an abandonment of her in her nakedness. Readers might be horrified at the father’s bizarre negligence and his abysmal failure to protect and maintain his daughter’s safety, honor, and body temperature as he goes to look for torn pages in the storeroom, leaving her naked in the back of the synagogue as he turns to his neighbors, not for a single moment considering removing his own coat to cover his daughter’s body. Here the father’s strength and stability are completely undermined: just as he lost his home to the attackers, he is not able to protect his daughter from the fire or to provide her with a garment to wear while she shivers from the cold. In the past, the father knew to cover the “sacred” book with a glorious red mantle adorned with silver threads, but now his daughter is forced to cover her body with her own hair, as if she knows that the chain of support and learning—from father to daughter—has been broken and she must fill in the gaps on her own. Her need to cover herself with her hair recalls the traditional rabbinic story about the daughter of the wealthy Nakdimon Ben Gurion, who lost everything after the destruction of the Temple. When Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai encounters her (and this, too, is a father–daughter encounter of sorts), he sees her gathering kernels of barley “from under the feet of animals belonging to Arabs.” The daughter covers herself with her hair and begs for his help and mercy, imploring, “Rebbe, provide for me.” And the rabbi recalls her family’s wealth and how rich fabric used to be spread beneath their feet. But instead of help and patronage, she receives a midrash:



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He said to her: Whose daughter are you? She said to him: I am the daughter of Nakdimon Ben Gurion, do you not remember signing my Ketubah? Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai turned to his disciples and said: “I signed this one’s Ketubah and in it I read [her dowry would consist of] a million gold dinars [indicating her family’s wealth— S.S.] from her father’s house and her father-in-law’s house. They would not enter the Temple Mount to pray until exquisite fabrics had been rolled out beneath their feet, and they would enter and bow down and merrily return to their homes, and all my life I have sought this verse and found it: If thou know not, O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds’ tents. Do not read thy kids but thy corpses, for when the People of Israel do the will of the Omnipresent, no nation nor any kingdom has any power over them; but when they do not do the will of the Omnipresent, God delivers them into the hands of a base people, and not only into the hands of a base people, but under the feet of the beasts of a base people.”44 Paralleling this rabbinic parable, “At the Outset of the Day” deals with the difficulties of losing spiritual and financial assets, as well as the great fall from the light, from the abundance and the love of Torah into abject poverty. In both cases, the fall is depicted through fabric—from delicate and expensive fabric spread out beneath their feet, or the narrator’s daughter’s “lovely clothes,” to scarcity so severe that the daughter has nothing with which to cover herself but the hair on her head. In both stories, the textile alludes to the text, and the event is understood as an opportunity for drash, an inquiry into the meaning of a text. After his encounter with the daughter, Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai arrives at a radical interpretation of a verse from the Song of Songs, which corresponds to the state of the people of Israel after the destruction of the Temple. The child’s father also deals with textual interpretation, interpreting her nakedness as a symbol expressing the desire for purification. Much like Ben Zakai, he views material decline as punishment for spiritual decline, a thought he also expresses through allusion to the Song of Songs: “I sought but found nothing. Wherever I directed my

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eyes, I met emptiness.” 45 In both cases, the wretched daughter is abandoned— in the midrash, by Ben Zakai, who does not grant her request for food, and in Agnon’s story, by the father, who fails to provide her clothing. In both cases, the fathers’ failings strongly echo the eroded figure of God himself who is, according to the narrator, “Our Father in Heaven, who is my father, your father and the father of the whole world.”46 Agnon repeatedly implies that drash, the interpretive or midrashic act, cannot fill in the cracks or provide a real solution. The wise man who “substitutes the need with will” neglects the material reality of the need—a reality of nakedness, poverty, and cold—in favor of spiritual and interpretive lessons. This is apparent also given the father’s baffling choice to seek clothing for his daughter in the corner of the genizah, of all places: I said to myself, I’ll go to the corner of the storeroom where the torn books are hidden away, perhaps I’ll find something there. Many a time when I was a young man I rummaged about in there and found many things, sometimes the end of a matter and sometimes its beginning or its middle. And now I turned there and found nothing with which to cover my little girl. And don’t be surprised that I found nothing. When books were read, they would tear; but now that books are not read, they do not tear.47 The search for torn pieces of text to use as clothing accentuates the materiality of the parchment and, by implication, the materiality of the Holy Tongue, which sanctifies the matter on which it is etched. The function of the genizah is to preserve sacred texts that are no longer in ritual use for example, they may be torn), but because they are holy, they cannot be used for everyday purposes nor destroyed. The stored text is sacred despite its flaw and is devoid of practical use. The father’s turning to the genizah is akin to an attempt to restore to use—in a sense, grant new life—to that which has been removed from use. Kurzweil, for example, sees the genizah as a symbol for the world of the forefathers, a world gone by; thus, he interprets the father’s search in the genizah allegorically, as a search for a solution to the spiritual emptiness characteristic of the present generation. However, this interpretation overlooks the fact that on the literal level, as a pshat, using texts from the genizah to cover a naked body is an act of sacrilege, the desecration of a ritual object by using it for everyday purposes. Such an interpretation also fails to address the dual aspect of genizah as a place and an act that signify



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both sanctity and desecration: the stored texts are sanctified and therefore cannot be destroyed, but they are no longer fit for ritual and therefore are not to be used. Agnon subtly alludes to this duality by mentioning the “beginning or conclusion of a matter” in relation to the genizah, which calls to mind the Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of the book of Ecclesiastes. The Babylonian sages were troubled by what they perceived as an incoherence in Ecclesiastes: its beginning and ending were appropriately Godfearing, but its central section verged on heresy. The Babylonian Talmud thus narrates, “Rab Judah son of Rab Samuel Bar Shilat said in Rab’s name: The Sages wished to store away the Book of Ecclesiastes, because its words are self-contradictory; yet why did they not store it away? Because its beginning is religious teaching and its end is religious teaching.”48 As Gil’ad Sasson writes, in response to these internal contradictions in Ecclesiastes, the Babylonian sages prefer to accuse Solomon (traditionally considered the author of Ecclesiastes) merely of literary “negligence” (carelessness) rather than outright heresy, which was the charge made by the Jerusalem Talmud.49 Thus, because of the sages’ reluctance to charge Solomon with an accusation as grave as heresy, the Babylonian Talmud depicts the Book of Ecclesiastes as an inconsistent text. Still, it deems it worthy of inclusion among the holy books by virtue of its beginning and end, which provide a question and answer, respectively, that affirm the worship of God and the word of the Bible. By alluding to the Babylonian discourse, Agnon characterizes the storing of sacred texts not only as closely intertwined with the question of interpretation but also as a place of contradiction. By association, the arena of the story itself emerges as one divided by conflicting desires, a space in which the possibility of heresy constantly echoes. Thus, the “beginning” or “end” of a matter—the affirmation of faith and meaning—cannot restore their lost validity.

Body, Desire, and Incest “At times she wears the form of an old woman and at times the form of a little girl,” the narrator says about the appearance of symbols. On the contrary, the little girl does not “wear” anything at all. Her dress is burned, she is naked, and she remains naked until the very end of the story while remaining in a sacred place on a sacred day. And indeed, the desire for spirituality that the story aspires to, the desire for the Torah embodied in the

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illuminated vision of the Old House of Study, is manifested through a father who leaves his daughter naked. I find it especially striking that the critics ignored this disturbing matter in favor of what they present as the story’s hidden meaning, which is more palatable and easier to contain. Even though the story tempts us to interpret its material elements as “spiritual” ones, the very act of turning to the abstract allows us to skip over what it means at face value. Like an open letter, it tells us another story of desire, a transgressive story that brings incestuous desire into the holiest of holy, during that liminal time on the eve of the Day of Atonement that seems to invite lawlessness and debauchery as a prelude to the suffering intended to purify the soul. Indeed, incestuous desire is present implicitly or explicitly in other works by Agnon, works, particularly the “family romances” populating his stories, such as “ ‘Ido and ‘Enam,” “A Simple Story,” “Betrothal,” and “In the Prime of Her Life.”50 However, “At the Outset of the Day” does not belong to this group of love or family stories. Its incestuous aspect takes on a different meaning: going beyond the psychoanalytic oedipal dimension, it relates both to the interpretive desire and the wish for redemption. Incestuous desire functions as the transgression through which redemption might gleam. Of course, as long as we downplay the soul’s personification in the form of a little girl, there is no disturbing incestuous allusion: if the daughter is not a daughter at all, but simply the suffering and tormented soul of the narrator, there is nothing truly problematic about her naked presence: it is no more than a transparent symbol. In that sense, her nakedness and the cold go along with the torment of the body and soul as the Day of Atonement approaches, seeming to purify the soul as it opens up to receive the light of the Torah. And yet, clearly Agnon does not skip over the incestuous dimension but makes it present in the story, both explicitly and implicitly. He does so explicitly through the mocking of the two worshippers, which causes the narrator to go on the offensive: “With my body I covered my little girl, trembling from the cold, and I stroked her hair. . . . ​He [the worshipper] regarded us for a moment, ran his eyes over us, then said something with a double meaning. My anger flowed into my hand, and I caught him by the beard and began yanking at his hair.”51 Freudian psychoanalysis teaches us that our displays of passion are shaped by the early models of our infantile desires. From this perspective, the desire for forbidden sexual relations is the covert and unconscious layer of our



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overt preferences, which act as “symptoms” of this suppression. Agnon’s story inverts this symptomatic logic: here, the incestuous tension appears not as a “hidden meaning” but quite explicitly in the father’s embrace of his naked daughter and in the ridicule directed at them by the men who enter the synagogue; therefore, this tension need not be gleaned from symptoms. Once we address the tangibility of the naked body and the various interactions with it, the incestuous aspect can no longer be seen as hidden but has a presence of its own. Yet, it is precisely because the heretical nakedness of the body is overt and present that existing interpretations have steered away from it and gravitated toward the abstract and implicit realm. The incestuous dimension also arises in the story in some elusive, indirect ways. For example, the narrator leaves his naked daughter at the synagogue and goes out in search of clothes for her in the home of Reb Alter, who had been a friend of his father. Returning to this province of the past momentarily confuses him: “Because so many years had passed, I mistook Reb Alter’s daughter for her mother.”52 The confusion between mother and daughter as the father’s life partner (a central theme in “The Prime of Her Life”) echoes with the potential for incestuous transgression. The same can be said of the intra-textual allusion to one of Agnon’s earlier stories, “The Tale of the Scribe,” which has multiple links to “At the Outset of the Day.”53 In both stories a candle sets a garment on fire in a synagogue. In “The Tale of the Scribe,” this event provides the context for Raphael and his future wife Miriam to become acquainted. On the eve of Simhat Torah, Raphael is singing and dancing, holding the Torah scroll in his arms. An enthusiastic little girl—Miriam—“pushed her way through the legs of the dancers, leaped toward Raphael, sank her red lips into the white mantle of the Torah scroll in Raphael’s arm, and kept on kissing the scroll and caressing it with both her hands. Just then the flag fell out of her hand, and the burning candle dropped on Raphael’s clothing.” This intimacy leads to their betrothal and marriage: “And for Raphael and Miriam’s wedding, a new garment was made for him.”54 Agnon depicts the passion for the Torah, which burns like a fire, as an erotic event. The conversion of the Raphael–Miriam couple into the father– daughter couple in “At the Outset of the Day” tinges the burning of the garment in the synagogue on the Day of Atonement with a hint of desire; that is to say, an incestuous desire. However, if in “The Tale of the Scribe” it is Raphael’s clothing that is set on fire with the young girl’s passion, in “At

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the Outset of the Day” it is the young girl’s garment that is burning and revealing the father’s desire.

The Desire for Redemption It is impossible to separate the pronounced desire of the narrator, whose soul “yearns to return to the purity of its infancy, free of sin,” from his current state of being: this is no routine passion or fixed theological longing. It is a yearning that emerges in an hour of destruction while the narrator and his daughter are stranded, homeless, and stripped of their property—lost, impoverished, and isolated. The daughter’s nakedness expresses, above all, a return to an unparalleled state of vulnerability, which is also the state of death (“Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither”)55 and the state of birth, a new beginning when everything is still possible and the potential is infinite. In this sense it is also the desire to be reborn, made possible precisely by the state of destruction. It is a desire that intensifies in the presence of the place and the permission granted at this specific time: the Day of Atonement, a day on which redemption is sought, when the possibility of repentance—the opportunity to turn over a new leaf and claim a clean slate—becomes available. In this sense the naked child embodies both the desire to go back in time—to the familiar and the known, to the past as embodied in childhood, family, and tradition—and the desire for the future, for redemption, and starting over in a different way. Paradoxically, redemption becomes possible through transgression and from within it—an idea related to Gershom Scholem, as discussed later. The story’s incestuous dimension signals the desire to eliminate distinctions or erase boundaries between subject and object, between the individual and the other, between generations; it expresses the urge for the father and daughter to merge and be swallowed up in each other, to undo any separation between purity and sexuality, desire and faith. As such, the girl found naked—not only in the courtyard of the synagogue but also at the end of the story, even at the height of prayer and in the presence of the Torah scroll—can almost be seen as the transplant of a Frankist fantasy into the heart of a sacred space.56 It echoes the notorious event that took place in the Frankist cult, which met with great resistance and ultimately led to its excommunication. I am referring to the antinomistic erotic ritual that occurred in Lanckorona in Podolia (Poland), in 1756, when the wife of the local rabbi



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danced naked with a Torah crown on her head, while Frank’s followers danced around her, kissing her naked body as if it were a mezuzah.57 Indeed, the ascended spiritual state that the child unknowingly reaches in the final scene of the story, as she dozes off in the corner of the synagogue repeating in her sleep, “each and every prayer in sweet melodies no ear has ever heard,” can be seen as a mitzvah haba’ah be-‘aveyrah (a mitzvah that comes about through sin), as Gershom Scholem refers to the dominant principle of Frankism.58 Here it should be noted that in A City in Its Fullness (Ir u-melo’ah), Agnon depicted Jacob Frank as a native of his own city, Buchach, even though he was well aware that this was a dubious claim (every scholar of Frankism, including Scholem, Agnon’s friend, agrees that Frank came from Podolia).59 Agnon does indeed call Frank a “despicable specimen,” and there is no reason to assume that he himself supported the nihilistic notion that the abrogation of Torah is its fulfillment. At the same time, it is clear that, along with his understandable aversion toward Frank, he is also enchanted by the very possibility of such a figure. In addition to the special intention directed toward the feminine aspect of the divine, reflected in “At the Outset of the Day” through the femininity of the soul, Frank’s doctrine also offers a literalization of religious allegoresis. Rachel Elior writes that Jacob Frank established “a world in which the abstract and the sensory, the symbolic and the metaphoric, the heavenly and the corporeal have become indistinguishably merged with one another . . . ​[He] turned the written mystical text of the Kabbalistic myth and the visionary revelation referring to the upper worlds into a mystical theater playing out in this world, dramatizing the abstract through the tangible and the symbolic through the ritualistic.”60 As Israel Yuval notes, this approach abandons traditional medieval symbolism, which is detached from the tangible, and ascribes a realistic ontological status to religious symbolism.61 This is the lens through which we need to consider the Frankist-like allusions in Agnon’s story: they are an invitation to adopt a new attitude about the relationship between the abstract and the tangible, the overt and covert—one that confers central importance on the physical and material presence. The realization of abstract meanings might also distort or alter those very meanings. The passion expressed in the story demonstrates that the desire for redemption and for the sublime in general cannot help but pass through the body and be manifested within it. But once the body is truly involved, it is no longer merely a symbol: in fact, its physical reality disrupts the metaphysical meaning of the story as a “positive” plot of purification and

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access to the sublime through disembodiment. Even though previous interpretations have been quick to turn to the story’s metaphysical meaning, to the soul and the spirit, the entire story is steeped in “physis” and desire, as if opposing this very desertion. Even though the story as a whole expresses the nakedness of the girl as reflecting both physical and spiritual suffering and as a shameful situation that calls for a solution that the father fails to find, at the end of the story the search for clothing suddenly stops, and nakedness no longer seems to appear as a problem to be solved; nor does it prevent the father and the daughter from witnessing the Torah scroll and taking part in prayer. This ending is ambivalent and can be interpreted in two opposing ways: both as a heretic transgression and as a moment of religious sublimity, a fragment of a redemptive bright light that flashes beyond time. This tension between sacrilege and holiness is far from being solved. At the end of the story, in front of the new scroll that is clothed in a mantle, the narrator says, “And of its own accord, my spirit wrapped itself and I stood and prayed as those wrapped in prayer shawls and ritual gowns. And even my little girl, who had dozed off, repeated in her sleep each and every prayer in sweet melodies no ear has ever heard.” The wrapping of the spirit indicates that at long last clothing was found for the soul and that it is protected and contained, just as the sacred book is. At the same time, in Hebrew, the phrase nit’atfah ‘alay nafshi, “my spirit wrapped itself,” divulges a gloominess and depression (see Jonah 2:8) and implies that the solution is no solution at all. The daughter’s singing is also multivalent: it is both creative and religious, but it also contains an element of blasphemy and desecration, as “the voice of a woman is indecent” (kol be-isha ‘ervah); let us not forget that she is still naked. Here we should also mention Gemulah’s singing in Agnon’s “ ‘Ido and ‘Enam,” and Miriam–Devorah in his story “The Cantors,” Ha-ḥazanim. This singing contains a strange duality: on the one hand, it “repeats” the words that have been sung throughout the ages from the prayer book, and on the other it seems to be something completely new and original, something “no ear has ever heard.” Much like the incestuous dimension, this dualistic performance of old and new, past and future, alludes to a desire to eliminate partitions. The prayer of the naked female body becomes a song that slips out inadvertently; it is unintentional singing that is all pure sound, “sweet melodies”—meaning language in its most corporeal and materialistic form, untranslatable, in its very becoming, even before it enters the chain of signification and is regulated within it.



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In this way, Agnon complicates the distinction between body and soul, language and material reality, allegory and meaning, the transcendent and the immanent. The return to the body in its appearance as a “need” not only reflects a criticism of the dualistic hermeneutic act itself, which distinguishes between content and expression, message and idea: it also constitutes a crucial and vulnerable tombstone for the moment of destruction, even as it captures, with a special physical and tangible force, the longing for spiritual and actual redemption, its bitter failure, and the myriad tensions and paradoxes they reveal.62

Chapter 3

Dirty Books

Narration, Contamination, and Textual Evidence for the Jewish Past Eva Mroczek

There are those who say that it [the Zohar] was found in a cave in Meron by an Ishmaelite farmer, and was sold to merchants of spices and perfumes who used [its pages] to wrap the spices. And a scholar from Dara who was in Israel found it in Safed (may it be built and rebuilt) scattered, disordered, and torn. And he gathered it and made great efforts [to collect it all] and even went to the garbage to gather up the small pieces that were sold to the merchants of spices. —Moshe Cordovero

Tales about newly discovered manuscripts often include a surprisingly widespread trope: contamination and decay. In narratives ranging from scholarly accounts to legends and fiction, as soon as ancient texts emerge from the obscurity of the past, they are already threatened with degeneration and defilement. The kinds of contaminants that soil ancient writings belie their dignity as carriers of verbal meaning, dragging them down into the lowest forms of matter as they touch—or even become—trash, food, pus, and excrement. In this chapter, I identify this trope of the “dirty book” as a pervasive feature of our scholarly mythologies. For those of us who seek to understand



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the distant past through the methods of history and philology, it is primarily the material fact of words on parchment or paper that have formed the basis for our scholarship, even as an increasing number of voices call for greater attention to material artifacts. But textual evidence is always also material, and this creates anxieties that become obvious in the discovery stories I discuss. If texts are the foundation of our scholarly regimes of knowledge about the past, the narratives about contamination and decay that surround them reveal some affective conditions that have long been part of philological and historical work: a fear that our record of the past is too defiled and decayed to be reliable, that we must fight against the degeneration and contamination of our knowledge. These fears and doubts are expressed in sometimes extreme terms, as we describe and imagine fragments of texts lost in the trash, biblical manuscripts digested by bats, or parchments made illegible by oozing, diseased skin. The juxtaposition of such “base matter” with the dignity of an ancient text as a carrier of verbal meaning might be understood most easily as a shocking contrast between the sacred and the profane. And indeed, this concern is central: the examples I discuss involve texts believed to be sacred or at least connected to sacred texts in some important way. Yet the juxtaposition reveals a related but more general pattern: the anxiety about contamination and decay is present not only because the texts in question are explicitly sacred but also because of the privileged place of written texts more broadly— both in religious thought and in academic philology. The privileging of written records over material remains in the study of religion has been famously critiqued by Gregory Schopen, who, in his work on Indian Buddhism, calls the scholarly preference for literary works over material culture a product of “Protestant presuppositions.”1 Schopen argues that material remains give a fuller and more accurate picture of Buddhist history and practice and traces how the outsized weight given to textual sources reflects a Protestant commitment to the “primacy of the Word”—a commitment to texts as the apex of religious knowledge over artifacts, rituals, and the like.2 Here, we can see how reverence for sacred texts in particular and the privileging of textual material in general influence and reinforce one another. Scholars of religion have, indeed, taken seriously the calls to attend to material evidence and practices, and book historians and material philologists have long been reminding us that texts are not inert vehicles for words but are also material objects. But most people were keenly aware of textual

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materiality long before it was a topic of scholarly analysis—and have communicated their anxieties about it through imaginative discourses about contamination and mishandling. A text’s material form is the way knowledge is supposed to survive across time in the absence of living tradents or reliable memory. But matter is dirty and matter decays: the past is at risk of loss, and sacred text is at risk of falling apart, decaying, becoming illegible. In the narratives I discuss—legendary, fictional, or actual—a scholar’s recovery of the past is imagined as a sorting through trash heaps, handling rotting flesh, and mucking about in rat droppings to reconstitute the text from dirty fragments. We can never fully abstract verbal meaning from its fragile and off-putting material forms, as much as we might wish to; tales of textual contamination reveal this broader affective context in which philology and history are practiced. This chapter focuses on narratives about literal physical contaminants that threaten manuscripts from the Jewish past. I do not claim that this trope is a uniquely Jewish phenomenon; indeed, we see later that it appears also in accounts of the discovery of ancient Christian and “pagan” texts. But the pattern can be clearly observed in a surprisingly wide array of Jewish contexts and has a particular resonance given the distinct way that the concepts of antiquity and the preservation of textual tradition emerge in both Jewish sources themselves and scholarly work about them. On the one hand, the written preservation of ancestral wisdom and divine speech from long ago and claims to continuity with them are central preoccupations of traditional Jewish texts, including parts of the Hebrew Bible itself. On the other hand, modern scholarship develops with and out of a long-standing Christian antiJewish theological scheme that associates Jews and Judaism with hoary antiquity, even coding them as “living relics” whose role in supersessionist Christian theology is to accurately preserve ancient scriptures “in the original” and to witness to a bygone age of religious history.3 Even when it is not conscious or intentional, this theological schema often colors the way critical scholars, Christian or not, approach and describe Jewish sources. Given these cultural patterns both within and around Jewish traditions, concepts of textual degradation, contamination, and illegibility have particular resonance in discourses about Jewish texts. More broadly, attending to narratives about literal contaminants can shed light on the better-known figurative sense of textual degeneration as traditionally understood in biblical and classical text criticism. Although the practice of text criticism has been critiqued and revised in recent years, in



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its classic articulation a text critic’s goal was to restore a text to a pristine original form, one that had been “corrupted” over time through the introduction of errors and accretions.4 The language of the “pristine” text is common in scholarly work in the field. For biblical text criticism in its traditional forms (now heavily critiqued), the search for this original purity has incredibly high stakes: to recover the pristine text is, implicitly or explicitly, to recover the very words of God. In addition to frequent references to a “pristine” text, “contamination” is a technical term in textual criticism. It denotes a specific obstacle in the attempt to recover an original, unadulterated text by working backward from later, imperfectly recopied manuscript witnesses that text critics sometimes call “corrupt.” The traditional method is to map relationships between manuscript versions stemmatically; that is, with the assumption that each version is descended from only one predecessor. A “contaminated” textual witness is one that does not simply copy (and introduce its own new errors and changes into) a single textual ancestor but also incorporates readings taken from a second manuscript tradition. Thus, the relationships among different textual forms cannot be mapped in terms of direct vertical dependence and development but must consider horizontal directions of influence as well: the “contaminated” manuscript does not clearly belong to any single line of the stemmatic family tree because it is dependent on more than one source. Identifying and removing the “contamination” are thought to clarify each version’s place in the stemma diagram and eventually help establish the pristine text. The philologist, then, scrubs the text clean from contamination and corruption so its purest lineage might be reconstructed.5 And the recovery of a lost purity in traditional textual criticism is, in its theological implications, the recovery of divine revelation itself. Attending to discourses where concepts of textual contamination are presented in literal and graphic fashion, evoking feelings of peril and disgust, may help us place these traditional approaches to philological work in a broader context of the history of affect in scholarly practice. This chapter has three thematic parts, structured around three kinds of discovery narratives associated with Jewish texts, each with a different degree of fictionality. The first is the brief sixteenth-century narrative from Moshe Cordovero that offers a legendary account of the discovery of the Zohar, its mishandling, and its reconstitution from a trash heap. Through this narrative, I explore the theme of fragmentation of sources and the pervasive

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idea in other narratives that precious ancient texts are precarious—a hair’s breadth from becoming worthless garbage. The second part takes its inspiration from a work of fiction, S. Y. Agnon’s “Forevermore,” a short story about a scholar who finds a lost ancient chronicle in a leper hospital. This book— the history of a destroyed city, Gumlidata—has been contaminated by the hands of lepers and has itself become like seeping leprous flesh that cannot be touched directly: one must wear protective equipment to handle it. Agnon’s story evokes much broader themes of contamination and defilement, including the rabbinic idea that sacred scriptures “defile the hands,” the apparently paradoxical idea that the holiest objects are also sources of impurity. It also calls attention to the place of the scholar, presenting an ironic picture of both imagined risk and pointless isolation in the pursuit of knowledge about the past. Third, I turn to a scholarly account of a real archaeological discovery: the documents from Wadi Muraba’at, found in the 1950s in the Judean desert, which contain letters from the second-century c.e. revolutionary and messianic figure Bar Kokhbah, as well as some religious texts. According to accounts of the discoveries, these documents were for the most part poorly preserved, covered in rat and bat excrement, incorporated into rats’ nests, or already themselves digested by rodents and turned into guano that Bedouin sold as fertilizer for the nearby orange groves. The dirty job of saving the legible words from their degeneration into base matter—not to mention rescuing them from both animals and the Bedouin, who, in the colonial codes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship, were equally ignorant of culture—falls to the Western scholar. I end with the opposite of the trope of the soiled book and the dirty job of history: a consideration of contemporary images of sterility in the preservation and reconstruction of ancient texts—lab coats and latex gloves worn by laboratory technicians whose primary job is to clean and preserve parchment fragments. Throughout, we will look at the physical contaminants of trash, pus, and shit—as well as a lab technician’s latex gloves—as paratexts.6 That is, we will consider them as elements of the way texts themselves are framed for interpretation. The “paratext,” as developed by Gerard Genette, traditionally denotes the peripheral elements of a published work, such as the cover, title, author’s or publisher’s name, preface, or colophon. Its function is to serve as a “threshold of interpretation,” thereby controlling a text’s reception. Paratexts serve as frames without which the text itself is naked and uncontextualized: absent such a framing, the audience has no instructions about how to categorize a text—and no direction about how they are sup-



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posed to feel about it.7 A note of attribution or a colophon, for example, may assert the authoritative lineage of a text’s author or transmitter, directing the audience to receive the text as authentic and worthy of reverence. Physical contaminants are, of course, discursive paratexts: they appear in stories about our sources, which are themselves paratextual, rather than as elements surrounding or attached to the manuscripts as they are received by most of their audiences. That is, nobody really receives the Bar Kokhbah letters inside a rat’s nest, or passages of the Zohar in a pile of trash, or a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of a sandal on a shepherd’s foot. Yet, the way we are asked to imagine our ancient texts is often as touching, surrounded by, or covered with dirty matter. In many discursive constructions of how our sources emerge from the past, it is not the elusive colophon, cover, title, or authorial name that contextualizes, surrounds, and frames the text: it is garbage, grease, or guano. Like more obvious paratextual elements, contaminants are also thresholds between text and audience, frames that present the text and control how it is received. Dirty matter and its opposite, the latex glove on a lab technician’s hand, affectively frame the reception of ancient materials—even the mere idea of ancient materials for those who have little knowledge or interest in their specific contents and history. Ancient texts are always rescued from the imminent threat of decay—often at the hands of a dehumanized “other”—and the ravages of materiality itself. Such images create an aura of danger and uncertainty for the survival of the past, increasing its value, and they position the scholar as a hero of the trash heap, the hazmat zone, or the pile of excrement, enduring physical discomfort and disgust to purify and preserve the sacred past. The persistent and graphic descriptions of contamination and decay reveal that although written texts are always material, we perceive this fact as a sometimes disgusting and always distressing problem. What is supposed to be pure, sacred, and discursive risks succumbing to biology and becoming soiled, base, or mute.

Trash Recall the sixteenth-century text about the discovery of the Zohar that opened this chapter: an Ishmaelite farmer discovered the Zohar in a cave and sold it to spice merchants, who repurposed its pages to wrap their wares. The pages eventually ended up in the trash in Safed, “scattered, disordered,

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and torn.” In this legend, the precious, purportedly ancient manuscript is torn up, used to wrap food, and tossed in the trash. The rediscovery, and collation, of the text is dirty work: a scholar picks through the garbage heaps of Safed to recover whatever somehow survived when the manuscript was so badly mishandled, whatever can be salvaged from the refuse (Or Yaqar 2.104).8 This is, of course, not the only legend about the origins of the Zohar.9 As I wrote in previous work on discovery narratives as a literary genre,10 some pseudepigraphic texts are transmitted together with narratives of provenance that explain how a purportedly ancient work has suddenly turned up centuries later. In this way, origin stories serve as authorizing strategies, constructing an ancient pedigree for a newly composed text. The Zohar is no different. Attributed to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai, the collection we have come to call the Zohar in fact originated in thirteenth-century Spain; its primary composer and redactor was kabbalist Moshe de Leon. Multiple origin stories circulated in the centuries after it was composed. Perhaps the most remarkable one was an account that negated the putative antiquity of the text. The diary of Isaac of Acre—an account extant only later in Zacuto’s Sefer Yuḥasin (early 16th c.)—claims to report the testimony of de Leon’s own widow, who allegedly said that her husband had not copied the text from an ancient manuscript but composed it “from his own head and heart.”11 He had attributed it to an ancient sage, she allegedly said, because a text with an ancient pedigree could fetch a higher price. But the second-century attribution became traditional. Legends like that of Cordovero, then, were needed to construct a chain of transmission for a text without a history. Thus, the story of an “Ishmaelite farmer” discovering the texts in a cave explains how Shimon bar Yochai’s composition had turned up centuries later. But, as I argue elsewhere, discovery narratives are far more than simply functional authorizing strategies for newly written texts and should be analyzed as narrative creations in their own right.12 Some of the elements of Cordovero’s narrative participate in a much broader constellation of literary traditions about textual discovery in general, and other aspects shed light on medieval and modern conceptions about the nature of the Zohar in particular. In the first case, the chronotope of the ancient Jewish text deposited in a cave and discovered by an Arab should strike a familiar chord. The most famous example of this trope is the story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls: a Bedouin shepherd followed a goat into a cave and discovered ancient biblical and nonbiblical manuscripts deposited there two millennia ear-



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lier. But the same narrative is much older, told in around 800 c.e. by the Eastern Christian bishop Timothy I: Timothy reports that an Arab hunter and his dog followed an animal into a cave near Jericho and found numerous Hebrew manuscripts.13 Similarly, the nineteenth-century antiquities dealer and forger, Moses Shapira, tried to pass off some forged fragments as ancient precursors of the book of Deuteronomy, claiming he bought them from Bedouin who had found them, blackened and illegible, in desert caves.14 In fact, the resemblance between Shapira’s origin story and that of the Dead Sea Scrolls led at least one prominent scholar to argue that the scrolls were a hoax, because the discovery narrative seemed to draw on an already existing “myth” about the lost and found text.15 Of course, the presence of mythical or folkloristic elements in the narration of a discovery is not a reliable litmus test for the authenticity of the discovery itself. Although each account possesses a different ratio of fact to fiction, the way the stories are told—the elements that have been emphasized and highlighted in their transmission— show a remarkable cultural persistence spanning at least 1,200 years.16 One of the major tropes in such stories is the Arab discoverer. The idea that the “other,” the Arab, possesses special access to mysterious knowledge is an old one in Jewish tradition. It is found, for example, in B. Baba Batra 73b–74a, where it is an Arab merchant who knows how to find the way to many lost mysteries—to those who died in the wilderness wandering, to Mount Sinai, to the men of Korah whom the earth swallowed up (Numbers 16:32), and to the place where heavens touch the earth.17 But in discovery narratives, the Arab who finds the manuscript plays a paradoxical role: he is both the one who knows the way to the text and the greatest obstacle to its access and preservation. This is because it is the Arab who severely mishandles the texts. In our example, the “Ishmaelite farmer” sells the pages of the Zohar to spice merchants who use it as wrapping paper. This is only one of many examples where a newly discovered text is misused in ways that belie its role as a carrier of verbal meaning, becoming a mere utilitarian material object. The texts become not words but things. A persistent rumor about the Bedouin who discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls was that they used the ancient parchment as replacement sandal straps.18 In nineteenth-century accounts about the discovery of Christian manuscripts in Syrian and Egyptian monasteries, local monks are reported to have used leaves of ancient gospels as butter wrappers or to cover jars of jam. And in the 1940s in Egypt, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts are no sooner discovered by locals than their mother throws them into the fire as fuel.19

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These reports are surely false, born of orientalist stereotypes rather than facts.20 (Note that these stereotypes are responsible for rumors that contradict each other—Bedouin who discover ancient texts frequently both neglect and destroy them and greedily hoard them because they want to turn a profit.) But their persistence reveals cultural patterns of thought not only about the uncultured and neglectful Arab who cannot be trusted with the cultural heritage but that also display a particular anxiety about the mishandling and misappropriation of texts. The fact that texts exist as material objects also presents the greatest challenge to their survival: there is a risk that they will become only material objects—wrappers, sandal straps, jar covers, fuel—and no longer vehicles for words. In these discourses, the material and mundane misappropriation of textual material threatens the records of a sacred Jewish past and perhaps poses a risk to the survival of divine speech itself. The story about the Zohar’s discovery, misuse as spice wrappers, and recovery from the trash also reveals a specific motif related to the textual history of the collection. Daniel Abrams connects Cordovero’s passage to the actual literary condition of the Zohar, which, as he illustrates, was not a unified “book” but a more undefined collection of related fragments: “The ‘Book of the Zohar,’ or the Zohar as a book, is a late invention that should not be attributed to the process or intention of its composition at the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth century. In other words, the Zohar was neither written, nor edited, nor distributed as a book by the various figures who produced the literary units that were later known by the name ‘Zohar.’ ”21 Cordovero’s passage, Abrams argues, “demonstrates a critical appreciation of the literary form of the Zohar in the face of traditions that sweepingly or simplistically attribute ‘the book’ to R. Shimon bar Yoḥai.”22 Instead of a unified and complete “book,” the collection we call the Zohar was discovered “scattered, disordered and torn.” Abrams writes that this passage “seeks to mediate between the desire to posit a lost original document and yet be faithful to the acknowledged disorder of the documentary evidence in their possession.”23 If Abrams is correct, the legend captures the actual historical state of kabbalistic manuscripts, which can only be retroactively and artificially subsumed under the category of a “book.” But there is an alternative—or additional—explanation that is less tied to a historical recognition of the Zohar’s specific literary form: the more general fear about the fragmentation and loss of religious knowledge. This awareness that our understanding of the past is only piecemeal and, more



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specifically, that we only possess a partial record of the vast repertoire of writing revealed through the generations, is an old one. It is reflected, for example, in the many legends, both Jewish and Christian, about sacred texts that do not exist in any library.24 In this way, the extant written record of past revelation is already in fragments. Not only do contemporary scholars keenly understand the partial nature of their ancient sources, but many writers in antiquity were also no less aware that their written heritage had a deep history that was only partly available to them.25 The Zohar legend thus serves to center the figure of the scholar as a rescuer of the fragmented, scattered past—one that requires salvage. Here we encounter a discovery narrative within a discovery narrative. The scholar from Dara sorts through garbage heaps to gather and partially restore a damaged record. We might compare this to older lore about the figure of Ezra, the salvager of a lost and scattered textual heritage after the destruction of Jerusalem. Although the oldest tradition about Ezra’s role as restorer of the Torah, the apocalyptic text 4Ezra (ca. 100 c.e.), narrates the work of restoration as an ecstatic divine re-revelation of the Torah, 26 later material in Jewish and Christian texts presents the task in less supernatural and more scholarly scribal terms. Ezra is responsible for gathering up the surviving texts and cobbling them back together in some (perhaps not fully satisfactory) approximation of what had been lost in the destruction.27 But what about the trash heap? The scholar in the Zohar legend does his work in a decidedly unscholarly environment, mucking about in the garbage to recover the small pieces sold to the spice merchants as wrapping paper. The image is rhetorically effective because the written material—ancient, precious, revelatory—is exactly the opposite of trash. This juxtaposition of opposites is evocative: take, for example, the choice of the title Sacred Trash for the most popular book on the Cairo Genizah: it sets up the contrast between the importance of the discovery and the fact that it is not only, literally, a collection of texts that had been discarded, but also that its physical condition is more reminiscent of a disordered pile of trash than a precious library. 28 This also holds true for the way some of the specific manuscripts salvaged from the heap have been described. Before Solomon Schechter visited the Cairo Genizah, the Scottish scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson (of “butter dish” manuscript fame) brought back some material they had purchased from it for him to help identify. The most significant manuscript was a fragment of the Hebrew text of Ben Sira, then known only in its

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Greek translation. In Lewis’s account, the “dirty scrap,” one of the most significant textual finds of the time, looked like “a grocer had used it for something greasy.”29 The idea of “sacred trash” finds expression in contexts beyond the Jewish tradition. A pointed example is the hoard of Christian manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus, an Egyptian garbage dump that yielded the earliest and most important textual witnesses to the text of the New Testament, among many other religious and literary materials mostly written in Greek. Scholars have long told the story of Oxyrhynchus as a tale of “sacred trash”; note that evocative oxymoron. Some of the most important papyri, which had clearly once been carefully and professionally inscribed, met a distinctly unsavory fate. One striking example is what AnneMarie Luijendijk has called “toilet papyrus,” a fragment of a good-quality copy of scholia to Homer’s Iliad that, based on laboratory analysis of the organic debris attached to it, ended its life as toilet paper. Luijendijk describes what the work of restoring such a fragment may have been like: I should mention that when dug up from trash heaps, papyri consist of crumpled-up, dry lumps. Before they can be deciphered, they have to be straightened out. This is done by applying moisture to make the papyrus supple again and then pulling and rubbing it in shape. Hunt even advised that this was best done with one’s fingers. Whether it was the vapors let loose when this Homer piece was dampened or more substantial organic remains stuck to it, the conservation of that papyrus must have been a surprisingly unpleasant task. . . . ​In most instances—fortunately, perhaps, for conservators—the circumstances surrounding the disuse of manuscripts are less apparent.30 Although the “toilet papyrus” example is perhaps most memorable, Luijendijk’s study is meant to do more than disgust and amuse her readers. She analyzes the Oxyrhynchus remains, particularly the Christian manuscripts, from the perspective of garbology, a field of study that can generate data about people’s cultural values and practices based on what they throw away. Based both on the material manuscript remains from the dump and on contemporary textual evidence, Luijendijk comes to the surprising conclusion that people in antiquity really did sometimes throw their scriptures in the



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trash—whether because of a lack of interest or because scribes discarded older exemplars after making new copies.31 Before they were discarded, it appears that these manuscripts were deliberately torn up, a practice that had a particular significance: The people discarding biblical manuscripts also seem to have shared [this practice] with their neighbors of different religions and . . . ​ seventh-century church fathers apparently took [this practice] for granted. In the case of these biblical manuscripts, I suggest that this deliberate destruction may also have had a symbolic function, namely of desacralizing the sacred scripture. . . . ​I consider it quite likely that people, in this case early Christians from Oxyrhynchus, purposely shredded sacred scriptures when they discarded them in order to definitely break the link between sacred text and sacred manuscript.32 Luijendijk draws a comparison with the later practice of destroying damaged icons so they could be “desacralized”—reverting to their basic materials—and discarded. This is not the place to assess this theory in the context of ancient Christianity, but what we can see is the recurrence of the twinned themes of trash and fragmentation in discourses about the survival of ancient texts. Indeed, the conceptual pair resonates not only in scholarly work but also in literary accounts about their discovery, such as Tony Harrison’s 1990 play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. The play is based partly on Sophocles’s Ichneutae (“Searchers” or “Trackers”), extant only in a few quotations until substantial remains were found at Oxyrhynchus. The scholars most associated with the Oxyrhynchus discoveries, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, are the main characters in the play; they are called by the god Apollo to find the “scraps and tatters” of the lost play in the trash heap and prevent it from becoming “mere manure.” Apollo, resurrected from the papyri, speaks: I’m a god, Apollo, but I was tipped on a rubbish tip inside this manuscript. I’ve spent 2,000 years asleep on an Oxyrhynchus rubbish heap. Till 1907 I had to wait

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when Grenfell and Hunt came to excavate. Covered in rubbish! But what’s much worse is being resurrected with scarcely half my verses. Converted into dust and bookworm excreta riddled lines with just a ghost of their meter.33 Harrison’s focus is on the classical world and its fuller emergence from the dump of Oxyrhynchus. But his evocation of the twinned themes of trash and fragmentation, found already in our legend about the Zohar, shows the broad resonance of such discourses about ancient material texts from traditions that are usually studied in isolation.

Pus Our second vignette from within Jewish literature comes from a work of fiction but, as Ilana Pardes has stressed, one written against the background of some deeply significant developments in biblical scholarship by a writer whose intimacy with ancient texts is evident throughout his oeuvre.34 S. Y. Agnon’s short story “Forevermore” (Ad ‘olam, 1954) was published at the height of a new movement in biblical criticism in the new State of Israel. Israeli biblicism focused on recovering the Bible as a historical document of identity and of belonging to the land, unmoored from the rabbinic interpretive traditions that emerged over hundreds of years of Jewish life in the diaspora. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion held Bible study meetings at his home, and his famous essay, “The Tanakh Shines with Its Own Light”—to be simplistic, the Bible does not require Jewish interpretive history—embodies this new approach and was written only a year before “Forevermore.”35 The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1947 but continuing for the next decade, also coincided with the birth of the Jewish state and new approaches to biblical studies. Agnon’s “Forevermore” is, in part, a parody of biblical philology.36 Its hero, ‘Adiel ‘Amzeh, is a scholar who has been occupied for many years with studying an ancient text—the Book of Gumlidata, the chronicle of a destroyed city. Although the book itself is apparently lost, ‘Amzeh is preoccupied with small details of what is known about it, such as how exactly the city’s walls were breached and apparently inconsequential points of linguistic form.37 Having devoted his solitary career to such study, he is about to



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meet a publisher finally willing to publish his life’s work on the lost chronicle when he receives a surprising visit: an elderly nurse, ‘Adah’ Eden, is looking for reading material for the patients at the leper hospital where she works. In the course of their conversation, it turns out that the lost Book of Gumlidata has been in that very leper hospital for years. Everything changes with this revelation that the lost book is recoverable after all. An initially skeptical ‘Amzeh skips the meeting with his publisher and follows the nurse to the leper hospital. And here, in Agnon’s fictional discovery narrative, we once again encounter the motif of contamination. ‘Amzeh finds the book, but it is tattered, decayed, contaminated, and barely legible: “The book had been touched by the hands of many untouchables, and it seemed almost as if it were not written on parchment, but on the skin of a leper, and not ink but pus had been used to inscribe the words.”38 The book itself has become untouchable. ‘Amzeh, although allowed to enter the leper hospital, is outfitted by the caretaker with “an antiseptic apron which reached from his neck to his feet” and “a pair of white gloves which they carefully tied so they would not fall off. Then they warned him again not to touch the book unless his hands were protected with gloves.” He is unperturbed: “Adiel Amzeh sat there and painstakingly read every letter, every word, column, and page which the book contained, the caretaker standing by his side and turning the pages as he progressed. . . . ​He sat there studying the text, joining letter to letter and word to word until he could read whole passages without trouble.”39 The infected book is so decayed it is barely legible, but ‘Amzeh reconstructs its text, letter by letter. The problem is that his work or reconstruction would never be permitted to leave the leper hospital: “His book never reached the hands of the living, for it was forbidden to remove any article or letter or book from the lepers’ house.”40 The lepers were the only audience for his discoveries about the ancient city. And yet, some echoes of his findings mysteriously made it out into the world, finding their way, unattributed, into the work of his scholarly colleagues. ‘Amzeh, in his antiseptic apron and protective gloves, commits to staying with the lepers, reading the chronicle “forevermore.” If the short story is a commentary on biblical philology, it is both a parody and a celebration. Even though ‘Amzeh emerges as a ridiculous figure, obsessed with the inconsequential details of an inaccessible text, Agnon’s story does not dispense with the intoxicating mystique of new discovery. Everything changes for ‘Amzeh when he finally discovers the real text is not lost after all, but can still, with effort and great sacrifice, be deciphered. This

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discovery story plays into many of the recurring tropes we have already noted: the book is decaying into something both off-putting and illegible—the skin of a leper, inscribed not with ink, but with pus. It is the scholar who must enter the realm of contamination and rescue its words, just as the scholar from Dara roots around in the trash to recover small fragments of the Zohar. But the leper hospital and its inhabitants are also relevant to the structure of the discovery story. The precious text is in the hands of people who are both its sole guardians and the main obstacles to its preservation and dissemination. They hold the text but do not know its true value, and they essentially prevent scholars from accessing it—in this case, because it is infected with their disease and cannot leave their charge. Although the lepers in Agnon’s story are sympathetically portrayed, in structural ways they play a similarly ambivalent role to the Arab discoverers and ignorant local monks who control ancient texts in other discovery narratives. Let us dwell a bit longer on the most striking images in the story: the infected book, written with pus on a leper’s skin, and the scholar working in a virtual hazmat suit to decode it. Ilana Pardes highlights the unmistakable resonances of this passage with rabbinic discussions about scriptural books that “defile the hands”—the idea that touching a biblical scroll imparts impurity to the hands that must be ritually removed,41 which was first articulated in M. Yadayim 3:5. In addition to the images of the infected pages that cannot be touched except through a barrier, the specific comparison to leprous, pus-filled skin amplifies the resonance with halakhah by evoking some of the most recognizable priestly discourses about seeping skin diseases and discharges, key sources of ritual impurity. The rabbinic passages in question do not explain why a holy scriptural text would impart impurity; instead, they discuss exactly which texts possess this feature. These discussions have been interpreted as rabbinic musings about the canonical or liturgical status of texts like Esther, Qohelet, and the Song of Songs.42 We will not enter this debate here. What I wish to point out is one partial explanation found in B. Shabbat and elaborated by Rashi. B. Shabbat 14ab contains this passage: “And why did the rabbis impose uncleanness upon scriptural books? R. Mesharshiya said: Because originally terumah foods were stored near Torah scrolls, for they argued: This is holy and that is holy. When it was seen that the books came to harm, the rabbis imposed uncleanness upon them.” The explanation here seems to be that there is nothing inherently impure about holy books. In fact, it is pre-



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cisely the opposite: the halakhic definition keeps the texts from harm. According to this tradition, Torah scrolls were kept together with pure food because both were holy; yet, since storing them this way was harmful to the texts, the scrolls were deemed impure so that they could no longer kept in the same place as pure terumah. Although the Talmud does not clarify the precise kind of “harm” that came to the texts, Rashi elaborates: keeping the scrolls together with food placed them at the mercy of rodents. But a scroll that rendered the hands impure would also require other special handling that protected it from damage, such as touching the scroll through a mantle rather than with the bare hands. Calling scriptural texts impure, then, was a pragmatic way of ensuring they were protected: what seems to be a statement about a text’s impurity, in fact, served to place limits on storage and handling, keeping that text from physical contamination. Agnon’s story, of course, does not provide direct commentary on rabbinic traditions, and the gloves and apron are apparently meant to protect ‘Adiel ‘Amzeh, not the unclean chronicle of Gumlidata. But the protective measures serve another purpose: nobody can carry the book away from its eternal place in the leper hospital where ‘Amzeh will do the work of reconstructing it, forevermore.

Excrement The third major example of discourses of contamination and decay comes from a 1960s account of the discovery of the documents at Wadi Muraba’at in the Judean desert; among these documents were the letters of Bar Kokhbah, the second-century c.e. Jewish revolutionary leader and messianic figure. The discovery of these texts is reminiscent in many ways of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Bedouin found the first texts in caves, and Western scholars report frustrating attempts to gain access to them. One startling account relates that a group of British soldiers helped Joseph Saad, the director of the Palestinian Archaeological Museum, kidnap one of the Bedouin men who found the manuscripts, coerced him to assist them, and forced him at gunpoint to walk seven hours in the desert each way to show them the location of the cave. The story—narrated by John Allegro in 1964 and then retold in a similar fashion by Michael Wise in a 2015 publication43—is presented as a rollicking tale: it seems the reader is expected to chuckle along, as if kidnapping a Bedouin were merely an entertaining joke. The bemused tone in

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which the accounts report that the museum director found “himself accused of kidnapping and incarcerating his guide,”44 but luckily got off with only a reprimand, seems to assume that the reader will agree that the term “kidnapping” is a somewhat extreme choice of language for describing the event— and that in any case, manhandling always recalcitrant Arabs is simply what one has to do to rescue cultural heritage. The description of soldiers who “herd” the “dust-covered Bedouin”45 to be questioned also contributes to a dehumanizing discourse. In these narratives, we see again that the Arab discoverer is presented both as the only way the Western scholar can access precious relics from the past and as the greatest obstacle to their proper preservation.46 Curiously, the role of this “other,” untrustworthy yet indispensable, is performed in some Christian contexts not by Bedouins but by Jews: in the Augustinian model, Jews are needed to preserve and authenticate Scripture for Christians but do not themselves understand its true meaning and must never be trusted.47 But there is another curious aspect to the Wadi Muraba’at discovery story. It has to do not with mishandling or hoarding by dehumanized people but with actual animals. With regard to the discovered documents, Allegro writes, A few are fairly well preserved, but most had suffered from the depredations of visiting animals, human and otherwise, and particularly in the activities of rats who, with regrettable lack of appreciation of true values, had used the precious leather and papyrus manuscripts as linings for their nests. In fact, the excavation developed into a hunt for rats’ nests, since each one was almost sure to produce remnants of a written document or two. Another contributory factor in the denudation of written material was that the later habitation by birds and small animals of the caves over hundreds of years had resulted in an abundant supply of guano [built-up excrement used as fertilizer] which the Bedouin had for years been collecting and selling in Bethlehem. It is not at all improbable, as Father De Vaux points out, that the Jewish orange groves near Bethlehem were fertilized with priceless ancient manuscripts written by their forefathers!48 This piece of whimsical mythmaking is found in a book that is meant to be a scholarly account of the discoveries in the Judean desert. What does this



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narrative about the “misuse” of manuscripts for rat nests and their processing into fertilizer tell us? Here again, the scholar gets his hands dirty: each rat’s nest is “almost sure to produce remnants of a written document or two.” Like the scholar from Dara searching through the garbage heap to piece together fragments of the Zohar, and like ‘Adiel ‘Amzeh who wears a bodysuit and gloves to handle the leprous text, “joining letter to letter and word to word until he could read whole passages,” those who study the texts of Wadi Muraba’at hope to rescue and read scraps of parchment chewed and repurposed into nest material by rodents. Other scraps are “processed” even more: digested and excreted and turned into fertilizer for orange groves, so no legible remnants survive. The animals, with the “lack of appreciation for true values” that usually describes the Arab discoverer, have misidentified the manuscripts as things, not words. This “category error” has put the texts’ communicative potential to channel the past or even the divine in peril. We have already noted the discourses that reveal an anxiety that texts will lose their linguistic power—become illegible or meaningless—and revert to basic materiality. This motif takes on greater significance in light of the recent scholarly emphasis on the importance of materiality in philological study. In the last generation or two, philologists and historians have begun to stress the material media of texts, sharply critiquing the older tendency to isolate verbal content from its physical context in inscriptions, manuscripts, and print. The fields of book history and new philology emphasize how material contexts affect the transmission and reception of texts; they highlight the fluidity, variation, and continuous revision we can observe in physical written texts as they were produced and used, rather than an abstract, disembodied idea of their verbal contents.49 Indeed, classic methods of textual criticism that attempt to recover a pristine original or the “final form” of a text—that is, the finished text as intended by its author before any errors or tampering—are shown to be working in the realm of disembodied fantasy, creating ideal texts that never actually existed in any physical form.50 The particularity of material forms of texts is thus already in opposition to the ideal of a pristine and permanent verbal message transmitted across the centuries. But the motifs of material defilement and decay that we are studying here add another dimension to this tension. If the material manuscript is theoretically supposed to safeguard the survival of words across generations, its very materiality also threatens their survival. Often, as we have seen, this danger is expressed as the misappropriation of precious manuscripts

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as mute utilitarian objects by negligent human beings (or personified rodents) who do not understand their value. But in addition to assigning blame to human or animal mishandling, this trope of a text that becomes mute matter reveals a deeper fear that the past is on the verge of becoming illegible. Its verbal content will decay into the landscape, becoming part of the wordless natural world. The idea of parchments that have been saturated with hundreds of years of bat droppings, turned into guano, sold by Bedouin as fertilizer, and incorporated into the soil of the “Jewish orange groves near Bethlehem”—which end up nurtured by the “priceless ancient manuscripts written by their forefathers”—is a maudlin sentiment, a variation on “we too are stardust.” Allegro credits archaeologist and Catholic priest Roland de Vaux with this whimsical musing on a manuscript’s life cycle and return to the earth. But the idea of the decay of verbal knowledge is more culturally widespread. Canadian artist Guy Laramée expresses this concept through a series of sculptures: he carves landscapes out of discarded books. In his evocative pieces, the verbal function of the books is literally destroyed and reshaped into hills, rock faces, and mountain ranges. In his artist’s statement, Laramée writes explicitly about the kind of life cycle of verbal communication as the ancient manuscripts become olive groves: mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are—mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply is. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.51 For both Allegro and Laramée, verbal, written knowledge—whether it is explicitly sacred or not—is at the mercy of its material forms, existing on a continuum with organic matter.

Gloves Contamination and decay have a counterpart: sterility. In recent years, best practices in the preservation of ancient manuscripts feature latex gloves, white coats, and climate-controlled environments, like the Dead Sea Scrolls Conservation Laboratory at the Israel Museum. Fragments of the scrolls travel to exhibitions around the world, each in its own airplane seat enclosed in a separate container. The skilled technicians at the Scrolls Lab spend much of their time cleaning the fragments—not from garbage or rat droppings but



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from the residue of Scotch tape, used by the first generation of Qumran scholars to connect the fragments together. Now nothing is permitted to touch the precious fragments. Like ‘Amzeh in “Forevermore,” the specialists who handle them wear gloves, though it is to protect the fragments from damage and contamination, rather than to avoid becoming contaminated through contact with a decayed and mostly illegible book. Even the minuscule scraps that carry no words, only single letters or partial marks, are suspended in time. For display, fragments are sewn between barely visible netting so they appear suspended in space as well. The scientific processes of restoration and conservation in the sterile lab environment, where nothing can come into contact with the fragments except the gloved hand of a specialist and correctly calibrated air, serve to allay anxieties about the soiled, stained, decaying manuscript that is about to revert into a pile of gross matter. Although the stories of mishandling distance Western scholars from the Orientalized, ignorant discoverers in our discovery stories, I claim elsewhere that the images of the sterile laboratory and the latex glove serve to distance contemporary practice from previous generations of Western scholars as well.52 Indeed, I perpetuate such a discourse in my own undergraduate classrooms and public lectures on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Images of scholars leaning over a box of parchment scraps with a lit cigarette and accounts of contamination with Scotch tape shock contemporary audiences, who are then relieved to see photos of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the context of gloved hands, white coats, and magnifying instruments. Indeed, the image of the texts in a library would not produce the same effect. The gloves and white coats and instruments are the typical trappings of a science laboratory—culturally coded as the most comforting vision of competence, sterility, objectivity, and rigor. This is where the past is reconstituted, purified, resacralized, and preserved, where dirty books can be cleaned and the inevitable decay of organic matter can be at least slowed down.

Conclusion What do our observations about the pervasive motif of dirty books in the Jewish tradition—imagined both as material contamination and as metaphorical ways to talk about the work of textual criticism—tell us about our own affective relationships with our sources more generally? The discovery

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of sources—especially those most privileged artifacts, ancient texts—is a condition for doing history: it enables scholars to claim their work is rational and evidence based. These sources—physical artifacts that transmit verbal knowledge—are supposed to embody historical facts, the building blocks that make narrating the past possible at all. If Hayden White argued that history writing is prose narrative and analyzed historiography in literary terms,53 we may go even further to consider how the very sources that form the evidentiary basis of historical narrative already come to us framed in literary prose—whether offhand anecdotes, legends, or full scholarly accounts of textual discovery. The motif of the dirty book specifically, and the literary features of discovery narratives—factual and fictional—more generally challenge the division between literary and scholarly regimes of knowledge. We may consider emplotment and selectivity in the accounts that tell us how our evidence was found and preserved and note how they already create an affective framework for the kind of history we might do with the discovered sources. If textual sources are a basis for evidence-based history, the way we talk about how they reach us, what their value is, and what stands in the way of their recovery show that the very prerequisites for sober scholarship—extant sources—are already mythologized and framed within affective paratexts. These paratexts play into scholars’ fear of a metaphorical “contamination” of their archives or datasets by concretizing it as images of physical contamination. The sources themselves are, in their narrative life, constantly under threat. The discovery narratives reveal not only a desire to recover the past, particularly the sacred past or sacred speech, but also a deep mistrust of the very possibility. The most precious treasures, texts—which are not merely ancient physical artifacts but primarily valued as eloquent, even sacred linguistic messengers—barely escape becoming worthless trash and mute matter. They may stop being words and become only things. The images of soiled and scattered texts reflect a vision of a soiled and scattered past and the fragility of religious knowledge, whose reconstruction is always a dirty job.54

Chapter 4

Jews and the Christian Olfactory Imagination John Efron

During the height of the Holocaust, the stench of Jews incarcerated in ghettos and camps without proper sanitation was very real, and the odor of burning Jews filled the air above Poland. At this moment, there appeared in print a Nazi anthology of antisemitic slurs. This 1942 volume, Der Jude im Sprichwort der Volker (The Jew in Popular Folk Sayings), was an enormous collection of derogatory sayings, poems, rhymes, proverbs, and maxims about Jews that dated as far back as the Middle Ages, although some were of more recent provenance. The volume’s editor, Ernst Hiemer, was a bestselling author of antisemitic children’s books and lead writer of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer from 1938 to 1942. Hiemer begins his compendium by specifically chastising members of the educated classes who, he claims, were proponents and backers of the Jews, too refined to tell the “truth” about them. By contrast, the “simple Volk” with their “clear vision and uncultivated thinking” had long been aware of the “Jewish danger.” The views of these “lower classes” manifested themselves in a corpus of sayings that these folk, in their simple wisdom, invented to capture unsparingly the true nature of the Jews.1 Divided into twenty-five thematic chapters, the compendium covers predictable topics such as Jews and money, Jews as oath breakers, the unfitness of Jews for military service, and Jews as a racial threat. But within these and many other categories, a surprising number of popular German insults specifically

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charge the Jews with being dirty and malodorous. Although the “dirty Jew” figures prominently in the antisemitic sentiments of many peoples, German culture has produced an unusually large number of rhymes, folk sayings, and iconographic depictions of the Jews as filthy. Taken together they form a rich, if disturbing, trove of evidence that the Jew was regarded as befouled.2 These sources indicate how deeply embedded were such notions about Jews in both the conscious language and unconscious thoughts of Germans. The sayings range from the specifically descriptive, “he/she is a dirty Jew” (common to this day in all languages), to the more all-embracing simile, “Er ist schmutzig wie der Jude” (He is as dirty as a Jew). The latter claim tellingly suggests that filth is the Jews’ most fundamental characteristic. Moreover, their dirtiness is paradigmatic. As such, it is the standard by which the filth of all people can and must be measured. This chapter examines various manifestations of antisemitism’s olfactory trope, one that declares smelliness to be an essential Jewish trait. In the folkloric imagination, the Jew cannot be conceived of as separate from his stench. How could it be otherwise when, according to a North German proverb, “Bleib von Juden weg, Denn er besteht nur aus Dreck” (Stay away from the Jew for he is composed entirely of shit).3 Linguistic and cultural regionalism saw Franconians issue the following warning: “Anständige Juden und Juden, die nicht stinken, Kannst du wohl suchen, aber nicht finden” (Decent Jews and Jews who do not stink, You may well look for them, but you will not find them).4 Here, all Jews are dirty, or as the Swabian expression has it, “Beim schönste Jude stenkt’s” (Even the most beautiful Jew stinks).5 And unlike other attributes, smell cannot be hidden. Despite being condemned to a life of restlessness, the eternally Wandering Jew of antisemitic lore, though ubiquitous, was unable to hide.6 In part, this is because his stench gave him away. Even when unseen, his smell signaled his presence. As an old saying from the Rhineland has it, “Wenn du den Juden nicht siehst, mußt du ihn riechen” (If one doesn’t see the Jew, one is bound to smell him).7 In German folklore, smell came to represent the unique destructive physicality and essential difference of the Jew. Of the Gentile with halitosis, it was said that he had acquired his bad breath because “Er hat einen Juden geküsst” (He kissed a Jew).8 In numerous European folk tales, the kiss is an entirely positive act. One need only recall the resuscitative kiss the prince bestowed on Sleeping Beauty. A kiss by a Jew, in contrast, was a poisonous act, one capable of doing permanent harm to the Christian. Moreover, it im-



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parted to the Christian the characteristic foulness of the Jew. The Christian was, in effect, made Jewish by having been contaminated by the Jew’s stench.9 Another theme that appears in the folklore of Jewish smelliness is the frequent comparison of Jews to rotting food, decaying organic matter being among the chief triggers of the human disgust response. This theme can be seen in the following children’s rhymes: “Der Jude Isaak Meyer, Der stinkt wie faule Eier” (The Jew Isaak Meyer, he stinks like rotten eggs) and “Butterbrot und Schincken, Alle Juden stinken” (Bread and butter and ham, all Jews stink).10 From western Germany there is the adage that “Drei Juden und zwei Käse sind fünf Stinker” (Three Jews and two cheeses make five stinkers), whereas from northern Germany comes the modern expression, “Die Pferdbahn fährt langsam, Die elektrische viel flinker, Sechs Juden und ein Limburger sind zusammen Sieben Stinker” (The horse-drawn tram moves slowly, the electric train much quicker, six Jews and one Limburger make seven stinkers).11 The spoilage and attendant stench of foodstuffs that had spoiled were extremely common before the modern period and the advent of refrigeration. Thus, just as the consumption of rotten food could lead to severe illness or even death, so too could the presence of the Jew sicken Christian society. As a modern southern German rhyme put it, “Gott schütze uns vor Trichinosen und Judennosen” (God protect us from trichinosis and Jewish noses).12 In this expression, the Jew is at one with disease—and one carried by pigs, no less. The association of Jews with spoiled food points up the fragility and ephemeral nature of Jewish corporeality. The Jewish body, like food itself, will spoil unless properly treated. In the way that food must be consumed before it has gone rotten, so too must Christian society, to protect itself, consume the Jew through a process of complete assimilation or physical removal. In religious conversion rituals, for example, baptismal water works on the Jew as a preservative agent in much the same way that salting meat preserves it. Without proper care, fleisch, be it in the form of a cut of meat or as the Jews’ body, requires the transformative processes of consumption, conversion, or curing, the last term in both its medical and culinary senses. Smell, like the other senses, is “not universal, not transhistorical, and can only be understood in [its] specific social and historical contexts.”13 This, then, is a chapter in sensory history, a contribution to a burgeoning field of scholarly inquiry that, despite its growth, has paid little attention to Jews and even less to the sensory dimensions of antisemitism. Historians have, by and large, treated smell as the most undervalued or lowest ranked of all

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the senses. This neglect in part reflects the Enlightenment era’s demotion of smell’s importance. The Enlightenment bequeathed us a world in which seeing is believing, where scent is displaced by sight as a source of truth. The denigration of smell continues as strongly in the modern period as in the premodern era. Yet odor has informed the conceptualization of class, racial, ethnic, gender, political, and religious hierarchies in all places at all times. It has been and continues to serve as an important system of classification. For these reasons, smell has played an important role in the history of discrimination.14 But what is it about smell that makes it so amenable a trope in the history of antisemitism, and why is it such a worthy category of analysis? There are several answers but high among them is that smell is the most elusive of the five senses.15 As one history of aroma has it, “Odours, unlike colours, for instance, cannot be named—at least not in European languages. ‘It smells like . . .’, we have to say when describing an odour, groping to express our olfactory experience by means of metaphors.”16 Indeed, smell is the sense that lends itself to metaphor to a greater degree than any other; taste, its closest sensory cousin, follows next but quite some way behind. Smell is elusive because, like taste, it is extremely difficult to apprehend, describe, and cognitively grasp; thus, imparting to others what we ourselves smell forces us to rely on highly subjective and imprecise descriptions. To describe an aroma, especially an unfamiliar one, is akin to describing the music one is listening to through headphones to someone else. Because there is no physical substratum, as is the case with sound frequency when hearing is tested or with visual markers when eyes are examined, the stimuli used to measure olfaction are based largely on subjective experience. Thus, when smell is invoked to stigmatize, it works perfectly with an exercise that itself requires little in the way of proof. The profound subjectivity, ineffable nature, and cultural contingency of smell have made it a powerful weapon in the arsenal of those Christians who, over many centuries, have “worked” with Jews and Judaism to think about their own place in the world. In addition, according to Marshall McLuhan’s and Walter Ong’s theory of the “great divide,” the invention of the printing press ushered in a world where sight became the preeminent human sense.17 I do not believe the “divide” was as great as that theory holds, nor that the nonvisual senses were left behind to such an extent with the advent of modernity. Although much of the evidence in this study predates what McLuhan called “Gutenberg’s Galaxy,” it does not place it in binary opposition to



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seeing. In fact, smelling and seeing worked in tandem to create vivid and horrifying images of Jews: the advent of print ushered in a modern way to understand the primitive charge that Jews were malodorous. Moreover, smell is a unique sense and is all the more powerful because it cannot be avoided. One can choose not to taste, touch, or see something, but odors—whether pleasant or disgusting—are invasive. In this respect, smell resembles hearing insofar as when a sound comes on suddenly, one cannot avoid hearing it. However, smelling is more intimate than hearing: odors do not carry as far as sound and thus require proximity to be experienced— in this case, proximity to Jews. Although the musicologist Ruth HaCohen has written persuasively that the sounds Jews were said to make, both spoken and musical, were subject to centuries-long attacks, it was still possible to avoid them by not speaking to Jews or by taking a route that did not entail passing a synagogue and hearing sounds that were thought to be a cacophony.18 By contrast, the smell of individual Jews, their homes, and their workplaces was largely unavoidable, given how close Jews and Christians lived next to each other. Thus, Jews were seen as posing an ongoing olfactory threat to Christian society, which occasioned olfactive vigilance and a deodorizing impulse among Christians. The desire to rid society of the stinking Jews certainly holds true for the culture in which Ernst Hiemer operated, but the fundamental notion that the Jews are a dirty, smelly people has a much longer history. In what follows I track the origins of the charges that Hiemer cataloged, long before they were a discursive adjunct to the Nazi’s categorical eliminationist imperative. There were three principal phases in the history of the Christian European idea of smell as it pertained to Jews. First, in the early Christian and medieval periods, the charge that Jews (and other nonbelievers) were malodorous was central to the Christian olfactory imagination, wherein good smells symbolized the savor of the Savior. From the advent of Christianity, Jews become associated with sensory disturbance, their blindness to the truth leading to the foulness of their smell. This theological concept of the Jews’ filthiness was also depicted in medieval art and folklore, both of which portrayed the Jews as perversely attracted to excrement. Second, an early modern elaboration of the fundamental Christian tenet that Jews smelled bad was presented not within the contexts of religious sermons or theological positions but in secular, ethnographic works that focused on Jewish customs. Finally, a modern version arose, in which the accusation of Jewish malodorousness was part of a secular, political, and cultural battle waged against Jews

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but that, nonetheless, traces its pedigree to Christian thinking. This chapter focuses on early Christian belief and the medieval and early modern periods.

Early Christianity and the Smell of Jewish Unbelief The abstemious and renunciatory religious practices of early Christianity were formulated within the context of a Roman culture that Christians considered all too earthly and debauched. An important symbol of this debauchery was the Romans’ extensive use of fragrances, perfumes, and scented lotions and oils. In stark reaction to these markers and acts of decadence, Christianity tended to the ascetic, and its focus on the world to come meant that it eschewed engagement with the immediate physical and sensory world. The church fathers, for example, explicitly condemned the use of incense. From a theological point of view, Christians considered incense unnecessary because “the Creator and Father of this Universe needs neither blood nor the savour of sacrifices, nor the fragrance of flowers and incense, Himself being the perfect fragrance.”19 Jewish practices also determined Christian attitudes. Deborah Green’s masterful study of rabbinic culture’s attitudes toward smell indicates Judaism’s overall positive acceptance of aromatic regimes, even if the rabbis saw libertinage in Roman culture and were sometimes critical of what they considered the Romans’ excessive use of perfume.20 As such, early Christian practices were understood as a necessary reaction against Judaism. In his “Homily Against the Jews,” John Chrysostom declared, “Ye must worship in truth; as former things were types, such as circumcision and whole burnt-offerings, victims and incense, they now no longer exist.”21 However, with the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the assumption of political and social power, Christianity’s stance toward the material world changed dramatically, as did its relationship to sensory experience. According to Susan Harvey, the preeminent scholar of Christian olfaction, “by the fifth century, a lavishly olfactory piety attended Christianity in its expressions, religious practices, and devotional experiences. Incense, scented oils, and perfumed unctions were used in almost all private and public Christian ceremonial practices.”22 To justify its use of incense, the church even frequently quoted Psalm 141:2: “Let my prayer be set forth as incense before Thee, The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.”23 The new Christian attitude toward smell approximated that of Judaism. Although



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Jews did not use aromatics ritualistically after the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 c.e., the rabbis and the church were both keenly attuned to the religious meanings of pleasant fragrances and foul odors. In their efforts to endow even the mundane with sacrality, the rabbis invented a variety of blessings to be recited on smelling a pleasant aroma.24 These prayers were largely an expression of thanks for the creation of heavensent scents. By contrast Christians shared with pagans the belief that access to the divine could take a physical form and that God could be made accessible through sensory perception. The ethereal and invisible nature of smell made it particularly conducive to claims that a pleasant fragrance might summon God or in fact be God’s detectable presence. Smell was, therefore, a privileged sense within a religious context because it, more than any other, was believed to facilitate divine communion. Paul claims in the Second Letter to Corinthians that the priests “are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life” (2 Cor. 2:15). Although there existed a long-standing classical belief that the gods made their presence felt through fragrant smells, the Christian moral order used olfaction to separate the world into good and bad. In the former category were the following, all of whom smelled good: God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, angels, saints, martyrs, and virtuous believers. In the latter, one finds those whose foul odor indicated their moral corruption: Satan, demons, heretics, and sinners. In addition, there were places whose smells bespoke their moral purity. Heaven and paradise smelled good while hell stunk.25 Other more mundane places, especially those inhabited by people whom early Christians considered debauched, were also considered zones of foulness. Included among these were theaters, bathhouses, brothels, and gymnasiums. Nonbelievers, prostitutes, the sexually promiscuous, and libertines of all kinds were said to stink both physically and morally. To a church father such as John Chrysostom, no place better represented a zone of foulness than the synagogue, which is, he claimed, “a lodging for wild beasts” and “the dwelling of demons,” the former emitting the natural malodor of the wild and the latter said to bear the stench of sulfur.26 For Christians then, odors signified where people and places stood in relation to God and to the truth. In the classicist Jerry Toner’s pithy formulation, “To smell God . . . ​was to smell of God.”27 In this olfactory universe, notions of odoriferousness meant that Judaism reeked of error. But more than this, the stench attributed to the religion laid the groundwork for a long-lived belief that Jews themselves were

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malodorous. Within the Christian olfactory world, to reject the sweet fragrance of Christ was to smell foul and thus to have run afoul of God. And the rejectionist stance of Jews was due to their being sensorily dead: blind to the truth, deaf to the Word, and impervious to the “odor of sanctity.”28 It was in the High Middle Ages that the accusation that Jews emitted a peculiarly foul odor, a foetor judaicus, first circulated widely. It was no doubt associated with the Christian belief, as we have seen, that the faithful emitted an “odor of sanctity,” whereas those whom the church condemned were said to stink. Because the Devil himself smelled of sulfur (Revelation 20:10), the Jews, who were either portrayed as the Devil or in league with him, could not but stink. And in keeping with Christian teaching, it was believed that only pristine baptismal waters could wash away the stench of the Devil that Jews carried. It was a miracle that was attested to many times over. Proof of the veracity of the claims was typically offered in the following form. A recently converted Jew returns home and is immediately struck by the stench of his or her still-Jewish family members. Before his conversion, the Jew was completely insensible to the odor.29 The medieval accusation that there was a particular foetor Judaicus seemed to be more metaphor than a genuinely believed fact, although surely many people did believe it. As metaphor it functioned well because it reinforced the theological notion that the unbaptized bore the taint of unbelief; to be accepted as true, the claim required faith more than it required actual proof. However, the accusation that Jews stunk went beyond the discursively theological and metaphorical. In a world where illiteracy was the norm, illustrations and folk sayings were extremely powerful media capable of reinforcing commonly held beliefs and accusations. Visual depictions were especially able to shock, titillate, and bluntly convey “actual” scenes of Jews acting out their “true” natures as a debased and vile-smelling people.

You Are What You Eat: The Judensau In medieval Europe, the two principal modes of depicting Jews as filthy and foul smelling turned on their alleged acts of bestiality and coprophagia (eating feces or dung). The most notorious visual example is the infamous Judensau.30 Unlike all other medieval charges directed at Jews such as ritual murder, host desecration, well poisoning, and usury, which were found across Europe, the pornographically obscene and utterly uninhibited Judensau was



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found almost exclusively in Germany. These artistic images generally depicted Jews acting in a piggish manner, suckling at the teats of sows, drinking their urine, eating their excrement, and even giving birth to piglets.31 From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, such representations were carved into church exteriors and the undersides of wooden pews and choir stalls; they were found in private homes and stores, as well as public buildings such as town halls and on city bridges and towers. The Judensau even appeared on stage in a fifteenth-century Fastnacht or carnival play. Furthermore, the distribution of such images in woodcuts, printed broadsheets, and other forms of graphic art continued into the nineteenth century. However, even after the image of the Judensau stopped being reproduced, the myriad folksongs, ditties, and children’s rhymes about it continued to be sung and recited into the twentieth century. There were a wide variety of Judensäue. In the very first Judensau, a relief dating from about 1230 on the cathedral at Brandenburg, the head of the sow is that of a Jew (Figure 4.1). He has long hair and is wearing the pointed Judenhut or Jews’ hat. Behind the sow a Jew crouches as he lifts the sow’s tail and reaches into her hindquarters. A woman stands in front of the pig, presumably the man’s wife, her arms extended, feeding the animal. Other Judensäue such as that from Lemgo in North-Rhine Westphalia dating from the late thirteenth century show a Jew merely holding a piglet. Most of the earliest examples in the thirteenth century are in keeping with the general use of animals in Gothic architecture to depict virtues and vices. In these sculptures the Jew represents the sinner. In the fourteenth century, Judensäue continue to play a role in virtue and vice scenes, but in certain instances we can detect a shift whereby various examples are shorn of their didactic moralizing and are intended solely to depict the obscenity of Jews. By the fifteenth century, wooden carvings, woodblock prints, and printed versions become increasingly vulgar and elaborate. A woodcut illustration from Munich dated from around 1470 shows an enormous sow surrounded by nine Jews engaged in various acts of bestiality, one of whom is being egged on by his brother to lick the pig’s anus; his finger is in the process of tickling it while he is lasciviously poking out his tongue (Figure 4.2). An ostentatious image, it is made even more unusual because it contains rhymed captions, with one bearded Jew exhorting “all Jews to behold what takes place between the sow and us” as another says to his fellow Jews, “We must not forget that we may not eat pork.” Yet another proclaims, “This is why we do not eat roast pork. And thus, we are

Figure 4.1. Judensau, Brandenburg Cathedral ca. 1230. The pig has the head of a Jew wearing the stereotypical conical Jews’ hat. Tastenlöwe, “Darstellung einer Judensau,” Wikimedia. December 22, 2019. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Darstellung_einer_Judensau_(Dom_Brandenburg).jpg.

Figure 4.2. Woodcut of a Judensau, ca. 1470 from Munich. It is the most elaborate rendering of the Judensau image and the only one with captions of Jews speaking. Anonymous, “Judensau Munich,” Wikipedia. February 28, 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:Judensau_Munich.jpg.



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lecherous and our breath stinks.”32 The latter two captions have the Jews joking sarcastically among themselves as they technically adhere to Jewish law by not eating the flesh of the pig even as they consume its waste—an ironic consequence of abstaining from pork, to be sure. Other depictions from the fifteenth century show Jews riding the pig and even jousting on pigback as seen on the choir stall in Erfurt Cathedral.33 Yet, some have asserted that these images, when first created in the Middle Ages, were not conceived in polemical terms nor were they “intended or used to insult Jews.” Rather, they were repurposed during the Reformation in what one historian has called that era’s “vulgarization of public style.”34 All these graven images have been interpreted either as allegorical, satirical, or a version of what are called Schandbilder—medieval depictions of women, lepers, heretics, and other outcast groups as or with animals—yet all designed to denote the impurity of such groups.35 What has not been fully noted is the extent to which the medieval association of Jews with pigs is part of or perhaps foundational to a larger discourse on the smell of Jews, one that goes beyond the theological error that is purported to be Judaism into one that is ethnographic and thus “real.” As such, beyond the gluttony depicted, these perverted acts are visual proof of the Jews’ stench. The pictures of Jews with pigs obviate the need for metaphor because one can see that it is impossible to engage in such behavior and not come away stinking. That the Judensäue often appeared on churches in towns before Jews settled in those locales, and thus could not have been created as a result of actual contact between Jews and Christians, does not alter the fact that for future generations, once Jews did live in these towns, these depictions were considered proof of the filthiness of real Jews. On the northeast corner of the church at Wittenberg, the very one where Luther pinned his famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door in 1517, there sits a sculpture of a Judensau near the roofline. Unlike many previous examples, this one is not part of a larger cycle of sculptures depicting virtues and vices. It is the first Judensau to stand alone as a singular monument of contempt (Figure 4.3). Jews crouch alongside the sow, suckling at its teats; standing behind it is another Jew who lifts the right hind leg of the animal and appears to be examining the beast. In his anti-Jewish diatribe of 1543, Vom Hamphoras (On the Ineffable Name), Luther vividly interprets the Wittenberg sculpture. He begins by declaring the Jews to no longer be God’s chosen people; they are instead one with the Devil. For Luther, the nature and behavior of the Jews depicted in the Judensau exemplify their fall from grace;

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Figure 4.3. Judensau, Stadtkirche Wittenberg. 1305. Martin Luther commented extensively on this sculpture, arguing that the scene was in keeping with the Jews’ nature. Posi66, “Judensau an der Stadtkirche Wittenberg,” Wikimedia. October 26, 2017. https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judensau_Wittenberg.jpg.

the pig represents Judaism, thus making the bestiality a sacralized and religiously imperative act: “Here in Wittenberg, in our parish church, there is a sow hewn in stone under which lie young piglets and Jews who are sucking. Behind the sow stands the rabbi who is lifting up the right leg of the sow and with his left hand he feels under the tail [the anus]; he bends down and peers with great deliberateness at the Talmud that is under the sow, as if he wanted to read and see something most difficult and particular; it is from that place [the anus] that they got their Shem Hamphoras.” A graphic allegory of Jewish greed and insatiability, this Judensau simultaneously dehumanizes Jews while depicting them as all too human, committing at least three of the seven deadly sins: lust, greed, and gluttony. (Figure 4.4).36 According to Martha Bayless, in medieval society, excrement

Figure 4.4. Eighteenth-century woodcut of the Judensau image that had been painted on Frankfurt’s Old Tower Bridge in the late fifteenth century. At the top of the illustration is the image of Simon of Trent, the child victim of an alleged Jewish ritual murder said to have taken place in 1475. After this, many printed versions of the Judensau bore a depiction of young Simon. Shalom, “Judensau from Frankfurt,” Wikimedia. December 6, 2006. https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Judensau_from_Frankfurt.jpg.

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was not merely a symbol of sin but “it was sin made material.”37 As such, its consumption by Jews materialized and made definitive their own sinfulness and perversity.

The Excremental Jew The depiction of coprophagia in the Judensau was part of a larger medieval belief system about excrement. As Martha Bayless observes, “Dung is not simply a metaphor for things that are despised; it is literally the substance belonging to the Devil, the result of sin, the corruption to which every human is subject.”38 Thus the association of Jews and dung was intended to convey the idea that Jews embodied human waste: they were inseparable from it and indeed thrived in it. This belief was exemplified in a story that first appeared in the twelfth century and was repeated in various versions until the seventeenth century. It is a Saturday and a Jew falls into a sewer. Seeing him in distress, a kind Christian attempts to pull him out, but the Jew refuses help, saying that he must remain in the sewer so as to not violate the Sabbath. The following day, the Jew beseeches the Christian to pull him out, but the Christian refuses, saying that he must not violate his own Sabbath. The Jew remains in the sewer. Bayless observes correctly that, as with the biblical story of humanity itself, this story of the Jew in the sewer begins with a fall, in this case into the filthiest of all pits. Here excrement is considered sin materialized and the Jew as the embodiment of sin. Moreover, he was at home in the filthy sewer; the Devil was often depicted as excrement, thus furthering the belief in the Jew as Devil. The Devil’s abode, hell or Gehenna, was located in a valley outside the city of Jerusalem, one originally used for refuse and reached by passing through the appropriately named Dung Gate.39 The story recalls the demand put to R. Yechiel ben Yosef by the Jewish convert Nicholas Donin at the Paris disputation of 1240 to explain the talmudic passage (B. Gittin 57a), in which Jesus is in hell enduring his punishment—immersion in a boiling vat of excrement. As Donin declares, “This is in order to make us Christians stink.”40 Another way that Jews and excrement were elided in the Middle Ages was by medicalization, which emerged in the claim that Jews suffered from certain diseases, one of which was diarrhea. The origin of this charge can be traced to the belief described in Acts 1:18 that Judas Iscariot died when his



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bowels burst or, in medieval readings of this passage, poured forth from his anus.41 Always associated with Judas in the Christian imagination, the Jews were thought to suffer intestinal incontinence for their sins. It was a punishment that was sure to make them smell disgusting. This was not all. Inspired by Matthew 27:25, “Let his blood be on us and on our children,” yet another claim arose about the Jews’ pathology—that Jewish men bled from the anus. Depending on the particular author, this bleeding could occur monthly (therefore simulating menstruation) or on the anniversary of Jesus’s crucifixion.42 This depiction was but a short step to the further charge that Jews suffered inordinately from hemorrhoids.43 It was widely believed that Jews frequently died of dysentery and when one of that disease’s major symptoms—bloody bowel movements—is taken into account, we square the circle that entraps Jews in a world of bodily abnormality whose loci are the bowels and anus that in Christian theology were the sites of sin and corruption.44 In a world turned upside down, Jewish men bleed like women and are covered in excrement. In fact, Jews were believed to value excrement highly and were depicted in popular culture as using it as a medicinal cure. In The Ointment Seller, a Czech play dating from around 1340, the Jew Abraham is in mourning for his dead son Izák. Desperate for him to come back to life, he resorts to a traditional “Jewish” cure and buys a pot of dung and begins to smear it all over the child’s buttocks.45 This was a particularly Jewish kind of anointing because, instead of the head being the locus of normative annointing, the father spread the excrement on the boy’s rear end. Just as riding a goat backward symbolized the inverted and perverted nature of Jewish culture, the focus of Jews (as well as heretics and Satan worshippers) on the hindquarters of the body, whether human or animal, typified their sinful and morally bankrupt unbelief and validates the claim in Psalms 77:66 that “he smote his enemies on the hinder parts; he put them to an everlasting reproach.”46 Whereas Izák’s father was said to have used excrement to return his dead son to life, many later Christian ethnographic accounts of Jewish customs and rituals charged Jews with using bodily waste to kill Christians (see the later discussion). Taken together, the diseases from which Jews were said to suffer, which were characterized by the presence of human waste and effluvia, contributed significantly to the discourse on the purported stench and uncleanliness of the Jews. Yet, in contrast to the folk sayings, representatives of the educated classes, such as members of the clergy and physicians, were the ones who

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helped propagate these ideas. The thirteenth century saw a “scientization” of disease and other natural occurrences, and numerous authors agreed that the bleeding of Jewish men demonstrated that they menstruated or had hemorrhoids, which explained their chronic melancholia and paleness.47 Rather than a consequence of divine wrath, hemorrhoids, according to Albertus Magnus, were caused by the “coarse and salty food” Jews consumed or, as Henry of Brussels opined, “because they use roast food and not boiled or cooked, and these are difficult to digest.”48 The meat derived from pigs and rabbits, animals that medieval art paired with Jews, were also thought to promote hemorrhoids and melancholia, the Jewish prohibition against eating them notwithstanding.49 One of the leading proponents of the idea that Jewish men bleed was the medieval preacher Thomas de Cantimpré, who declared that the Jews had concluded that there was only one cure for their annual bleeding and that it was “solo sanguine Christiano” (only the blood of Christians): thus, their need for such blood necessitated that the Jews commit homicide.50 As late as the sixteenth century, the Swiss preacher Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg still clung to the idea that the Jews required the blood of Christians to cure themselves of the “illness of women.”51 Here we can see that the sociopathy of the Jews drove their homeopathy. As befit their nature, the Jews needed and enjoyed ingesting that which was foul. The Jews, raged Martin Luther, had closed their “mouths, eyes, ears, noses, their whole hearts and all their powers” to the word of God, but then “the Devil came along to open their eyes, mouths, ears, hearts and all their sense and then threw at them and sprayed them full of his own excrement so that they overflowed [with it] and [gave off] the stench of pure Devil’s shit. And they slurped it up as does a sow.”52 As bleeders themselves, the Jews consumed Christian blood, and as chronic sufferers of diarrhea they replenished themselves with the excrement of the Devil and pigs. Thus Jews, it was believed, lived by the dictum similia simibilus curentur (like cures like). The Judensau and other manifestations of “excremental assault”53 on Jews were rooted in a larger universe of religious polemic and othering. As Alexandra Cuffel demonstrates in her study of medieval religious polemics, pagans, Jews, and Christians all associated each other with excrement, menstrual blood, and other secretions born of illness such as vomit and diarrhea. These fluids were foul smelling and defined the person covered in them, their stench signaling their heresy and unbelief. Othering in this fashion was designed to evoke disgust and express the idea that the other party was in religious



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error, was contagious, and posed a genuine threat to the health and wellbeing of members of other faith communities. The body was thus a site of theological conflict. Cuffel goes further in highlighting the gendered nature of the dispute, noting that “though both men and women ate, digested, excreted, and eventually decayed, women’s more than men’s bodies were associated with dirt, waste, and rot.” Add lactation and menstruation to the list of bodily functions, and all three faiths shared a particular “abhorrence for the leaking body.”54 Beyond attacks on Jesus, Jewish anti-incarnation polemics focused on Mary and, in particular, her abdomen as a site tainted by menstrual blood, excrement, urine, and semen, a space whose foulness stood in contrast to the “fragrance, holiness, and exceptional bodies of Mary and Jesus.”55 The rhetoric of disgust about the body of the religious Other was extended to the animal realm, particularly in the form of metaphor. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all used animal imagery to denigrate the Other; it is here that the gendered nature of religious polemic comes together with the Judensau: the beast depicted in these carvings and later illustrations was, by definition, always a female and as such, the Jews were rendered into her suckling children. Indeed, in the earlier mentioned fifteenth-century Munich woodcut, the youngest-looking Jew, his mien full of pathos, rests his cheek on the sow’s face and calls it “mother.” Thus, the Judensau is a family portrait. The beast secretes from every orifice, so that its pollution becomes the pollution of the Jewish beneficiaries of the pig’s bodily functions. The head-to-tail consumption of the pig by Christians nevertheless excluded one very important part of the sow; namely, its milk, which was rarely consumed by humans.56 By depicting the Jews as suckling at the teats of lactating pigs, Christians portrayed them not only as being in moral error but also as engaged in an act of fundamentally antihuman behavior. In this theological constellation, pigs (and dogs) because of their filthiness symbolized Jews, who were both deaf to the word of Christ and were backsliders. As it is written in 2 Peter 2:22, “What the true proverb says has happened to them: ‘The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.’ ”57 In response, Christians, in an act of metaphorical purification, washed their hands of the nonbelievers by means of social segregation. There is no more potent image in the entire history of Western art affirming the supposed feculence of the Jews than their performance of these vile acts with pigs. As such, one would expect the outer appearance of Jews

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in these images to match their dirty habits, but that is not the case. The Jews depicted most frequently appear to be well-to-do and solidly bourgeois, to use an anachronistic term. These are well-attired, well-groomed men and women who, quite mysteriously, seem clean, their outward selves not betraying their inner perversions. This is not unusual, because a long-lived and central trope in all anti-Jewish and antisemitic discourse is the supposed secretiveness of the Jews. In killing Christ, the Jews, said the church father Origen, had “formed a conspiracy against the human race.” Their language, Hebrew, was a secret to outsiders while their customs were shrouded in mystery. Everything about the Jews was a masquerade hiding their evil intent.58 However respectably they may have dressed, their fine appearance merely cloaked the fact that underneath lurked the real Jew, depraved and filthy. It is for this reason that the Judensau became the perfect vehicle for imparting the idea that the Jew is inherently and congenitally disposed to acts that decent Christians must find offensive, if not inconceivable. There was, however, no masking the consequences of their bestial behavior, for that which was invisible—namely their stench—was now made detectable through graphic art. One might speak here of antisemitic synesthesia, wherein the sense of sight triggers the sense of smell. The stench of the Jews depicted in medieval and early modern German iconography as deriving from their intimate association with the one animal that was strictly taboo for them was believed to be ineradicable.59 Indeed, this view was in keeping with Jewishness itself, which was held to be immutable, notwithstanding medieval claims about the supposed efficacy of baptismal water.60 Just as Jews could not stop the impulse to consort with pigs, so too could they never truly become Christians, because their natures were fixed and unchanging. As their porcine fixation demonstrated, Jews were fundamentally beings of a different nature. According to the rhymed inscription under the Judensau of the Freising cathedral, “As surely as the mouse does not eat the cat, so too can the Jew never become a true Christian” (So wahr die Maus die Katz nit frisst, wird der Jud ein wahrer Christ).61

The Smells of the Ghetto Whether through their association with the Devil or their predilection for pigs, including their waste, as well as their desire for human waste, the Jews were believed to be a dirty people who emitted a particularly foul odor. This



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medieval calumny was believed for a very long time. Yet in the early modern period, an entirely new genre of literature emerges that picks up the theme of smell and uncleanliness but places it within a wide-ranging descriptive analysis of Jews, the likes of which had not been seen before. Between the early sixteenth and the late eighteenth century, approximately seventy-five ethnographic accounts were published that examined Jewish customs and rituals. They were part of a much larger ethnographic project that emerged at the same time and was focused on peoples other than Jews.62 The Jewish ethnographies were often notable for their wide-ranging use of sources, as well as their actual observation and consultation with Jews. The treatments offered detailed and sometimes exhaustive descriptions of Jewish religious holidays and customs as practiced both in the synagogue and home, life-cycle events, clothing, appearance, language, foodways, gender relations, demography, and even sub-ethnic differences among Jewish communities. According to the leading historian of this material, Yaakov Deutsch, this literature constituted a major “shift from a theological discussion-cum-polemic to a discourse that featured two new concepts: ethnicity and cultural foreignness.” Two other features distinguished such “polemical ethnography.” First, most of these works—about three-quarters—were written by Jewish converts to Christianity. Second, of the seventy-five ethnographies produced from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, sixty were written in German; eight were written in English, being the second-most popular language for such literature. We are thus dealing with an overwhelmingly German phenomenon. The intent behind all these texts was not merely to describe Jewish culture but specifically to deride it and demonstrate the deliberately anti-Christian character of Jewish customs.63 According to the historian of early modern Jewry Elisheva Carlebach, “the most innovative addition to the discourse [about the Jews’ penchant for secrecy] was the attribution of secrecy to the quotidian details of Jewish life, marginalizing Jews further by designating the simple, elemental aspects of their lives as ‘secrets’ to be probed for clandestine evil intent.”64 The formerly Jewish authors of these ethnographic works did not so much promise to explain but to expose the so-called secret and nefarious customs of the Jews. Among the things to be revealed to the Christian reader was the mysterious source of the smell of the Jews, something that was a result of their clandestine habits. According to the seventeenth-century convert and polemicist Samuel Friedrich Brenz, Jews expressed their hatred of Jesus and Christians

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in numerous ways, one of which was to purposefully make themselves smell bad. Ordinarily “the Jews devour a lot of garlic, especially on Christmas Eve. Ask the reason and the answer is to dishonor the thola, the hanged one [ Jesus] or so that they can stink even more [than usual]. [Because of this] God ordered Jesus to clean out their synagogues [rid society of Jews] on Christmas Eve.” Brenz continues the theme of Jewish debauchery when he claims that on the same night, Jews are “extremely merry; they gamble, gorge themselves and drink to excess.”65 In his enormously influential, four-volume study of Jewish customs, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten (Jewish Curiosities, 1714) the Orientalist, Hebraist, and ethnographer Johann Jakob Schudt (1664–1722), who was a Christian, identified the singular quality of Jewish corporeality: he claimed that God had endowed Jews with particular behavioral, characterological, and physical features that render them so “easily identifiable” that even “among thousands of people one can immediately recognize a Jew.”66 In terms of behavior, their religion demands that they remain entirely separate from Christians, careful not in any way to imitate Christian norms, customs, or fashions or, of course, to socialize or break bread with them.67 In fact, quoting the notoriously antisemitic work Entdecktes Judentum (Jewry Revealed, 1700) by the Orientalist Johann Andreas Eisenmenger, Schudt claimed that, vis-à-vis Christianity, Jews lived their entire lives according to the organizing principle that is conveyed in the Hebrew word “le-havdil,” to differentiate.68 As such, their deliberate choice to be oppositional made them immediately distinctive. Schudt identified the body as the outer expression of character and lifestyle, anticipating physiognomic theory that would come into its own later in the eighteenth century with the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater.69 Schudt focused on the face as a window onto the soul, claiming that Jewish features, such as “the nose, lips, eyes, including their color,” reveal the truth about Jews. He, however, did not stop at Jewish facial features, declaring that “the entire deportment of the body” makes the Jew distinctive. Following these claims about the pathological particularity of the Jews, Schudt commented on what he considered their especially hideous looks. Approvingly he quoted the seventeenth-century Protestant theologian Christian Scriver, who declared that in terms of appearance “there was not one, out of hundreds of Jews, who did not have something out of place or ugly about them.” Their complexions “were either pale or tallow or blackish; their heads and mouths were large; their lips pouting; bulging eyes; eyelashes like bristles;



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big ears, crooked feet and hands that hang down below the knees; misshapen warts and limbs that are asymmetrical and ill proportioned.”70 According to Schudt, the son of a Protestant minister, “the outer appearance of the Jews disturbs God’s order.”71 Although illustrations of Jews in Schudt’s day in fact rarely, if ever, portrayed Jews as hideous, what Scriver and Schudt described became the stereotypical depiction of Jews in nearly all antisemitic iconography from the nineteenth century on. For Schudt, the hideous bodies of the Jews matched their ugly character traits. In his study on Frankfurt Jewry, he devotes chapters to “On Jewish Usury and Haggling,” “On the Despised State of the Frankfurt Jews and Those Elsewhere and Insults Towards Them,” and “On the Insolence, Haughtiness, and Wanton Audacity and Maliciousness of Jews in Frankfurt and Elsewhere.” Alone among all the ethnographic accounts of Jews, Schudt dedicated an entire chapter to the subject of the way Jews smelled. Titled “Von der Frankfurter under anderer Juden Gesank” (On the Stench of the Jews of Frankfurt and Elsewhere), the author detailed the olfactory offenses caused by Jews. He noted that, although some authors declared that “the stench of the Jews is part of their nature, for even their small children stink” (solcher Gestank hencke denen Juden von Natur an, weil auch sogar ihre kleine Kinder also stinken), the Jews did not in fact possess an innately vile smell.72 They did, however, possess an unpleasant odor as far as Schudt was concerned, but it was a product of their general uncleanliness and terrible living conditions. In other words, their corporeal condition was not congenital. Schudt, it must be said, still hoped for the conversion of the Jews and the resultant benefits that would accrue to them once they became Christians. And although he peddled in antisemitic stereotypes, there were occasions when he defended Jews, describing their mistreatment, especially at the hands of the mob, as “unfair and un-Christian.”73 Describing someone or some place as stinking is not always the product of a bigoted imagination. In the eighteenth century, the Frankfurt ghetto with its approximately three thousand Jews was the most densely packed Jewish quarter in the world, and it is reasonable to assume that the Judengasse, as the Jewish quarter was called, was not a particularly pleasant-smelling part of the city.74 The air was indeed most likely fetid, and bathing was not a daily activity. Still, Jews did not smell any worse than contemporary Christians, whose lives were just as unsanitary.75 What differentiated the Jewish quarter from similarly insalubrious and foul-smelling urban areas was a long history of olfaction wherein Jews were considered putrid by virtue of their religious

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and social customs. Rather than blame city officials and the laws they passed that confined Jews to this overcrowded, fetid space, observers such as Schudt focused on the Jews themselves as responsible for the stench. Kenneth Stow has written of the Roman ghetto that its inhabitants considered the area to be “a walled Jerusalem, realized on foreign soil, but still a pure place, a holy place [and the Jews] themselves to be pure, the outside world a source of impurity.”76 In fact, those who lived in the Roman ghetto abided by the high papal standards set for the entire city of Rome for waste and water disposal; Jews too expressed the need for maintaining clean air in the ghetto. Communal ordinances were passed that mandated the owner of a restaurant in the ghetto to clean out his chimney once a month and prohibited anyone from opening a window next to a fireplace. However, meeting and often exceeding the norms for public hygiene in Rome would have made little impression on Christian commentators. As Stow observes, “Even had the ghetto become sparkling pure in its physical aspects, in the eyes of most Christians, it would have remained . . . ​spiritually contaminated.”77 The sheer density of the Frankfurt ghetto most likely made conditions worse there than in Rome, though not bad enough to curb the astronomical birthrate, which compounded the physical problems faced by the inhabitants of the ghetto. For Schudt, if there was a singular representative of the filth and stench that was the ghetto, it was the Jewish butcher.78 Long a figure of contempt and fear, the butcher was often accused of responsibility for the ritual murder of Christian children, his expertise supposedly allowing him to successfully drain blood from the child victim for ritual purposes.79 In ethnographic accounts, especially those written by Jewish converts to Christianity, the butcher was also a figure of malicious deceit. In his 1599 exposé of Jewish customs, Juden Geissel (The Scourge of the Jews), the Jewish convert Ernst Ferdinand Hess wrote about kosher animal slaughter and what was done to the meat that was declared to be nonkosher and then sold to Gentiles. Hess warned his readers, “But look, you Christians who gladly eat with the Jews [should] see what they do to the meat. In the first place their children are made to sully the meat by smearing snot on it and pissing on it, and they say: ‘the Gentiles must eat the meat misse missethone [sic],’ the meat causes an incurable sickness or certain death.”80 Schudt did not believe the accusations of ritual murder, nor did he charge the butcher with intentionally defiling the meat sold to Christians. However, he considered the meat so disgusting that he was astounded that non-



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Jews would buy it. He wrote about the filthiness of the butchers themselves, complaining bitterly that the aprons of “dirty, foul, filthy Jewish butchers and their wives” are covered in blood and feces and that their clothes are “greasy and dirty.” He was so nauseated by their filth that he claimed it took away his appetite.81 Of course, animal slaughter is never clean and pleasant smelling. As the historian of sensory perception Alain Corbin observed when speaking of eighteenth-century France, “The urban slaughterhouse was an amalgam of stenches. In butchers’ narrow courtyards odors of dung, fresh refuse, and organic remains combined with foul-smelling gasses escaping from the intestines. Blood trickled out in the open air, ran down the streets, covered the paving stones with brownish glazes and decomposed in the gaps.”82 So it was in the Frankfurt ghetto too. In his chapter, “On the Stench of the Jews of Frankfurt and Elsewhere,” Schudt sought to make a more general argument about the smell of the Jews. He begins by laying out the various historical claims about Jews having a particularly offensive smell as the result of divine punishment. He enumerated each of the twelve tribes of Israel and the afflictions each one is supposed to bear because they were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Schudt dismissed all such claims as mere religious fables and instead understood the smell of the Jews as historically and socially contingent. For the old claims to be true, Jews everywhere would have to exhibit their various bodily curses; as proof of their falsity, he points to the Italian Jews, both men and women, whom he describes as “clean and neat.” However, such was not the case for German and Polish Jews. They certainly reeked but not because of a divine curse; instead, their stench was caused by “filthy lifestyles and the way they maintain their homes”; this he attributed to the women who are “lazy and do not sweep, scrub and clean house.” The proof that these were merely bad habits that were correctible was that, when Jews stayed with Christians following the great ghetto fire in 1711, they were exposed to proper housekeeping and came away with a greater appreciation for and knowledge of cleanliness.83 Moving from the observations of this ethnographer to folklore rhymes, we find the dirtiness of Jews’ homes was a subject of children’s word games, whose power to create a lasting impression derives from their mindless repetition. The word games also reinforced for those of a young age a very common epithet used by adults: Stinkjude, a compound noun that harnesses the Jew to his or her own particular Jewish smell and dirtiness, rendering them inseparable:

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Schmeißt ihn raus darf ’s nicht sagen? Sonst will mich der Jud verklagen. Schmeißt ihn raus den Juden Itzig, Denn er macht die Stube schmutzig.84 [May I not say, “throw” him out? Otherwise the Jew will sue. Throw him out, the Jew Hymie, Because he makes the house grimy.] Die Juden und die Schweine Die hatten einen Krieg Es galt, wer ist der Reine, Den Schweinen blieb der Sieg.85 [The Jews and the pigs, They had themselves a war, To see who was cleaner, The pig remained the victor.]

Garlic Breath Of the many markers that separated Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors in the premodern world, eating and the laws of kashrut surrounding such activity separated Christian from Jew perhaps more starkly than any other human activity, and early modern anti-Jewish polemicists focused on it. Meal taking was a means of separation enforced by both communities.86 Although food laws and customs instantiated one’s religious affiliation, they could also be interpreted to mean so much more. For example, because Judaism was considered a false religion and the Jews deicidal, many Christian observers observed that the food consumed by Jews symbolized their error and eternal punishment. Blood, which Jews were said to ingest even though it is strictly forbidden to them, was said to offend not only the souls of Christians but also their bodies.87 Food was inextricably linked to the belief that Jews emitted a foul smell. Above all, its cause was said to have been the Jewish predilection for garlic, something attested to but given a sinister interpretation by the earlier men-



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tioned convert, Samuel Friedrich Brenz. Textual sources of Judaism do, in fact, celebrate or encourage its consumption.88 The Bible relates the longing for garlic of those Israelites wandering in the desert (Numbers 11:5), and in several places the Talmud enjoins Jews to consume garlic, whether with fish at the Friday evening meal (B. Shabbat 118b); to heighten the pleasure of the Sabbath; for a host of health reasons, including as a treatment for toothache when mixed with salt and oil (B. Gittin 69a); and for its qualities as an aphrodisiac and agent promoting procreation, especially recommended for use on Shabbat (B. Baba Kama 82a).89 By the Middle Ages, garlic was so characteristic of the Ashkenazic diet that it was a source of othering by nonAshkenazic Jews. The Italian rabbi Abraham Farissol referred to German Jews as “garlic eaters,” and the leading historian of Jewish food John Cooper relates the testimony of a fifteenth-century Karaite scholar who claimed that Ashkenazic Torah scholars “eat their dishes with garlic which ascends to their brains.”90 Although a somewhat enigmatic claim, one can safely assume that the Karaite did not share the positive opinion that the rabbis of Ashkenaz had for garlic’s efficaciousness. For many Christians, Jewish consumption of garlic was an olfactory mark of Cain: an eternally permanent symbol of divine punishment and rejection. However, it was not that for Johann Jacob Schudt. He attributed it to culture and social conditions. After their poor personal habits, the second cause that Schudt identifies for the foul smell of German and Polish Jews was their consumption of garlic. Schudt provides numerous citations from Christian authors, who claimed that the Jewish predilection for it remained the same as it had been for their “forefathers in Egypt.” As “evidence” Schudt cites a claim made both by the Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wangenseil (1633–1705) and the medieval Spanish king, Alfonse X (1221–1284), who notably declared that eating garlic “is one of the distinctively evil customs of the Hebrew people; they devour it like goats and give off an unbelievable stench.”91 Schudt claims that, at the annual fair in the Polish city of Jaroslav (he does not say which year), Jews consumed 20,000 florins worth of garlic.92 Finally, there was the case of the famous German physician Christian Francis Paullini (1643–1712), who published a comprehensive book on nutmeg, including a section on its medicinal uses. In that part of the book, he relates the case of a Jew who had supposedly succumbed to a very high fever caused by the overconsumption of garlic, apparently found in the food cooked by his wife. The accompanying sweats reeked so badly of garlic that the odor troubled not only Christian neighbors but also the other Jewish residents of

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the man’s house. After about three hours, the man recovered, and even though Paullini had fumigated the house with nutmeg, he was still so overpowered by the stench of garlic that he was forced to flee the house to avoid fainting.93 In the end, Schudt rejects all notions of Jews as bearing an inherently garlicky smell. He does not believe in a foetor Judaicus. However, although he agrees that Jews certainly do smell of garlic, he concludes that the reason is because they eat garlic “surely to conserve their health.”94 That particular claim was confirmed by R. Zalman Zvi of Aufenhausen in Yudisher Teriak (1717), his Yiddish polemical text written to refute all the anti-Jewish charges made by Samuel Friedrich Brenz. Jews, he said, liked to eat garlic, because the rabbis of old had enjoined them to do so; among other positive effects, it aided procreation. R. Zalman was also aware of the socially constructed meaning of smells and tastes, observing that the olfactory offense Jews supposedly commit was because, in contrast to their love of garlic, “the Germans find it abhorrent.”95 The rabbi was quick to point out that in Italy, France, and Spain members of the aristocracy, as well as ordinary folk, ate a considerable amount of garlic.96 The association of Jews and garlic was so commonplace that it appeared as an iconic picture on the back of playing cards from early modern Germany, where a man is depicted holding several heads of garlic. In addition, the Hebrew acronym of the three original towns of Ashkenazic Jewry— Speyer, Worms, and Mainz—is ShUM (the Hebrew word for garlic is shum). The German word for garlic, Knoblauch, also became a common Jewish surname.97 With the advent of the early modern ethnographies about Jews we begin to enter the modern era. The early Christian and medieval idea that the Jews were unclean and stunk was no longer claimed to be an innate, congenital condition attributed to divine wrath. Rather, it was their behavior and customs that were said to cause their malodorousness. Jewish converts such as Brenz and Hess were, by necessity but unselfconsciously, partly responsible for this change. Having abandoned Judaism and become Christians, they became living symbols of the capacity of Jews to change, to shed that which was once thought to be indelible. Even for those who did not take such drastic action there was still hope, as the example of the Jews learning Christian standards and techniques of cleanliness after being billeted in German homes in 1711 demonstrated. Such contact, Schudt believed, would have a salutary impact on the hygiene and smell of the Jews.



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The advent of print in the early modern period ensured a greater dissemination and viewership of antisemitic images than ever before. Such depictions of Jews had a powerful impact on shaping Christian hearts and minds during the modern period, when they enjoyed a power that was unrivaled by anything that had come before. To conclude where we began, the Nazi goal of rendering the world Judenrein, clean or pure of Jews, suggests an entire ideology and a domestic and a foreign policy based on the premise that the Jews are a filthy and dangerous pollutant. Instead of having died out as a relic of obloquies long past, the “dirty, stinking Jew” lived on in books, newspapers, posters, folklore, verbal abuse, and in the film productions of Josef Goebbels. Moreover, with criminal insidiousness, the Nazis made sure that representation became reality. They did so by deliberately creating the diseased, foul, and stinking conditions that existed in the ghettos and extermination camps, where Jews were led into faux showers only to be gassed. With the Nazis, the final act in Germany’s centuries-long obsession with the Jews as dirty and malodorous came to pass, with their calculated transformation of living Jews into the odor of death as their bodies burned in the crematoria.

Chapter 5

Imagining a Father

The Wandering Jew and Modern Jewish Identities in Danilo Kiš’s Prose Galit Hasan-Rokem

The Legendary Imagination Akin to ex nihilo creation, imagination is a human capacity with an unmistakably divine aura, and as such, it has fascinated thinkers since antiquity. Aristotle saw imagination as a distinct human capacity actively involved in thoughts, dreams, and memories. For Aristotle, imagination differed from perception in its unreliability.1 Yet in what is arguably his most famous appraisal of poetry, Aristotle extols literary creativity: “Poetry . . . ​is a more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”2 In his own literary practice, the Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš, whose work is the subject of this chapter, embraced this Aristotelian dualism through his remarkable interweaving of historical reality and imagination, as exemplified by his enlisting of the Wandering Jew to create a fantastic autobiographical portrait of his lost father. Imagination is an indispensable prerequisite for any kind of storytelling, and as its etymology—image—tells us, it accentuates the visual aspect of narrative. The figure of the Wandering Jew is the most well-known traditional figment of the European cultural imagination, which multiple generations have infused with their perceptions of real Jews. The distinctive characteristics of the Wandering Jew—in particular, his condemnation to an eternal life of wandering for the sin of blaspheming or harassing Jesus—



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situated this figure in the borderlands of life and death and on the boundaries between Jewish and Christian cultures. Related to Christian sacred (albeit apocryphal) history, the figure grew into an emblematic articulation of the Christian–Jewish relationship in all its complex transformations. Its various motifs and elements can be traced to both Christian and Jewish sources: it is a testimony to centuries of cultural co-production. The tale of the Wandering Jew emerged from intricate narrative exchanges between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, apparently moving from the eastern parts of the Mediterranean to southern Europe and to the westernmost parts of the continent and beyond to the British Isles. The tale then circled back from an English abbey to the European continent in various versions of monastic chronicles. In the tale, the figure of the Wandering Jew—who, according to the legend, had been an eyewitness contemporary of Jesus—was remarkably compatible with the return to the life of Jesus in Protestant theology. The early modern seventeenth-century version of the story spread in numerous printed editions that then continued to nourish new oral and written versions all over Europe.3 In literary renditions, popular printed chapbooks, and recorded oral recitations of the legend, this figure’s wandering is attributed to his refusal to let Jesus rest against the wall of his house on the via crucis, along which he bore his instrument of suffering. The biblical signification of wandering as Cain’s punishment for murder (Augustine and others famously likened the Jewish people to Cain) implies that the relatively innocuous transgression of the Jerusalemite shoemaker, who in post-seventeenth-century versions is often named Ahasverus (in English it is frequently shortened to Ahasver), barely conceals a much greater sin—the crucifixion and the killing of the savior. Consequently, many of the legend’s numerous iterations predict that the end of his wanderings will coincide with Jesus’s second coming. Whereas that ending takes place in the unforeseeable future, many local tales of the Wandering Jew’s travels around Europe report his latest sighting in a particular place, such as Basel, Hamburg, or an obscure village in Western Finland. The present time of the narrative is thus a temporary stop on his journey. These stops are reported by anonymous eyewitnesses who lend the narrative, which otherwise bears the collective stamp of a traditional tale, the subjective authority of a testimony. The Wandering Jew is ubiquitous: he is everywhere. Evolving from the medieval and early modern legendary wanderer to a multifunctional symbol, he has traversed cultural systems, moving between folk narratives and

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lyrical poetry, historical fiction and autobiography. The figure is a persistent crosser of all borders, not least the border between life and death. It is thus not surprising that its circulation in culture often signals or marks the borders created by social groups, as well as their general fluidity and instability. Clearly distinguished from the medieval legendary traditions of the Wandering Jew, modern literature employs this figure in various degrees of concreteness, from purely symbolic references to metaphorical characterizations and even full-fledged personifications.4 The imaginative operations shaping the literary Wandering Jews can be distinguished as rooted in the exegesis of Jewish and Christian sacred texts, on the one hand, and in the ethnographic perception of Jewish life in Europe, on the other—activating versatile modes of imagination such as the exegetical and the ethnographic.5 From the Romantics onward, poets and novelists adopted the figure of the Wandering Jew, ambivalently cast at times as an object of pity and empathy and at other times as a demonic threat. In the nineteenth century, elaborations on the Wandering Jew abounded in both ideological essays and fiction, especially in German. The figure appeared frequently in popular and marginal fiction such as locally distributed chapbooks and popular lowbrow Gothic novels. Throughout the twentieth century, the Wandering Jew also appeared in highbrow literary works. In modern narrative genres, authors project diverse endings onto the wandering of the protagonist, thereby revealing their own ideological and psychological insights, which often radically differ from the tale’s original theological message. This chapter explores the themes of surreal mobility, miraculous survival, and outcast status as they develop in and around the figure of the Wandering Jew in the work of Danilo Kiš (1935–1989). Possibly no other author has offered a more personal and intimate depiction of the Wandering Jew than Kiš. He was born in 1935 in Serbian Subotica, a town close to the Hungarian border, and was baptized in his Montenegrin mother’s Greek Orthodox creed in 1939. He and his mother survived World War II in Novi-Sad, but his father, a Hungarian Jew, perished in Auschwitz. This remarkable halfJewish Yugoslav author adopted the Wandering Jew as his imaginary father in several of his texts, surrealistically blending autobiography and fiction. In his short but momentous career as a writer, Danilo Kiš celebrated his Jewishness in the spirit of a continuous black wedding, or a sinister bar mitzvah, or better yet a prolonged funeral representing the funeral that his father was denied. As if commenting on the earlier mentioned tension between



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facts and fiction in Aristotle’s thinking, Kiš suggests a hierarchy between history and literature: “I believe that literature must correct History. . . . ​Literature corrects the indifference of historical data by replacing History’s lack of specificity with a specific individual.”6 Such is the intellectual motivation for enlisting a literary, fictional, legendary figure to represent his “historical” father in the text. Danilo Kiš’s Wandering Jew communicates a liminal Jewish identity retrieved from total loss—or total rescue, if you wish—because this figure with its traditional features enables the expression of that identity. His father as a “specific individual” replaces the indifference of history abhorred by Kiš, but the absence of concrete contents regarding this specific individual in the author’s own life, caused by the violent and anonymous forces of history, compels him to replace the void with a symbolic representation, the Wandering Jew. Although Kiš repeatedly expressed his disdain for folklore as kitsch, the only bearable imaginary form in which he could bring back the father murdered in Auschwitz was this folkloric figure.7

The Wandering Father In his insightful investigation of Danilo Kiš’s life, Mark Thompson produced a wrought tapestry whose elaborate commentary is worthy of being called “talmudic.”8 Thompson’s “Mishnah,” or core text, is Kiš’s “Birth Certificate (A Short Autobiography),” typed mechanically in Serbo-Croatian language in 1983—the date inscribed in the document—and laced with his handwritten annotations.9 The biographer elaborates on this layered document sentence by sentence, passage by passage, creating a multivocal discourse that is interwoven into his account of literary works by Kiš, his contemporaries, and many others and of visual materials, mainly photographs from the authors’ lives. Although Kiš’s life was replete with dramatic turns, the few biographical details mentioned earlier suffice for the purposes of interpreting how he adopted the Wandering Jew as a central component of his identity project. Here, I allude to his project of understanding, negotiating, and constructing his own Jewish identity from the obviously ambiguous and unstable points of departure allotted to him by history and fate.10 The Wandering Jew eminently suited this purpose because the figure’s Jewish identity, like that of Kiš, is open ended and unstable and is characterized by immortality and eternal itinerancy. The Wandering Jew also embodies an ecotypical disposition of

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transforming in response to changing contexts, to use a theoretical concept from folklore scholarship that addresses local adaptations of ideas, narratives, and motifs.11 I suggest that, like other authors, including some noncanonical European writers, Kiš acquires the knowledge of the Wandering Jew and applies it in the same way that one learns and applies a proverb or other short verbal elements of folk tradition and popular culture. One may say that these short elements move into literary contexts not necessarily from one particular speech act to another in the manner of quotes but instead from a more general knowledge base recognized as “tradition.”12 The Wandering Jew’s presence in a literary text such as Kiš’s stems from its availability as a symbol for a collective identity, which is often a complex Jewish identity with its labyrinth of insider–outsider perspectives.13 Modern literary predecessors are numerous: for example, in Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1925 novel Jud Süss, the protagonist’s mysterious uncle (who is in fact a mystic) is explicitly endowed with traits identifying him as the Wandering Jew who characteristically appears in chapbooks of the eighteenth century, the novel’s historical setting. Feuchtwanger introduces Uncle Gabriel as the Wandering Jew through the rumors of the people of Bad Wittenberg, where the plot, based loosely on historical documents, evolves to its tragic end.14 In his novel Job and his novella Leviathan, Joseph Roth employs the Wandering Jew as a less explicit but still effective hermeneutic index, assigning the figure’s characteristic traits to the protagonists of both texts and to other characters’ views of them.15 In James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, in which the Wandering Jew is explicitly wedded to Ulysses in the person of the protagonist Leopold Bloom, this paragon of modern man is not only metaphorically but also actually a Jewish man restlessly perambulating around Dublin. Making Bloom half a Jew (on his father’s side, like Kiš) and explicitly mentioning the Wandering Jew, and once even by the name Ahasuerus,16 Joyce reinterpreted his own exile from Dublin to Trieste and Paris through the modernized version of the traditional figure—now partly universalized (or rather, Europeanized) in his masterpiece. Kiš explicitly noted Joyce’s significant influence on his work in the concise version of his earlier mentioned autobiography, which he titled “Birth Certificate.” Joyce’s choice of Trieste, located in Kiš’s native Balkans, as his spiritual homeland may have played a role, but certainly the liberation from traditional forms of prose that Joyce pioneered opened the gate for Kiš’s imaginative narratives.17 In modern literature, the signification of the Wandering Jew often expands from its original narrow reference to Jews to a much wider significa-



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tion of mobility in general and thus also modernity itself. In principle, one may say that the Wandering Jew has come to rest in the sense that his lonely wandering has been incorporated into a general human mobility. Moreover, the category of modernity as mobility is positively experienced and positively expressed in many instances. However, the identity-marking function of the Wandering Jew lingers on and unsettles the theme of closure at a journey’s end. During the twentieth century, the Wandering Jew’s unrest often takes on tragic and catastrophic overtones. The second chapter of garden, ashes, Danilo Kiš’s achingly beautiful autobiographical novel that was originally published in Serbo-Croatian in 1965, opens with a scene of seemingly innocent preparation for travel: “My mother told me one evening, after kissing me good night and turning on the night light, that in a few days we would be starting off on a train trip.”18 Only later will the reader become aware that this trip is none other than the family’s escape through the Balkans and Central Europe while Nazism rises and World War II rages. Instead, at this point in the novel, a Chagall-esque fantasy is conjured in the child’s mind (or rather, the author’s memory of it): Afterward, half-asleep, I heard my mother coming slowly into the room and whispering . . . “Imagine you’re already traveling.” All of a sudden, my bed, my mother and I, the flower vase, the marbletopped nightstand and the glass of water, my father’s cigarettes, the angel that watches over children, my mother’s Singer sewing machine, the night lamp, the dressers and curtains, the whole room started traveling through the night like a first-class railway carriage, and this compelling illusion put me to sleep as depots and towns passed alongside me in my dreams, with names that my father would roll over his tongue in a fever, raving. For my father was working at that time on the third or fourth edition of one of his most poetic books: the then famous Bus, Ship, Rail, and Air Travel Guide.19 Veiled in the blue smoke of his cigarette, red-eyed, irritable, slightly intoxicated, this genius of travel, this Wandering Jew looked like a poet being consumed by the fire of creative inspiration.20 Captured in the child’s grim prescience, the adult author’s traumatic loss of his father in Auschwitz is metonymically expressed by the consuming fire and the smoke that accompany this first real mention of the father, who from the very beginning is introduced as a Wandering Jew. In the preceding first

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chapter, whose events occur when the mother and her son are already on the road, the father is replaced symbolically by Our Father—that is, the God of the Christian goodnight prayer but also the Father God shared by Jews and Christians. At the beginning of the fourth chapter, the father’s destiny further unfolds in prophetic and even in astrological terms, branding his ethnic identity as the Wandering Jew: “For days my father had been sitting stubbornly next to the coachman, suddenly strangely lucid, pathetically aware of his destiny as inscribed in his genealogy, in the books of the prophets. . . . ​He only knew that he was supposed to fulfill a chapter of the great prophecy, for it had been written about him that he was to wander and flee ‘head over heels.’ ”21 Although it is not entirely clear whose prophecy the narrator cites—the Hebrew Bible’s verdict imposed on Cain or the legendary doom of the Wandering Jew—the sense of destiny clearly sharpens: “My father was steering our ship with a sure hand. . . . ​The coachman did not know that my father was searching for the star of his destiny, which was marked precisely in the Hungarian cabalistic-astrological study A csillagfejtetés könyve.”22 Then, the prophecy is almost inevitably fulfilled: With nervous haste, my father was endeavoring to fulfill his destiny, to fulfill the words of the prophecy and to accomplish his own redemption. The fact that he had made his appearance—as the Wandering Jew—in the place where he had spent his childhood, from which he had long since fled, guided by a grand vision, made him recognize the fate into which he had fallen, in a kind of circulus viciosus from which there was no way out: the arc of his life’s adventure was closing like a trap. Impotent before God, obsessed by the idea that he was destined to expiate the sins of all mankind, he blamed all humanity for his curse and held his sisters and relatives responsible for all his misfortunes. He considered himself a scapegoat.23 The vicious circle in which the father returns to his place of birth bears a clear resemblance to the cyclical mode of travel that characterizes the traditional oral versions of the Wandering Jew legend. The cycle is inherently associated with end-of-the-world prophecies, such as the short Finnish tale stating that the legendary figure began his wanderings in the native county of the narrator—in blatant contradiction to the dominant tradition situat-



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ing the event in Jerusalem—and when he returns there, the world will end.24 The primary Christian association probably attaches the cycle to the person of Christ, as in the expectation for his return—imminent Parousia; the early church later adapted to a time scale that allowed for a longer waiting period for the second coming. Expressing the interreligious sphere of associations that is his inheritance, here Kiš as narrator interprets his father’s catastrophic fate in terms of Christ’s sacrifice, rather than as the redemption of the Wandering Jew at the second coming.25 Later in the book, the narrator provides a full-blown image of the accumulation of prejudice and anxiety that the Christian environment associated with Jews, and especially with the emblematic Wandering Jew. This accumulation encompassed a wide range of demonic beliefs and anecdotes extant in folk beliefs in the supernatural and the bearers of such beliefs, most of whom, as per the stereotype, were women. The passage also unabashedly associates the dissemination of the Wandering Jew tradition and its demonic paraphernalia with the church: The fact that my father had second sight, that he was a clairvoyant and a madman, was evidence enough to the Church of his dealings with dark forces. . . . ​The story went round, and was preached from the pulpit, that his iron-tipped cane possessed magical powers, that trees withered like grass whenever he walked in the Count’s forest, that his spit produced poisonous mushrooms—Ithyphallus impudicus—that grew under the guise of edible, cultivated varieties. Before long the spying on my father was taken over by the socalled Women of the Third Order, queer, devout village creatures who for their merits wore a rope with three big knots around their waists. . . . ​26 Under pressure from the Church, the authorities were finally compelled to act.27 After the final separation from his Christian wife and son, the Jewish father was apparently transported to Auschwitz. The events of his loss are referred to by the adult Kiš as the father’s “disappearance”; in biographer Mark Thompson’s words, it is a disappearance “stronger than his mother’s presence.”28 The father’s subsequent phantom reappearances to the son intensify the merging of the father with the Wandering Jew. The dividing lines blur between the remembered, real-life father and the son’s wishful projection of the would-be father as the Wandering Jew, who, like the legendary model,

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has traversed death and remained changeable and immortal. In Thompson’s words, “Kiš’s father, by contrast [to his mother] was remote and enigmatic even before he ’disappeared’ in Auschwitz, so his fate could only be imagined. . . . ​Eduard’s [the father’s] life could be re-created as a vagrant spirit, a Wandering Jew, blessed and cursed with a yearning for unattainable liberty.”29 Kiš develops the Wandering Jew theme further in ways that emphasize the uncanny hide-and-seek of the known and unknown, a dynamic born of deep loss that drapes the father in the shape of a German tourist who, disturbingly, denotes the identity of his father’s murderers30: The more he hid from me, the more determined I was to find him, to rip away the veil of mystery. . . . ​If my father had agreed to withdraw nicely from the world, to reconcile himself to death, to commit himself definitively to one world, one country, one family, I would not have created a problem for him. But he continued to vent his spite toward the world, to reject a reconciliation with old age and death, to assume the visage of the Wandering Jew and descend upon me—usually dressed as a German tourist—to provoke me, to torment me in my dreams, to remind me of his presence.31 Here the Wandering Jew as the father is already somewhat deconstructed: he is portrayed as assuming a “visage,” almost a costume or a mask. The unknowns of his death prevent the finality of separation and render the father as a specter, wearing not a death mask but instead the mask of eternal life such as Ahasver’s. The last mention of the legendary figure of the Wandering Jew in garden, ashes evokes the figure in explicitly theatrical terms, “when my father was playing his role as the Wandering Jew,” reinforcing the unsettling carnivalesque aspects of both the father and the legend—and indeed, of life in general.32 I use Bakhtin’s critical term “carnivalesque” to underline the socially liberating message that this moment in the novel communicates.33 Significantly, this instance follows the author’s account of his ecstatic initiation into the role of poet in terms that call to mind initiations of biblical prophets, an association he directly reinforces: “A marvelous, allembracing rhythm quivered inside me, and the words came out of my mouth as if I were a medium speaking Hebrew.”34 Assuming the roles of poet and author enables the narrator, and Kiš, to produce a socially acceptable course of behavior out of the havoc of his life,



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in the same way that Bakhtin reveals the carnival as a mode of expressing rebellion acceptable to the throne and the church. Kiš’s biographer Thompson suggests, “Literature promised salvation from the overpowering specificity of his [Kiš’s] own experience and the multiplicity of his ethnic identities, by removing and transposing these threats into communicable, indeed beautiful form.”35 Literature is the arena in which Kiš allowed his entangled identity’s components to combat each other so that “a terrible beauty is born,” to quote William Butler Yeats. The Montenegrin bard and storyteller from his mother’s lineage challenged the Hebrew prophets, Jewish mystics, and railway clerks from his father’s side, producing a narrative that was neither fiction nor historical truth, teleologically leading to catastrophe but in no way in a linear fashion. The novel’s final words do not explicitly mention the Wandering Jew. However, they evoke a parallel European, non-Jewish figure—perhaps the pagan Wotan/Odin roaming in the forests or the Christian Flying Dutchman, both identified with the elements of nature and especially with the wind.36 These figures are hinted at in the mother’s words in the closing sentence of the book: Out father’s ghost hovered in the woods. Didn’t we hear him blowing his nose into a scrap of newspaper only a few minutes ago, while the woods reverberated with a triple echo? “We have to get going,” my mother would say at that point. “Lord, how quickly it gets dark here.”37 Here, the three parallel figures—the Wandering Jew, Odin, and the Flying Dutchman; Jewish, pagan, and Christian—are transformed into the wind blowing through the forest and enveloped by the common Jewish and Christian term for the divinity, “Lord.” Almost as a grotesque parallel to the conversion of his son, the father as Wandering Jew would seem to have attained rest when interred in the earth of Europe with millions of Jewish and other dead. The possibility of conversion does not put an end to wandering, however, either in the case of Ahasver (who has become a pious Christian but is still called the Wandering Jew), or of Kiš’s father, or of Kiš himself. Even death apparently does not put an end to wandering, as I suggested in an earlier work comparing the Dybbuk and the Wandering Jew.38 The son—half wandering Jew, half wandering Christian—is prodded by his mother, and the Lord himself cannot prevent

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the dark from covering Europe’s vast cemeteries. In the mother’s words, wandering at least partly transcends its specific association with Jews and is revealed as a human condition of homelessness. Although some modern ideologies suggest redemptive endings for the long life of the Wandering Jew, such as the rest of death among other disappearing nationalities in the ultimate socialist utopia39 or the rest at home envisioned by Zionists,40 Kiš’s novel eschews rest by ending in a perturbed imbalance, the ultimate predicament of all humanity.

Modern Jewish Male, Lost in Wandering In contrast to the intimately imaginative and carnivalesque tone of garden, ashes, in which the plot organizes the child’s emotional chaos, in his 1972 novel Hourglass, Kiš describes raw violence and destruction in greater detail. The narrative of Hourglass is dominated by an anxiety-ridden, fragmented, highly intricate maze of despair.41 Constructed as the last tortured weeks in the life of Kiš’s father, Hourglass moves between the father’s first-person narrative, as he sometimes answers an interrogator, and anonymous voices observing him. Here, the Wandering Jew figure enables Kiš to appropriate his Jewish legacy as a border-crossing identity, which he characterizes as vagrant and crossbred: I can’t help thinking about the amazing resemblance between potato and man, and at the same time, begging your pardon, between potato and Jew . . . ​dark history . . . ​it will survive the great cataclysm . . . ​the only thing not created by the will of God . . . ​it was not brought to Europe until the sixteenth century. . . . ​And do you know to what country? To Spain, gentlemen. This, I believe speaks for itself with regard to my apt comparison between the Jew and the potato, for it was undoubtedly in Spain, where the Ewige Jude was selected for further wanderings, that there occurred the fateful meeting between man and potato, between the hooked Sephardic nose and the imperfect bumpy tuber.42 Later in Hourglass, the fictionalized father imagines various fantastic plots through which he attempts to supply a narrative context for the endless list of meaningless deaths that he encounters. These plots are interspersed



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with names familiar to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the European Wandering Jew tradition, as in the following passage: Driven by obscure (historic) guilt feelings and fear, a certain Malchus or Karafil or Johannes Buttadeus . . . ​begins at an early age to change not only his name and identity but also his occupation and place of residence . . . ​[he] is relegated to a mental hospital, where it comes to him in a kind of illumination that he was born to work on the railroad and that travel will cure his anxieties . . . ​he becomes . . . ​finally an inspector of the state railroads. . . . ​In the end, he experiences another illumination, very much like the first: in his office at a small railroad station, Mr. Joannes Buttadeus (or Buttadio) or Joăo d’Espera em Dios, alias Isaac Laquedem, meets Jesus his executioner.43 Kiš thus interprets twentieth-century history by switching the traditional roles of Christ and the Jew within the Wandering Jew legend in a way that highlights the Jew’s suffering and victimhood. The process of adaptation to new situations and locales has the signs of an oikotype or ecotype, perhaps one of the most theoretically viable concepts created in folklore studies in the twentieth century and one that serves especially well in interpreting the transformations of the Wandering Jew figure in various historical and cultural contexts.44 The Wandering Jew figure, which underwent many changes between the thirteenth and twenty-first centuries, from southern to northern Europe and almost all over the world, also changes within the much smaller ecosystem of the life of Kiš. The literal and psychological border crossings take on turbulent rhythms; under Nazi rule, Jewishness not only makes one a victim but also means being a son to a father in a tragic conundrum that resounds with Kafka’s “Letter to my Father.”45 Aligning himself with Jewish writers, Kiš reflected, “What a paradox that even today the Jewish father can loom so terribly, though he is socially so weak, which is why the work of Jewish writers almost always perpetuates a conflict with the father.”46 In the transfer of the legendary folk figure of the Wandering Jew into modern literature (and here specifically into Kiš’s novels), the traditional narrative is further destabilized both by modernity and by how each individual author appropriates and reshapes the collectively created motif. Embodying a transforming and transgressive identity, the Wandering Jew continues to

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bridge death and life, yet with a growing sense of the dissolution of the original framework of sin and punishment. In modern literature, he becomes the ultimate witness of sins gone unpunished. As an image of the Jewish male in general, the Wandering Jew challenges received notions, and Kiš’s personal version of the legendary figure goes even beyond radically critical models of masculinity. Daniel Boyarin’s model of “unheroic conduct” in his influential book of the same name affirms an exemplary performance of Jewish maleness.47 For Boyarin, it above all takes the form of the edelkayt of the gentle yeshivah student,48 and his ideal male projects a theoretical and historical model of the life of Diaspora Jews: “an idealized Diaspora generalized from those situations in Jewish history when Jews were both relatively free from persecution and yet constituted by strong identity—those situations, moreover, within which Promethean Jewish creativity was not antithetical, indeed was synergistic with a general cultural activity.”49 Neither Kiš nor his father enjoyed such ideal conditions. The author’s careful adoption of the Wandering Jew figure as his father in life and death pushes the limits of Jewish “femminized” (Boyarin’s term to distinguish men’s cultural femininity from women) maleness beyond the image of the yeshive-bokher. Reading Kiš, we must make room in the model of the Jewish male for the split, composite, and torn identity of the Wandering Jew, a figure always walking on the inherently thin dividing line between Jewishness and Christianity. The conditions of what Boyarin has called “femminization” may be relevant in Kiš’s view, but less in the intellectual sense than in the sense of physical vulnerability. Kiš’s image of a menstruating male invokes an acute weakness, relating to physical rather than intellectual reality, such that the male’s very survival must be seen as an utterly admirable “heroic conduct”: “I admit it: my heart menstruates. The late, painful menstruation of my Jewishness. . . . ​[ellipsis in original] Yes, your honors, my heart menstruates. A biological deviation, a manifestation of the Jewish, feminine principle. . . . ​Male menstruation? No. Feminine principle carried to its ultimate consequence. Menstruation of the heart. Seed of death. Weltschmerz.”50 In Kiš’s case, the weakness produced by historical catastrophe is intensified by his borderline existence, one that straddles Jewishness and a Christian identity deriving from an interfaith marriage and baptism. He also lacks the entitlement of the superiority of the talmudic legacy that animates Boyarin’s ideal of edelkayt. The question remains as to whether there is any chance to compensate for the absence of a “pure” model of Jewishness through



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involvement in a rich and diverse Lebenswelt,51 albeit one that often involves misery. Is it possible to reaffirm the fragmented model by experiencing reality—not necessarily as comfortable but as leavened by the “perpetual, creative, diasporic tension”? 52 Is it possible to enlist other sources of tradition, ideology, humanism, and culture to connect with that other exemplar from Unheroic Conduct—the mentsch—with its much greater potential for gendered inclusion and a heightened capacity for solidarity with those suffering injustice?53

Mourning for and with the Wandering Jew After having devoted most of my discussion to how Kiš imagines his father as the Wandering Jew, I must mention that Kiš defined himself at least once in similar terms: his biographer Thompson quotes Kiš saying, “My fate is to be a wandering Jew,” in an interview.54 Kiš intuitively grasped that the legendary figure embodied his own boundary-crossing identity rather than any idealized Jewish identity. His turn to the Wandering Jew for self-expression explains how his own tortured existence animated the imagined father of his books. The Wandering Jew embodies age-old questions about life and death, such as the possibility of an individual or a collective eternal life as a mission that moves from suffering to some as-yet unknown but possibly attainable future redemption. The figure locates the meaning of life in movement and connects metaphysical questions to cultural practices, especially those of a cyclical character, such as holidays, reading cycles, and other periodic customs and habits. On the meta level of discourse on the Wandering Jew, the theme of itinerancy is reflected in the mode of production of the texts: these writings themselves vary—or travel—from place to place, from period to period, and from one genre or mode of expression to multiple others. Itinerancy also characterizes the relationship between the Wandering Jew and the category of imagination itself. Because the Wandering Jew frequently disappears, it is necessary to imagine him. The condensed figure, with its heightened visual attributes, is perhaps a Denkfigur in Walter Benjamin’s terms—a figure of loss, of disappearance, of transience. He exists in hundreds, indeed thousands, of stories, pictures, and performances—but mainly in the void created by his disappearance, his invisibility, reflecting the voids inside all of

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us. Thus, he serves as a representation of Freud’s insight on transience: “But why it is that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us and we have not hitherto been able to frame any hypothesis to account for it. We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready to hand. Such then is mourning.”55 I find Freud’s humility, in his admitted inability to theorize mourning, especially powerful, and I see it as indicative of our need to create symbolic modes such as the Wandering Jew to express it.56 The various appearances of the figure of the Wandering Jew, in what it explicitly articulates and what is alluded to by its traditional associations, are where Kiš’s work most powerfully leads its readers to the domains beyond reason. By linking the endlessness of wandering and the legendary life without consolation and reconciliation with his father, he has effectively encoded his relationship to his father as a source of personal despair. It would be comforting to be able to say that Kiš’s work and his use of the Wandering Jew demonstrate how imagination is able to transcend the mourning over loss and transience, but I could hardly make that claim. It is, however, a great example of how the impossibility of consolation can transform into great art.

Chapter 6

Consolation Beyond Theodicy

A Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Isaiah’s Prophecies of Consolation Eli Schonfeld

Suffering signifies in the form of giving, even if the price of signification is that the subject run the risk of suffering without reason. If the subject did not run this risk, pain would lose its very painfulness. —Emmanuel Levinas

The question of evil is at the heart of the human condition, and insofar as religion addresses the fundamental concerns of the human condition, it is at the heart of religion. The theological question is well known. How could God, who is infinitely good, create a world where injustice prevails over justice, where the wicked prevail over the righteous, where evil and suffering are so flagrant? Theological answers to this question abound: “No suffering without iniquity,” teaches R. Ami in the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 55a).1 Or the famous deus absconditus argument: God is hidden or hides his face from humans, leaving humankind to its own destiny (as in Deuteronomy 31:18). Or God’s master plan is one that we cannot grasp, because the divine will and intentions infinitely surpass our ability to understand them. These answers are all examples of what Leibniz, in his 1710 treatise, called theodicy: “Wisdom only shows God the best possible exercise of his goodness: after that, the evil that occurs is an inevitable result of the best. I will add

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something stronger: To permit the evil, as God permits it, is the greatest goodness. Si mala sustulerat, non erat ille bonus [had he abolished evils, he would not be good].”2 The overall plan is good, the world we live in is the best of possible worlds; for it to be so, a certain amount of evil has to be permitted. This is a Machiavellian argument applied to God’s intentions: evil is allowed for the sake of the greater good. And only the one who is capable of grasping the bigger picture—God, who, with his infinite analytical powers, can compare all the possible worlds and judge ours to be the best of them— is capable of understanding it fully. Humans, finite by definition, are incapable of this and are therefore doomed to metaphysical resignation. What remains is to believe that (visible) evil serves the (invisible) greater good. This is surprising: not only the theologian but also the philosopher, the one who relies on logos, ultimately demand an act of faith. While theologians and philosophers approach suffering as a purely theoretical issue, the suffering person (as well as the thinker who seeks to address suffering in its concreteness) experiences these classical theological answers as outrageous. For our generation, this revolt can be summarized in one proper noun: Auschwitz. Faced with the immensity of that event, any form of theodicy, any attempt to rationally justify God, any theological account that one could possibly give is not only doomed to fail but is also immediately conceived as scandalous and blasphemous. For Levinas, this is what characterizes our post–World War II era: “Perhaps the most revolutionary fact of our twentieth-century consciousness . . . ​is that of the destruction of all balance between Western thought’s explicit and implicit theodicy and the forms that suffering and its evil are taking on in the very unfolding of this century.”3 He concludes, “The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity. Its possibility puts into question the millennia-long tradition of faith. Did not Nietzsche’s saying about the death of God take on, in the extermination camps, the meaning of a quasi-empirical fact?”4 Logos means, first and foremost, language or discourse. It is a discourse that makes sense of the world. Thanks to language, we breathe meaning into our world. Theo-logy, in this sense, is a subgenre of logos: it supposes the primacy of logos, of rational language, of a language that reasons the world while taking into account the theos, God. Or better yet: it is a speech that recognizes the theos as that which makes sense of the world, as that without which logos cannot accomplish its mission. But what happens when no word can make sense of the world anymore? According to Levinas, this is



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what characterizes our era, making theology obsolete. But does it mean that religion as such must admit its definitive failure? Could it be, on the contrary, that at the precise moment when theology loses its meaning, religion is finally ready to detach itself from logos and to reveal itself more genuinely? The moment when religion is called to exceed logos, to do more and otherwise than logos can do, is perhaps the very moment when religion is finally called to stand beyond reason. This does not mean standing in the territory of faith, as the standard opposition of reason and faith might imply. Instead, thinking religion beyond reason would entail envisaging another relation to the world, grounded in another function of language than explaining, rationalizing, or justifying. Language may be more than logos. What is language supposed to do— and if one of the main concerns of religion is the problem of evil, then what is religious language expected to do—to address suffering in its concreteness, in its existential here and now? The answer: to console. This is the thesis I defend in the following pages: religious language, when it addresses the problem of evil, does not explain or make sense of suffering but rather consoles. This consolation is not the result of a naïve acceptance of theological dogmas (the afterlife, divine providence, etc.) but an affect produced by language, in language, and that aims to address the actuality of suffering, to confront the reality of evil and suffering face to face. In this sense, religion is beyond reason when it consoles, and by doing so, it might be disclosing deep potentialities of language, perhaps even its essence. In what follows I think of the language of consolation as neither a theological language nor a language of faith but one that addresses the problem of evil and suffering in its existential dimension. To do this, I turn to texts that are part of the life of religion, namely liturgical texts. Inspired by Franz Rosenzweig and his particular way of understanding religion from within its lived practices rather than from within its theological dogmas or philosophies,5 I focus on the liturgical wisdom of religion and, in this chapter, on the liturgical wisdom of Judaism.6 Liturgy, at least in Judaism, is at the center of religion. Through it, even though indirectly, an implicit wisdom is conveyed and transmitted to the members of the religious community, a wisdom that is not easily thematizable but that, through the generations, shapes the deep sensibilities of those who are part of the community. To address the question of suffering from this perspective, I discuss the liturgical cycle of the seven weeks following the holiday of Tisha B’Av. The Ninth of Av is the day of mourning commemorating the destruction of

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the two Temples. In the course of history, it became the day of mourning for all the suffering that the Jewish people has endured during its exile. (Therefore, in certain Orthodox communities Tisha B’Av is seen as the day commemorating the Shoah.) The seven weeks following Tisha B’Av are called sheva de-neḥamta, the seven (weeks) of consolation, or the seven Shabbatot of consolation. They are called so because the haftarot 7 read on those Shabbatot are selected passages from the prophecies of consolation in the book of Isaiah.8 If there is a wisdom of consolation—beyond reason, beyond theodicy—then it is in this context and in those liturgical texts that one has to search for it. Some readers may wonder whether, by trying to thematize that which I claim is beyond reason, I am betraying that very wisdom. After all, if this wisdom can be thematized, does that also mean that it is not really beyond reason? My theoretical assumption here is that phenomenology—in particular, phenomenological hermeneutics—can lead us out of this conundrum. Phenomenological hermeneutics is a descriptive exercise, rather than an explanatory one. Its aim is to discover the meaning of phenomena rather than to reduce them to their causes. In what follows I propose a phenomenological hermeneutics of the consolations of Isaiah to enable us to look deeper into the meaning of consolation.

From Lamentation . . . Before addressing the prophecies of consolation, I propose to look briefly at the liturgy of Tisha B’Av, particularly at the text that is read out loud in synagogues during this day: the book of Lamentations. Lamentations throws us directly into the realm of the question. The very title of the book intimates a question that must be unveiled for this text to be heard. The Hebrew name of Lamentations is Eykhah, named after the first word of the book: eykhah (from eykh, “how?”9). Lamentation is eykhah: first and foremost, it is a question: Eykhah? Why? How could You? This question is not a simple one. Better yet, it is not simply a question: it is the question of the suffering subject. Yet this subject does not ask questions; his question is not an ordinary question. While suffering, I do not have the theoretical distance that is required to pose an ordinary question. And still, the words uttered by the suffering subject are questions: How? Eykhah? Why me? The



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form of his speech is that of a question. What is the nature of this question, if it is not an ordinary question? What is extra-ordinary in this question? Questions are usually posed with the intention of receiving an answer. What is the sum of two and three? What is the capital of Belgium? The answer can be true or false, satisfying or unsatisfying, convincing or unconvincing. What is peculiar to the question of the suffering subject is, first, that contrary to theoretical questions, here, the question is existential: the questioning subject is not detached from his question (as opposed to the mathematician, whose object is abstract and whose position is disinterested). The suffering subject is deeply interested; in fact, he does not have a question—he is his question. But more important for my purposes here is that the question of the suffering subject does not, in fact, anticipate an answer. Its intentionality—to use the language of phenomenology—is not oriented toward an answer. On the contrary, its aim is to express the impossibility of an answer. It is, in a way, an inverted rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions do not expect to be answered because the answer is implied in the question, those questions being in fact positive assertions. For example, when Shakespeare’s Mark Antony exclaims in his funeral oration “Here was a Caesar! When comes such another?”, he is not asking a question but rather is asserting that there will never be a Caesar such as Julius. Yet the question of the suffering subject does not expect to be answered because the question itself implies that there is no answer to this question and never will be one. The purpose of the question here, its raison d’être, is simply the expression of inexplicable suffering. The question of the suffering subject is, in fact, a pure cry. A pure protest. I propose to call this question a lament-question. An Eykhah-question. The lament-question is more than a simple question: it is a question that calls into question the very legitimacy of the customary way of posing the question of evil; that is, the question of evil understood as a question-answer question. That is because this question—which is a cry in the dark, a pure expression of rebuke—already implies the impossibility of an answer. How . . . ​Auschwitz?! Everyone understands immediately that this question defies any possible theoretical (philosophical or theological) answer. If truly heard, this question is absolutely without answer. The lament-question must be misheard for it to be understood as a theoretical question. Instead of hearing the voice of the sufferer, the pure protest uttered through his “How?” the theologian—so as not to hear the lament-question, because he would

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not know what to do with such a question—hears content, an ordinary question. The theologian’s bad faith consists in displacing the question from the true distress of the sufferer by interpreting the sufferer’s question as a theoretical one. What is truly revolting about the theological answers (punishment for sin, the overall divine plan, etc.) is that they ignore suffering. They attest to the fact that the lament-question was not heard, that it was immediately recuperated and interpreted in the cold terms of question and answer. Theology and theodicy are both playing the game of logos. But here, logos is but a means to avoid looking face to face into the pain of the sufferer. Here resides the latent birth of theodicy: a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation (it does not matter whether it is voluntary or involuntary) of the original “how?” It is only when the existential “how?” is silenced that the theoretical “why?” becomes possible. The book of Lamentations does not start with an ordinary question then, but with a lament that is a pure expression of the subject’s anger and outrage. And this outrage will not dissipate throughout the scroll.10 Hence the metaphysical audacity of Lamentations: it allows for a moment of pure revolt from within the religious topos. There is a distinct moment in the liturgical calendar for pure revolt, for pure lament.11 A question without an answer, a question that has no solution. And the question will resound forever: the liturgy of the Tisha B’Av ensures it.

. . . ​to Consolation In Lamentations the cry remains intact. Nevertheless, from within its distress, the suffering subject does expect something; he has a desire. The suffering subject does not long for an answer but for consolation. The first chapter of Lamentations hints at this: its leitmotif is eyn lah menaḥem, there is no one to console her. Zion, says the prophet time and again in this chapter, has no consoler; there is no consolation for her. To express his infinite distress, the sufferer proclaims the absence of consolation and of the consoler: eyn menaḥem.12 Through a kind of via negativa, this chapter teaches us that the suffering subject truly longs not for theoretical answers but for existential consolation. It is against this background that the prophecies of consolation in Isaiah should be read. And indeed, this is how the rabbinic tradition saw these



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prophecies: “Isaiah is full of consolation,” says the Talmud in B. Baba Batra (14b). And in B. Berakhot (57b): “If one sees [in a dream] . . . ​[the book of] Isaiah he may look forward to consolation.” Those prophecies of consolations are to be found in Chapters 40–66, from which the passages that are read during the seven weeks of consolation are selected.13 And the first prophecy of consolation, read the Shabbat after the Ninth of Av, opens precisely with those words: “Naḥamu, naḥamu ami—Comfort, oh comfort My people” (40:1).14 The vast majority of biblical scholars read Isaiah as an answer to Lamentations.15 The midrash already sensed this: “All the severe prophecies that Jeremiah [traditionally supposed to be the author of Lamentations] prophesied against Israel were anticipated and healed by Isaiah.”16 A few examples suffice. Lamentations declares that Zion has no consoler (eyn lah menaḥem), whereas Isaiah proposes consolation and a consoler (40:1, 51:3, 51: 12). In Lamentations the ancients of Zion sit on the ground (2:10); in Isaiah, Zion is called to rise (51:17, 52:2, 60:1). In Lamentations, the streets of Zion are deserted and abandoned (1:1, 1:4, 4:18), whereas in Isaiah those same streets are described as flooded by returning pilgrims (60:4, 62:10).17 But although it is not difficult to recognize how Isaiah formally answers Lamentations, the more intriguing question is what kind of an answer it is, or what kind of healing it is, to use the words of Lamentations Rabbah. One thing at least we know: for Isaiah to constitute a true answer, a true healing, to the lament-question in Lamentations, it has to offer something else than a theoretical or a theological answer. My objective is therefore twofold. First, I want to show how the consolations of Isaiah read during the seven weeks of consolation transcend the theoretical question-answer structure. Second, I want to understand what these passages actually do, if they do not provide an answer in the classical sense of the term. I propose to demonstrate their positive effect. Before addressing the content of the prophesies of consolation read during the seven weeks of consolation, it is important to look closer at the singularity of those texts, particularly in relation to the whole corpus of Deutero-Isaiah. The first thing that strikes the eye, when reading through Deutero-Isaiah, is its very pronounced theological character, which is very atypical for scripture. Martin Buber, in his work on the prophets, writes, “There is no sense at all in calling Deutero-Isaiah ‘the first monotheist of Israel,’ but certainly he is the first concerned with a monotheistic theology.”18 Buber’s remark applies first and foremost to Isaiah 44:6: “Thus said the Lord,

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the King of Israel, Their Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts: I am the first and I am the last; and there is no God but Me.” In fact, Isaiah can be read as a long attempt to provide (theological) answers to the problem of evil and suffering. Three examples suffice. Isaiah contains the classic formulation of the disproportion between man’s finitude and God’s infinite nature, the very presupposition of theodicy: “For my plans are not your plans, nor are My ways your ways—declares the Lord. But as the heavens are high above the earth; So are My ways high above your ways; And My plans above your plans” (55:8–9). It contains the idea of God’s hiding his face because of humans’ sins: “But your iniquities have been a barrier; Between you and your God, Your sins have made Him turn His face away; And refuse to hear you. For your hands are defiled with crime; And your fingers with iniquity. Your lips speak falsehood; Your tongue utters treachery” (59:2–3). Most famously, Isaiah contains several texts about the “suffering servant” who enacts redemption through suffering (42:1–7; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; and primarily 52:13–53:12). God’s thoughts are impossible to grasp for us finite humans; God hides his face because of our sins; suffering ultimately has a meaning, even if we do not understand it; suffering is redemptive. Those are the profoundly theological messages of Isaiah, because they all answer directly the question of evil.19 Let us turn now to the haftarot. It is remarkable that none of the theological verses just mentioned—and that constitute the core of Deutero-Isaiah’s “theology”—are present in the texts that the sages of Israel selected for the seven weeks of consolation. Neither the verses on God’s infinite thought, nor the verses on Israel’s suffering as a sign of their election (42:6), nor the “suffering servant” verses—all of which occupy such an important place in Christian patristic literature, which sees in those verses a prefiguration of the redemptive power of the suffering of Jesus on the cross—appear.20 Occasionally, the selected text ends just before a theological passage, only just avoiding it, as if the sages who selected those passages knew exactly what they were doing or perhaps as if they very consciously restrained themselves from including them in the haftarot.21 Based solely on the haftarot of consolation, Buber could never have claimed what he claimed about Deutero-Isaiah, namely that it is a theology. Not only are the sages, in their very careful selection of texts from DeuteroIsaiah, refusing to recreate Isaiah’s theology of consolation but they are also undoing it, replacing it with what I would call a performance of consolation. The effect of consolation that those haftarot seek to provoke differs radically from the effect that theological answers are capable of. Recognizing the dif-



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ference between Isaiah and the haftarot—and therefore understanding the inner logic of the selection of the haftarot themselves—is crucial for the understanding of the wisdom of consolation that rabbinic Judaism, through this selection, suggests.22 But what do those haftarot positively do? Rather than providing an answer, they enact a dialogue between God and Israel. This is how the fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi David Abudirham, in The Book of Abudirham: A Commentary on the Blessings and the Prayers, reads the sequence of the haftarot of consolation: It says in the midrash, in high language, that they decided to begin the haftaroth of consolation with Comfort, comfort my people (40:1), which is to say that the Holy One Blessed be He says to the prophets, Comfort, comfort my people. The congregation of Israel responds to this, And Zion says the Name has abandoned me (49:14). Which is to say, “I am not appeased by the consolations of the prophets.” And he says, Arise, arise, don strength, arm of the Name. Arise like in days of old (51:9). And in the places where they recite Unhappy, stormtossed one, uncomforted (54:11) instead of this haftarah, this is to say that the prophets respond and say before the Holy One Blessed be He, “Behold, the congregation of Israel is not pacified by our consolations.” To this the Holy One blessed be He replies, I, I am he who comforts you (51:12). And he says further, Rejoice, barren one who has not given birth (54:1), and he says Arise, shine, for your light comes (60:1). To this, the congregation of Israel responds, I will greatly rejoice in the Name (61:10), which is to say, “Now I have reason to rejoice and be happy.” My soul rejoices in God because he clothed me in garments of salvation (62:10).23 The dialogical structure of the haftarot is revealing in more than one way. First, as I already noted, no theology is involved in it. It is not a discourse about God’s divinity and absolute knowledge, power, or justice. Instead, it is God addressing Zion; it is God making attempts to approach Zion, to get closer to her. But mainly, contrary to Deutero-Isaiah, the haftarot ingeniously make a place for the voice of Zion, without which there is no dialogue. As Elsie Stern insightfully notes, “In the biblical context, the voice of Zion is usually cited in a polemical context. The prophet, or God speaking through the prophet, cites Israel’s words in order to rebut them. In many cases, the

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rebuttal is a harsh one. . . . ​The lectionary cycle gives the impression that God takes Israel’s protest and challenges quite seriously.”24 The haftarot of consolation stage a genuine dialogue in which God attempts to console Israel, fails to do so, and returns week after week until Israel is finally consoled. Let us try to listen to this dialogue. The haftarot of consolation are divided in two parts. The first part, comprising the haftarot for the first three Shabbatot of consolation, are ultimately failed attempts made by God to console Israel. In those haftarot, Zion declares time and time again that she remains unconsoled: “Comfort, oh comfort My people; Will say your God,” says Isaiah 40:1 (from the first haftarah)25; and Zion answers, “Zion says, ‘The Lord has forsaken me’ ” (49:14, second haftarah); and again, “Unhappy, storm-tossed one, uncomforted!” (54:11, third haftarah). Until the fourth haftarah, Zion remains unconsoled. The fourth haftarah is the pivotal moment. It starts with God’s declaration: “I, I am He who comforts you!” (anokhi anokhi hu menaḥem­ khem]” (51:13). And from there on—in the fifth to seventh haftarot—Zion seems to slowly recover. She now hears God’s words of comfort, until the grand finale in the seventh haftarah when she rejoices in God: “I greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being exults in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of triumph, wrapped me in a robe of victory, like a bridegroom adorned with a turban, like a bride bedecked with her finery” (61:10). The key question is thus: Why does Zion refuse the consolations of the first three haftarot, and what happens in the fourth haftarah that changes everything? What is the moment of consolation in this strange dialogue? The first haftarah starts with those words: “ ‘Comfort, oh comfort My people’ will say your God” (40:1). Three points are worth highlighting. First, the opening verse announces something that will happen in the future. One day, God will say, “Comfort, comfort My people”—at least if yomar is in the future tense (as found in Targum Yonatan, credited to the tanna Yonatan ben Uziel, and in commentaries from the eleventh- to twelfth-century French exegete Joseph Kara).26 Second, and more importantly (for reasons that become clear later in the chapter), in this opening verse, God delegates the responsibility to the prophet: “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and declare to her” (40:2). God does not address Israel directly. God hides, so to speak, behind the prophet, who must go and comfort Israel. Finally, in those opening lines, God reminds Zion of her sins: “Declare to her that her term of service is over, that her iniquity is expiated; for she has received at the hand of the Lord double for all her sins” (40:2). Even if included to absolve them



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(acknowledging that Zion paid—double!27—for her sins), the opening verses mention the cause of Israel’s suffering (its sin), justifying it in a way. This sin–punishment theology is repeated in the middle of the second haftarah: “You were only sold off for your sins; And your mother dismissed for your crimes” (50:1). Yet, those consolations, as Abudirham notes, are not effective: they do not appease Israel: “Unhappy, storm-tossed one, uncomforted!” (54:11), concludes the third haftarah. With the fourth haftarah, everything changes dramatically: “Anokhi anokhi hu menaḥemkhem” (I, I am He who comforts you!; 51:12). “I am” is in the present tense. There are no more ambiguities as to the temporality of the event: it happens here and now, in a continuous present (hence the participle form of the verb). not in a future time. “I am” is a first-person singular pronoun. It is no longer through prophets that God addresses Zion, but he does so himself: anokhi anokhi. The pronoun anokhi is reminiscent of the first of the Ten Sayings at Mount Sinai: “Anokhi hashem elohekhem . . . ​, I am the Name your God” (Exodus 20:2, translation slightly modified). This is the language of revelation par excellence. Through the liturgical rhythm of the text, God is approaching. He exposes himself. He does not proclaim his message from afar anymore but presents himself in person. He is there, for Zion, for “the man.” And so, from the fourth haftarah onward, the discourse becomes more and more intimate: juridical tropes are replaced by tropes of love (mainly in the fifth and sixth haftarot), and there is less and less insistence on God’s might and power. God is coming closer; he exposes himself. And this exposure has a dramatic consequence: in haftarot four to seven, the lexicon of iniquity, offense, or sin (ḥet, avon, pesha) completely vanishes from the discourse. The verses abandon completely the vocabulary of crime and punishment. All that is left is Zion’s pure suffering, which means a suffering without cause. And this is true for every suffering: it is always—when suffered—suffered as if without cause. Ex nihilo: a pure event. A modality of revelation.28 To better hear what is going on in the shift from the first group of haftarot to the second, let us look closer at two passages, one from the second haftarah and one from the fourth. “Thus said the Lord: Where is the bill of divorce; Of your mother whom I dismissed? And which of my creditors was it; To whom I sold you off? You were only sold off for your sins; And your mother dismissed for your crimes” (50:1, from the second haftarah). Because of your sins you were sold off: suffering as punishment. That tune is well known.

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Now let us turn to a passage from the fourth haftarah (quoted here from the 1917 Jewish Publication Society Tanakh translation), to highlight the contrast in content and in tone. For thus saith the Lord: Ye were sold for nought; And ye shall be redeemed without money. For thus saith the Lord God: My people went down aforetime into Egypt to sojourn there; And the Assyrian oppressed them without cause. Now therefore, what do I here, saith the Lord, Seeing that My people is taken away for nought? They that rule over them do howl, saith the Lord, And My name continually all the day is blasphemed. Therefore My people shall know My name; Therefore they shall know in that day That I, even He that spoke, behold, here I am. (52:3–6) This crucial passage presents complex translation challenges (mainly in the last verse). It marks the dramatic transition from the first set of haftarot to the second, and the difference is striking. Isaiah 50:1 speaks of the sins of Israel: “You were only sold off for your sins.” Suffering has a cause, a reason. God is the master of the world, he rules, he administers. In Isaiah 52:3–6, the whole structure collapses: “Ye were sold for nought.” The opposition is flagrant: “because of your sins you were sold” (hen ba‘ovonoteykhem nimkartem; Isaiah 50:1) versus “Ye were sold for nothing” (ḥinam nimkartem; Isaiah 52:3). The latter phrase articulates a useless suffering, a gratuitous suffering— ḥinam in Hebrew, without cause.29 In fact, this idea of suffering without cause is no less than an aberration or a heresy with respect to theology. The incredible thing here is that God Himself proclaims it. God, the heretic.30 And the prophet-poet continues, conveying God’s word, and insisting, “My people is taken away [lukaḥ] for nought [ḥinam].” My people have been taken without cause, without my consent. Lukaḥ is usually used in the context of theft (Judges 17:2; 2 Kings 2:10; Isaiah 53:8). Israel, says God, has been stolen from Me—as if God had lost control over the world, over history, and is passively looking at the world, lamenting his fate. And the description continues: “And My name continually all the day is blasphemed.” “All the day,” “constantly”—the synonymic repetition corresponds to the style of lament:



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God’s name is sullied, and God cannot do anything. God admits that suffering has no cause, and he acknowledges his own impotency. This is a terrible moment, a moment of mysterium tremendum, caused not by God’s overwhelming power, as in Rudolf Otto’s The Holy, but by God’s helplessness. It is terrible to see a father cry. Yet, fathers cry.31 This is not a theology of the eclipse of God but a testimony of God’s vulnerability, of God’s weakness, of his impotency. Those verses are a true earthquake, fissuring the scripture from the inside, threatening to swallow its theology and reduce its logos to nothingness. God does not hide anymore. For as Isaiah 52:6 claims, God’s impotence exists alongside with God’s refusal to hide. He is here, as who he truly is. He is close. The sequence of verses I am commenting on (52:3–6) culminates with one that is very difficult to decipher and almost impossible to translate. Let us, nevertheless, try the impossible: Therefore My people shall know My name Therefore they shall know in that day That I, even He that spoke, behold, here I am. What is the meaning of this “therefore,” lakhen? Normally, this adverb designates a relation of causality. However, what precedes the adverb describes God’s vulnerability, his weakness. How can his weakness permit one to know his name? Unless—though this is a terrible hypothesis, it is precisely what this sequence of verses suggests—it is that knowing this, knowing what was just exposed in the previous verses (suffering without cause, God’s helplessness), means knowing God’s name: therefore—lakhen—my people shall know my name. Such an exegesis—faithful to the literalism of the verses—may sound theologically absurd. Yet paradoxically, they make sense existentially: God here is the existential addressee of a call, the immediate interlocutor of a suffering subject. He is not the big savior; he is not the magician who can do and undo everything that is: God is simply he who admits the irreducibility of evil, without justifying it metaphysically and without being able to do anything about it. He who, purely and simply, is there. In person: “Behold, here I am.” Hineni: the formula is well known, but the people who say it are usually those who are responding to God’s call: Abraham before the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22:1), Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:4). It indicates the absolute readiness of the one who has been called. Here I am: I am here for

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you, without reserve. As Rosenzweig remarks, in his inimitable style, “The man, totally open, totally unfolded, totally ready, totally—soul, now answers: ‘I am here.’ ”32 Contrary to the verses in Genesis or in Exodus where a person (Abraham, Moses) is answering the call of God, in Isaiah 52:6, it is God who utters hineni. What an incredible reversal of the situation! God is the one who is accountable, who has to be there for man. Only once this reversal is accomplished—only when God says, “Here I am”—can he, through his proximity and without theology or theodicy, like a pure and simple caress, console. Only then does his consolation affect man. And indeed, this absolute presence of transcendence is what seals this sequence of verses. It opens the path for the next sequence of verses in which, for the first time, Zion is said to be consoled: Hark! Your watchmen raise their voices. As one they shout for joy; for every eye shall behold the Lord’s return to Zion. Raise a shout together, O ruins of Jerusalem! For the Lord has comforted His people; He has redeemed Jerusalem. (52:8–9, translation slightly changed)

The Wisdom of Consolation This reading of the haftarot of consolation led us to a point where God exposes himself in his absolute vulnerability and weakness. However, I must address one last question. Is this, finally, no more than yet another theology, albeit an atypical one? Is it not another version of a theology of God’s impotency—the very theology that Hans Jonas, for instance, thematized in his famous “The Concept of God After Auschwitz” when he argued that we “cannot uphold the time-honored (medieval) doctrine of absolute, unlimited divine power”33? After a long theoretical excursus, analyzing the different attributes of God and their relations (God’s infinite goodness, his omnipotence, and his intelligibility), he concludes, “But God was silent. And there I say, or my myth says: Not because he chose not to, but because he could not intervene did he fail to intervene.”34 God, in Jonas’s theology, as in the fourth haftarah, simply cannot, because he lacks power. So, what is so different between Jonas’s theology and my reading of the haftarot of consolation, other than the textual basis of our respective arguments (insofar as Jonas grounded his speculative theology in the kabbalistic idea of divine self-



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contraction or tsimtsum, whereas I turn to the haftarot of consolation)? Moreover, if the outcome of my reading is but another version of this theology of God’s impotency, then did I not fail precisely in claiming the originality of my phenomenology of consolation—that it was not to be yet another theo-logy, to offer an alternative to logos, to be beyond reason? This question allows me to emphasize for a last time what I consider to be truly original in the haftarot of consolation (as well as in an analysis that focuses on those texts rather than on theological texts).35 Not only does this analysis differ from Jonas’s because of the simple fact that the theme of consolation—which is essential, as I argue, to the question of evil—is completely absent from his reflection but also because through the way he formulates his question and mainly by the way he answers it, he inscribes himself in a very precise tradition: the tradition of logos (or theo-logos), this tradition that is interested in resolving the contradiction between the existence of evil and the idea of an omnipotent, intelligible, and infinitely good God who created this world. The haftarot of consolation have no such concern. One can always try to reduce their message, to approach them as semantic material supporting a theological claim about God’s impotency (the way for Jonas the idea of tsimtsum functions as an authoritative source grounding his thesis). However, that would mean not considering them for what they truly are, not looking at them as they give themselves, as moments in a dialogue between man and God, the aim of which is consolation. This is the way they are experienced by the subjects who are reciting them out loud, in its proper liturgical context. This is the way we—theoreticians malgré nous—should read it. These are not abstract theoretical texts about God’s nature but verses that are part of a ritual. They are experienced before being thought. The phenomenological hermeneutics I proposed—and which comes always too late, after the experience of consolation, and which cannot replace the experience it tries to capture—tries to make sense of this experience, to­unveil a hidden wisdom that inspires those verses, this experience: the wisdom of consolation. Words can touch: “In the approach of a face the flesh becomes word, the caress a saying.”36 The haftarot of consolation in Isaiah, rather than procuring an answer, punctuate a choreography of approach, of proximity. Only when God presents himself in person—Anokhi—and only when he exposes himself in his vulnerability, helpless and confused, not blaming Israel anymore for its sins but accepting the irreducibility of pain and suffering, can his presence be acknowledged. Only then can his words touch the soul of the

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sufferer. Then, and only then, are they able to open a dimension of future, where there is none. Then, and only then, are they able to console. What is a promise when an impotent God proclaims it? It is, precisely, a genuine promise. Like the promise of a father, it does not predict the future; it simply reveals the dimension of futurity. If this is possible, then this is where consolation resides.

Chapter 7

Beyond Faith and Reason

R. Avraham Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish) on Certainty and Doubt, Love of the Law, and Constructing the Halakhic Self Shaul Magid

A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty, not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, but also because doubt is good for the human soul. —Emanuel Rackman

Although it has sometimes been said that Judaism is concerned primarily with acts (halakhah) and only secondarily with theology or philosophy (sometimes called “meta-halakhah”), the energy and resources Jewish thinkers have put into meta-halakhic endeavors are enormous. “Meta-halakhah” has various meanings, but here I mean those matters that define a Jew’s relationship to God and Torah that are not expressed through halakhic performance but are often articulated in philosophy and theology. Scholars have argued that the relationship between thought and action, or theology/philosophy and halakhah, is not binary but rather exists in constant tension. In his essay “Religion and Law,” Isadore Twersky argued as follows: A tense, dialectical relationship between religion in essence and religion in manifestation is at the core of the religious consciousness. . . . ​

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The tension flows from the painful awareness that manifestations and essence sometimes drift apart, from the sober recognition that a carefully constructed, firmly chiseled normative system cannot regularly reflect, refract, to energize interior, fluid spiritual forces and motives. . . . ​If halakhah is a means for the actualization and celebration of ethical norms, historical experiences, and theological postulates, then external conformity must be nurtured by internal sensibility and spirituality.1 Twersky is suggesting that the history of this “spirituality” is played out in the tension between what to think and how to feel and act. Following Twersky’s roadmap pointing to the tension between law and spirit, or religion and law, my focus in this chapter is on Jewish subjectivity, particularly about the construction of the halakhic self: the reconstituted self who acts in the halakhic orbit as a vehicle for devotion. Are halakhah and supererogatory acts of piety (lifney mishurat ha-din) synonymous in classical Judaism?2 Can the latter exist independently of the former? These questions, in addition to the issue of doubt and certainty in relationship to Jewish piety, brought me to the modern musar movement and the work of famed talmudist and legal authority R. Avraham Karelitz (1878–1953), known as the Ḥazon Ish.3 My exploration of the subjectivity of the halakhic self in the literature of modern musar and its discontents was motivated by my sense that the paradigm of faith versus reason, which dominates thinking about classical Jewish meta-halakhic literature, does not quite capture the tradition of musar.4 In this chapter I offer an analysis of the Ḥazon Ish’s anti-musar work Emunah u-bitaḥon (Faith and Trust) as an alternative model of devotional literature that will help us better understand what is at stake in the particular form of pietism that is articulated in modern musar, initiated by R. Israel Salanter (1809–83) and then developed by his students.5 To begin, what exactly is modern musar, and how does it embody a particular form of Jewish pietism? By modern musar I refer to a body of literature that focuses on modes of behavior as opposed to or, in many cases, in addition to matters of belief or knowledge. Pietistic literature more generally is concerned with emotive states—for example, love, equanimity, repose, patience, repentance, and anger—rather than knowing, believing in, or, even in some cases, experiencing God.6 In many instances, both philosophers and kabbalists wrote what can be labeled as pietistic texts, but when doing so, their emphasis often moved from



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the epistemological to the ethical: from what can I know to what must I do.7 Jewish philosophers and kabbalists do not deny halakhah; almost all were strict halakhists and even functioned as legal decisors (poskim). Yet largely by implication, philosophy, kabbalah, and musar all suggest that halakhah alone does not, or cannot, fulfill the Jewish devotional life. Such a devotional life requires additional attention to matters of knowledge, belief, experience of God, or tikkun ha-middot, the practical aspiration for human perfection that philosophy, kabbalah, or musar can provide. In Emunah u-bitaḥon, the Ḥazon Ish contested the very notion of the need for meta-halakhah, in its entirety, positing a view of human nature and the law that constitutes what I call “halakhic totalism.” Such concentrated devotion to halakhah as the exclusive arbiter of the Jewish response to the divine call was, for him, the only way to ensure that the practitioner would not become mired in self-deception in the name of fidelity to tradition. My thesis in the pages that follow rests in part on the assumption that the faith-versus-reason paradigm that informed many Jewish philosophical and theological texts, including many but not all kabbalistic and even Hasidic ones, focuses on the question of truth and falsity—more specifically, true belief versus false belief—and affirms or criticizes the epistemological status of reason to ascertain the truth. However, the texts of modern musar largely focus on a different set of questions, including doubt and certainty, and the way each requires and informs the other. As we will see, the Hazon Ish has a problem with the entire dichotomy of doubt and certainty. Doubt for him is a barrier to true piety and makes certainty, as a devotional posture, impossible. What then can be the vehicle for this certainty? In modern musar literature, the quest for truth is sometimes replaced by the intimacy of conviction—what the musar thinker Yosef Yoisel Hurwitz of Novardok (1849–1919) called haskamah and what the Ḥazon Ish, in a different register, called ’ahavat ha-halakhah, love of the law. This is the conviction that love of the law has the power to produce a kind of certainty that the Ḥazon Ish (along with some musar teachers) believed to be necessary for an authentic devotional life.8 Conviction in this sense is believing fully and totally in one’s action at the moment one acts. I argue that for the Ḥazon Ish “love of the law” is in accord with a kind of conviction, with the love itself being an exhibition of the very certainty of the act. I may doubt whether I love someone, but in the act of loving them, that doubt is either bracketed or falls away. The act of love is never performed in a state of doubt. Loving the law becomes intrinsic to its very effectiveness

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because precisely in the moment it is enacted it is done without doubt. In fact, for the Ḥazon Ish such love, or intimacy, makes the law operational insofar as it contributes to creating the conditions for living exclusively inside divine will through the law. For the Ḥazon Ish, the law functions properly and optimally as the exclusive medium of Jewish devotion only when the practitioner falls in love with it and thus desires it as an act of fidelity to law as a divine gift that is not performed as an act of obligation or a vehicle for something that lies outside it.9 Emunah u-bitaḥon (EB), published posthumously in 1953, is a slim but at times dense work that the Ḥazon Ish wrote relatively late in life, directing his disciples not to publish it until after his death.10 Part of its charm is its idiosyncratic Hebrew prose, which contains a variety of words and phrases that appear almost nowhere else in classical or modern Hebrew literature. My analysis of EB rests on two main points. The first is the Ḥazon Ish’s questioning of the ability of reason to function in a genuinely autonomous fashion, distinct enough from self-interest (which he views as the central function of the yetser ha-ra‘ or evil inclination), to properly determine divine will or produce certainty sufficient for a devotional life. The autonomy of reason is where the Ḥazon Ish believed philosophy, musar, and the Brisk/ Volozhin method of talmudic analysis all fail for different reasons.11 As I show, his view of the inability of reason to function distinct from human self-interest amounts to a kind of doctrine of original sin yet does not fall prey to fideism or a rejection of reason. Second, I examine his provocative notion of falling in love with the law (’ahavat ha-halakhah or ’ahavat ha-mishpat). For the Ḥazon Ish, falling in love with the law serves as the necessary prerequisite for complete fidelity to it that prevents it from being undermined by self-interest. Love here does not seem to suggest romantic love, but rather love as a vehicle of self-sacrifice. I love the other against my self-interest; love is an act of submission to something outside the self for the purposes of undermining that part of the self (yetser ha-ra‘) that is the source of all deviant behavior. Without that sacrificial relationship to the law or without the law’s exclusive role in determining human behavior, the self is hopelessly torn between the desire to do good and the even stronger inclination to satisfy one’s needs. For him, even the positive aspirational modes such as devekut (cleaving to God) or tikkun ha-middot (sustained behavior modification) found through studying musar invariably become trapped in the evil inclination’s innate desire for self-interest.



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This notion of love of the law clearly reflects a male gendered view of the self. The object of love, either Torah or law, appears in a feminine register: both “Torah” and “halakhah” are feminine nouns in Hebrew. It is a heteronormative claim in a homosocial world, the world of the yeshivah. The Ḥazon Ish never refers to any kind of reciprocity in this love; the love of halakhah is for the benefit of the lover and not the beloved. I love the law so I can prevent my deviant self from cajoling me into transgressive behavior. Through submission to the law, I deconstruct and then reconstruct the self as a law-lover, one who swears fidelity to a set of practices determined by the tradition. It does not much matter if they are true in any objective sense, a notion I return to in my conclusion. What matters is that the object of love offers me a subject to submit to so I can resolve the war inside myself as a male practitioner. To understand the need for the law according to the Ḥazon Ish is to understand his lack of confidence that the self, a product of original sin, can overcome the desire to transgress. It is not that the law serves to fulfill the love; rather, it provides an alternative to failings of the fallen self.

* * * The Ḥazon Ish was born in Kossov, Belarus, in 1878 and moved to Mandate Palestine in 1933. During his almost twenty years in Bnei Brak, he rose to become the patriarch of contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy and its most reliable and respected halakhic authority. Largely a recluse, he never studied formally in a yeshivah. He learned as a young man with R. Ḥayyim Soloveitchik of Brisk (1853–1918), whose analytical method of Talmud study he initially absorbed and eventually rejected. Beginning in 1920, he studied with R. Ḥayyim Ozer Grodzinski (1863–1940), the great rabbinical chief justice (’av beit din) of Vilnius. Even during his years in Bnei Brak when he served as the unofficial leader of the community, he rarely left his home. Rather, he was visited by many students who studied with him and people from all walks of life. One famous visit in 1952 was from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who came to the Ḥazon Ish’s small apartment to try to convince him to allow religious women to do national service for the country. The Ḥazon Ish listened respectfully and then refused Ben-Gurion’s request.12 A lover of Eretz Yisrael, he was not a Zionist. Most of the Ḥazon Ish’s written work consists of talmudic novellae (ḥidushim) and halakhic adjudication (psak halakhah). It was only during the final years of his life that he moved from his purely talmudic or halakhic endeavors and composed what would become Emunah u-bitaḥon (EB).

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EB is often referred to as an anti-musar text addressing questions of behavior, desire, doubt, and certainty. How best to cultivate correct behavior, or tikkun ha-middot, is the subject of both musar texts and EB. The difference between musar and the Ḥazon Ish’s anti-musar approach to this question lies in how each views human nature and the best way to achieve these behavioral goals.13 For both musar thinkers and the Ḥazon Ish, knowledge of God, or metaphysics, does not necessarily bring one to act in accord with God’s will. In this sense, neither philosophy (knowledge) nor pure halakhism (behaviorism) can solve the dilemma of knowing what to do and then being able to do it. Individuals must create the best possible conditions to understand correct behavior and put themselves in the most viable position to act accordingly. For the masters of musar (ba‘aley musar) this is through the study of musar texts and applying their directives; for the Ḥazon Ish it is through “falling in love with the law” and spending one’s time deciphering the law so as to best perform it. This means full submission to the law— which he sometimes called halakhah, sometimes mishpat (judgments), and sometimes dikduk ha-din (behavioral exactitude)—with the belief that the law is the clearest and most tangible manifestation of divine will that exists.14 This falling in love does not envision the law only as a set of obligatory prescriptions but rather as the most tenable and beautiful vehicle for an individual to minimize doubt in his devotional life. Submission to the law as an act of love is, for the Ḥazon Ish, as close as one can get to behavioral certainty. This raises another issue in regard to the relationship between love and certainty in the Ḥazon Ish. Why is acting out of love an act of certainty? Although Ḥazon Ish never explains why, one might see it through a fidelityversus-obligation paradigm and suggest that for him love is an act of fidelity that stems from both desire (the male desire to transgress) and submission (to that which will prevent the desire to transgress).15 Obligation, in contrast, stems from responsibility, which may imply that there still may remain a kind of space between the actor and the law; one may certainly love what one is obligated to do, but often the obligatory act is not necessarily generated by something internal (such as love) but by something or someone external to the self.16 The Ḥazon Ish’s rejection of musar stemmed from his belief that the autonomy of the intellect and will (sekhel and ratson) cannot sufficiently extricate themselves from the evil inclination (yetser ha-ra‘) in human nature enough to act according to their aspirations. In EB 3.4, the Ḥazon Ish wrote,



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One’s evil inclination is strongest when a sin is not obvious and requires deliberation. This is the case when the shielding power embedded in the human heart against destructive behavior that always comes to help with good intentions against physical desire is dimmed in the judgment of one who is slow (ha-‘amum) and the evil inclination is embedded (natul ‘atsmo) to justify the negative consequences that arise from this distorted judgment. Emotion is not a determining factor in the law. One’s emotions will not allow one to consider that perhaps his judgment is twisted. Therefore, it is not surprising that [even] select individuals who have refined certain character traits, when presented with another trait in a particular situation that results in confrontation, will not seek out the voice of his teachers or the halakhah. Rather he will become entrenched in the dispute and its arguments, and all the refinement of his nature will suddenly vanish.17 The notion of the evil inclination, inextricably embedded in human nature that justifies the error of the autonomous self, stands at the center of Hazon Ish’s view of the human being and his critique of musar.18 Thus, EB 3:5 continues, acquiring the lofty trait of submission to the law (hakhna’ah le-mishpat) has two advantages.19 The first is habit (hergel) and the second is study (limmud). It is known that limited faith (emunah ha-metsumtsemet) is not sufficient to prevent one from acting in an evil manner in that we invariably pursue our natural inclinations [which are] like a raging river.20 As the next pararaphs demonstrate, the law is efficacious precisely because it is against human nature. Therefore, when working properly, halakhah often forces the individual to act against his (“his” is the appropriate pronoun) inclinations in matters where he would otherwise justify errant behavior, specifically in matters of interhuman relations. The way the individual can allow halakhah to function this way is by “falling in love” with it. In a sense, then, the good is achieved through love/submission to an external system that will counter subjectivity: Good behavior is made from a war and struggle against subjectivity (ratson ha-ḥofshi) to turn the inclination of the heart from evil to good.21 In this manner one can acquire the good by means of habit to persevere against the quotidian emergence of physical desire and the ways of subjectivity (neti’ot ḥofshiyot) and to act according to dictates of reason (hora’at ha-sekhel) and the precepts of Torah. Little by little he will accustom himself to the good as a free volitional and natural act.22

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Before further exploring the Ḥazon Ish’s notion of subjectivity and falling in love with the law, it is worth reflecting on what he means here by “dictates of reason” (hora’at ha-sekhel), a term rarely found in traditional Jewish writing.23 In fact, the Ḥazon Ish only uses it once in EB. For the Ḥazon Ish, these “dictates of reason” are not identical to Torah, because he separates them. And yet it appears unlikely that he is advocating for an autonomy of reason in any Maimonidean sense. If so, he could have used language more germane to the Jewish philosophical tradition, such as sekhel ha-enoshi. It seems to me that the Ḥazon Ish here is suggesting that “dictates of reason” are tools for deciphering “precepts of Torah.” We need reason, not because reason itself will enable us to achieve the certainty required for the pious life: the Ḥazon Ish’s central critique of musar. Instead, reason, or hora’at ha-sekhel, is necessary to understand the dictates of Torah. Put otherwise, for the Ḥazon Ish “the dictates of reason” are the vehicle for but not the arbiter of love. They enable us to understand that which we can then love. For the Ḥazon Ish the act of “falling in love” with the law is volitional; one can enact that love through sheer will. Thus, it is not a romantic but more of a pragmatic kind of love. The innate doubt in the human self—what I am calling “subjectivity” (and what he calls neti’ot ḥofshiyot)—stems from Adam’s sin in Genesis; thus, the Ḥazon Ish seems to have been sympathetic to a kind of original sin without stressing any sexual context. By original sin, I mean that Adam and Eve’s sin changed human nature such that their progeny became unable to save themselves from themselves.24 The mixing of good and evil through the encounter with the serpent resulted in an inextricable doubt that is endemic to human nature. Yakir Englander puts it this way: “The human being experiences estrangement from himself since he cannot focus and depend on himself. He is always in a state of doubt in regards to his feelings and desires even if it appears to him that he is following an inner authentic voice to do good.”25 For the Ḥazon Ish, this state of doubt is exactly where the yetser ha-ra‘ resides, because uncertainty makes the individual susceptible to justifying his natural inclinations. At that moment, according to the Ḥazon Ish, evil effaces the good, even when one aspires to the opposite. The Ḥazon Ish, however, did not extend his notion of the intrinsic yetser ha-ra‘ to a fideistic end whereby reason is itself viewed, in Martin Luther’s words, as a “whore.”26 Rather, he argued that the Torah is God’s will manifest in this world and that the Talmud is the most proximate and accessible aspect of that divine will: “The roots of [our] faith is that everything that was said, whether [in] the Mishnah or the Gemara, whether



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halakhah or aggadah, these are the very things that were revealed to us by force of prophecy that is transferred through the kiss of the emanated intellect combined with the intellect embedded in the body.”27 Submitting to that will, which becomes manifest through Torah study with its intent toward practice, brings one beyond the perennial doubt of one’s own existential situation by putting one as close to divine will, and thus certainty, as possible. The intellect and the powers of reason can then be deployed in full force to decipher and navigate that will through the act of Torah study, what the Ḥazon Ish called “toiling in Torah” (‘amal be-Torah or shkedat ha-Torah).28 The problem with musar, according to the Ḥazon Ish, is that even though the ba‘al musar pledges fidelity to Torah and halakhah, he also maintains that the intellect and will can function autonomously to facilitate tikkun ha-middot or human perfection.29 As mentioned earlier, musar is generally founded on the possibility of human autonomy: that it is possible for individuals to come to understand what is required of them in terms of human action in accord with divine will. A short excerpt from ’Or Yisrael, written by R. Israel Salanter, the founder of musar, makes this point: “One should transform one’s emotional forces and character traits for the good, until the power of evil is entirely uprooted from within oneself. In this area, it does not suffice to correct one’s will in a general manner. . . . ​Rather, a person must seek out the way to correct each individual character trait and emotional force. This aspect of rectification refers to the rational mitzvot that are between a person and their fellow.”30 The implication here is that the autonomous self can succeed in this act of rectifying its character (tikkun ha-middot) and that this success is not fully dependent on the halakhic life or, at least, is not fully determined by it. For the Ḥazon Ish, this view is simply an error (EB 4:9): “One could almost say that the intricacies of the law (dikduk ha-din) are the exclusive way to fix one’s character.” In addition, the Ḥazon Ish opposed musar’s focus on the rectification of many character traits. For him, there were really only two traits: submission to the law as the sole possibility of human perfection, and the belief in the autonomy of the human will, which sets up the self to succumb to human nature and the power of the yetser ha-ra‘. Everything else extends from that decision: The matters of musar (ḥakhmey ha-yirah [lit. the wisdom of fear of God]) claim that the refinement of one’s attributes (tikkun ha-middot) is a specific dimension of perfecting one’s devotional life. They

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spend a great deal of time talking in detail about specific behavioral traits such as anger, pride, appetites, love, honor, competitiveness, revenge, cursing, etc. They maintain that proper habituation will result in the establishment of human perfection in many hearts, which will then relate to specific appendages of the human being (‘avarim nifradim). This approach may work for those who are psychologically damaged (ḥoley nefesh) and bring one out of a lowly place.31 But in its origins there is only one good trait and one bad trait. The bad trait is succumbing to one’s natural inclination.32 By avoiding this one can perfect all evil inclinations, for example, anger, revenge, pride, etc. . . . The good trait is the absolute conviction to choose the proper feeling (regesh musari) against the feeling of desire, and it is here where one can do battle against all the bad traits at once. It is not possible for this conviction to be compromised. This individual whose intellect and soul is [sic] awakened and who merits the sensitivity to choose correctly will be drawn to the good without impediments and will not experience any satisfaction from those choices. He will see true existence, and at that moment he will loathe all the bad traits.33 Elsewhere in EB (4:4), the Ḥazon Ish reiterates this point: “All the bad traits are really, at their source, only one. And all the good traits are only one. Curing one of the specific traits cures all of them.”34 Conviction—that which holds the potential to cure every bad trait—is, for the Ḥazon Ish, “falling in love with the law” (EB 3:8): “With the persistence of the investigation of the law, the love of the law [my emphasis] will become embedded in the individual in a way specific to the law he is engaged in. The love will increase in the continued investigation in all the laws (mishpatey) of the Torah. This is because the specific faith of the mitsvah which manifests as feeling, needs to be acquired; it is not natural.”35 According to Salanter, musar is a meta-halakhic enterprise, not unlike Hasidism (which arguably focuses on certainty through devekut) and the Lithuanian method of Talmud study focused on ḥidush or pilpul as the quintessential act of Jewish creativity.36 Each of these schools of thought— musar, Hasidism, and Lithuanian Talmudism—assumes some aspect of autonomy of the self. As Lawrence Kaplan puts it in regard to the Ḥazon Ish’s critique of the Brisker method, “For the Ḥazon Ish, the analytic ap-



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proach [to Talmud study] allows too much room for self-expression, for the play of the individual’s own intellectual powers unconstrained by the discipline of the text.”37 This is the basis of Kaplan’s thesis about the Ḥazon Ish’s antimusar polemic being an expression of his anti-modernism, with modernism understood to be founded on the basic belief in the autonomy of the human intellect.38 It is the very claim that the self can achieve certainty outside the halakhic system (albeit not necessarily in opposition to it) that is, for the Ḥazon Ish, the infiltration of modernity into traditional modes of living and thereby a choice for a life of doubt over a life of certainty. In the introduction to this chapter, I suggested that Ḥazon Ish posits a theory of “halakhic totalism” as a counter to musar’s meta-halakhic behaviorism. Halakhic totalism argues that, as an agent, the self is unable to free itself from its own evil inclination (yetser ha-ra‘) enough to achieve any certainty. By certainty I mean a posture whereby the actor is not disturbed by doubt and ambivalence. That is, he or she can never be certain that reason has transcended self-interest. Reason, for Ḥazon Ish, is thus forever in a state of doubt. In fact, the self is in a state of perennial doubt whereby all calculations (shikul ha-da‘at) are subject to error and uncertainty. Reason, however refined, can never free itself from the grip of self-interest. This contrasts starkly with some musar positions; for example, that of R. Simcha Zissel Ziv of Kelm (1824–98) in Ḥokhmah u-musar: “But with God’s help we will clearly demonstrate that most of the Torah is based on natural human reason [my emphasis], and from such [reason] we can understand the depth of what goes beyond human reason and is only known from being received at Sinai.”39 Meta-halakhic behaviorism asserts that reason can, independently of the law (but not against it), investigate and conclude the true nature of divine will and correct behavior. This is because Torah, including the law, is based on “natural human reason.” Yet the Ḥazon Ish’s rejection of the autonomy of the intellect is not a rejection of reason per se; rather, it is a claim of its necessity as a power always subordinated to the law. As mentioned, this is not a fideism whereby reason cedes to some kind of irrational faith. In this respect, he is not similar to someone such as Naḥman of Bratslav.40 For the Ḥazon Ish, the correct choice is the submission of the self through the act of falling in love with an external system beyond the self (i.e., halakhah) that dictates acting against the self ’s natural inclinations. That system is simply accepted as “true” even as that truth remains to be fully deciphered. The only role of reason is to do that deciphering; the adept uses reason to decipher the Talmud to the best

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of his ability. In an undated letter, the Ḥazon Ish wrote, “The principles of our faith and knowledge that we have received are founded in the depths of wisdom and the pursuit of scientific knowledge (meḥkar ha-mada’). But the correct way before us is to go with simplicity (be-tom lev) and believe with perfect and simple faith. . . . ​And the basis of this simple faith is in the oral law. I do not enter into it to ask ‘why?’ Rather my desire is to be a simple Jew (yisrael hedi’ot) who can communicate the ‘what’ that he has received.’41 Once one submits to the law, reason comes alive as the tool needed to ascertain its proper application. The quintessential exercise becomes the act of adjudication (psak halakhah). Rendering law (psak) as an act of love is what gives birth to the certainty of the act prescribed. Here I think there is a distinction between Torah study (talmud torah) as a vehicle of human creativity in the Brisk/Volozhin notion of ḥidush, and study toward the adjudication of halakhah to respond to specific cases. It is significant that the Ḥazon Ish did not often use the phrase ’ahavat Torah, love of Torah, but instead ’ahavat ha-halakhah or ’ahavat ha-mishpat. Neither is his position identical to the aspirational notion of “study is great because it leads to action” (B. Baba Kama 17a). The object of love for the Ḥazon Ish in EB is not the study of Talmud but the law (halakhah) that is created and enacted through it. Reason serves as the vehicle whereby the study of Talmud can itself adjudicate law, the object of the practitioner’s love. Although Torah study may be the quintessential act, for the Ḥazon Ish the love is directed toward halakhah, which is brought to life through Torah study—and as a result is not coterminous with it—and then performed as an expression of love. In the Ḥazon Ish’s worldview, the hero is the talmid ḥakham. It is certainly the case that the talmid ḥakham is the individual for whom reason is the tool of his trade; yet he should never use reason to engage in the autonomous pursuit of certainty outside the law. The talmid ḥakham uses reason only to understand the words on the talmudic page and decide on their applicability (halakhah). This distinguishes the talmid ḥakham from the ba‘al musar or the master of pilpul (casuistry), for whom reason has an autonomous status, even as all three draw extensively from the Talmud.42 Interestingly, those who practice pilpul are not focused on halakhah as the culmination of Torah study. For many of them, even though they are adherents of halakhah, the purpose of Torah study (torah lishmah) is study without attention to its practical application. For the Ḥazon Ish, when reason functions inside the law, it becomes a partner of the divine covenant, the result of which is psak halakhah. The



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adjudication of the law, which one then follows, comes as close as one can come to the certainty of correct behavior. The Ḥazon Ish accepted that practical halakhah—that is, laws that have contemporary applicability, which he considers the primary vocation of the talmid ḥakham—is a product of reasoned deliberation, but he also argued that it is deliberation practiced only within a system that received divine sanction. In this regard the question for the Ḥazon Ish was never whether this or that halakhic decision is or is not true in any ontological sense. Rather, the adjudication becomes “certain” because it is the product of an act of love of one who is absorbed in a system whose truth is a given.43 The pious act, then, includes the rectification of human behavior—what is for the Ḥazon Ish genuine musar—and lies in the submission of the self to that which dwells outside it (the law), which one then examines through reason to evaluate its applicability.44 For the Ḥazon Ish this is precisely what gives birth to the halakhic self. The yetser ha-ra‘ remains operative but is mitigated by the fact that the system outside the self will determine human action; submission to it via love of it will help prevent the yetser ha-ra‘ from intervening for the sake of self-interest. That is, submission to the law will sometimes, perhaps even often, force persons to act against their self-interest, a point the Ḥazon Ish stressed at the beginning of Part Three of EB.45 This is what the law accomplishes and musar does not, arguably cannot, because using reason outside the law to deliberate tikkun ha-middot makes musar, by definition, susceptible to the yetser ha-ra‘ ’s vocation of self-justification. The Hazon Ish states that for a true posek or talmid ḥakham “the judge and the law become one” (dayan ve-din, ḥad hu). There is no evidence that he meant this in any mystical way. Rather, when the talmid ḥakham submits to the law, his self is reconstructed through that act of submission such that his reason can now be used to apply this new self (the halakhic self, bound together with the law) to different situations. This is also the foundation of his notion of da‘at torah, the ability and authority of the talmid ḥakham to render a Torah decision on matters not related to halakhah per se. There is nothing mystical in his notion of da‘at torah (although there is in certain other Hasidic articulations founded on fealty to the tzaddik). Rather, for the Hazon Ish the reconstructed self of the talmid ḥakham has become a “halakhic self ” such that he can more easily intuit what a Torah position might look like.46 This is not to say the talmid ḥakham cannot err in his deliberations, halakhic or otherwise, but the error itself does not contradict divine will when it is made through a reasoned examination of the sources of one

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whose self has been reconstructed through submission to the system and love of the law.47 I do not think the Ḥazon Ish had any ontology of halakhah in the sense that that there was some objective correct answer to any halakhic question. As I read him, the truth of halakhah is the product of the talmid ḥakham who deliberates using reason fully submitted to, and in love with, the halakhic system and taking into consideration historical precedent and contemporary circumstances. What he decides using those faculties and criteria simply is the halakhah. This may also help explain why the Ḥazon Ish was so opposed to R. Rafael Natan Rabinowitz’s Dikdukei Sofrim, a work that examines talmudic manuscripts and offers variant readings of the printed editions of the Talmud. In some cases, these manuscript readings show scribal errors or textual variants that may clarify halakhic decisions made from the printed text. For the Ḥazon Ish, the printed Talmud, given its ubiquity, exists as part of a divine plan; variants do not and cannot undermine its authority. One can render law from the Talmud even with scribal errors, and the law would remain legitimate.48 This is why I suggest that his view of the law is without ontology. Unlike R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik in Halakhic Man, the Ḥazon Ish made no ontological claim about halakhah per se, even though the transformation of the self as halakhic self through that love may be grounded ontologically in that it is a state of being that is different than the self before the love of the law was activated.49 Reason is a tool, more specifically an exercise of love, to be used solely inside the ethics of submission to the law. Reason works in the service of love. The ba‘al musar, alternatively, uses reason to achieve tikkun ha-middot through a combination of Torah sources and autonomous deliberation. For the Ḥazon Ish, this too easily results in a distortion of the sources because they are being evaluated without submission to the law as the sole criterion of determination. In fact, the Ḥazon Ish went as far as to argue that the ba‘al musar is more susceptible to the yetser ha-ra‘ than the simple Jew who does not study musar (EB 3:11): Evolved individuals who have developed good character due to the study of musar (sifrey tikkun ha-middot) in their youth but did not sufficiently study the law (mishpat) and thus did not acquire a love of the law (’ahavat ha-mishpat); these people are more likely to waver when it comes to the fulfillment of the law than the more common folk who did not study musar. This is because the evil



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inclination (yetser ha-ra‘) implants haughtiness and rigidity in such an evolved individual. He will view the common folk in a pretentious manner, as if he is more evolved than they are and everything he does is more refined. And he will laugh at those who think he is acting against the law because his behavior is always supererogatory (lifnim mishurat ha-din) and arcs toward the good and thus they will think “the warning to guard the law is not directed toward me. Perhaps this is a warning for those who love themselves and their unrefined behavior and in all their actions seek wealth.”50 To those God-fearers and evolved people, this is not relevant. In fact, the whole thing is suspect in his eyes; it diminishes the sages and desecrates divine honor, heaven forbid. The Ḥazon Ish here makes the somewhat provocative suggestion that the occupational hazard of musar is that it creates a sense of superiority even as it teaches humility. This is because musar promotes one’s subjectivity as an expression of certainty in terms of behavioral choices; in doing so, it opens itself to the persuasive power of the yetser ha-ra‘ to justify self-interest. In this regard, musar makes submission to the law more difficult, not easier, and in effect diminishes the opportunity for the acknowledgment of doubt of the self and the need for submission to the law and love of it as the exclusive path of certainty. As noted previously, the act of submission to the law for the Ḥazon Ish is described as “falling in love with the law” (’ahavat ha-halakhah), a locution that to my knowledge appears almost nowhere else in classical Jewish literature outside EB.51 Given this unusual, and to my mind deliberate, turn of phrase, it is worth exploring it more closely. I see the use of the term “love” to describe one’s relationship to the law as intended to promote an intimacy between the individual and the law cultivated through an act of submission, an emotive exercise that produces a desire on the part of the lover to engage the beloved. Terms like ’ahavat ha-shem (love of God) or ’ahavat yisrael (love of the Jewish people) are certainly evocative and used often but can be viewed as reflexive and even vacuous terms, in part because the object of that love (God or the Jewish people) is quite ephemeral. But ’ahavat ha-halakhah or ’ahavat ha-mishpat—loving the law—is something that is really quite tangible. It means, perhaps, the desire to engage and act in accordance with a set of rubrics and texts for the sake of the reconstruction of the self in a way that mitigates the doubt that is integral to the very existence of the self.

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This love of the law is sometimes limited to very practical matters of human behavior: for example, shaking a lulav on Sukkot, giving charity to the poor, or tithing one’s produce in the land of Israel. Yet it is well known that the Ḥazon Ish advocated studying the impracticable laws of Temple worship and purity. In this sense, love extends beyond the practical and becomes simply an exercise in submission.52 The talmudic adept, for the Ḥazon Ish, loves the very nature and fabric of the law even in its inapplicable state. It has been suggested that his famous propensity for ḥumrot (stringent legal positions) is the outgrowth of his belief that law is, by definition and design, counter to human nature.53 Thus, the more law, the stricter the law, the better. This is not necessarily only for the sake of punctilious behavior but rather is an effusive expression of love as an act that enables one to counter one’s deviant self. Although it is likely true that for the one who loves the law, the more law the better, it could also be the case that ḥumrah, enacting the law beyond its required precepts, is itself a product of love: one loves the law to the extent that one wants to embody, to enact, to perform the law, as much as possible. If I really love the law, I can never have too much law. The intimacy implied in this love is born not only of fidelity but also of the commitment that the object of my love is an object I desire to know in all its myriad details and that I accept even if it compels me to act for its sake against my own self-interest. The Ḥazon Ish claimed, “With the persistence of the investigation of the law, the love of the law will become embedded in the individual in a way specific to the law he is engaged in. This love will increase in the continued investigation in all the laws (mishpatey) of the Torah” (EB 3:8). Only this can correct character traits, as EB’s next section makes clear: “The fundamental healing of what ails the soul is the careful investigation of the law in all its minute details until the absolute love of the law becomes embedded inside him” (3:9). The discussion of the law in EB becomes more specific as embodied in the characters of Abraham and Moses (EB 3:10): We see that law breaks the destructive arms of the evildoers, forcefully takes stolen property from them and returns it to its proper owner, thereby establishing the world and enabling it to fulfill its divine mandate, since God created the world for it to continue to exist. In this way it is as if [law] is a partner in the creation. Abraham, to whom God did not make known [God’s intentions to destroy Sodom] but is called “one who loved Me” was called so because



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he followed the law (ha-mishpat) and educated his children to do so.54 Moses, the master of all prophets took [his father-in-law] Jethro’s advice regarding law and set up a legal system to guide Israel through law (mishpat). And God agreed with Moses’s decision. On this reading, the law is not simply halakhah in a formal sense but is a way of engaging with a God that is otherwise inaccessible by partnering in what that inaccessible God gives to the Jews (the law). Elsewhere in Emunah u-bitaḥon, this engagement is described with the phrase dikduk ha-din, which also appears almost exclusively in the Ḥazon Ish’s writings.55 Translating this term to capture the spirit in which it is used is difficult. Literally it means “exacting in observance,” but I suggest rendering it more in concert with the notion of loving the law. It is a kind of “making love with the law,” an attentiveness to detail as an act of fidelity and caress: “When one is exacting in his actions (ha-medakdek be-ma’asav) one acquires a treasured object of endless loving for exactitude.56 This love will enable one to despise all that stands against him, even those who were ‘friends from childhood,’ that is, all of the bad traits that he delighted in as a child” (EB 4:8). This act of love (dikduk) creates a boundless love for the act of law itself, propelling it onward, and that love will overcome all that stands against it. I use the phrase “making love to the law” in a heuristic way and mean no disrespect to the Ḥazon Ish’s position. I do think, however, that his use of the phrase ahavat ha-halakhah—especially because it appears almost nowhere else in the classic canon of Jewish thought—is intentional and invites closer examination. For him, there appears to be an intimacy between the actor (the Jew) and the object of action (the law) that is best expressed through the term “love making.” It gestures to something more than obligation or responsibility and more toward yearning and desire. For example, whereas in Hasidism yearning for God may be expressed in devekut, which is also expressed in some Hasidic literature in quite erotic ways, for the Ḥazon Ish the object of yearning is not God in any abstract sense but the law (its adjudication and its practice), which is as close to God as anyone can get. This language of love of the law is crucial for the Ḥazon Ish; it provides him with an emotional expression of heteronormativity in a homosocial setting for that which stands as the only solution to the human battle with the yetser ha-ra‘, the human struggle with doubt. Although the Ḥazon Ish never uses the Garden of Eden story in EB, the notion of Eve (and the serpent through Eve) seems apt. The temptation of the yetser ha-ra‘ is gendered right

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from the third chapter of Genesis. The certainty that enables the devotional life to succeed resides in the love one has for that which best enables him to overcome the blemish of the human condition. The truth in this certainty is not the “objective truth” of the philosophers but the musar conviction that one is as close to God, and thus the good, as one can be. The distinction Ludwig Wittgenstein makes between “objective” and “subjective” certainty that I address in the next section may enable us to better situate both musar and the Ḥazon Ish’s anti-musar “halakhic totalism” (expressed through “love of the law”) in the broader Jewish philosophical tradition. By looking at truth as something other than being fully outside the self or solely the product of reason—and that which can be felt, rather than only thought—the faith and reason paradigm that dominates Jewish philosophy, at least until modernity, can be seen as one of a variety of intellectual approaches to Jewish piety.

* * * As a way to further articulate what the Ḥazon Ish meant by submission and certainty, in particular their relationship to truth, and his critique of reason that does not collapse into fideism, I briefly mention a few distinctions in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s last published work On Certainty (1969) in regard to “objective” and “subjective” certainty. In addition, I draw attention to a distinction made by Terence Penelhum between “evangelical’ and “conformist” fideism to better understand the limits of the Ḥazon Ish’s notion of certainty in relation to reason. The framework of faith and reason in the Jewish philosophical tradition more generally is the underlying question of knowing the “truth,” which is often articulated as distinguishing between true or false beliefs (in Saadia Gaon’s language, ’emunot ve de’ot). This can be illustrated in Maimonides’s claim in the opening to his Mishneh Torah that one is obligated to “know” (le-da‘at) that there is a First Cause.57 I suggested earlier that pietism, with modern musar being one example and the Ḥazon Ish another, is less concerned with truth than with certainty, less with knowledge than with devotion. I want to suggest two distinctions here, both drawn from Wittgenstein, that help get at what separates musar from the anti-musar of the Ḥazon Ish: the distinction between truth and certainty and that between subjective certainty and objective certainty. One of the great philosophical challenges posed in modernity comes from René Descartes’s “radical skepticism” and the many ways philosophers



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examine whether such skepticism is warranted and should be the subject of philosophical inquiry. Descartes’s method asks us to question our ability to know with certainty anything outside ourselves. For Descartes the question is whether the only things that one can be certain of are those things that one thinks. British philosopher G. E. Moore, in an essay from 1939 titled “Proof of an External World,” engaged Descartes’s question about skepticism toward the external world and subsequent responses to it that Wittgenstein takes up in On Certainty.58 In On Certainty, Wittgenstein investigated a series of questions in response to Moore, including that of the difference between knowledge and certainty and between various kinds of certainty. Wittgenstein suggested the following path out of the conundrum by separating knowledge from certainty: “Suppose I replaced Moore’s ‘I know’ with ‘I am of the unshakeable conviction’?”59 The point reappears more clearly: “ ‘Knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ belong to two different categories. They are not two ‘mental states’ like, say ‘surmising’ and ‘being sure.’ ”60 What, then, is the categorical distinction between the two? Wittgenstein’s clearest answer to this question was as follows: With the word “certain” we express compete conviction, the total absence of doubt, and thereby we seek to convince other people. That is subjective certainty. But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible. But what kind of possibility is that? Mustn’t mistake be logically excluded?61 On one reading, objective certainty here is close to what many in the Middle Ages called knowledge, that about which I cannot be mistaken. For example, if I am sitting in a chair and I say, “I am not sitting in a chair,” that utterance is not for Wittgenstein a mistake but something else. Although many modern philosophers limit that kind of knowledge to examples where there are empirical data, in the Middle Ages metaphysics was also a realm where such truth could be accepted as true. The unmistakability of such truth is, for Wittgenstein, part of its universality: it can true regardless of context or culture. Now, of course, Descartes can come along and say, “You have been fooled by a demon,” and Wittgenstein may respond, “Oh yes, perhaps, but that it not likely enough for me to doubt its truth.” But if a scientist came along and proved empirically false something that Wittgenstein

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thought was true, he would likely relent.62 In any case, Wittgenstein seems to have been more interested in what he defined as objective and not subjective certainty. In a different context, classical Jewish philosophers were interested in objective certainty as shown by, for example, treatments of the epistemological question of how much one can “know” the truth of revelation and thereby minimize the element of doubt in one’s belief. Put otherwise, in Maimonides’s works, are “faith” and “knowledge” ultimately different categories or different expressions of the same thing reflecting different stages of knowing?63 Scholars of Maimonides have debated that question for centuries. Pietists—at least in the modern musar tradition, and the Ḥazon Ish in a different way—are generally more inclined toward what Wittgenstein calls subjective certainty, or conviction. They are interested in the emotive and perhaps even psychological states that create conditions for specific actions. They are interested in “conviction” that erases doubt in the moment, not by discovering universal truth or understanding something that cannot be other than it is but by cultivating a way of bracketing doubt from the process of making decisions how to behave. This is not to say that pietists do not believe their subjective certainty is also “true” in an objective sense; this may or may not be the case. I do not know, for example, whether the Ḥazon Ish believed a specific halakhic decision (psak) was true in any objective or universalized way, although I frankly do not think that such an issue would have concerned him, because he seems not to have had a halakhic ontology.64 He certainly did not care that much about the “correct” talmudic text ascertained by manuscript variants. In fact, he openly spoke against that. For the Ḥazon Ish, halakhic adjudication of the talmid ḥakham is “certain” (one can act on it and be certain one is fulfilling divine will) because it emerges from a loving relationship between the decisor or posek (the talmid ḥakham) and the law (this includes the textual tradition where the law is adjudicated). And that loving relationship has equipped the posek, through years of study, to be able to connect the talmudic text to halakhic practice. This connection is important if we view the Talmud according to the Ḥazon Ish as the yet-unrealized template of the law that can only be realized through the talmid ḥakham. The talmid ḥakham releases the potential in the Talmud to produce the law (halakhah) that he loves. And that law assures him of the certainly of his actions as being in accord with divine will that is embedded in the oral law.



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One of the questions that arises from a close reading of Emunah u-bitaḥon’s critique of reason is whether the Ḥazon Ish is a fideist and, if so, what kind. That is, how does the Ḥazon Ish understand reason? Alvin Plantinga famously defined fideism as the “exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth.”65 Although this may apply to Jews such as Naḥman of Bratslav and perhaps Yosef Yoisel Hurwitz of Novardok, it does not quite fit the Ḥazon Ish, who was quite positive about reason (understood within the context of love of the law) and whose deep engagement with the law was marked by reasoned analysis. In God and Skepticism, Terence Penelhum makes a useful distinction between “evangelical fideism” and “conformist fideism.”66 Evangelical fideism is the erasure of skepticism through fervent conviction; it is what animates Hurwitz, who uses the term haskamah (conviction) as his central musar motif.67 Conformist fideism is identified as loyalty to a tradition. Once that loyalty—or, in the case of the Ḥazon Ish, love—is enacted through submission, reason can and must function by understanding that tradition as a way of performing that loyalty. Reason thus becomes an act of caressing, but it never functions as the tool that ascertains truth in any objective or universalizing sense. Reason may be the vehicle for divine worship (e.g., ta‘amei ha-mitzvot, understanding the purpose of mitzvot), but it is never the object of love. For the Ḥazon Ish, one does not love reason; one loves the law. Reason is simply the tool that produces the law. In this case Ḥazon Ish may be a “conformist fideist,” for whom loyalty/love serves as the foundation of reason’s legitimacy and efficacy. Without that loyalty/love, reason becomes the tool of the yetser ha-ra‘ whose function is the justification of self-interest. In sum, this exploration of the question of doubt and certainty through the prism of musar and the Ḥazon Ish’s critique of it in Emunah u-bitaḥon is aimed at investigating one aspect of the tension between thought and action (or Twersky’s “law and religion”) that informs the entirety of the Jewish meta-halakhic tradition. Although musar has sometimes been a part of this investigation, rarely has the Ḥazon Ish’s anti-musar position been evaluated in conjunction with it as having something significant to contribute not only to the Jewish conversation about law and piety but also the broader discourse that takes seriously human emotions as an integral part of the religious life. What should the adept’s relationship be toward the law when it conflicts with, or even contradicts, one’s human or ethical inclinations? Is

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the law always right? If so, what does this say about the human condition? What is the difference between love and obligation, and how do both factor in the decision to act in accordance with the halakhic tradition? These questions, of course, are far broader than the Jewish textual tradition, but they are also endemic to it. In his short work Emunah u-bitaḥon, which addresses a narrow set of issues generic to the author’s limited area of concern, the Ḥazon Ish offers a suggestive and even provocative intervention on the nature of halakhah, the role of emotions, and the nature of the human condition more generally. I was initially drawn to the Ḥazon Ish’s discussion of halakhah, even though I am not “in love with the law,” because I often found the use of love language difficult as a way of describing religious life and devotion. Loving God seems unsatisfactory if God is unknowable or ineffable. Loving the Jewish people always felt indecipherable: Who are “the Jewish people”? All Jews? Some disembodied abstract or reified idea? And loving Israel the nation-state was never satisfying, because I do not know what it means to love a state, or a country, or a flag. As part of the construction of subjectivity, love needs a more tangible object. The pietistic tradition’s rendering of this dilemma offers love through an experiential lens, either a feeling of unity (unio mystica) or communion (devekut) with the divine. This makes more sense to me, but that requires a strong inclination, and even desire, for such an experience. The Ḥazon Ish offers something quite different but equally compelling in regard to the love question: love of the law. The law is present; it is tangible and concrete. And its ritualization often contains an aesthetic dimension that evokes a feeling of intimacy. So although I may not ascribe to the Ḥazon Ish’s rendering of certainly or love of the law, I found his framing of the dilemma forceful, evocative, and suggestive. In addition, I was drawn to Ḥazon Ish’s non-essentialist understanding of the law, in which it is simply the byproduct of the talmid ḥakham who falls in love with it, and in which studying the law is an act of love making that produces the very thing (halakhah) that perpetuates the love that produced it. Viewing Judaism as an agent of subject formation that includes both submission to a higher authority via conviction and autonomy as agency, the Ḥazon Ish’s critique of modern musar offers a suggestive conceptualization of the problem of religion and modernity.

Chapter 8

Enchanted Thinking

Toward a Genealogy of Mitnagdism and Talmudic Conceptualism (Lomdus) Paul E. Nahme

Although no longer the grand sociological narrative it once was, the secularization thesis—the claim that modern society has and will continue to become more secular, rational, and disenchanted—has remained implicit in many studies of modern religion. In large part, the continued adherence to this thesis is due to Max Weber’s original description of secularization as an increasing rationalization and accompanying “disenchantment” of the world.1 Rationalization, as Weber understood it, comes to represent the increasing dominance of the natural-scientific worldview and its explanatory power as a rival to “religious” or “magical” thinking enchanted by ritual and transcendence, myth and belief. Disenchantment characterizes the ceding of “traditional” authority and meaning to the newfound authority of rational calculation and the demystification of nature, both of which are characteristic of “modernity.” Enchantment therefore connotes the supposed lack of reason, analysis, and critical or historical consciousness about where institutions and norms have come from and why they deserve veneration or legitimacy. Some contemporary studies of religion have sought to problematize this characterization of a disenchanted modernity because it demands that subaltern classes, non-Christian religious traditions, and non-European Christianities conform to this model of reason. Such problematizing of a rational modernity has at times adopted the strategy of decentering reason entirely.2

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This line of argument assumes that only by moving completely outside reason can scholars gain access to what religion means to its adherents in the modern world. It seems to be at work, for example, in the writings of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, who have described the apparent incommensurability of pain and injury some traditional Muslims experience in light of purported norms of free speech in liberal conceptions of public discourse.3 Considering the controversies about cartoon representations of the Prophet Muhammad from the 2000s, they show how juridical right and sovereign power similarly present images of rationality and subjectivity that do not square with the agency of lived religious affects; they therefore bar what traditional Muslims experience from being recognized by the liberal norms of public reason.4 Although centering how power and affect discipline and shape subjects in ways that do not conform to canons of (Western) public reason is undoubtedly an important corrective to the Eurocentric notions of political agency, this zero-sum evaluation of reason may be a disservice to understanding the complexity of religious affect in the modern world. At the very least, it falls short of correcting Weber’s distinction between reason and enchantment by leaving the opposition in place and simply opting for one over the other. By emphasizing the exclusively noncognitive dimensions of such religious formations in the experience of pain and injury or blasphemy, such arguments paradoxically reinvent “religion” as an autonomous category subject to norms wholly independent of reason. Religion is thus defined as anything but rational: it is emotive, embodied, and disciplinary. But rarely is this question asked: Might reason be too narrowly defined in such accounts? Does the suggestion that enchantment or affect lie wholly at odds with reason not simply concede that religion remains something unmodern or at least irrational? Some narratives of modern Judaism have similarly assumed definitions of “religion” that abide by a strict opposition between enchantment and rationality. For example, Shmuel Feiner’s recent history of the secularization of the Jews of modern Europe understands it primarily as a process of growing individual “religious laxity” whereby “men and women increasingly aspired to live according to fashion, to enjoy the pleasures of this world, and to express their freedom and independence as individuals.”5 This laxity, continues Feiner, symbolizes the lack of belief that—pace Jacob Katz’s more inclusive account of “tradition”6—cannot simply be folded in as if it were but a wrinkle in the garment of tradition. In its place, these modern Jews exer-



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cise “choice” and reason. For Feiner secularization is thus a breach, a crashing through a defined boundary, a tear beyond the mendable seam. Becoming individuals—both fashionable and independent—these modern Jews stepped out of the “old” and into the “new.” They opted to practice less because they did not believe in certain premodern notions and exercised a “freedom” to choose that was apparently foreclosed by traditional modes of being. Narratives of modern Jewish history such as Feiner’s therefore abide by the distinction between modern reason and traditional enchantment. Although the concept is certainly difficult to define in any sufficient way, what “modernity” thereby comes to represent is the rise of historical consciousness, enlightenment, and emancipation all bundled together as the standards by which to judge the transformations of Jewish identity and tradition. By marking a shift away from “irrational” modes of being characteristic of Jewish “religion” and toward newly embraced rational forms of modern subjectivity, however, these narratives presuppose the European epistemic norms of an Enlightenment, Protestant faith, and citizen subjectivity as the litmus test for Jewish modernity.7 Such a standard deems the enchanted world of halakhah and Torah—the transnational and transhistorical sphere of traditional Jewish religious practices, beliefs, discourses about social and communal organization, and so on—as incompatible with the demands of European modernity. As a result, narratives such as Feiner’s replicate arguments for emancipation put forward by many liberal Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth century from Leopold Zunz to Gabriel Riesser. In emphasizing the eastward spread of the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah as part of a broader program of rationalization and reform,8 these histories contrast the emancipatory goals of reform to the normative traditionalism and lived religion of Eastern European Jews.9 Eastern European Jews thereby become mere objects of a historical discourse about them and their passive path toward disenchantment because they lack the characteristic self-reflexivity of a properly “modern” society. Hence, Eastern European Jews remain “traditionalists” who lack a sense of their own modernity. As Gershon Hundert writes, “Eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Jewry”—the context in which the Mitnagdic (anti-Hasidic) tradition first emerged—“inhabited a cultural universe constructed of elements that arose out of its own traditions. It was, in the Weberian sense, a ‘traditional society.’ The basic values and patterns of behavior by which most Jews lived their lives were unexamined and unselfconscious.”10 Tradition, in this Weberian sense, is opposed to the kind of self-reflexivity and self-consciousness that would befit truly modern

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e­ nlightened persons shaped by the “European” worldview of the Wissenschaft des Judentums or the Haskalah. But does such a “traditional” society, lacking the “self-consciousness” of historical discourse, really lack forms of agency or reasoned judgment about its own goods and possible flourishing? Might the presupposition that reason and enchantment are mutually exclusive be the sign of a more problematic epistemological assumption governing the study of modern Jewry, namely, that traditional Jewish piety and religious life continue to be subjected to an assimilatory project—one that does not debate Jewish eligibility for emancipation but does assert that Jewish modernity conforms to the standard of secular disenchantment? How then should we understand Jewish religious practice in the modern world? Is there another way of talking about rationalization and modernity that does not equate with Weber’s account of disenchantment? In this chapter, I argue that alternative epistemologies—other rationalities bound to worlds with differing parameters of enchantment, truth, and affective longing—exist in the realm of traditional Jewish religious thought where the boundaries between reason and affect, enchantment and modernity, blur. These alternative epistemologies are in need of study if we are not simply to reify a binary between the modern-rational and the traditionalirrational, or the racialized variety of such colonial privileging of Euro-American epistemologies as modern versus the “savage” or “primitive” desires of dehumanized others. If we are to move beyond the problematic assumptions of classical theories of secularization in the study of religion in the contemporary world, it is necessary to envision alternative rationalities as they constitute other worlds of lived experience and possibility. Instead of asking whether modern Jewry moved either beyond reason or religion, I want to take one step that might help begin to decolonize modern Jewish history by going beyond the religion/secular and the rational/irrational binaries characteristic of Euro-American epistemological norms. I therefore outline an alternative narrative about the path to modernity and rationality taken by religious Jews. It neither culminates in the Enlightenment citizen subject—one recognizable by public reason and legal right, deserving of emancipation; that is, a modern subject unencumbered by ritual, communally distinct practices, or hybrid identity—nor in an unself-conscious traditionalism and affective life of enchantment lacking cognition and meaning.11 Drawing on examples culled from the canon of modern rabbinic thinkers in the Mitnagdic tradition and the development of Lithuanian talmudic conceptualism (lomdus),12 this chapter grapples with the conscious



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entanglements of traditional Jews with rationalization, modernization, secularity, and enchantment. By problematizing the role such terms might play in a description of Eastern European Jewry,13 my goal is not to exhaustively demonstrate a distinct worldview nor simply to showcase the arguments made by these rabbinic thinkers but rather to provide some examples followed by critical reflections on how we might subvert the opposition of secular reason to religion with a more enchanted form of reasoning. I hope that this gesture will open the theoretical space required for undertaking a more sustained treatment of these primary sources in future work. To that end, I focus on the Mitnagdic discourse surrounding the priority of Torah and Talmud study that emerged in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that this literature pursued a self-conscious ideology of this-worldly enchantment, of seeing finite human reasoning as imbued with divine traces and creative potential. I also suggest that the development of greater conceptualism in Torah study was an emphatically “rational” development: it was a self-reflexive account of how Torah could provide a framework for negotiating a this-worldly modernity. Yet, these methods of study were infused with a metaphysical and affective circuitry that traced holiness and cosmic meaning in the cultivation of logical and conceptual thinking. Thus, as I suggest elsewhere,14 to the extent that these developments in halakhic and talmudic thinking help us reconfigure what we mean by Jewish “modernity,” they should also help us reconsider what we mean by “reason” when we discuss the secular and the modern. In contrast to the implicit demand for a disenchanted rationalization found in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (a legacy that continues to dominate the historical study of Jewish religion until today) or the vision of the Haskalah that at times presented a program committed to a neutral, disenchanted, and universal Enlightenment citizen subjectivity, I propose that mitnagdic thought and later conceptualism or “lomdus” engaged in what I describe as enchanted thinking. Blurring the boundaries between reason and enchantment, this enchanted thinking speaks of the ritual life of Judaism—with its purities and impurities, its prohibitions and allowances, its remembered sacrificial cults and extant civil transactions—in a new idiom of reasoning. By “rationalization” and “reasoning,” I therefore understand a developing self-reflexivity and consciousness of the work that concepts and categories play in reflecting on contradictions, textual variations, and distinct forms of ritual, civil-legal, and mystical phenomena. Therefore, this reflection on the work of thinking, the labor of thinking, presents a different version of

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the negotiation of a “secular” or this-worldly consciousness emerging in modern Judaism. And yet, by emphasizing that the formations of Jewish subjectivity at stake were thoroughly saturated with divinity—and with concerns about unseen impurities and the invisible efficacy of ritual intention, devotion, and attunement in understanding rabbinic law—I maintain that such negotiations of reasoning were very much enchanted, tracing a supernal world whose shape transcends the limits of human reasoning. In such a world, human agency is but one dimension of reality. Yet, by focusing on some modern rabbinic thinkers who embraced a distinctively new reasoning about halakhic categories to idealize their world, we will find that the concept of Torah became the site of creative agency for thinking in the emphatically this-worldly realm of human existence. In a world encumbered by thisworldly concerns, ranging from the struggles of Jewish life in the former Pale of Settlement and the demands of imperial Russian modernization, to the challenge of Hasidism in transforming everyday Jewish life and ritual, how this-worldliness was framed in such traditional communities is the primary key to understanding this moment in Jewish history. And it is here that we might better understand how this alternative form of modernity embraced an alternative form of world-making with its own canons of reason. This history of enchanted reasoning should force us to reconsider the dominant theoretical assumptions about reason and tradition that govern the history of modern Judaism by taking seriously the ways in which traditional, religious Jews might have thought their way into modernity.15

The Secular and the Rational Defining the “secular” in terms of disenchantment and the absence of “traditional” forms of knowledge is problematic for a few reasons. First, it assumes a static, ready-made rationality that stands above the historical fray. Detached from the lived experiences, institutions, embodied selves, and structures of power that shape rationalities, it also presumes that what is religious and what is not can be readily identified by this same neutral reason. But knowledge is produced through what Foucault described as “regimes of truth” or the development of principles and categories that achieve epistemic dominance.16 The shifting schemes of European knowledge and truth that yielded the regime of modern science, for example, in turn unmoored definitions of truth from their former reliance on Christian theological dogma



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and enabled a new regime of empirical or historical evidence. This shift similarly represented the stimulus for Weber’s understanding of disenchanted rationalization. But in accounts of Jewish secularization and modernization, the transformations of traditional Jewish education, thinking, and self-understanding in Eastern European Jewish life in the nineteenth century did not simply move regimes of truth away from a universe governed by Torah to one determined by a (decidedly non-Jewish) scientific rationality.17 Rather, as in the example of the Haskalah, a certain syncretism in Jewish knowledge production developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.18 Nevertheless, the perception that rationalizing methods were innovative and potentially foreign intrusions into traditional education was prominent. Thus, opponents of the rationalizing curricular innovations such as those to be found in the yeshivah of Volozhin would go on to chastise the method for being nothing more than as if “a certain rabbi invented the study of ‘chemistry’ . . . ​and many call it logic, and this has been very harmful for us, for it is a foreign spirit from outside which they have brought in to the study of the Oral Torah.”19 The scientific and thus “secular” character of this “chemistry” or “logic” stands in stark contrast to traditional Torah study. But what exactly is so foreign about this rationalizing logic? To assume that the introduction of a rationalizing element into traditional Torah study is the result of a foreign imposition of European modernity or secularism misses the opportunity to examine what was at stake for Jews in such innovations.20 For although there were certainly external demands that Jewish education be reformed in a manner appropriate for enabling emancipation—this Russian imperial policy led to the first closing of the yeshivah of Volozhin by Russian authorities in 1892—they cannot be the only explanation for such animus. Indeed, the hard distinction between tradition and modernity, between the knowledge and institutions considered enchanted with the past and with religion and those considered modern and secular (i.e., non-Jewish) fails to grasp the conceptual and ritual mechanics of Jewish religious life and the way traditional knowledge was facilitated and produced in Jews’ experience of the modern world. Traditional Jewish religious life in the modern world can be better understood by shifting our attention from defining “religion” in terms of these quantifiable markers that have been a mainstay of historians and sociologists, taking such data to define the grid and boundaries of an inhabited world of “tradition,” and mapping degrees of observance as indications of “piety” or “belief.” In other words, by demarcating what counts as “enchanted”

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and what counts as secular manifestations of “reason,” there is much that falls out of view that might otherwise constitute the lifeworld of modern Judaism. The complexities of lived religion, such as the contemporaneous experience of Hasidim in Kiev, who were said to be smoking cigars on the Sabbath while having their palms read by a purportedly psychic woman, 21 do not find an easy classification by this standard of definition.22 Thus, even though such “laxity” of practice may strike some historians as patently secular behavior, I want to imagine how such practices could be reimagined as part of an enchanted world in which the boundaries between tradition and modernity, rational and superstitious, material and spiritual are far less pronounced. The practice of halakhah, mediated through the study of Torah, forms part of a living religious world that requires everyday human decisions that weave together rather than rend apart such various threads. Thus, to understand the transformation of halakhic study from a means leading to or justifying practical observance of ritual to a ritualization of thinking, we must see reasoning or thinking as more than abstract calculation—as becoming a manner of being attuned to a world saturated with efficacy reverberating beyond the empirically visible—in other words, an enchanted world. By tarrying with the enchantment of Torah itself—an otherworldliness nested in this-worldly reasoning about it—this kind of reasoning or thinking also transforms how selves are embodied, particularly in the experience of studying Torah. By pulling enchantment down from a transcendent plane and placing it very much within the human world of thought and action, this halakhic thinking shapes a new kind of Jewish self.

Torah as an Enchanted World Reframing “enchantment” and “reason” as entangled and blurred, rather than distinct and opposed, we can better interpret the emphatically “this-worldly” polemics of Mitnagdim against early Hasidism in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas Hasidic acosmism sought to uncover divinity in every dimension of this world—a created world—in the writings of Mitnagdic thinkers working under the influence of R. Elijah b. Solomon, the Vilna Gaon or GRA (1720–97), we find a distinctive characterization of the Torah as the delimited sphere of divinity accessible only as an intellectual realm. This focus on Torah, as opposed to the acosmism of Hasidic writ-



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ers such as R. Shneur Zalman of Liady’s Likkutey Amarin: Tanya, sought to contend with the challenge posed by Hasidism by insisting that human perceptions of God are necessarily limited. The GRA thus emphasized God’s essential transcendence of the world, “since God is without any limitation, so that in referring to Him we ourselves set a boundary. Nonetheless, that we refer to God only in accordance with the limitations of what we are able to perceive in no way implies that there is any restriction of the glory of God per se.”23 Although the GRA, as Allan Nadler notes, was “most concerned that man respect his own epistemological limits,”24 it is also clear that God’s glory is not limited in itself; rather it is hidden in plain sight from us. Thus, Hasidism sought to decipher God’s immanence in the world, the divinity surrounding us, by way of bitul ha-yeshut, or annulment of sensory limitations on cleaving to God. For the GRA and his disciples, this path was mired in error because it failed to demarcate how this world of separation requires a particular path to access God; namely, Torah and (as it would become for later proponents) halakhah. The distinctive window into the supernal realm represented by Torah was an emphatically intellectual sphere. We see this in the Mitnagdic emphasis on the epistemological limitations on human reasoning. Although intellectualized, this was far from a denial of the splendor of a supernal world of divinity beyond. Rather, the insistence on a “this-worldly” limitation of human reasoning entailed that only Torah can be the point of access to a world of enchantment, rather than the performance of mitzvot, supererogatory acts of piety (le-hitḥased), or the pursuit of ecstatic prayer per the Hasidim. For the Mitnagdim, the Torah comes to represent the unique garment that encompasses the supernal ontology of the transcendent world as an ideational and psychic sphere of human thought. This ideology finds its most well-known expression in the work Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim by one of the most notable students of the Vilna Gaon, R. Ḥayyim ben Yitzḥak of Volozhin (1749–1821). In this classic work of Mitnagdic theological polemic against the populist challenge of early Hasidism, we find a sustained elaboration of the centrality of Torah and Torah study to the cosmic blueprint and to Jewish religious life. R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin furthered a polemic against Hasidism by focusing on the singular sphere of truly enchanted cleaving to God (devekut): Torah study. In Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim, he suggests that the limitations define the capacities and bounds of human reasoning, which is flawed and circumscribed. As Shaul Magid and Allan Nadler have shown, 25 the Mitnagdim did not exclude God’s immanence

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altogether, revealing their metaphysical affinities with Hasidic acosmism, but rather insisted on “preserving the distinction between the human and divine perspectives on the nature of the cosmos.”26 As Nadler observes, this distinction was preserved to prevent the potential antinomian consequences of the intelligibility of God’s immanence: such a doctrine might risk “the blurring of concrete moral distinctions” with its potential to undermine the observance of the law. 27 Although we might suppose that R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin’s emphasis on the limitations of human reasoning suggests that a realm of enchantment is barred from human experience, his metaphysical map of the cosmos insists, strikingly, that the Torah emanates from the highest order of the sefirotic configurations themselves. As Norman Lamm suggests in his reading of R. Ḥayyim, Torah is placed above the first three sefirot of Keter, Ḥokhmah, and Binah—emerging before the world of creation (‘olam de-briah).28 Torah’s origins beyond the realm of human intellectual comprehension, even “as it were” (ke-beyakhol), thus suggests that the immanent enchantment of the supernal realm nevertheless gains a foothold in this world in the Torah itself.29 These supernal origins of Torah entail that its study support and sustain the supernal connections of emanation to this world. For R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin, this attainment is only possible through the devekut of Torah study because the supernal source and hidden root of the holy Torah is more exalted than all of the worlds, in the beginning and root of the Atsilut of His holiness, may He be blessed, enclothed in supernal secrecy, as our master, the wondrous, divine man the Ari z”l has taught us, only the emanation and descent, as it were, down to the earth is illuminated by its glory. And God, may God be blessed, transmitted and planted it in us, so that we should become the bearers and supporters of the Tree of Life. And it follows from this, that all animation and sustenance of all of the worlds depends and stands but upon our comprehension and rational toiling in it. . . . ​We awaken the source of its supernal root, the source of holiness and blessing.30 For R. Ḥayyim, the origin of the Torah is itself hidden in the most exalted and enchanted sphere of divine emanation. And yet, Torah has been implanted—by means of its refraction through the emanatory schema of the sefirot—in humans so that the intellectual sphere of Torah study itself becomes the conduit to the supernal realm of divine emanation. The enchant-



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ment of this metaphysical sphere is thus channeled into the human being. In the process of studying Torah, the Jew cleaves to this holiness. Put differently, the enchanted thinking demanded by R. Ḥayyim opens another world and plane of existence, whereby even the epistemological limitations of human reasoning play a necessary metaphysical role—indeed, the highest possible role—in sustaining the cosmos. The insistence on Torah as the circuitry of a divine enchantment that courses through this world otherwise unseen thus became a fundamental pillar of Mitnagdic thought. And although R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin represents the most well-known ideologue of this Mitnagdic kabbalism, he was hardly alone. Indeed, his articulation of Torah as rooted in the supernal realm, and thus connecting the upper and lower worlds, is echoed in the work of R. Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov (d. 1827), another close disciple of the GRA. Together they represent the more theosophic articulations of Torah study, which is configured as the limited scope through which humans can access the divine. For R. Menaḥem Mendel, however, it is an expansive notion of Torah, including the mitzvot (commandments), that originates in the supernal sphere configured by Adam Kadmon or the highest emanatory world of primordial man. In this latter world of pure light, as Menaḥem Mendel suggests, the foundation of wisdom (ḥokhmah) and the root of understanding (binah), is Adam Kadmon who is first among all antiquity, as the Adam of the world of creation (adam de-briah), and his root is the supernal wisdom (ḥokhmah ha-elyonah) . . . ​and the root of all roots is in the sefirah of Keter, which is the embellishment of the letter yod, as this is the purpose of creation to be the recipient of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, and as such enables the crowning to be achieved through his service which he performs according to God’s will, in the 620 commandments [613 de-oraita and 7 de-rabbanan, whose numerical value equals Keter].31 By placing Torah and mitzvot at the center of the creative emanation structure in the cosmic blueprint for this world as well as the human being, Me­ naḥem Mendel not only shares R. Ḥayyim’s intellectualizing of Torah but he also spiritualizes the commandments, such that they signify the blueprint of creation of humans and the world. It is only the intellectual toil of Torah study that reveals this world, because even though divine “wisdom and will

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are one, it is will that is essential to all as it is actually the will of God and wisdom is the revelation of will.”32 This, Menaḥem Mendel suggests, is why even the rabbinic statement that “it is not study (limmud) that is essential, but rather action (ma’aseh)” (changing “midrash” to “limmud” in the original Mishnah in Avot 1:17) is nevertheless proof of the priority of intellection, because supernal intellection is the highest form of “action.” As Menaḥem Mendel explains the verse further, this is because Talmud is highest. Thus, comprehension (hasagah) is likewise dependent on divine will since comprehension is the grasping of His wisdom, may He be blessed, which is hidden in His actions. And to recognize God’s will by means of comprehension suggests that one depends on the other. And as in the Ancient one (atiqah) who retracts (siluk) the will and renders it impossible to comprehend it any more in animated life (ba-ḥayyim ḥayuto), behold the supernal wisdom also becomes concealed (setom) there and anything that can be comprehended is only a beginning . . . ​and understand thus that it is ever the case that comprehension (ha-hasagah) is the beginning of all beginnings over and against that which is comprehended (shehesig), and it is the first, and the most esteemed, and the most elevated above all, the beginning and the first to that which is comprehended further, and all that is comprehended already in the past is included in comprehension in the present and thus constitutes the secret of the dimension of unity (yeḥidah), which is the purpose of all and the origin of all.33 For Menaḥem Mendel, the relationship between limmud and ma’aseh is raised to the supernal heights of all that is hidden in the emanatory schema of creation, and there they are unified in their hidden source. Limmud (learning) is thus dependent on ma’aseh (action) in the same manner that comprehension becomes dependent on divine will. But because the divine will cannot be comprehended in itself—yet another degree of limitation—comprehension becomes elevated to the highest form of “action” as the beginning and end of all that is comprehensible in the cosmos. The comprehended (learning) thus becomes the action of comprehension. Torah—both the written Torah (Torah she-be-ketav) and the Oral Torah (Torah she-be-‘al peh)—therefore constitute the action of comprehension. As Menaḥem Mendel notes, citing the GRA,



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The written Torah and the Oral Torah are both the secret (sod) of Ḥesed and Gevurah, of right and left, and study for its own sake (limmud lishmah) is in the central pillar (be-‘amuda de-emtsaita), in awe and in love (be-deḥilu u-reḥimu) of the supernal abba and ima of the central pillar both are encompassed . . . ​and the two Torahs are given two adornments in the secret of Keter Torah, and divided into two parts, written and Oral Torah, for they are two kings who rule with one crown. . . . ​And it is known that the principle of the revealing of the written Torah is by means of the Oral Torah, and thus the written text recalls only the secret.34 Both written and Oral Torah conduct the supernal realm into this world, and the act of study serves as a central pillar of the cosmic bridge. Thus, we find in Menaḥem Mendel the mystical intensification of the this-worldly sphere of Torah as it connects the separated world of human reasoning to the divine. In both R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin and R. Menaḥem Mendel, we see the insistence on the epistemological limitations of human reasoning as the cornerstone of Mitnagdic thought. But this limited epistemological perspective on the divine is nevertheless infused with supernal traces and in turn affects the supernal world. Torah study thus becomes the elevated site of agency in an enchanted world. Indeed, it is elevated above all other practical commandments, as we will see. Recognizing that Torah study becomes the site of the holiest pursuit possible—communing with divinity and the sefirotic emanation of creation—the cultivation of a method of rigorous comprehension thus became ever more significant to Mitnagdic thinkers. Hence, the limitations of human reasoning come to represent the sphere of creative divine action: thinking. Recognizing this cultivation of Torah study as a distinct religious practice and a kind of divine action in itself, we can thereby interpret R. Aryeh Leib Ha-Kohen Heller’s (1745–1813) Ketsot ha-ḥoshen (1788–96) and Shev shema‘teta (1804; popularly pronounced Shev shemaysa) as developing a method for rigorous comprehension of the Torah that seeks to translate the metaphysical complexities of Torah’s supernal origins and intellectual ramifications into a this-worldly practice. Again, by insisting on the epistemological limitations of human reason, Heller turns his focus directly to difficult halakhic concepts in the sphere of ritual purity, the sacrificial cult, and civic and evidentiary laws to distinguish what can be known from what remains

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unknown in human comprehension of the Torah. Heller’s works can be considered a kind of proto-conceptualism anticipating the more formal institutionalization of the conceptual method (lomdus) and would become canonical texts on the bookshelves of the Lithuanian yeshivot. And although one could characterize Heller’s works as nothing more than an intensification of the derided style of pedagogy known as pilpul, the casuistic form of raising seemingly unrelated cases and comparing improbable outcomes of legal decisions with no obvious goal at stake, Heller’s insights are more conceptually organized and systematic. Particularly, the clearest indication that something new was afoot—and precisely the topic of analysis that would transfix many later conceptualists—was his explicit rationale for writing: to clarify the nature and scope of the expansive meaning of Torah, particularly the ongoing rabbinic formulation of Oral Law, as it is here that the lived reality of human thinking with all its uncertainty (safek) is found. Heller’s Shev shema‘teta therefore opens with an emphatically theological question about a quotidian experience. When we speak of uncertainty, how do we understand this limitation to knowledge when discussing revealed laws based in a revealed text? What does it really mean to claim uncertainty about something that is explicitly stated in the Torah? In pursuing this line of questioning, Heller cites the medieval commentators on the Talmud (rishonim). He begins by considering a disagreement between Maimonides and R. Shelomoh ibn Aderet (Rashba) on this question. Maimonides held that all uncertainties about a prohibition outlined in the Torah (safek de-oraita) that are dealt with by means of an added stringency are deemed so by rabbinic decree.35 That is to say, Maimonides understands the Torah as a text subject to interpretation and that any uncertainties arising therefrom, along with any added stringencies, are the results of human reasoning about those same uncertainties. By contrast, ibn Aderet maintains that the Torah itself determines that uncertainties must be treated with stringency to overcome those very uncertainties.36 This is because he considers the Torah—revelation itself—a Torah of certainty (torat vaday). Thus, if we are uncertain about whether something falls under a Torah prohibition, by calculating the probability that something might be forbidden, we treat the item as if it were known with certainty (sefeka de-orayta ke-vaday min ha-Torah). Whereas ibn Aderet pursues the overcoming of uncertainty, Heller seems to read Maimonides as urging us to accept uncertainty as a characteristic of human reasoning. Accordingly, determining such uncertainties and their relation to the Torah requires a method of reasoning, and Heller seeks to elaborate just such a method.



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In his introduction to the Ketsot ha-ḥoshen, Heller makes clear why dwelling on uncertainty matters and what is at stake altogether for the rabbinic project: the Torah was given to human beings who use the flawed vehicle of human reason to think about a fundamentally divine origin. It is precisely because of reason that we encounter uncertainty and error: Because of this one should therefore tremble lest he attributes to Torah things that are incorrect (pen yedabber ba-torah bi-devarim asher lo’ ken). Human reason clings to the comprehension of truth and yet, in this case, the intention of the Torah cannot even be comprehended by the seraphim and angels. . . . ​But behold the Torah was not given to the ministering angels. It was given to humans, who have human reason, and God gave us the Torah and in multiplying His mercy and kindness according to the ruling of human reason, even when it is not true in the estimation of the separate intellects (ha-sekhelim ha-nivdalim).37 The Torah was given to human beings, as Heller notes, even though human reason is limited. Citing the aggadic story in Baba Metzia 59b in which R. Eliezer and the sages disagree about a halakhah and a divine voice confirms that the sages had ruled incorrectly, Heller affirms that “it is not in heaven” to decide such things. Thus, we tarry with uncertainty (safek) because we are human. Citing the explanation of R. Nissim of Gerondi, Heller claims, “God, may He be blessed, did not indicate ruling regarding uncertainties should be for a prophet or a divine voice, but according to the sages in that generation.” Accordingly, “If the sages encountered an uncertainty about something . . . ​it would be best to let the issue remain in uncertainty, as was said [B. Temurah 16a] ‘in regard to the days of mourning for Moses, that laws were forgotten, etc. and that they asked of Joshua to inquire [from God] and he replied [Deut. 30:12], “it is not in the heavens.” ’ ”38 In keeping with his fellow Mitnagdic ideologues, Heller’s focus on a Torah given to human beings maintains a separation between God and Israel. It is not an irreparable break, but only a loosening of the metaphysical relation between God and the world. Here, Torah becomes a necessary conduit between the two. However, Heller’s pun at the end of the quotation suggests something perhaps even more radical than epistemological limitation. Using the phrase sekhelim nivdalim to refer both to “separate intellects” (medieval writers’ term for angels) and to the differing reasoning processes among humans that

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reflect their distance from angels of the divine realm,39 Heller nevertheless justifies human conceptions of truth at odds with other supernal beings. Human reasoning therefore achieves an exalted status, which is why mapping uncertainty is necessary: it enables the process of attaining truth. And truth, in this degree of separation from what God or the angels might know to be true, enables the creative act of human thinking. Thus, Heller continues, “In this, what is said in the Zohar can be understood, that from creative interpretations of Torah new land is created (me-ḥiddushei orayta boreh arets ḥadashah). . . . ​The Holy One who is blessed chose us and gave us the Torah according to the ruling of human reason even though it may not be true, and if that is the case then the one who creatively interprets anew, their interpretation is a complete novelty, only it is true in the ruling of human reason.”40 The creative capacity of human reason, in Heller’s estimation, is the unique gift of Torah and the core of human responsibility in observing commandments and in moral action.41 And because Heller understands uncertainty to be the domain of human reason, he turns his attention in his introduction to the Ketsot ha-ḥoshen as well as the Shev shema‘teta to the Oral Torah, which may very well be judged incorrect according to a divine reason. Heller was not the first to examine the reality of uncertainty, to be sure.42 However, he took the fundamentally epistemic question about limited human reasoning advanced first by the GRA and other Mitnagdim and prioritized a method for addressing the uncertainties that inevitably result from this metaphysical separation between God and human. Heller thus enhances the agency of human reasoning not despite, but because of the this-worldly limitations placed on human thinking. The uncertainties about the supernal source of Torah are due to our limited comprehension of Torah, yet our ability to think this enchanted world of Torah into greater degrees of clarity and “truth” would seem to achieve that which Menaḥem Mendel elevated to the highest form of divine action: comprehension. And because the creative freedom of Torah enables human thinking not only to participate in but now also create new dimensions of the enchanted world, Heller’s elaboration of Torah intensifies the enchantment of the world, within the space God occupies in this world; namely, the four cubits (amot) of the halakhah.43 The Mitnagdic intensification of a distinctive human Torah enables a growing sense of agency for human reason because the divine and the holy— the enchantment of transcendence—are projected into the immanent sphere of human reasoning. This form of reasoning is not simply the abstraction of the derided style of casuistry known as pilpul, but rather the activity of a



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divinely willed freedom for the human being, which becomes manifest in human agency. Although God may not be actively correcting human errors of reasoning, the world becomes enchanted by tracing our epistemological uncertainties. And by means of this limitation, the rigorous pursuit of uncertainty frees human thinking to create new meanings. The Torah becomes a conduit for human thinking to bring more and more enchantment into this world. If rationalization is only understood as the work of an Enlightenment subjectivity, whose autonomous use of reason achieves emancipation from all heteronomous tradition, then it is not possible to understand the distinctive developments of Mitnagdic thought. For its part, much of modern rabbinic thought, both Hasidic and Mitnagdic, represents tradition as a body of knowledge through which human thinking is shaped and articulated.44 Thus, the uncertainty about law and ritual that results from such knowledge becomes a primary site for individual Jews to express creative agency and place themselves within a world that is saturated with supernal traces, which become psychically real through comprehension.45 This knowledge is not purely constituted through the acceptance of revelation alone, if that is taken to be an otherworldly thing that is injected into “this world” in a single moment. Rather, the work of adapting the Oral Torah—the transmission of knowledge about ritual purity and practice from generation to generation to the demands of the current generation—requires human beings to take possession of and embody something otherwise than an abstract autonomous reason. Uncertainty is the mark of this kind of precarious freedom. Enchanted thinking is dependent on the tradition through which it sees the world. As a distinctly human possession, rather than a metaphysical force to which Jews are passively submitted, the Oral Torah provides a space in which new selves are articulated.

The Modern Yeshivah In the previous section, I suggested that the intellectualization of Torah in Mitnagdic thought is in part a result of ideological polemic against Hasidic acosmism that insisted on separation. By emphasizing the epistemological limits of human reasoning, the Mitnagdim understood Torah as the exclusive gateway to enchantment. Supernal in its origin, Torah nevertheless represents a space of divinity within an otherwise finite and incomplete world.

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But I also suggested that the development of an active technique for cultivating uncertainty in the pursuit of truth, in the conceptualizing work of Heller, represented a shift toward the creative freedom of a limited human reasoning. Rather than a vulnerability that resulted in a wound, the precarity of human reasoning elevated the act of study to an even higher rank. Torah became something decidedly more than textual stimulus printed in books alone; it left its imprint on the thinker, and the thinker in turn imprinted the world with enchantment.46 That is to say, Torah was not interpreted as the textual means to interpretive legal ends nor simply as a guide to ritual observance. It is with this intensification of the this-worldly performance of Torah study that we can begin to trace a developing consciousness of Torah as a practice of self-cultivation. When the Mitnagdic intellectualization of Torah secured an institutional space within the walls of the Etz Ḥayyim yeshivah of Volozhin, Torah became a world of its own into which thinking could step and gain connection with the divine. But the yeshivah of Volozhin, first opened in 1803, also became a social and cultural center in which students could inhabit this enchanted world of Torah and participate in the creative work of ḥiddushim as a singular end in itself. Torah study thus became the vehicle for a generation of modern Jews to cultivate an enchanted sense of self. Self-consciously designed to be an alternative to the popular piety of the Hasidic movement and its theological worldview of cleaving to divinity in this world, the yeshivah of Volozhin is characterized by the pursuit of this-worldly reasoning.47 Neither taking the form of autonomous Kantian reason that brackets the enchantment of metaphysics nor of purely heteronomous revelation, the reasoning practiced in Volozhin sought the cultivation of the supernal in each individual’s display of intellectual prowess. In pursuit of the metaphysical splendor of the supernal Torah, the yeshivah’s founder, R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin, did not institute the study of kabbalistic theories such as the one presented in his own Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim but instead prioritized the study of Talmud. The Talmud came to represent the apex of logical argument, and students’ mastery of that material would demonstrate their cultivation of an exalted reasoning. Hence, the yeshivah was intended as a site of intensive study for its own sake, rather than for preparation for the rabbinate or for the cultivation of other spiritual practices. As a kind of existential dwelling in the words—and the worlds—of Torah, it sought to fulfill R. Ḥayyim’s vision of cleaving one’s soul to the divine (devekut). Devekut, when understood as such dwelling in the enchantment of



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Torah, explains R. Ḥayyim, means to “know, to comprehend, and to increasingly obtain through analysis (pilpul).”48 Analysis or pilpul therefore becomes a praxis of being enchanted through the labor of reasoning. The study of Torah lishmah casts the enchanted cosmos as a kind of hyperreal stage play in which the various halakhic positions mapped out by the tannaim and amoraim, when viewed according to the internal conceptual logic of such distinct halakhic worldviews, assemble the mise-en-scène of the world.49 By placing these halakhic worldviews into greater conceptual focus, the yeshivah emphasized a hermeneutic in which the student sought to comprehend himself as entering into the ideal, logical components of a thinker’s method (shitah) as a space in which to also dwell.50 And at base of this meta-worldview of a halakhic universe was R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin’s quasi-mystical vision of Torah study as perhaps the most efficacious means of bringing this otherworldliness into the world. By cleaving to a world beyond the discernibly present one, it is significant that the emphasis of analysis and logic in Volozhin demonstrated a kind of rationality that could be a tool to comprehend the otherwise than rational.51 Yet the move to standardize such an enchanted reasoning in a curriculum, as it was developed further in the middle of the nineteenth century, should be understood in context. Israel Bartal has demonstrated that Eastern European Jewry was completely transformed by the dissolution of the Kahal in 1844,52 and in the wake of this newfound social and political vulnerability, new networks of sociality emerged along with new forms of communal authority and negotiations of autonomy. By learning this method of study and by dwelling in enchantment, therefore, the student of the yeshivah was primed for a new model of self-formation that emphasized the cultivation of one’s individual agency as dependent on dwelling in a tradition of knowledge in the midst of an increasingly unstable world for modern Jewry. For example, as Shaul Stampfer notes, it does not seem as though study partners were the norm in Volozhin, but rather students studied individually, perhaps because of the culture of individual distinction encouraged among the student body.53 Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik’s famous poem “Ha-Matmid” (“The Talmud Student”) famously caricatured the students’ striving to demonstrate their intellectual prowess: For there, in the dark corner, wait for him— Faithful companions since the day he came— Three friends: his stand, his candle and his Talmud. . . .

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See! He has locked within his heart, forever, Two of the ponderous tractates; can repeat Each page, each column, and each syllable. His fellow students eye him enviously— Foresee his triumph in the days to come. Two tractates whole! How happy is his lot! Shall not the inward heart of him rejoice Who plucks so soon the guerdon of his toil? Two titles has he—wonder-child and scholar. One jewel shines upon the High Priest’s brow, One crown of laurel is the poet’s prize One wreath of bays is to the hero given; On his, the boy’s brow, two already shine, One for the wonder-child, one for the scholar. On the sky-soaring ladder of the Torah, It’s only one step more to the rank of Gaon? Have many reached the glory which is his?54 Bialik’s description of the lone student toiling in a dreamscape of heroic intellectual prowess, despite being all alone in a dusty corner, bemoans what “this-worldly” achievements the Matmid might have accomplished. Yet, Bialik also gives voice to the exalted value represented by Torah study as transporting the student into a new world. And as even Bialik and other alumni including Michah Yosef Berdyczewski would have acknowledged, it was the intellectually compelling mode of thought that developed in Volozhin that transfixed a generation of modern Jews, for whom the yeshivah was a stepping-stone toward higher education and cultural formation.55 In transforming the already novel worldview of study for its own sake (Torah lishmah) that was permeating the yeshivah into a practical pedagogy, R. Yosef Dovber HaLevi Soloveitchik, the head of the yeshivah of Volozhin from 1854–65 and the rabbi of Brisk from 1877–92, ensured that the yeshivah would become and remain the center of talmudic and halakhic learning in Eastern Europe. His method of instruction and of study provided students with the conceptual resources and training to think an enchanted modernity into being. Soloveitchik stressed conceptual study and analytical deepening of the halakhah (be-‘iyyun u-be-ameku shel ha-halakhah) over the rote memorization or instrumental study of the Oral Torah.56 Such an ideology created a new conception of the talmid ḥakham, the student who toils in



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learning Torah, as an explicitly distinct form of life. For example, writing in response to an inquiry from a teacher in Pressburg, whose patrons no doubt voiced their anxieties over their children’s ability to balance the demands of the modern world and earning a living and trying to acquire a knowledge of halakhah, Soloveitchik explained his rationale for admission to the yeshivah of Volozhin and its curricular design; he claimed that although he values the desire of laypeople (ba‘al ha-batim) to steep themselves in Torah as well and to learn bits and pieces, their desire for students to be educated in such a way was misplaced. While asking that their children be educated in practical halakhic matters, to lessen for the students [of the yeshivah] the extreme burden and respectably desire that the path one takes from the easy to the difficult be shortened and eased until they grow in Torah, to this, I see it fit to reveal to these honorable folk my thoughts about the true purpose [of study] and that such a desire to soften the burden does not exempt one from its obligation. And because of this it is not possible for the simplification of study to enable students to grow as they might hope because from them Torah is spread to all of Israel and they would [merely] administer the people of God to Torah and its documentation. The experience of our Torah is the opposite because anyone who tastes the sweetness of Torah in labor and ambient perspiration in their youth will not depart its worlds [‘olamim] even when he grows old. And if you encounter one student whose countenance slips from focus upon God, you should know for certain that even in his youth his Torah was only from his words and not from his labor and not in exertion, only in word upon his lips and because of this he will lose it.57 Although Soloveitchik was certainly proposing a kind of traditionalist observance of halakhah, his stated goal was not to merely administer Torah as though it were a kind of certificate that teachers of Torah should bring with them and help them lead their communities merely to check boxes. That is, Torah is not a document or a text to be administered. It is the “world of worlds” that is revealed to the one who “labors.” Anything less than a style of study that is complete immersion in a life of labor, Soloveitchik intimates, will no doubt lead one away from God. It is only the labor of thinking and toil and diligent study that lead to the truly disciplined self, the talmid ḥakham.

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This kind of thinking must be embodied; it must lead to perspiration, toil, and exertion. Only then, Soloveitchik claims, can the student come to know something deeper within the halakhah: that the highest value of Torah study is to treat it as labor and the priority of a Jewish life. Thus, for Soloveitchik, the yeshivah must therefore foster a different kind of religious life. In the introduction to the Teshuvot beit ha-Levi (1863), where he similarly explained his own study method, Soloveitchik stresses that his explicitly titled “responsa” should not mislead anyone into assuming that he has in fact set out to compose answers to halakhic questions or a final ruling (siyyum ha-halakhah) based on his time spent learning and teaching in the yeshivah of Volozhin. His stated purpose is to provide an impression of how to seek the proper understanding and clarification of the halakhah, not to account for the practical ruling of the law (lo’ le-ma’aseh). Soloveitchik writes, “I am accustomed to sharpening (le-ḥaded) the understanding of my students, because who can really understand the halakhah if there is no honing (ḥidudah) of their knowledge prior to its [blunt] clarification (libunah)?”58 In other words, Soloveitchik’s stated aim, almost in apologetic fashion, is to concentrate his efforts as an author in the same manner as his pedagogic efforts: the goal is not to teach rote memorization and performance of the law (libunah) but to instill the clarity and precision of how to think the halakhah (ḥidudah). Bending a rabbinic phrase, Soloveitchik therefore mutes the potentially pugnacious retort of critics of the yeshivah, concerned with the difficulty and confusion caused by focusing on the study rather than the practice of the halakhah, as though it were merely a return to the derided pilpul of previous talmudic education, by claiming his interest lies only in the theoretical rather than the practical halakhah (le-halakha ve-lo-le-ma’aseh). For Soloveitchik, the labor of Torah study must lead to a cleaving to an embodied holiness in the act of study such that, as Soloveitchik writes, a talmid ḥakham experiences a spiritual transformation: the very body of the student becomes sanctified with the holiness of Torah that falls into being as the body of the student (’etsem ha-kedushah hal alav be-gufo).59 As the embodiment of holiness, the student who studies Torah for its own sake becomes saturated with this otherworldliness. This enchantment of Torah impresses itself on the body and transmits its energy without an action having transpired to alter objects in the world or enact a ritual transition between times, or any alteration to the physical world through what we might normally describe as labor. And yet, the sensation of a transformation and the affective state of circulating this otherworldliness through



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the body are real, perhaps realer than real. Pursuing something other than either mastery of rote ritual practice or ecstatic piety, as Zalman Epstein recounts, the students of Volozhin thus sought a more modern goal in that they studied Torah, Gemara, and the medieval commentaries not out of fear of heaven, and not because it is a mitzvah but rather because it was something real—science, knowledge, the matter of greatest value and the most primary aspect of Jewish life—and thinking finds so much satisfaction in it. They studied with desire and regularity, and they delighted in the struggle (milḥamah) of Torah, in the broad sea of Talmud, that streams and flows and inundates in every direction, without beginning and without end. . . . ​The student was no longer zealous or obsessive, dim, inclined toward excessive piety. This was already a force revealed, open, and alive and prepared for development and progress. This was no longer the archaic and rigid power of the old Jewish street, which neither thunder nor lightning could move: covered with a layer of mud as though no life remained—and resolved (patur)!60 Epstein describes the realness of study and science, the eclipse of a naïve or superstitious submission to forces unknown, as the preparation for “development and progress,” as something “new.” This “primary aspect of Jewish life” was found at the meeting point between the knowledge and matter of greatest value that the individual thinker experienced while studying the traditional sources of Torah. Placing the student within the sphere of “science” and the most real knowledge separated the yeshivah and its students from the “old Jewish street.” What they were undertaking was new, and it was alive within them. This creative freedom to think with and about Torah was crucial to the Mitnagdic project, as we have seen. Even nonconceptualist scholars such as Volozhin’s dean, R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (Netziv), pursued this form of creative agency when he compares Bezalel’s independent designs of the Tabernacle in the desert to the human capacity to think the Oral Torah through one’s individual creative agency.61 Those who think Oral Torah are therefore the embodiment of this otherworldly world, whose cleaving to enchantment opens them up to an overlapping of enchantment and disenchantment in the self. And in the project of the yeshivah of Volozhin, we see that the pursuit of a distinctively human practice of cultivating uncertainty

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and recognizing the human capacity to create new queries about what we do not know established the goal not simply of creating new laws but rather of creating a new sense of self and self-reflexivity.62 The “identity” of the student in the yeshivah was self-conscious of his limitations; this became the site of agency and the realm of enchantment.

Conclusion: The Ritualization of an Enchanted Reason The Mitnagdic project of prioritizing Torah study and of locating creative freedom in Oral Torah enabled an enchanted, otherworldly script to be written on a this-worldly parchment. In other words, if we understand “secularity” as a reference to the this-worldly preoccupations of human thinking and acting—to the Torah given to humans and not the ministering angels, as Heller described it—then the yeshivah of Volozhin should be considered a central piece of the emerging this-worldly, secular Jewish world. To be clear, however, I am not making any claims here of a specific chain of influences or causes. Nor am I suggesting that by describing the yeshivah as an institution conditioned by secularity that we should understand it as a site of nonreligious or nontraditional thought and practice. Rather, I am challenging the notion that the secular can be defined in Weberian terms of its supposed rationality to the exclusion of any sense of enchantment. I therefore drew attention to the way that Oral Torah becomes a site for what we might interpret as new, this-worldly concerns, such as cultivating a self-conscious identity, ritual agency, and creative capacity for knowing and acting through the lens of an enchanted tradition. My interpretation of these materials suggested that the cosmological blueprint for vindicating human thought takes shape in this human activity of thinking and that the particular emphasis on Torah not as text but an intellectual and spiritual realm of thinking represents a move that unsettles what reason might mean as an arbiter of both secularity and modernity. The implications of these claims about the Mitnagdic project of intellectualizing Torah is that it becomes the site of an alternative account of “modern” Jewish selfhood. Much as I suggested earlier about the “secular,” I do not mean by “modern” that this vision follows the account of enlightened rationality or an abstract, rights-bearing subject of legal and political discourse. Rather, I mean that a self that is shaped by thinking about its dependence on a tradition and on a realm of meaning that is both part of



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and beyond this world still participates in the discursive forms of modernity while endowing them with enchantment. I am thus suggesting that it is not historical discourse that ought to characterize the capacity for self-reflexivity so often deemed the marker of modernity, but rather that dependency on enchantment might also be included within the scope of what counts as selfreflexive. Characterizing this dependent yet expressive agency to cultivate uncertainty as modern is therefore to suggest that modernity might be defined in terms of the capacity for self-reflexivity or the distinct development of a self that is capable of change through reflection on its meaningful entanglement with the world and of changing its world through those same reflections. It is this religious anthropology of the Oral Torah that conditions the turn to talmudic conceptualism as a turn to the practice of thinking. The modern self is a self that thinks Torah into being. This practice of thinking— this work of idealizing Torah as a task of thinking,63 rather than certainty about “reality,” whether divine or human—demonstrates the modern dimension of this project. The Mitnagdic ideal of Torah study sought to cultivate a distinctive world of enchantment—of supernal meaning brought into a this-worldly experience of thinking—amidst what was seen as an increasingly disenchanted modern world. To better understand how this thinking remained “enchanted,” it may be helpful to think of Volozhin as a site for the ritualization of thinking. That is, Volozhin’s ethos was governed by a commitment to dwelling in the overlapping worlds of Torah and human thinking. Within the yeshivah, the emphatically human possession of Oral Torah that allowed reason and enchantment to become ever more entangled also allowed the student of Torah to ritualize thinking as part of his self-formation. In other words, following Catherine Bell, we might describe this enchanted thinking as a form of ritualization, or the process through which ritual agents negotiate relative power structures and manipulate the norms and structures that shape their experience. Rather than a negation of previous ritual and tradition, ritualization helps explain the dialectical enveloping of shifting powers that condition ritual agents. As Bell writes, such transformations reveal how the ultimate purpose of ritualization is neither the immediate goals avowed by the community or of the officiant nor the more abstract functions of social solidarity and conflict resolution: it is nothing other than the production of ritualized agents, persons who have

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an instinctive knowledge of the schemes embedded in their bodies, in their sense of reality, and in their understanding of how to act in ways that both maintain and qualify the complex microrelations of power. Such practical knowledge is not an inflexible set of assumptions, beliefs, or body postures; rather it is the ability to deploy, play, and manipulate basic schemes in ways that appropriate and condition experience effectively. It is a mastery that experiences itself as relatively empowered, not as conditioned or molded.64 The ritualization of thinking in the elaborations of Mitnagdic writers reflects what Bell calls “practical knowledge,” not as a form of justification for practices but rather as the appropriation of a way of being. Torah, in this light, becomes embodied in the act of thinking—an act of thinking that disciplines the self and, in turn, allows the self to emerge as a ritual agent. When studied “for its own sake,” the Torah becomes something “enacted” at the level of its conceptual organization and recreation, something thought into being. Yet, more than abstract cogitation, the study of Torah lishmah is an enacted thinking that embodies the Torah in the person of the student. This entangles the world of embodiment with an aura of enchantment, creating an affective lens that gazes through this world into otherworldly spheres. Throughout this chapter my goal has been to articulate an overlooked dimension of Jewish modernization as it developed within the intellectual worldview of modern rabbinic thought and its revolutionary method and practice of study. In doing so, I traced genealogically a distinct notion of modern Jewish religious thinking that was emphatically “rationalizing” while simultaneously enchanted by emphasizing the human dimension of Oral Torah. As we saw with Heller, the limitations of human reasoning nevertheless enabled a creative agency. We might suggest that this increasing conceptualization of Torah study enabled a new form of selfhood to emerge out of the discipline of thinking: actively tarrying with uncertainty, asking questions, raising objections, and pushing deeper into what is known and what is not known. This ritualization of thinking helped express the humanizing secularity or this-worldly nature of Oral Torah that would be embraced by and later popularized in the depictions of Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man. And although the description of a halakhic worldview is most commonly associated with the latter work, I suggest that it represents a polemic of a different sort due to the increasing purchase of the religion/



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secular binary as it was internalized by halakhic discourse in the twentieth century.65 But as we saw with Heller and the Beit Halevi, the self is shaped through an encounter, labor, and possession of the Oral Torah—a human possession that is inhabited and in turn inscribed on the very self that emerges from this act of thinking. Although a this-worldly affair, the enchantment of Torah is sustained. Thus, uncertainty and knowledge open a space in which the self is recreated as an enchanted agent of ritualization, capable of manipulating schemes of knowledge that are always already conditioning those improvisations, as Bourdieu and Bell might put it. As such, even in R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s more explicit engagement with knowledge and cognition as a sphere of secularity, there is no assertion of an epistemic or already constituted rational subject prior to the encounter with the halakhic given.66 An account of secularization as rationalizing disenchantment therefore fails to capture the intellectual worldview described here. The ritualization of thinking—the enchantment of thinking—helps articulate a distinct modernism within the intellectual worldview of Mitnagdic thought and later Talmudic conceptualism. A distinctly epistemological discipline shapes the embodied self. Thinking therefore means something quite distinct from the disenchanted “reason” described by Weber. The ritualized thinking presented in this chapter is a process through which the self is carved out as an embodiment of holiness, a spiritual entity that cannot be reduced to a norm or an institution but is rather a kind of pistis sharpened through episteme, a faith in knowledge. The boundaries between tradition and modernity, between old and new worlds, between reason and enchantment are blurred.

Notes

introduction 1. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 230. 2. Naomi Seidman, Sarah Schenirer and the Bais Yaakov Movement: A Revolution in the Name of Tradition (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2019), 6. 3. Seidman, Sarah Schenirer, 222–23. 4. Heschel, Abraham Geiger, 22. 5. David Myers, The Stakes of History: On the Use and Abuse of Jewish History for Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 118. 6. See, for example, Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 148–49. 7. Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 101, and its citation of George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 8. See also Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52–76, esp. 75; Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Feminist Consequences: Theory for the New Century, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Misha Kavka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 126–60, esp. 144–48.

chapter 1 Note to epigraph: Adam Kirsch, “Israel’s Founding Novelist,” New Yorker, November 21, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/21/israels-founding-novelist. 1. Yael S. Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 2. Yael S. Feldman, “Deliverance Denied: Isaac’s Sacrifice in Israeli Arts and Culture— A Jewish-Christian Exchange?” in The Bible Retold by Jewish Artists, Writers, Composers and Filmmakers, ed. Helen Leneman and Barry Dov Walfish (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2015), 85– 117. Cf. Shulamit Laderman, “Models of Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity as Seen Through Artistic Representations of the Sacrifice of Isaac,” in The Actuality of Sacrifice: Past

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and Present, ed. Alberdina Houtman, Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Yossi Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 343–76. 3. For details about the momentous personal events that led to Agnon’s return to Jewish religion see Dan Laor, Ḥayey Agnon (Agnon’s Life) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998), 160–67. 4. The understanding of self-annihilation in suicide/martyrdom as an economically “reasonable” barter between man and god/s was one of the cornerstones of the nascent field of sociology developed near the beginning of the twentieth century by its French founder Émile Durkheim and his disciples Henry Hubert and Marcel Mauss. This approach continued to thrive in the work of their heirs Bataille, Derrida, and others. See Émile Durkheim, Suicide [1897], trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (London: Routledge, 1952); Henry Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function [1899], trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies [1925], trans. Ian Cunnison (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954); Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III [1947, 1986], trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991); René Girard, Violence and the Sacred [1972], trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death [1992], trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 5. Euripides had applied a similar though less striking rewriting to the sacrificed Trojan princess Polyxena in his earlier play Hecuba (424 b.c.e.). 6. Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Nicholas Rudall (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 59. For a summary of the scholarly debate about the interpretation of this sudden turning point in the play, and especially for feminist critiques of the narrow choice—to become a victim willingly—that Iphigenia is actually allowed, see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 27–30. 7. See, for example. Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University Press of California, 1987); Arthur J. Droge and James Tabor, A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992); Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Elisabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); and Shmuel Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8. See Feldman, “Deliverance Denied.” 9. Based on Genesis 31, this patriarchal “deity” was interpreted in Jewish mysticism as the representation of evil and heresy (equivalent to sitra aḥra, the “other” or “dark” side). 10. For details see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 1–10. For an analysis of an early, pre-Israel [1942!] case of rejection of the classical ‘Akedah “economy,” see Yael Feldman, “Is Ashman the Forgotten Grandfather of the Psycho-Political Akedah of Contemporary Israel?” in Habimah: ‘Iyunim ḥadashim be-te’atron le’umi (New Studies of Habimah, a National Theater), ed. Shelly Zer-Zion, Dorit Yerushalmi, and Gad Kaynar-Kissinger (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2017), 405–16. 11. Feldman, Glory and Agony, 11–38. 12. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Trading Pain for Knowledge or: How the West was Won,” Social Research 75, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 485–510. 13. Harpham cites Simone Weil’s famous statement, “The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation,” found in her essay, “Human Personality” (originally, La personne et



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le sacré [!], 1933). Cf. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self in Early Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1995). 14. Interestingly, Harpham was then the president and director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. 15. On “sacred” or “holy” pain and their secular offshoots, see Ariel Glucklich, Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Cf. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Talal Asad, “Thinking About Agency and Pain,” in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 67–124. 16. Harpham, “Trading Pain,” 485–86. Cf. Esther Cohen, Leona Toker, Manuela Consonni, and Otniel E. Dror, eds., Knowledge and Pain (Leiden, Belgium: Brill, 2012). My thanks to the editors of that volume for the invitation to present an early foray into this theme at the Scholion Seminar on Knowledge and Pain at the Hebrew University in May 2010. 17. Feldman, Glory and Agony, 75–84. This critique reached new heights following the infamous Kishinev pogrom; see Yael S. Feldman, “ ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter’? On Trauma, Selective Memory, and the Making of Historical Consciousness,” Jewish Social Studies 19, no. 3 (2013): 139–69. 18. Feldman, Glory and Agony, 70–106. 19. Notice that the traditional label of the story of Genesis 22 is ‘Akedah, namely, “binding,” rather than Korban (sacrifice; victim); for more on this issue see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 41–69. 20. By the date 1880s I refer to the Russian pogroms that led to the formation of the first Jewish self-defense movements along with the earliest modern Jewish national martyric discourse; as I show in Glory and Agony, this discourse began to wane as early as the 1960s but came virtually under attack in Israeli culture after the 1973 War, and even more so after the Lebanon War of 1982. 21. Feldman, Glory and Agony, 131–310. 22. Feldman, “ ‘Not as Sheep.’ ” 23. Although the first chapter of Shirah was published in the fall of 1948, and other chapters followed in the next two decades, the novel was published only posthumously in 1971. 24. For a different take on the pro and con argument over Jewish martyrdom in Agnon’s work, see Michal Arbel, “Continuity and Crisis in National Identity in Agnon’s A Guest for the Night, ‘The Letter,’ and ‘The Sign,’ ” in Itot shel shinui: Sifruyot yehudiot ba-tekufah ha-modernit, ed. Gidi Nevo, Michal Arbel, and Michael Gluzman (Sede Boker: Ben Gurion Institute, 2008), 173–208. For a general analysis of the role of economy in Agnon’s corpus, see Yonatan Sagiv, Indebted: Capitalism and Religion in the Writings of Shmuel Yosef Agnon (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2016). 25. S. Y. Agnon, Ore’aḥ nata lalun (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975 [1939]); A Guest for the Night, ed. Naftali C. Brandwein and Allen Mandelbaum, trans. Misha Louvish (New York: Schocken, 1968); republished with a new foreword by Jeffrey Saks (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2015). 26. The highlights of this literary revolt, which criticized the national sacrifice of contemporary Isaacs rather than lauding it, include early works by some of the most prestigious veteran Israeli authors, such as Amos Oz, Shulamit Hareven, and A. B. Yehoshua. See Feldman,

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Glory and Agony, 215–309; for Amos Oz’s early 1960s antecedents, see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 183–214. 27. Interestingly, Agnon does not engage here in an oedipal analysis of the son–father agon; theirs is an ideational parting of the ways, portrayed with hardly any deep psychological dynamics. 28. Agnon, Ore’aḥ, 37; emphasis added. All translations from the Hebrew are mine. 29. See David Flusser, ed., Sefer Yosippon (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978), Vol. 1:70–75. For English, see Sepher Yosippon: A Tenth-Century History of Ancient Israel, translated and introduced by Steven Bowman (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State UP, 2022), 67–71. 30. Lamentation Rabbah 1, 50; emphasis added. Of the rich scholarly literature on “the mother of the seven sons,” Aharon Agus emphasizes the narrator’s need to rationalize the story, so that it sounds both heroic and true; see The Binding of Isaac and Messiah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 14ff. That this story was the earliest model for the Jewish martyrdom tradition (harugei malkhut) was established by Gerson D. Cohen, “Hannah and Her Seven Sons in Hebrew Literature,” in Sefer ha-yovel [Festschrift] for M. M. Kaplan (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1953), 109–23; cf. Jan Willem van Henten, The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviors of the Jewish People (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 210–69; on the rabbinic versions of the tale see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Riqmat ḥayim (Web of Life): Folklore in Rabbinic Literature (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1996), 108–28; for the medieval versions see Elisheva Baumgarten and Rela Koshalevsky, “From the ‘Mother and Her Sons’ to the ‘Mother of Sons’ in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Zion 71, no. 3 (2006): 301–42; and Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, “The Mother and Seven Sons in Late Antique and Medieval Ashkenazi Judaism: Narrative Transformations and Communal Identity,” in Dying for the Faith, Killing for the Faith (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 125–46. 31. On the various implications of the lack of lexical distinction in Hebrew between the notions of “sacrifice” and “victim” (and the Russian and German parallels), see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 34–36. 32. For my early exploration of this theme see Yael S. Feldman, “How Does a Convention Mean? A Semiotic Reading of Agnon’s Bilingual Key-Irony in A Guest for the Night,” Hebrew Union College Annual 56 (1985): 251–69. For a brief Hebrew version, see “Beyn mafte’aḥ le-man’ul: ‘al ironia agnonit aḥat” (Between a Key and a Lock: On Agnon’s Irony), Ha-sifrut 32 (1983): 148–54. The implication of Agnon’s bilingual irony was further developed recently in Jeffery Saks’s foreword to the new English edition of A Guest for the Night, titled “Agnon’s Roman à Clef of Going Home Again” (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2015), vii–xviii. 33. Agnon, Ore’aḥ, 440. 34. My reading here builds on my earlier interpretations in my articles “How Does a Convention Mean?” (n. 32) and “The Latent and the Manifest: Freudianism in A Guest for the Night,” Prooftexts 7, no. 1 (January 1987), 29–39. In the 1980s my reading swerved from the mainstream redemptive interpretation of the novel’s closure, as established by Baruch Kurzweil in his Masot ‘al sipurey Shai Agnon (Essays on S. Y. Agnon’s Fiction) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975), 57, and Arnold Band, Nostalgia and Nightmare (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 308. Recent readings are still divided on the issue. Dan Laor upholds the novel’s redemptive conclusion by highlighting Agnon’s close relations with the Zionist rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935); see his Shai Agnon: Hebetim Ḥadashim (Agnon: New Perspectives) (Tel Aviv, 1995), 38. Others downplay the political solution and emphasize the art of writing as the only redemption left; for example, Anne Golomb Hoffman, Between Exile and Return:



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S. Y. Agnon and the Drama of Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press,1991), 100; Michal Arbel, “Rabbi Amnon of Maintz as an Exemplary Figure in Agnon’s Work,” in Meḥkarim ba-sipporet ha-yehudit (Studies in Jewish Literature), ed. Avidov Lipsker and Rella Kushlavsky (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2009), 2:325–59. 35. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Agnon Before and After,” Prooftexts 2, no. 1 (January 1982): 78–94; Dan Laor, “Did Agnon Write About the Shoah?” Yad Vashem Studies 22 (1992): 17–63. 36. The edited volume—Hans-Jürgen Becker and Hillel Weiss, eds., Agnon in Germany (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2010)—includes several refutations of this premise, including Hillel Weiss, “The Presence of the Holocaust in Agnon’s Writings” (428–50) and Yaniv Hagbi, “Aspects of ‘Primary Holocaust’ in the Works of S. Y. Agnon” (451–72). 37. S. Y. Agnon, “Ha-siman,” Moznaim 18, no. 2 (1944): 103–4. A greatly extended version was included in Ha-esh ve-ha-`etzim (The Fire and the Wood) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1971), 283–315. 38. See Alan Mintz, “Between Holocaust and Homeland: ‘The Sign’ as a Dedicatory Story,” ‘Idan Ha-tzionut (2000): 317–35. For a diametrically opposite take, see Nitza Ben-Dov, “An Ironic Gaze at God’s Mercy—The Shoah Experience in Agnon’s ‘The Sign,’ ” in Ḥayim Ketuvim: Israeli Literary Autobiographies (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2011), 31–52. 39. S. Y. Agnon, “Lefi ha-tza’ar ha-sakhar,” Ha’aretz, September 23, 1947. 40. S. Y. Agnon, “Lefi ha-tza’ar ha-sakhar,” in Ha-’esh ve-ha-`etzim, 5–19. 41. This interpretation was established by Baruch Kurzweil early on; see his “The Fire and the Wood: An Interim Epic Summary After the ‘Akedah,” in Masot ‘al sipurey Shai Agnon (Essays on S.Y. Agnon’s Fiction) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1975), 311–27. Hillel Weiss followed this interpretation in his “Remarks on ‘Akedat Yitzhak,” in Ha-’akedah ve-ha-tokhehah (Binding and Reproach), ed. Zvi Luz (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991), 50–51. 42. The first chapter of Shirah was published a year later, in 1948, also in Ha’aretz. 43. See S. Y. Agnon, “ ‘Ad ‘olam” [Forevermore] (1954), in Ha-esh ve-ha-’etzim, 315–34; and in Jeffrey Saks, ed., Forevermore & Other Stories (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2017). 44. My thanks to Hanoch Ben-Pazi of Bar Ilan University for the second suggestion. As we see, the story indeed struggles with the justification of divine judgment as possibly hinted by the name “Tzidkiya,” which combines the Hebrew root for justice (tz.d.k) with the noun “Ya,” one of the synonyms for the word “God.” 45. For example, Aryeh Wineman reads the story as set in medieval times and also suggests that the hero’s name may mean “Mr. Charity”: the Hebrew word for almsgiving, tzedakah, also derives from the root tz.d.k. See his “Paytan and Paradox: An Analysis of Agnon’s “Lefi ha-tsaʿar ha-sakhar,’ ” Hebrew Union College Annual 49 (1978), 295–310. Focusing on the rich midrashic tradition that nourished this tale, this article demonstrates the parallels between “Isaac’s self-enacted sacrifice” as it appears in this corpus and the burning to ashes of Mar Tzidkiya’s liturgy about it. Though this analogy is certainly evoked by Agnon’s text, one should not ignore its weakness: How can a poem, an inanimate object with no will of its own that was sentenced to be burned by its creator, be compared to the Midrashic Isaac, who, unlike his passive biblical prototype, had been endowed with an independent will of his own, thus becoming the active martyr found in late antiquity and medieval Judaism? On the latter see especially Spiegel, n. 56. 46. Cf. the ambiguous, double message controlling Agnon’s “Petiḥah le-Kaddish” (published in 1947 too!) as analyzed by James A. Diamond in “Agnon’s Kaddish: Mourning for God,” Shofar 22, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 22–42.

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47. On the link between devotion to faith and dedication to art, see Michal Arbel’s observation that in Agnon’s stories, “issues of continuity and crisis of faith are always woven with questions of the artist and artistic destiny and devotion; the two contexts of devotion— to faith and to art—are almost inseparably interwoven.” Arbel, “The Sad Cantoress MiriamDevorah and Other Cantors in Agnon’s Stories ‘The Cantors’ and ‘Measuring Gain by Pain,’ ” Ayin Gimel: A Journal for Agnon Studies 2 (2012): 108–30. 48. In Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003) Susan Sontag “replied” to Virginia Woolf ’s question, “How are we to prevent war?” in her 1938 essay “Three Guineas” that grew out of her collection of images of the ravages inflicted by the Spanish Civil War, that horrific prelude to World War II. For a discussion of “Three Guineas,” see Yael  S. Feldman, “From Essentialism to Constructivism? The Gender of Peace and War in Gilman, Woolf, Freud,” Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature and History of Ideas 2, no. 12 (January 2004): 113–45. 49. Agnon, The Fire and the Wood, 7. 50. Was “God” deliberately omitted here from the commonly used phrase “God’s finger,” which one would expect in this context? 51. Agnon, The Fire and the Wood, 7. 52. Shalom Spiegel, “Me-aggadot ha-‘akedah” (1950); translated as The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice; trans. Judah Goldin (New York: Schocken, 1967). For a detailed analysis and contextualization, see Feldman, Glory and Agony, 154–57. 53. Agnon, The Fire and the Wood, 11. 54. The ironic reference to Shibush (meaning a disruption, mess-up, error)—Agnon’s literary name for his Galician hometown Buchach—is transparent. 55. Agnon, Fire and the Wood, 18. 56. Of the rich literature about the fraught relationship between Yiddish and Hebrew, especially during the twentieth century, see Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 57. See the harsh, anti-redemptive story “Kisui ha-dam” (Covering the Blood) in contrast to “Hadom ve-kise” (Footrest and Royal Seat), both published posthumously in Lifnim min ha-ḥomah (Inside the City Walls) (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1976). 58. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 17–34. 59. Albert Camus, La Peste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). 60. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 108. 61. This description of the beggar naturally lends itself to a messianic interpretation that would multiply the fault and “fall” of Mar Tzidkiya for his failure to recognize him. For the wide range of the symbolic valence of the image of the beggar, see Galili Shahar, “The Beggars,” in Gufim ve-shemot (Bodies and Names: Readings in Modern Jewish Literature) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2016), 90–149. 62. In her note to the second Hebrew edition of Shirah (Schocken, 1974, p. 542), Agnon’s daughter and literary executor Emunah Yaron writes, “My father wrote Shirah and the story ‘Forevermore’ at the same time. After the [first] publication of Shirah [1971], Rafi Weiser of Agnon’s Archive found how ‘Forevermore’ fits in a specific page of the manuscript of Shirah. Apparently, at a certain point in time ‘Forevermore’ was pulled out of Shirah and became an



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independent story. The 1974 edition of Shirah also includes a ‘Final Chapter’ in which the male protagonist of the novel, the historian and would-be dramaturg Dr. Manfred Herbst, decides to follow his beloved, the now sick Shirah, to the lepers’ residence. In ‘Forevermore’ the scholar Adi’el Amzeh makes a similar decision not for the love of a woman but rather for the love of knowledge [!]: he enters a lepers’ residence only to gain access to an old manuscript that held an indispensable clue for the historical study to which he has dedicated his whole life.” 63. For example, Shirah, 243: “Should I admire the fact that some good for nothing ignored his wife and young children while they were dying of hunger so he could enjoy being idle—what some call ‘worshipping god’?” 64. Agnon dedicated himself to “rebuilding” his hometown Buchach in his late stories, yet never had them published . His stories were posthumously published in the book ‘Ir umelo’ah (1973) and only recently translated to English as Alan Mintz and Jeffrey Saks, eds., A City in Its Fullness (New Milford, CT: Toby Press, 2016). 65. For example, Rabbi Simha Eilberg, Akeidath Treblinka (Shanghai: n.p., 1946); Eliezer Berkovits, With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettos and Death Camps (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1979); and Elie Wiesel, Night, Dawn, the Accident: Three Tales (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972). According to Eilberg, the ‘Akedah “moved with Israel from land to land until it ended up in the death camp”; see “The Akedah of Treblinka,” in Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 192–98. See also Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, “Holy Fire,” in Wrestling with God, 30–40; Gershon Greenberg, “Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Thought About the Holocaust Since World War II: The Radicalized Aspect,” in Wrestling with God, 11–25; Gershon Greenberg, “Sacred Death for Orthodox Jewish Thought During the Holocaust,” in Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature, ed. Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Joseph Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 289–315. See also Feldman, “ ‘Not as Sheep Led to Slaughter?’ ” 66. For details, see Feldman, Glory and Agony. Portions of this chapter were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Washington, D.C. (December 2011), at a Bar-Ilan University International Conference on “Nazism, Holocaust, and Ethics” (May 2018), and at a colloquium on “Mechanisms for Change and Development in the History of the Jews and Judaism” sponsored by both NYU and Tel Aviv University (May 2019). My thanks to the organizers and participants of these meetings for their fruitful critiques and suggestions, as well as to the editors and readers of the present version.

chapter 2 1. This group includes Dov Sadan, Baruch Kurzweil, Meshulam Tukhner, David Kena’ani and others. 2. See Avino’am Barshay, “Kavim ba-bikoret le-dyukan Agnon ha-sofer,” in S. Y. Agnon ba-bikoret ha-‘ivrit: sikumim ve-ha’arakhot ‘al yetzirato, Vol. 1, ed. Avino’am Barshay (Tel Aviv: Schocken, Open University, 1991). 3. Dov Sadan, “Be-mevoey sefer ve-sofro: mavo,” in Pesher Agnon, ed. Meshulam Tukhner (Tel Aviv: Masada, 1968), 7–26. 4. Gershon Shaked, Omanut ha-sipur shel Agnon (Merhavia: Sifriat Po’alim, 1973).

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5. From the collection of stories Thus Far (‘Ad henah), 1952. S. Y. Agnon, “ ‘Im knisat ha-yom,” in ‘Ad henah (Thus Far) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1952), 171–77. See the English translation in S. Y. Agnon, “At the Outset of the Day,” in Twenty-One Stories, ed. Nahum Glatzer and trans. Isaac Franck (New York: Schocken, 1970), 7–25. Excerpts from the story are based on the English translation but have undergone certain revisions; page numbers refer to the Hebrew publication. The first version of this story was published under the title “Between the House and the Yard” (Beyn ha-bayit ve-lakhatzer) in Y. L. Barukh, Sefer ha-mo’adim: parashat mo’adey Israel, ‘erkam, giluyehem ve-hashpa’atam be-ḥayey ‘am Israel u-ve-sifruto mi-ymey kedem ve-’ad ha-yom ha-zeh (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1950). 6. “At the Outset,” 172. 7. “At the Outset,” 173. 8. “At the Outset,” 177. 9. See Shmuel Yeshaya Pnueli, “Yetzirato shel S. Y. Agnon,” in Tarbut ve-ḥinukh (Tel Aviv, 1960); Baruch Kurzweil, Masot ‘al sipurey S. Y. Agnon (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1963); Ya’akov Bahat, “ ‘Im knisat ha-yom le-S. Y. Agnon: mekorot ve-’iyun,” Ha-ḥinukh 39, no. 6–1 (1967): 121–27; Samuel Leiter, Selected Stories of S. Y. Agnon (New York: Tarbut Foundation, 1970); Hillel Barzel, “Ha-poetikah shel S.  Y. Agnon,” Sde ḥemed (February–March  1971): 261–79; Edna Aphek, Ma’arakhot milim: i’yunim be-signono shel S. Y. Agnon (Tel Aviv: Dekel Academic Publishing, 1979); Malka Shaked, “Be‘ayat yom ha-kipurim u-fitronah be-yetsirat Agnon,” in Ḥikrey Agnon: ‘Iyunim u-meḥkarim be-yetsirat S. Y. Agnon, ed. Hillel Weiss and Hillel Barzel (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 1994), 321–35; Rachel ‘Ofer, “ ‘Im knisat ha-yom’: Yamim nora’im ve-teshuvah be-yetzirato shel S.  Y. Agnon,” in Teshuvah u-psykhologiyah (Alon Shvut: 2001): 67–76; Yaniv Hagbi, Lashon, he’ader, mis’ḥak: Yahadut ve-superstrukturalism ba-poetikah shel S. Y. Agnon (Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House, 2007); Galili Shahar, Gufim ve-shemot: kri’ot be-sifrut yehudit ḥadashah (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2016). 10. Kurzweil, Masot, 176, 277. 11. On this matter Moshe Goultschin, analyzing Kurzweil’s critical work, notes,“Kurzweil takes advantage of the way in which he fills the comprehension gaps in Agnon’s work to sway the cultural consensus towards a defiant, pessimistic reading of Agnon’s work.” Goultschin, Barukh Kurzweil ke-parshan shel tarbut (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Publishing, 2009), 168. 12. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 7. James Paxson, writing on new trends in cultural studies, notes a renewed attunement to allegory, a trope that deconstruction has almost anaesthetized and taken out of use due to its over-application. Paxson, “(Re)facing Prosopopeia and Allegory in Contemporary Theory and Iconography,” Studies in Iconography 22 (2001): 1–20. In the twentyfirst century, new emphasis has been placed on the materialism of allegory and its physical, bodily, and corporeal elements—sexuality, desire, violence, abjection, and pain; this is in contrast to the traditional manner in which it was generally handled, as a mechanism for expressing abstract ideas and meanings, and unlike Paul De Man’s deconstructive treatment, which emphasizes the allegory’s self-reference and its detachment from the empirical world. 13. “At the Outset,” 171. 14. “At the Outset,” 172. 15. “At the Outset,” 173. 16. “At the Outset,” 172. 17. “At the Outset,” 175. 18. “At the Outset,” 171.



Notes to Pages 37–43

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19. Psalm 130, KJV. 20. The Book of Deeds (Sefer ha-ma’asim) by Agnon is a collection of thirteen short stories (first published as a collection in 1941), all characterized by a nightmarish and surreal style that blurs the boundaries of time and place, as well as the borders between life and death, reality and imagination. See Agnon, Samukh ve-nire’e (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1950). 21. Bahat, “ ‘Im knisat ha-yom,” 122. 22. “At the Outset,” 177. 23. “At the Outset” 172. 24. Gershom Scholem, “Reflections on S. Y. Agnon,” Commentary (December 1967): 59–66. 25. Hagbi, Lashon, he’ader, misḥak, 282. 26. “At the Outset,” 172. 27. “At the Outset,” 175. 28. Leiter, Selected Stories, 92. 29. Ofer, “ ‘Im knisat ha-yom,’ ” 74. 30. “At the Outset,” 172. 31. “At the Outset,” 177; emphasis added. 32. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 175. 33. “At the Outset,” 177. 34. Pshat and drash are two classical methods of Jewish exegesis. Pshat is defined as referring to the surface or direct meaning of a text, whereas drash is the attempt to interpret and fill gaps in the text, mostly to draw a lesson out of this interpretation. 35. “Each sentence says: ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it.” See also Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 246. 36. “At the Outset,” 175. 37. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 147. 38. This tendency also relates to Agnon’s prominent interest in scholarly characters, as is evident in works such as “Betrothed” (Shevu’at emunim), “ ‘Ido and ‘Enam” (‘Ido ve-’Enam), Shira, and others—as opposed to his lack of interest in “author-writer” characters (see also Scholem, “Reflections,” 59–66). This interest also places the interpretive desire at its center, as the preferred activity rather than the solution. A typical story in this context is “Forevermore” (‘Ad ‘olam), in which ‘Adiel ‘Amzeh spends his days consumed with his research on the lost city of Gumlidata in an attempt to understand from which gate the city was conquered— meaning from which direction one should approach the text: not only the “history of Gumlidata” text but also the story “Forevermore” itself. Even after he solves the riddle of the gate, ‘Amzeh continues to research the book “Forevermore” at the lepers’ home. Yaniv Hagbi notes that Agnon’s insistence on being cryptic while rejecting a solution is his way of enriching the interpretive spectrum and directing his readers’ attention to the creative act itself; see Hagbi, Lashon, he’ader, mis’ḥak, 236–238. 39. Paul De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 205. 40. Paul De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1983), 222.

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41. Edna Aphek writes about Agnon’s fusion between the Hebrew homonyms “tear” and “read” (kra) in this story: “Tearing and reading have merged in the story to weave a dead world; a world in which no activity takes place.” See Aphek, Ma’arakhot milim, 31. By contrast, I view the tearing as an invitation to partake in creative interpretive activity. 42. “At the Outset,” 176. Agnon repeatedly uses the motif of copying. Thus, in “In the Prime of Her Life” (Bi-dmi yamehah), where ‘Akavia Mazal’s diary is repeatedly copied; in “The Tale of the Scribe” (Agadat ha-sofer), which tells the story of a Torah scribe; in “Forevermore” (‘Ad ‘olam), where ‘Amzeh copies the chronicles of Gumlidata. The special emphasis on the act of copying, repetition, and reconstruction shows that, for Agnon, these are the avenues of creation. But here, “creation” takes on a negative meaning because the repetition of the father’s words seeks to erase his real despair and even his own self, whereas in the other works I mentioned the act of copying is steeped in matter and does not deny it. 43. At the Outset,” 176. 44. Sifre Devarim 31:14. 45. “At the Outset,” 173. See also the Song of Songs 3:1. On Agnon and the Song of Songs, see Ilana Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 46. “At the Outset,” 172. 47. “At the Outset,” 173. 48. B. Shabbat 30b. 49. Gil’ad Sasson, “ ‘Mishley ve-Shir ha-shirim ve-Kohelet gnuzim hayu’: levateyhem shel ha-tana’im ve-ha-emora’im be-yaḥas le-sfarav shel Shlomo ha-melekh,” in Ḥokhmat ḥayim ve-shirat ḥayim, eds. Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, Nitza Davidovitch, and Orzion Bartana (Ariel: Ariel University Press, 2009), 205–16. 50. On expressions of incest in “ ‘Ido and ‘Enam” see Tsahi Weiss, “Lada‘at mi-bli lada’at,” Reshit 1 (2009): 261–277; on expressions of incest in “Betrothal,” see Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers. Nitza Ben-Dov’s book Their Praise (Ve-hi tehilatekha) presents incestuous desire as a motivating force of the plot in modern Hebrew literature and shows that Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua draw the incestuous schemes in their novels from the works of S. Y. Agnon. Ben-Dov, Ve-hi tehilatekha: ‘Iyunim be-yetzirot S. Y. Agnon, A. B. Yehoshu’a ve-’Amos ‘Oz (Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2006). 51. “At the Outset,” 175–76. 52. “At the Outset,” 174. 53. There are many links and echoes between these two stories, including their prominent preoccupation with clothing and parchments of sacred texts, the tone and melody of prayer, and the space of the synagogue. For an interesting reading of the tensions between Eros and creation in “The Tale of the Scribe,” see Michal Arbel, Katuv ‘al ‘oro shel ha-kelev: ‘Al tfisat ha-yetzirah etzel S. Y. Agnon (Jerusalem: Keter, 2006). 54. Agnon, “The Tale of the Scribe,” trans. David S. Segal, in Twenty-One Stories, 23–24. 55. Job 1:21 KJV. 56. “Forevermore,” too, expresses a Shabtaian or Frankist debauchery, because “heresy is at the very core of Gumlidata”; see Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers, 124. 57. On the Frankist ceremony in Podolia see Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).



Notes to Pages 51–58

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58. Gershom Scholem, Meḥkarim u-mekorot le-toldot ha-shabta’ut ve-gilguleyhah (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1982), 9–67. 59. This appears in a chapter whose title is also related to the matter at hand, called “Things that Are Better Concealed than Revealed,” where the text reads: “But among all of Buczacz failings we could not find even one of its sons who followed Jacob Frank, even though this despicable specimen was from Buczacz and in Buczacz he was born on Kolorevka Street, and because there is one small town called Koroluvka some chroniclers mistakenly chronicled Frank’s birth as having happened in the city of Koroluvka, and indeed Frank was born on Kolorevka in Buczacz, and Kolorevka Street in Buczacz is two and a half kilometers long, about the size of a small town in our country.” See Agnon, ‘Ir ‘u-melo’ah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1973), 214. Scholem mentions the dubious belief that Frank hailed from a suburb of Buchach bearing a name identical to a town east of Galicia where he was actually born: Koroluvka (and not Kolorebka!). See also Scholem, Meḥkarim u-mekorot, 199. 60. Rachel Elior, “Sefer divrey ha-’adon” le-Ya’akov Frank: Otomitographiyah mistit, nihilizm dati ve-ḥazon ha-ḥerut ha-meshiḥi ke-reyalizatziyah shel mytos u-metaforah,” in Ha-ḥalom ve-shivro: ha-tnu’ah ha-shabta’it ve-shluḥoteyhah, Vol. 2: Meḥkarey yerushalayim bemaḥshevet Israel, 17 (2001): 540–41. 61. Israel Yuval, “Leḥem ve-yayin? lo be-veyt knesiyatenu,” Ha’aretz, August 13, 2011. 62. I am grateful to my colleague Haim Weiss. The discussion of “At the Outset” was born of a mutual thought process, and our dialogue is embedded in my words in ways that can no longer be reconstructed. I would also like to thank Lital Levy, Anne Dailey, and Oreet Meital for their constructive remarks, which have proven very helpful to me.

chapter 3 Note to epigraph: Moshe Cordovero, Or Yakar, 2.104. 1. Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism,” History of Religions 31 (1991): 1–23. 2. Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions,” 20, citing Carlos N. M. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 76. 3. This way of conceptualizing the role of Jews in Christian theology is the legacy of Augustine and has persisted since; see, e.g., Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 4. Brennan Breed, Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 50–51. 5. Jacqueline Vayntrub, “Uncommon Sense: On Philological Method and Teaching Ancient Language” (paper presented at the Harvard Semitic Philology Workshop, Harvard University, 2015): “the philologist is the hero who liberates the ancient text from every previous incorrect reading” (13). 6. I thank Martin Kavka for the initial suggestion that the latex glove used to handle a manuscript fragment might be understood as a paratext. It became clear to me only later how this idea helps us understand the function of the contaminating and sterile objects we see and imagine to be adjacent to textual artifacts. On the role of paratext for framing and presenting a work, see Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), translated as

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Notes to Pages 59–61

Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and idem, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History 22 (1991): 261–72. 7. A paratext is “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that . . . ​is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” Genette, Paratexts, 2. 8. Cordovero, Or Yakar, 2.104; on this text, see Daniel Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts and Textual Theory: Methodologies of Textual Scholarship and Editorial Practice in the Study of Jewish Mysticism, 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2013), 254–55 for discussion and notes; and Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1:19. 9. See Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 256–57 and notes; and Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), esp. 177–87. 10. See my two articles, “True Stories and the Poetics of Textual Discovery,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 45 (2016): 21–31; and “Truth and Doubt in Manuscript Discovery Narratives,” in Rethinking ‘Authority’ in Late Antiquity: Authorship, Law, and Transmission in Jewish and Christian Tradition, ed. A. J. Berkovitz and Mark Letteney (New York: Routledge, 2018), 139–60. 11. Abraham Zacuto, Sefer Yuhasin (Jerusalem, 1963), 88–89; Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 256–57 and notes; Anidjar, “Our Place in al-Andalus,” 177–87. 12. Mroczek, “Truth and Doubt.” 13. See Mroczek, “True Stories,” 28–29. The letter was first published by O. Braun, “Ein Brief des Katholikos Timotheos I über biblische Studien des 9 Jahrhunderts,” Oriens Christianus 1 (1901): 299–313. For analysis and English translation, see J. C. Reeves, “Exploring the Afterlife of Jewish Pseudepigrapha in Medieval Near Eastern Religious Traditions: Some Initial Soundings,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 30 (1999): 175–77. 14. See Michael Press, “ ‘ The Lying Pen of the Scribes’: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll,” The Appendix 3, no. 2 (2014); Fred N. Reiner, “C. D. Ginsburg and the Shapira Affair: A Nineteenth-Century Dead Sea Scroll Controversy,” British Library Journal 21 (1995): 109–27; and Chanan Tigay, The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible (New York: Ecco, 2016). 15. See Mroczek, “True Stories,” 22–23, and “Truth and Doubt” for an analysis of Solomon Zeitlin’s claims that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a hoax, published in a series of his articles in Jewish Quarterly Review: “Scholarship and the Hoax of the Recent Discoveries,” JQR 39 (1949): 337–63; “The Alleged Antiquity of the Scrolls,” JQR 40 (1949): 57–78; “The Hebrew Scrolls: Once More and Finally,” JQR 41 (1950): 1–58; and “When Were the Hebrew Scrolls ‘Discovered’: In 1947 or 1907?” JQR 40 (1950): 373–78. 16. Folkloristic analysis. See Dina Stein, “Following Goats: Text, Place, and Diaspora(s),” in Talmudic Transgressions: Engaging the Work of Daniel Boyarin, ed. Charlotte Fonrobert, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Aharon Shemesh, and Moulie Vidas (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 532–36; Stein, “A Wild Goat Chase: Models of Diaspora and Salvation,” Jewish Studies 51 (2016): 93–130 (Hebrew). See also Mroczek, “True Stories,” and “Truth and Doubt.” 17. I thank Galit Hasan-Rokem for this reference. 18. Other accounts focus more on neglect than misappropriation: for example, allowing the parchments to be carried off by playing children or blown away by the wind. Weston W. Fields, Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History (Boston: Brill, 2009), 1:26, 521.



Notes to Pages 61–65

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19. Cf. the rumor that leaves from the Sinaitic Palimpsest were used to hold butter at St. Catherine’s monastery, described by Janet Soskice, Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Found the Hidden Gospels (New York: Knopf, 2009), 295. Reports by English traveler Robert Curzon claim that monks used manuscript pages as covers for jam jars and ancient codices as mats to stand on; Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (London: Murray, 1849). A classic version of the Nag Hammadi discovery narrative claims the discoverers’ mother burned some manuscripts in an oven; see Nicola Denzey Lewis and Justine A. Blount, “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices,” Journal of Biblical Literature 133 (2014): 399–419; Mark Goodacre, “How Reliable Is the Story of the Nag Hammadi Discovery?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35 (2013): 303–22; Maia Kotrosits, “Romance and Danger at Nag Hammadi,” The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012): 39–52; Dylan M. Burns, “Telling Nag Hammadi’s Egyptian Stories,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 45 (2016): 5–11. 20. On the Orientalist implications of such narratives see Denzey Lewis and Blount, “Rethinking the Origins”; Kotrosits, “Romance and Danger”; and Burns, “Telling Nag Hammadi’s Egyptian Stories.” 21. Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 227; emphasis in the original. 22. Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 254. 23. Abrams, Kabbalistic Manuscripts, 255–56. 24. See my discussion in the context of Second Temple Judaism in The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), esp. summations on 154–55 and 182–89; Lawrence H. Schiffman, “Pseudepigrapha in the Pseudepigrapha: Mythical Books in Second Temple Literature,” Revue de Qumran 21 (2004): 429–38; and Leslie Baynes, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 b.c.e.–200 c.e. (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 25. One example is a recurring discourse on missing texts that were taken out of circulation by King Hezekiah. See David J. Halperin, “The ‘Book of Remedies,’ the Canonization of the Solomonic Writings, and the Riddle of Pseudo-Eusebius,” Jewish Quarterly Review 72 (1982): 269–92, and Eva Mroczek, “Hezekiah the Censor and Ancient Theories of Canon Formation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 140 (2021): 481–502, which identifies this as a broader tradition. 26. See Hindy Najman, Losing the Temple and Recovering the Future: An Analysis of 4 Ezra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27. See, e.g., B. Sanhedrin 4:7, Y. Megillah 1:9, and B. Sanhedrin 21b–22a; on traditions about Ezra’s salvage work and their implications for rabbinic attitudes toward the text of the Bible, see the work of Rebecca Scharbach Wollenberg, including “The People of the Book Without the Book: Jewish Ambivalence Toward Biblical Text After the Rise of Christianity” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015) and “ ‘A King and a Scribe like Moses’: The Reception of Deuteronomy 34:10 and a Rabbinic Theory of Collective Biblical Authorship,” Hebrew Union College Annual 90 (2019): 209–26. 28. Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011); for an account of the rhetorical strategies of this book, see David Nirenberg, “From Cairo to Córdoba: The Story of the Cairo Geniza,” The Nation, June 1, 2011, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/cairo-cordoba-story-cairo-geniza/; and a brief analysis in Mroczek, “True Stories.” 29. Hoffman and Cole, Sacred Trash, 10. 30. AnneMarie Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash: Biblical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus,” Vigiliae Christianae 64 (2010): 217–54, 246. 31. Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash,” 249.

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32. Luijendijk, “Sacred Scriptures as Trash,” 249. 33. Tony Harrison, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), 92. 34. Ilana Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). 35. On this connection, see Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers, 123, who also cites Adi Zemach, “Al ha-tefisa ha-historiosofit bi-shnayim mi-sipurav ha-meuharim shel Agnon” [On the historical conception in two of Agnon’s stories], Ha-Sifrut 1 (1968): 378–85, 381–85. 36. Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers, 129–30. 37. Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers, 129. 38. S. Y. Agnon, “Forevermore,” trans. Joel Blocker, in Modern Hebrew Literature, Library of Jewish Studies, ed. Robert Alter (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1972), 231–49, 245; original Hebrew “Ad olam,” published in Ha-esh ve-ha-‘etzim (The Fire and the Wood) (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1998), 255–69. 39. Agnon, “Forevermore,” 245, 248. 40. Agnon, “Forevermore,” 249. 41. Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers, 131. 42. See the rabbinic passages collected by Sid Z. Leiman, The Canonization of Hebrew Scripture: The Talmudic and Midrashic Evidence (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1976), 102–20, and analysis, among many others, in John Barton, Oracles of God: Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel After the Exile (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1986), 68–71; Martin Goodman, “Sacred Scripture and ‘Defiling the Hands,’ ” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990): 99–107; Timothy H. Lim, “The Defilement of the Hands as a Principle Determining the Holiness of Scriptures,” Journal of Theological Studies 61 (2010): 501–15. 43. John M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal (New York: Penguin, 1964); Michael O. Wise, Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea: A Study of the Bar Kokhba Documents (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 44. Wise, Language and Literacy, 64. 45. Wise, Language and Literacy, 64. 46. On this, see Morag M. Kersel, Christina Luke, and Christopher H. Roosevelt, “Valuing the Past: Perceptions of Archaeological Practice in Lydia and the Levant,” Journal of Social Archaeology 8 (2008): 298–319; Hershel Shanks, “Should These Looters Go to Jail?” Biblical Archaeology Review 43 (July/August 2017); and incisive analysis by Michael Press, “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Looters,” Textual Cultures, Material Cultures (blog), August 4, 2017, http://textualcultures.blogspot.com/2017/08/wont-somebody-please-think-of-looters. html. See also my essay, “Batshit Stories: New Tales of Discovering Ancient Texts,” Marginalia Review of Books (blog), June  22, 2018, https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/batshit-stories​ -new-tales-of-discovering-ancient-texts/. 47. I owe this important point to an anonymous reviewer of this chapter. Augustine’s articulation of the Jews as “witnesses” to biblical prophecy and the legacy of this idea have been extensively discussed; see, most prominently, Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and Paula Frederiksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). The broader structural phenomenon, however—the untrustworthy, ignorant, possibly deceptive, and yet indispensable ethnic other as an instrument of textual preservation for another group that claims ownership and correct interpretation of the texts—needs to be identified and analyzed more precisely.



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48. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 182–83. 49. See, most recently, an account of these movements by Liv I. Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, “Introduction,” in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology, ed. Liv I. Lied and Hugo Lundhaug (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 1–19. 50. See a recent analysis in Breed, Nomadic Text, esp. chap. 1, “The Miltonesque Concept of the Original Text,” 1–14. 51. Guy Laramée, “Artist Statement,” https://guylaramee.com/artist-statement/, accessed June 15, 2019. 52. Mroczek, “True Stories,” 28. 53. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); and the essays collected in White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 54. The idea for this chapter—and my larger project on discovery tales—emerged in conversation with Galit Hasan-Rokem and Martin Kavka in the hallways of the Katz Center at the University of Pennsylvania. I am deeply grateful to both of them for inspiring me to take this topic seriously and thereby setting the direction my research has taken over the last six years.

chapter 4 1. Ernst Hiemer, ed., Der Jude im Sprichwort der Völker (Nuremberg: Der Stürmer Buchverlag, 1942), 7. 2. Abraham Roback, A Dictionary of International Slurs (Waukesha, WI: Maledicta Press, 1979), 323. 3. Hiemer, Der Jude, 7. On the place of excrement in German folk culture, see Alan Dundes, Life Is a Chicken Coop Ladder. A Portrait of German Culture Through Folklore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 4. Hiemer, Der Jude, 38 and 161. 5. Hiemer, Der Jude, 19. A variant for women is “Sie stinkt wie ein Judenweib,” 120. 6. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, The Wandering Jew: Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 7. Hiemer, Der Jude, 16. 8. Hiemer, Der Jude, 17. 9. Another expression that was common to the Sudentenland maintained the untrustworthiness of the Jew, thus “Trost keinem Pfederdefuß, Hundebiß und Judenkuß!” (Don’t trust the club footed, the bite of a dog, or the kiss of a Jew). Hiemer, Der Jude, 158. 10. Hiemer, Der Jude, 18. 11. Hiemer, Der Jude, 16 and 172. 12. Hiemer, Der Jude, 14. 13. Mark M. Smith and Tristan Palmer, Sensing the Past: Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 3. To stress the lack of universality when it comes to the senses, some non-Western cultures have fewer than our five senses, others have more, and still other cultures classify the senses differ-

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ently. See David Howes and Constance Classen, “Doing Sensory Anthropology,” http://www. sensorystudies.org/sensorial-investigations/doing-sensory-anthropology/ (accessed May 6, 2018). 14. Smith and Palmer, Sensing the Past, 59–74. 15. William S. Cain, “History of Research on Smell,” in Handbook of Perception, ed. Edward C. Carterette and Morton P. Friedmann (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 6A:197–229. 16. Constance Classen, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 3. See also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 17. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982). 18. Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 19. Edward G. C. F. Atchley, A History of the Use of Incense in Divine Worship (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 81. 20. Deborah A. Green, The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). See also Michal Dayagi-Mendels, Perfumes and Cosmetics in the Ancient World (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1989). Although Dayagi-Mendels does not solely focus on Judaism in antiquity, there are many references to perfumes and cosmetics in the Bible throughout the text that serve to place those references in comparative historical perspective. There is very little in the way of scholarship on Jews and the senses. Green’s contribution may be said to be pioneering. More recently it has been joined by Rachel Neis, The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The modern period in Jewish history remains sorely neglected. 21. Atchley, Use of Incense, 88–89, quoted in Classen, Aroma, 81. 22. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2. 23. Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 14. 24. Deborah Green, “Fragrance in the Rabbinic World,” in Smell and the Ancient Senses, ed. Mark Bradley (London: Routledge, 2014), 147–148 and 150. Green observes that with the Havdalah ceremony conducted at the conclusion of the Sabbath, “the sniffing and passing of the spice box as well as the blessing for its pleasing aroma is the only specific scent custom in Judaism today” (p. 154). On the various prayers related to pleasant olfactory moments see “Brachot on a Nice Smell,” http://halachipedia.com/index.php?title=Brachot_on_a_nice_smell (accessed August 16, 2018), and for the rules pertaining to the recitation of prayers in the presence of bad odors, see “Reciting Brachos in the Presence of Unpleasant Odors,” http://rabbikaganoff. com/reciting-brachos-in-the-presence-of-unpleasant-odors/ (accessed August 16, 2018). 25. Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 100. 26. John Chrysostom, “Homily Against the Jews,” http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/ chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm (accessed May 30, 2018). 27. Jerry Toner, “Smell and Christianity,” in Bradley, Smell and the Ancient Senses, 159. 28. According to Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, “By the ‘odor of sanctity’ is meant not only that the dead bodies of saints exhale a sweet perfume, and those of sinners a disagreeable smell, but that even when alive the holy smell sweet and the unholy offensively.” Brewer, A Dictionary of Miracles: Imitative, Realistic, and Dogmatic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), 510. Brewer provides numerous examples whereby various saints, on death, exude a sweet odor.



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29. Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 169; Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 47–50. 30. Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and Its History (London: Warburg Institute, 1974); Birgit Wiedl, “Laughing at the Beast: The Judensau: Anti-Jewish Propaganda and Humor from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, Its Meaning, and Consequences, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 325–64; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Juden in der Kunst Europas: Ein historischer Bildatlas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002), 331–37; and Eduard Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Albert Langen, 1921), 114–23. The Judensau was not the only means by which Jews were associated with pigs. When medieval Jews were administered oaths, for example, they could be forced to stand barefoot on a pig skin. See Guido Kisch, Jewry Law in Medieval Germany; Laws and Court Decisions Concerning Jews (New York: American Academy of Jewish Research, 1949), 51 and 97; Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13.—20. Jh) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1994), 277–78. For more on animals in church architecture see E. P. Evans, Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture (London: W. Heinemann, 1896). On pigs specifically in medieval culture, see Wilfried Schouwink, Der wilde Eber in Gottes Weinberg: Zur Darstellung des Schweins in Literatur und Kunst des Mittelalters (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1985), 75– 88; Sarah Phillips, “The Pig in Medieval Iconography,” in Pigs and Humans: 10,000 Years of Interaction, ed. Umberto Albarella, Keith Dobney, Anton Ervynck, and Peter Rowley-Conwy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 373–87. 31. On a Jewish woman giving birth to live piglets, see Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 53. 32. Fuchs, Die Juden in der Karikatur, unpaginated; the two-page reproduction lies between pp. 8 and 9. 33. Shachar, Judensau, 15–42. 34. Shachar, Judensau, 2. 35. Petra Schöner, Judenbilder im deutschen Einblattdruck der Renaissance: Ein Beitrag zur Imagologie (Baden: Valentin Koener, 2002), 189–208; Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 198–239 and more generally, Sarah Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible Moralisée (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). More generally, see Alison G. Stewart, “Man’s Best Friend? Dogs and Pigs in Early Modern Germany,” in Animals and Early Modern Identity, ed. Pia F. Cuneo (Farnham: Ashgate/Gower, 2014), 19–44. 36. Martin Luther, Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (Wittenberg, 1544), https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/content/pageview/759311 (accessed May 30, 2018). On this particular Judensau, see David Kaufmann, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Kommissions Verlag, 1908), 1:174–81. 37. Martha Bayless, Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture: The Devil in the Latrine (New York: Routledge, 2012), xviii. 38. Bayless, Sin and Filth, 162. 39. Martha Bayless, “The Story of the Fallen Jew and the Iconography of Jewish Unbelief,” Viator 34 (2003): 142–56. 40. Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans. Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1982), 156.

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41. Bayless, Sin and Faith, 124–28; Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), esp. 190–224. More generally, see Hyam Maccoby, Judas Iscariot and the Myth of Jewish Evil (New York: Free Press, 1992). 42. Willis Johnson, “The Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” Journal of Medieval History 24, no. 3 (1998): 273–95. 43. M. Lindsay Kaplan, “ ‘His blood be upon us and on our children’: Medieval Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern England,” in The Cultural Politics of Blood, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Zita Nunes, and Carla L. Peterson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 107–26; Peter Biller, “Views of Jews from Paris Around 1300: Christian or ‘Scientific’?” Studies in Church History 9 (1992): 187–208. 44. Bayless, Sin and Filth, 98–163. 45. Bayless, Sin and Filth, 81. 46. Jewish criminals were also hung upside down in Germany to demonstrate their inverted and corrupted morality. See Rudolf Glanz, “The ‘Jewish Execution’ in Medieval Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 5 (1943): 3–26; Guido Kisch, “The ‘Jewish Execution’ in Medieval Germany,” Historia Judaica 5 (1943): 101–32. 47. Irvin Resnick, “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses,” Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 3 (2000): 241–63. 48. Biller, “Views of Jews,” 192–94. 49. Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 177–178. 50. Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 169–70; Julius Aronius, Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden in fränkischen und deutschen Reiche bis zum Jahre 1273 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), nr. 728. See also Trachtenberg, Devil and the Jews, 148. More generally on the ritual murder charge and accusation of Jewish use of Christian blood, see David Khvolson, Die Blutanklage und sonstige mittelalerliche Beschuldigungen der Juden: Eine historische Untersuchung nach den Quellen (Frankfurt: J. Kaufmann, 1901). 51. Rudolf Cruel, Geschichte des deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter (Detmold: Meyer’sche Hof buchhandlung, 1879), 622–23. 52. Martin Luther, Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (Wittenberg, 1544), https://sammlungen.ulb.uni-muenster.de/hd/content/pageview/759311 (accessed May 31, 2018). 53. The term “excremental assault” is a chapter title in Terence De Pres’s brilliant meditation on the Holocaust, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 51–73. In it, he describes the way the Nazis sought to kill the souls of extermination camp inmates by systematically subjecting them to “excremental attack to bring about “the physical inducement of disgust and self-loathing.” 54. Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 25–26. 55. Cuffel, Gendering Disgust, 118. 56. There are biological reasons for this, such as the paucity of milk given by pigs (thirteen pounds per day versus sixty-five for cows), they have eight to ten teats that are largely hidden, are aggressive when lactating, and have a very brief milk-ejection time (ten minutes for a cow versus fifteen seconds for a pig). Perhaps equally important is the fact that pig milk is said to be gamy and that there has historically been an aversion to drinking the milk of an animal considered to be filthy. In Deborah Valenz’s, Milk: A Local and Global History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), the word “pig” does not even appear in the index. See also “Others’ Milk,” http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2012/07/why_don_t_we_



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drink_other_animals_milk_the_dairy_of_camels_buffalo_pigs_sheep_and_goats_.html (accessed May 31, 2018) and “Why Don’t We Drink Pig Milk?” https://onpasture.com/2015​/01​ /05​/why-dont-we-drink-pig-milk/ (accessed May 31, 2018). 57. In the Jewish polemical tradition, Jews also portrayed Christians as asses and pigs, but more recent arguments that interpret such claims as expressions of Jewish resistance or as a symbol of the tit-for-tat nature of relations between the two groups seem to set aside the obvious imbalance in power relations between the two groups, focusing on the discourse rather than the impossibility for Jews to genuinely act out any form of effective resistance. See Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 127–29. See also Israel Jacob Yuval, “ ’ They tell lies: you ate the man’: Jewish Reactions to Ritual Murder Accusations,” in Religious Violence Between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. Anna Sapir Abulafia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 86–106; Martin Przybilski, “Zwei Beispiele antichristlicher Polemik, in Spätantike und Mittelalter: ‘Tol’dot’ Jeschu und ‘Nizzachon Jaschan,’ ” in Ein Thema—zwei Perspektiven: Juden und Christen in Mittelalter und Frühneuzeit, ed. Eveline Brugger and Birgit Wiedl (Bozen: Innsbruck, 2007), 253–68. 58. Elisheva Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy and Perceptions of Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies 2, no. 3 (1996): 115–35. 59. On the linkage between Jews and pigs in European culture more broadly, see Claudine Fabre-Vassas, The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians, and the Pig (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 60. On the skepticism toward converts in early modern Germany, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 61. F. L. Bösigk, “Ueber de Judenspottbilder des Mittelalters in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Kunstgeschichte 1 (1856): 463–69, quotation at 468. 62. Margaret T. Hogden, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964); Joan-Pau Rubiés, ed., Medieval Ethnographies: European Perceptions of the World Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 63. Yaakov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 35 and 41. Deutsch is surely right to point out that there was also a difference between the objectives of those authors who were born Jewish and those born Christian (1–2). Deutsch identifies four main reasons for the proliferation of these works in German: (1) there was a continual Jewish presence in Germany lands; (2) the important role played by converts in the production of this literature; (3) the particular interest that Protestant intellectuals took in Hebrew and other Jewish topics; and (4) English and French ethnographic literature focused on the peoples of their far-flung imperial holdings. With Germany lacking such territories, ethnographers in Germany focused on the Other in their midst—the Jews. 64. Carlebach, “Attribution of Secrecy,” 125. 65. Samuel Friedrich Brenz, Jüdischer abgestreiffter Schlangenbalg (Augspurg: Christoff Mang, 1614), 17–18.

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66. Johann Jakob Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten (Frankfurt: n.p., 1714), 368. Especially important on this subject is Maria Diemling, “The Ethnographer and the Jewish Body: Johann Jakob Schudt on the Civilisation Process of the Jews in Frankfurt,” Jewish Culture and History 10, nos. 2–3 (2008): 95–110. 67. On the refusal of Jews to eat and drink with Christians, see Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:267–68. 68. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:355. 69. Johann Kaspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Befö rderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Weidmann und Reich, 1775–1778). 70. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:368–69. 71. Quoted in Maria Diemling, “ ‘Daß man unter so viel tausend Menschen so fort einen Juden erkennen kan’: Johann Jacob Schudt und der jüdische Körper,” in Die Frankfurter Judengasse: Jüdisches Leben in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Fritz Backhaus et. al. (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societäts-Druckerei, 2007), 77–89, quotation at 88. 72. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:349. 73. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:267–68. 74. Fritz Backhaus, “The Population Explosion in the Frankfurt Ghetto in the Sixteenth Century,” Jewish Culture and History 10, nos. 2–3 (2008): 25–44. For Schudt’s vivid description of the overcrowding in the ghetto, see his Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:156–62. 75. Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (New York: North Point Press, 2007). 76. Kenneth Stow, “Was the Ghetto Cleaner?” in Rome: Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease and Hygiene in the Eternal City from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. Mark Bradley and Kenneth Stow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 172. 77. Stow, “Was the Ghetto Cleaner?” 172. 78. Like other ethnographers, Schudt focused on Jewish ritual slaughter of animals, namely shehitah. All of them pointed to what they considered to be the absurdity of its rules, as well as those of kashrut as they pertained to which animals it was prohibited and permissible to eat, the prohibition against Jews consuming blood, as well as the hindquarters of sheep and cattle, the post-slaughter inspection of the carcass, and the sale of meat to Christians that had been rendered unkosher either because of organic reasons or because of the way it had been slaughtered. For more detail on the Jewish ritual slaughterer in early modern ethnographies, see Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes, 182–208. 79. Rainer Erb, ed., Die Legende vom Riutalmord: Zur Geschichte der Blutbeschuldigung gegen die Juden (Berlin: Metrolo, 1993). 80. Ernst Ferdinand Hess, Flagellum Judeorum; Juden Geissel (Erfurt: Martin Wessel, 1599). The passage also appears in Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes, 187. The “misse missethone” that Hess speaks of is actually “misseh mishineh” in Ashkenazic Hebrew, a curse in which one wishes on one’s enemy an unnatural death. 81. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:376. 82. Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant, 31. 83. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:350. 84. Fritz Kynass, Der Jude in deutschen Volkslied (Greifswald: E. Panzig, 1934), 76. 85. Kynass, Der Jude in deutschen Volkslied, 81. 86. Christian prohibitions against feasting with Jews date back to the early church. See Winfried Frey, “Jews and Christians at the Lord’s Table?” in Food in the Middle Ages: A Book of Essays, ed. Melitta Weiss Adamson (New York: Garland, 1995), 113–44.



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87. Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Darren O’Brien, The Pinnacle of Hatred: The Blood Libel and the Jews (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011). Of course, Jews too responded to Christian accusations and to Christian uses of blood with their own charges. See David Biale, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 88. Immanuel Löw, Die Flora der Juden (Vienna: R. Löwit, 1924), 2:138–48. 89. Julius Preuss, Biblical and Talmudic Medicine, ed. and trans. Fred Rosner (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 461. 90. On Farissol, see Löw, Die Flora der Juden, 145; John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993), 85. 91. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:350. 92. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:350. 93. The story appears in a review of Paullini’s Latin-language study of nutmeg. See Ernst Tentzel, Curieusen Bibliothec, oder Monatlichen Unterredungen einiger guten Freunde (Frankfurt Philip Wilhelm Stick, 1704), 618. 94. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:352. 95. Indeed, German cooking refrained from using garlic until modern times. 96. Schudt, Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten, 2:352. See also Maria Diemling, “ ‘As Jews Like to Eat Garlick’: Garlic in Christian-Jewish Polemical Discourse in Early Modern Germany,” in Food and Judaism, ed. Leonard Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2005), 223. 97. Frequently, Jews used the variant spelling Knobloch for their family name.

chapter 5 1. Christopher Shields, “Imagination,” supplement to Aristotle’s psychology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-psychology/suppl4.html (accessed July 13, 2017 The Greek phantasia includes the same visual etymology as imagination that is derived from Latin. Aristotle, De Anima, 414b33–415a3 (3.3), 429a4–7 (3.3); Aristotle, De Memoria 450a22–25. 2. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, with introduction by Francis Fergusson (New York: Hill and Wang [1961] 1999), 68. 3. For the most extensive historical review of the material, see George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1965). For some interpretive approaches, see, for example, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Alan Dundes, eds., The Legend of the Wandering Jew: Interpretations of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). The bibliography in most major European languages is vast. 4. The bibliography is extensive. See, for example, Maria Körte, Die Uneinholbarkeit des Verfolgten: Der Ewige Jude in der Literarischen Phantastik (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000); Alfred Bodenheimer, Wandernde Schatten: Ahasver, Moses und die Authentizität der jüdischen Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002); Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Joban Transformations of the Wandering Jew in Joseph Roth’s Hiob and Der Leviathan,” in The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics, ed. Leora Batnitzky and Ilana Pardes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 145–69. 5. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Imagining the Wandering Jew in Modernity: Exegesis and Ethnography in Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süss,” in Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Jewish

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­ thnography, ed. Andreas Kilcher and Gabriella Safran (Bloomington: Indiana University E Press, 2016), 159–80. 6. A 1985 interview with the author is quoted in Mark Thompson, Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 151, n. 53. See Renate Lachmann’s sophisticated discussion of the intricate dynamics of fact and fiction in Kiš’s prose in “Danilo Kiš: Factography and Thanatography (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Psalm 44, The Hourglass),” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4, no. 2 (2006): 219–38. 7. Thompson, who refers numerous times to the Wandering Jew figure in Kiš’s work in his Birth Certificate (e.g., p. 200), does not recognize its roots in folklore, if we judge by his comment (110, n. 34) on a Serbian folktale mentioned by Kiš: “This minuscule allusion to folklore is one of very few in Kiš’ work.” Kiš himself suggested that “kitsch and folklore . . . ​ are nothing if not nationalism in disguise” (168). Yet, as a boy in Montenegro, Kiš fantasized about collecting folk poetry (139) and his mother shared folk stories and epic ballads from Montenegro with her children (174). 8. Thompson, Birth Certificate. 9. The Serbo-Croatian original appears in three different places in the book (Thompson, Birth Certificate, xvi, 124, 276); the English translation is on 1–2. Also Thompson refers to Danilo Kiš, “Izvod iz knjige rođenih” (3, n. 1). RealAudio format, 04:25, read by the author himself, http://www.kis.org.rs/web/Acitav/A/index.htm. The website displays many additional photographs and personal documents. 10. Dina Kattan Ben-Zion, Presence and Disappearance: Jews and Jewishness in Former Yugoslavia Reflected in Literature [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2002), 179, 184–85, 188, 332. The author briefly mentions the relevance of the Wandering Jew also for the work of other, more unambiguously Jewish writers from Yugoslavia (220, 261). Cf. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 126. 11. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Ecotypes: Theory of the Lived and Narrated Experience,” Narrative Culture 3, no. 1 (2016): 110–37. For an application of the concept in talmudic contexts, see, e.g., Daniel Boyarin, Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 13–136; Boyarin, “An Unimagined Community: Against the Legends of the Jews,” in Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews: Ancient Jewish Folk Literature Reconsidered, ed. Galit HasanRokem and Ithamar Gruenwald (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 49–63; and Boyarin, A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 105; for nineteenth-century French cultural history, see David Hopkin, “The Ecotype or a Modest Proposal to Reconnect Cultural and Social History,” in Exploring Cultural History: Essays in Honour of Peter Burke, ed. Melissa Calaresu, Joan Pau Rubiés, and Filippo de Vivo (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 31–54; Hopkin, Voices of the People in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 12. Roman Jakobson’s enlisting of Fernand de Saussure’s distinction between “parole,” a concrete speech act, and “langue”—the semiotic system of language or signs in general—is the theoretical basis for this distinction. Roman Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77; for an application to proverbs, see Galit Hasan-Rokem, Proverbs in Israeli Folk Narratives: A Structural Semantic Analysis (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1982), 54–57; for midrash, see Daniel Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 28–29. This semiotic formulation of the Wandering Jew figure emphasizes its folkloristic phenomenology as collectively created; cf. Roman Jakobson and



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Petr Bogatyrev, “Folklore as Special Form of Creation,” in Roman Jakobson’s Selected Writings, trans. John M. O’Hara (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 4:1–15. 13. There are numerous examples, such as Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Judith Butler, Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 14. Hasan-Rokem, “Imagining the Wandering Jew,” 168, 173. 15. Hasan-Rokem, “Joban Transformations,” 165–67. In another case, I pointed at the shadow that this figure sometimes casts when omitted; for instance, as an indication of Carl Schmitt’s denial of the role of Jews in European culture. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Carl Schmitt and Ahasver: The Idea of the State and the Wandering Jew,” Behemoth, A Journal on Civilization 2 (2008): 4–25. Galit Hasan-Rokem “The Specter of Ahasver.” Forum on Georg Simmel’s “The Stranger”, edited by Jakob Egholm Feldt and Amos Morris-Reich. The Jewish Quarterly Review 111, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 318–321. 16. James Joyce, Ulysses, with an introduction by Declan Kiberd (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 439; see also “The wandering jew” [sic] on 279 and 623. 17. There are numerous references to Kiš’s indebtedness to Joyce in Thompson, Birth Certificate, esp. 33–39; for example: “No writer meant more to the young Kiš than Joyce, nor any book more than Ulysses” (33). 18. Danilo Kiš, garden, ashes, trans. William J. Hannaher, with introduction by Aleksandr Hemon (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, [1965] 2003), 48. 19. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 9, on the Travel Guide as Kiš’s “literary heritage” from his father. 20. Kiš, garden, ashes, 16–17. 21. Kiš, garden, ashes, 48. The italics and the quotation marks marking the phrases as quotes are the author’s and the translator’s. 22. Kiš, 49. Kiš possibly refers to the Hungarian popularizer of Indian culture, Ervin Baktay’s book, A csillagfejtés könyve (Astrology) published in 1942. The author’s birth surname was Gottesmann and he was probably Jewish. 23. Kiš, garden, ashes, 50. 24. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “The Cobbler of Jerusalem in Finnish Folklore,” in HasanRokem and Dundes, Legend of the Wandering Jew, 130. 25. Similar sentiments abound in modern Jewish literatures as shown by Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Neta Stahl, Other and Brother: The Figure of Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 26. Kiš, garden, ashes, 90–91. 27. Kiš, garden, ashes, 91–92. 28. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 11. 29. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 200. 30. Thompson beautifully analyzes Kiš’s infatuation with the uncanny in his writing and its encoding in the term Heimlichkeit—the formal opposite of Unheimlichkeit, Freud’s German coinage for the concept—in the short autobiographical “birth certificate” (Birth Certificate, 105–9). 31. Kiš, garden, ashes, 120. 32. Kiš, garden, ashes, 168.

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33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 217–20, and in many other places in the book. 34. Kiš, garden, ashes, 167. 35. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 66. 36. Karl Blind, “Wodan, the Wild Huntsman, and the Wandering Jew,” in Hasan-Rokem and Dundes, Legend of the Wandering Jew, 109–94. Notably, Serbo-Croatian, like most other Slavic languages and like Hebrew, retains a double meaning of the word, indicating both “wind” and “spirit.” See the etymological dictionary of Semjonon, https://gufo.me/dict/semenov​ /%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%85. Thanks to Michael Lukin for assistance in this regard. 37. Kiš, garden, ashes, 120. 38. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Dybbuk and the Wandering Jew: No Rest on Earth or in Heaven,” in Fleeting Dreams and Possessive Dybbuks: On Dreams and Possession in Jewish and Other Cultures, ed. Rachel Elior, Yoram Bilu, Avigdor Shinan, and Yair Zakovitch (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2013), 284–304. 39. Karl Kautsky, “The Last Stages of Judaism,” Are the Jews a Race? chap. 6, https:// www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/jewsrace/ch12.htm. 40. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Contemporary Perspectives on Tradition: Moving on with the Wandering Jew,” in Konstellationen: über Geschichte, Erfahrung und Erkenntnis, ed. Nicolas Berg, Omar Kamil, Markus Kirchhoff, and Susanne Zepp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 319. 41. Danilo Kiš, Hourglass, trans. Ralph Manheim (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, [1972] 1997). 42. Kiš, Hourglass, 51. In another instance (238), the father narrator reveals the identity of a person who helps him as a shoemaker, the standard occupation of Ahasver from the early seventeenth-century German chapbooks onward. The passage is quoted with omissions marked by three dots (. . .). 43. Kiš, Hourglass, 208. For the various names of the Wandering Jew figure, see Anderson, The Legend, in the index. 44. Hasan-Rokem, “Ecotypes.” 45. Thompson mentions Kiš’s relationship to Kafka’s work through a somewhat Wandering Jew-like figure “Hunter Gracchus” in Birth Certificate, 121, n. 38. 46. Thompson, Birth Certificate, 71, n. 21. 47. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct. On Kiš’s attraction to unheroic figures, see Thompson, Birth Certificate, 60. 48. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 2 and numerous pages in the book. 49. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4 (1993): 711. 50. Kiš, Hourglass, 55. 51. A concept underlining the (subjectively) experienced aspect of the phenomenal world. See, for example, Gerd Brand, Die Lebenswelt: Eine Philosophie des konkreten Apriori (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971). 52. Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora,” 714. 53. Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, 23. 54. In Birth Certificate, 69, where Thompson refers to Kiš, Gorki talog iskustva, ed. Mirjana Miočinović (Belgrade: Prosveta, [1990] 2007), 333. This volume of interviews was edited by his wife, with whom he was married from 1962 to 1981.



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55. Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (1914–1916), ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth, 1957), 305–6. Special thanks to Itamar Lurie for introducing me to this text and other psychoanalytic wisdoms. 56. I am grateful for the following insight of one of the editors, Anne C. Dailey, for whom the appearances, disappearances and reappearances of the Wandering Jew qua father reminded her of Freud’s famous fort-da game, in which a young child—missing his mother, who has left for just a short while—makes the toy disappear and then reappear in an imaginative/creative play that allows the child to ward off the anxiety and sadness at the loss of the mother. Freud’s point there is that the child turns to imaginative play to master the overwhelming feelings of loss, to begin to make his way in the world on his own. Dailey rightly observed that it would lead my discussion to a less ambivalent ending—perhaps something along the lines of “how great art can console us as we struggle with feelings of loss.” She suggests that seems to be exactly the point of Kiš’s work for Kiš himself: enabling him to conjure up his father through his art, as some kind of consolation for the actual loss. I opt for a less therapeutic view of Kiš’s work—that it exhibited a deep existential pessimism that perhaps led to his self-destructive lifestyle, possibly bringing about his premature death. Similar to some traditional genres, such as midrashic literature, my understanding of Kiš’s work is that it resists the consolation of an illusion of mastery of one’s fate; instead, it accepts the tragic position of a lack of control. I want to extend my thanks to a unique group of scholars at the Katz Center’s 2015–16 research group “Jews Beyond Reason” who inspired the writing of this chapter; to the editors of this volume, especially to Lital Levy and Anne Dailey for their conscientious and gifted editing, and to Alon Rejwan for excellent research assistance at the Department of Hebrew Literature of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

chapter 6 Note to epigraph: Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 50. 1. The translations from the Talmud are from the Soncino translation of the Babylonian Talmud. 2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, trans. E. M. Huggard (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985), 195 (§121). 3. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Continuum, 2006), 83 (translation slightly modified). 4. Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” 83–84. 5. See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), esp. 327–347 and 374–97. 6. A similar exercise can be attempted with Christian or Muslim liturgy, but it would require an intimate understanding and experience of its liturgy, which I lack. 7. The haftarah (lit. “parting” or “taking leave”) is a selection from the books of prophets that is publicly read in synagogue as part of the weekly reading of the Torah. The haftarah reading follows the Torah reading on each Sabbath and on Jewish festivals and fast days. Typically, it is thematically linked to the Torah portion that precedes it. The institution

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of the haftarah was established by the time of the amoraim, who discuss it on several occasions in the Talmud (see B. Gittin 60a, B. Megillah 31a, T. Megillah 4:1, B. Shabbat 24a). It is unclear who exactly selected and arranged the haftarot and when. Among others, see Louis Rabinowitz, “Haftarah,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, es. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 8:198–200; Shlomo Katz, The Haftarah: Laws, Customs & History (Silver Spring, MD: Hamaayan, 2000), 4; and Matthew B. Schwartz, “Torah Reading in the Ancient Synagogue” (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1975), 181. 8. Maimonides, in the final paragraph of “The Order of Prayers” that supplements the second book of his Mishneh Torah (Sefer Ahavah, Book of Love), mentions the passages that are to be read during those weeks: Isaiah 40: 1–11 (first week), Isaiah 49: 14–26 (second week), Isaiah 54:1–17, 55:1–5 (third week), Isaiah 51:12–23, 52:1–2 (fourth week), Isaiah 59: 1–8 (fifth week), Isaiah 60:1–22 (sixth week), and Isaiah 61:10–11, 62:1–12, 63: 1–9 (seventh week). 9. See Yehiel Zwi Moskowitz, Da’at Mikra on Eykhah (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, Jerusalem 1990). 10. Moshe Halbertal, in his insightful work, “Eikhah and the Stance of Lament,” emphasizes both the status of the Eykhah question (a “bewildered protest” or a “bewildered outrage,” as he calls it there) and beautifully demonstrates how Lamentations has no conciliatory end: “Lament, which is a defiant bewildered protest, maintains its posture of solitude until the end. There is no catharsis and no consolation.” Halbertal, “Eikhah and the Stance of Lament,” in Lament in Jewish Thought: Philosophical, Theological and Literary Perspectives, ed. Ilit Ferber and Paula Schwebel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 10. 11. This view is in opposition to those understandings of Christian liturgy or theology that make no place whatsoever for this kind of text, such as the following from Claus Westermann: “It is thought inappropriate to lament before God; lamentation is not compatible with proper behavior toward God. Lament disturbs or detracts from a pious attitude toward God. . . . ​Such a depreciatory attitude toward the lament reflects the fact that lamentation has been severed from prayer in Christian piety throughout the history of the church. In the Old Testament lamentation is an intrinsic component of prayer. . . . ​In the Christian church, on the other hand, the lament no longer receives a hearing.” Westermann, Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation, trans. Charles Muenchow (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 81–82. On the same issue, see Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7–9. 12. I analyzed this moment in a previous work. See Eli Schonfeld, “Ein Menahem: On Lament and Consolation,” in Lament in Jewish Thought, 11–30. 13. The anonymous author of those chapters is not the historical Isaiah of the eighth century b.c.e. but, more than probably, lived some three hundred years later, at the end of the Babylonian exile (598–538 b.c.e.), anticipating the imminent return of the people of Israel to Zion with the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great. The anonymous author of those chapters is commonly referred to in biblical scholarship as Deutero-Isaiah, and in my analysis, I refer only to texts from Deutero-Isaiah. Therefore, whenever I mention Isaiah, I always mean Deutero-Isaiah. 14. All the translations from the Bible are from the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, unless stated otherwise. 15. See, for instance, Norman Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations (London: SCM Press, 1954); Patricia Tull Willey, Remember the Former Things (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997); and Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40–66: A Commentary, trans. David Stalker (London: SCM Press, 1969).



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16. Lamentations Rabbah, trans. Abraham Cohen, in Midrash Rabbah (London: Soncino Press, 1939), 7:57. Jeremiah is the supposed author of the book of Lamentations. The midrashist, who attributes the whole book of Isaiah to the historical Isaiah, has to wrestle with the fact that Isaiah preceded Jeremiah and therefore speaks of Isaiah as anticipating the “severe prophecies” of Jeremiah. 17. For an exhaustive list of correspondences between Isaiah and Lamentations, both thematic and literary, see Elsie Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation: Exegesis and Theology in the Liturgical Anthology of the Ninth of Av Season (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004), 54–56. 18. Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlyle Witton-Davies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 259. 19. Buber, in his text, goes further, linking the theological character of this book to the fact that the anonymous author of Deutero-Isaiah witnessed the historical resolution of Israel’s exile and suffering. He experienced or at least anticipated the return to Zion, an event he understood as the objective, concrete response to the question of Lamentations: “he is the first concerned with a ‘monotheistic theology,’ ” writes Buber, “because he is concerned with a theology of world-history” (Prophetic Faith, 259). “He announces history because he makes it,” he continues, qualifying Isaiah’s faith as “undogmatic historical realism” (262). Buber’s insight here is far-reaching, as if the reason for reading the world with theological glasses is history, as if only when immersed in history is a theology possible. I do not explore this topic further, other than suggesting that it implicates the complex relationship between the Zionist claim of a “return to history” of the Jewish people and the question of Jewish theology today. 20. There may be a polemic with Christianity underlying the choice of the haftarot and the voluntary omission of the “suffering servant” texts. In Acts 8:27–35, to the question of the eunuch Ethiopian pilgrim who asks about the identity of the suffering servant in Isaiah, Philip answers unequivocally that it is Jesus. By the time the haftarot were selected, early church fathers had already made use of this text, identifying the suffering servant with Jesus. The earliest known example of a Jew and a Christian debating the meaning of Isaiah 53 is in Origen’s Contra Celsum 1.55. See Peter Stuhlmacher, “Isaiah 53 in the Gospels and Acts,” and Christoph Markschies, “Jesus Christ as a Man Before God: Two Interpretive Models for Isaiah 53 in the Patristic Literature and Their Development,” both in The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources, ed. Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher, trans. Daniel P. Bailey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 147–62 and 225–323. 21. The third haftarah, for instance, ends at 55:4, whereas the verses about God’s infinite knowledge begin at 55:8; the fourth haftarah ends at 52:12, whereas the “suffering servant” verses begin at 52:13. 22. In her insightful analysis of Isaiah, Elsie Stern highlights the difference between Deutero-Isaiah and the haftarot of consolation. For her, the anonymous Deutero-Isaiah, who witnessed or anticipated the political recovery of Israel under Cyrus, understood the return to Zion as an answer to the laments of Eykhah (which explains the theology of sin-punishment-atonement-redemption of Deutero-Isaiah). In contrast, the rabbis who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e., which was not followed by a historico-political recovery (especially after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 c.e.), could not afford to passively accept Isaiah’s theology with the (historico-political) redemption it includes (the return to Zion). Therefore, they had to rethink the very idea of consolation. In Stern’s words: “They [the rabbis] were part of a complex of messianic expectation which, for

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the most part, was postponed to some indefinite time in the future. . . . ​However, her [Zion’s] accusation of divine abandonment and her complaint that ‘she has no comforter’ are addressed in the present in the midst of the worshipping community” (Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation, 58). She concludes, “In the lectionary cycle, reconciliation is unhitched from redemption” (58). This is the coup de force of the sages: to separate reconciliation and redemption, and consolation from solution and resolution. But this was possible only by formulating a new semantics of consolation, in which consolation is not about resolution and therefore honestly addresses the question of “Eykhah?” Where I differ from Stern, or at least where I try to add nuance to her analysis, is on the question of the centrality of a theology in which suffering is punishment for sin, which she finds both in the biblical texts and in the rabbinic selection. Of course, one cannot deny that this theology is present in those texts. Nevertheless, as I try to show, this theology is made fragile in the haftaroth, to a point where it eventually collapses and entirely disappears from the consolations: in the last four haftaroth for the Sabbaths of consolation, there is no such theology anymore. 23. David Abudirham, The Book of Abudirham: A Commentary of the Blessings and the Prayers, quoted from Elsie Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation, 58–59. 24. Stern, From Rebuke to Consolation, 59. 25. Translation slightly changed. 26. See Isaiah 40:1 at Mikra’ot Gedolot ‘Haketer’, ed. Menahem Cohen (Ramat Gan: BarIlan University Press, 1996), 252. Most commentators and translators read yomar as a present or a present continuous verb. 27. Prof. Israel Knohl insightfully pointed out to me that this doubling of the suffering as a payment for Zion’s sins indicates again that we are not in a logic of theodicy—which is a logic of rational calculation where, for each sin, the punishment requires an exact amount of suffering—but in a logic of excess: Israel pays more, paying double, for her sins; there is a surplus of suffering, a “more than required” of suffering here. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, in his 1978 essay “Transcendence and Evil,” offers a phenomenological analysis of the relation between suffering and revelation, based on Philippe Nemo’s commentary on the book of Job, Job and the Excess of Evil. See Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 122–34. Inspired by this phenomenology, I read the verses in Isaiah as expressing the true relation of the subject to the divine through suffering. But whereas Levinas is pointing at the dialogical qualities of one’s relation to suffering, the prophet allows one to push the analysis even further and to recognize—as I try to do here—the consoling qualities of this dialogical revelation. 29. The term ḥinam has two meanings in biblical Hebrew: an economic meaning—“for free,” as in Genesis 29:15 or Exodus 21:2 and 21:11—and a more abstract meaning: “without cause,” as in 1 Samuel 19:5 and 25:31 or 1 Kings 2:31. Most of the medieval commentators (Rashi, Radak, Mezudat David) tried to avoid reading the term ḥinam according to its abstract meaning in an effort to avoid the theological problem of suffering without cause (see next footnote). Nevertheless, it is clear that the meaning here is metaphorical: “without cause.” Prof. Galit Hasan-Rokem insightfully pointed out to me that in fact, both meanings could remain. Indeed, read according to the economic meaning, the verse makes even more sense. God did not profit in any way from the sufferings of Israel, which makes this suffering that more useless. Moreover, the economic language used here is extremely suggestive. Is not theodicy or the belief that suffering is proportional to sin precisely an economic relation? Does not the God of theodicy



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have all the traits of a divine bookkeeper? Our verse, on the contrary, puts an end to this economic relation between sin and suffering. It admits a “free suffering” that is not only without cause but that also jeopardizes the very economic structure on which theodicy reposes. 30. That is probably why medieval commentators, who I suppose were unable to bear this heresy, desperately try to reintroduce the logic of sin and punishment in this verse. Rashi, the classical eleventh-century commentator, explains Isaiah 52:3 thus: “Because you have dealt with unworthy things, which means the evil inclination from which you cannot benefit” (Rashi on Isaiah, 52: 3, in Mikra’ot Gedolot ‘Haketer’, ed. Menahem Cohen (Bar-Ilan University Press, Ramat-Gan 1996), 330 (my translation). R. David Kimhi (Radak, 1160–1235) follows in Rashi’s footsteps: “Without money but with sins” (Radak on Isaiah 52:3, in Mikra’ot Gedolot ‘Haketer’, 330 (my translation). The only exception I found is Ibn Ezra, the twelfthcentury commentator, who usually offers a more literal explanation. Nevertheless, here he interprets the term ḥinam as without cause: “I have sold you to the nations without receiving money for you, and so will I redeem you without giving money for you” (Ibn Ezra on Isaiah 52:3, translation Sefaria). The seventeenth-century Mezudat David (R. David Altshuler) again interprets this term in a strictly monetary way: “You have been given away to the idolators and I have taken no money for it” (Mezudat David on Isaiah 52:3, my translation). 31. God’s cry is the central theme of the famous petiḥta (proem, lit. “opening”) 24, II, in Lamentations Rabbah. Torn between Israel’s sins, for which they will have to pay, and his love of Israel, God has no choice but to inflict them with suffering as punishment. This lack of choice nevertheless devastates God to the point where he cannot keep from crying. To the angel Metatron who begs God not to cry, God answers that if Metatron will not let him cry, he will hide from Metatron and cry in secret. One can interpret Metatron as the personification of the common doctrine of suffering as punishment for sin, as opposed to God who, while having no choice but to punish Israel, nevertheless in his deep interior regrets and mourns Israel’s suffering—as if the common doctrine must exist for the intimate voice of God to be heard. 32. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 190. 33. Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz,” in Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 138. 34. Hans Jonas, “Concept of God,” 140. 35. I am thankful to the editors of this volume—Anne Dailey, Martin Kavka, and Lital Levy—as well as to my friend Dana Rubinstein, for having urged me to clarify and deepen this important point. 36. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 94.

chapter 7 Note to epigraph: Emanuel Rackman, One Man’s Judaism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1970), 25. 1. Isadore Twersky, “Religion and Law,” in Religion in a Religious Age, ed. S. D. Goitein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 69–70. 2. See, for example, Aharon Lichstenstein, “Does Jewish Tradition Recognize an Ethic Independent of Halakha?” in Modern Jewish Ethics, ed. Marvin Fox (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975), 62–88.

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3. In another essay I deal with musar, neo-musar, and the Ḥazon Ish as they relate to the construction of the secular. See my “The Road from Religious Law (Halakha) to the Secular: Constructing the Autonomous Self in the Musar Tradition and Its Discontents,” in Jewish Spirituality and Social Transformation, ed. Philip Wexler (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2019), 203–22. 4. Modern Jewish pietism as a literary genre has been the subject of many important studies. See, for example, Mendel Piekarz, The Beginnings of Hasidism: Ideological Trends in Drush and Musar Literature (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1978) [Hebrew]. On the modern musar movement, see Immanuel Etkes, R. Yisrael Salanter and the Beginning of the Musar Movement (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1984) [Hebrew]; Dov Katz, Tenu‘at Musar, 5 vols. (Bnei Brak, 2006) [Hebrew]; and, more recently, Geoffrey Claussen, Sharing the Burden: R. Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015). For a fresh approach to the trajectory of musar literature going back to early modernity, see Patrick Koch, Human Self-Perfection: A Re-Assessment of Kabbalistic Musar-Literature of Sixteenth-Century Safed (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2013). 5. On Salanter, see Hillel Goldberg, Israel Salanter: Text, Structure, Idea (New York: Ktav, 1982); and Immanuel Etkes, Rabbi Israel Salanter and the Musar Movement: Seeking the Truth of Torah (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993). Faith and reason are, of course, categories that scholarship uses to understand the medieval philosophical tradition. For example, see Joseph Sarachek’s Faith and Reason: The Conflict over the Rationalism of Maimonides (Williamsport, PA: Bayard, 1935). One can also see this in Julius Guttmann’s Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1964) and, more recently, in Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997). I use this paradigm to illustrate that, in fact, even though these are second-tier categories, they are illustrative of the basic discourse and contours of the medieval philosophical tradition. 6. See the discussion of the broad goals of musar in Katz, Tenu‘at Musar, 1:70–85. The language Katz uses to define the teleology of musar is shelamut ha-’adam (the fulfillment of the human, or human potential). Koch, in Human Self-Perfection, views this material as “human perfection” literature, which I think captures its emotive and psychological as opposed to epistemological intent. 7. Although it is true that much philosophical and kabbalistic literature contains pietistic elements, and some philosophers and kabbalists such as Moses Maimonides, Moshe Cordovero, and Hayyim Vital (among many others) wrote separate pietistic works, such as Maimonides’s “Eight Chapters,” Moshe Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah, or Hayyim Vital’s Sha‘arey Kedushah, we can still distinguish pietism, or musar, as a distinct genre of Jewish writing that deserves to be examined using different evaluative criteria than philosophical literature, even by the same author. Pietistic texts are not necessarily musar texts, but there is often a deep similarity between them. 8. Although a full explanation of “love of the law” appears in later sections of this chapter, it is significant to note in advance that a DBS database search of the term ’ahavat hahalakhah in classical, musar, kabbalistic, and Hasidic literature showed that it only appears in Ḥazon Ish’s Emunah u-bitaḥon. This original locution stands at the very center of his view of human perfection. For R. Yosef Yoisel of Novardok, see his Madregat ha-’adam discussed at length in Katz, Tenu’at Musar, vol. 4, and my discussion of that work in “Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety,” in Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron Hughes (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 205–28.



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9. There are numerous biographies in Hebrew of Ḥazon Ish. See, for example, Shlomo Kohen, ed., Pe’er ha-dor (Bnei Brak: Nezach, 1966), and Shlomo Yosef Zevin, Ishim ve-shitot (Jerusalem, 1952), 281–315. The English biography by Shimon Finkelman, Hazon Ish (New York: Mesorah, 1989) draws on many of the earlier biographical studies. The study of the Ḥazon Ish has extensively deepened with the recent publication of Benjamin Brown’s Ḥazon Ish: Posek, ha-ma’amin u-manhig ha-ma’arekhah ha-ḥaredit (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011). Other studies that have informed my views are Yakir Englander, “The Understanding of the Human and the Purpose of Halakha in the Writings of the Ḥazon Ish” [Hebrew], Reishit 2 (2011): 183–201; Daniel Stein, “The Limits of Religious Optimism: The Ḥazon Ish and the Alter of Novordok on Bittahon,” Tradition 43, no. 2 (2011): 32–48; Lawrence Kaplan, “The Hazon Ish: Hasidic Critic of Traditional Orthodoxy,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: JTS Press, 1993), 145–74; and Kaplan, “The Ethics of Submission: Unification with the Spirit of Torah and Its Stature in Reference to Contemporary Challenges, R. Avraham Yeshayahu Karlitz, the Hazon Ish” [Hebrew], in Ha-Gedolim: Leaders Who Shaped Haredi Jewry in Israel, ed. Benjamin Brown and Nissim Leon (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2017), 479–519. 10. Benjamin Brown notes that the Hazon Ish was concerned that EB would be taken the wrong way and that his critique of musar was really an “internal family dispute.” He therefore held off publishing it in his lifetime. In general Brown views that the dispute between musar and anti-musar the in Ḥazon Ish was really one of emphasis. See Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 131. As we see later, Englander has a different view of the matter and views the dispute as both substantive and substantial, with each side holding a very different view of the construction of the human being. 11. The Ḥazon Ish had little interest in kabbalah and only parenthetically discussed Hasidism, although one could easily extend his critique of musar to include Hasidism as well. In general, his focus on musar developed out of the fact that musar was directly relevant to his community, whereas Hasidism was somewhat outside the orbit of the Lithuanian talmudic world where he lived. 12. On this meeting, see Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 265–74. On the Ḥazon Ish’s view of the female draft, see Kovetz Igrot (hereafter referred to as KI), ed. Shmuel Greineman (Bnei Brak, 1990), 1:113. 13. One certainly cannot use the term “musar,” even modern musar, as if it is a unified category. As Katz’s Tenu’at Musar illustrates, there were many schools, some opposing one another, and each had its own criteria for properly understanding and applying musar. I use the general term “musar” because the Ḥazon Ish did not distinguish among the various schools and viewed all of them as guilty of a fundamental error in terms of the autonomy of reason, the view of human nature, and the role of halakhah in tikkun ha-middot. 14. See KI 3:2. 15. Interestingly, his marriage was not viewed as a happy one. 16. There is an interesting debate between Benjamin Brown and Yakir Englander on the nature of Hazon Ish’s anti-musar polemic. Brown argues that Ḥazon Ish’s anti-musar position is an internal polemic that is based more on emphasis than any kind of fundamental difference in worldview between his view and musar. Brown writes, “The two sides of the disagreement (maḥloket) are in regards to the medium (‘emza’im) and not the goals (hamatarot).” Yakir Englander, in contrast, argues that the “Ḥazon Ish differs on the very essence (be-ofen mahuti) of the musar movement. According to Ḥazon Ish musar does not

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understand the depth of the influence of the evil inclination (yetser ha-ra‘) on the soul and the body of the person. . . . ​The disagreement between the musar movement and Ḥazon Ish is not a disagreement about levels or emphases but a significant disagreement about the very make-up of the human self (teva’ ha-adam), the self ’s very purpose and function in the world.” See Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 49; Englander, “Understanding of the Human,” 195. 17. All translations are mine. This battle against emotionalism is a common one in the mitnagdic battle against Hasidism. On Hasidic emotionalism, Gershom Scholem cites a teaching from the Maggid of Mezeritch in the name of the Besht: “Sometimes the evil urge entices a man to devote all his time to the study of Talmud and halakhah only.” See Scholem, Lecture on Hasidism (unpublished manuscript, 1946), 188. This is a great example of the ­Hasidic belief that subjectivity in the form of emotionalism is the dominant means of human communion with God, so that study of the law prevents the emotions from achieving their aim. The Hazon Ish would reject this out of hand precisely because for him emotions are inextricably intertwined with desire and the human inclination is to act only out of self-interest. 18. For a further treatment of this issue, see my “The Road from Religious Law.” 19. On submission as the sine qua non of Hazon Ish’s approach to tikkun ha-middot, see Brown, Ha-Hazon Ish, 121. 20. It is not clear what “limited faith” means. Perhaps it refers to faith that is not the product of habit and study; that is, faith acquired either through the study of musar or unreflective habit—what one becomes accustomed to through childhood. More generally, it may refer to faith as the product of subjectivity. 21. The term ratson ḥofshi literally translates as “free will” (sometimes called beḥirat ḥofshi), but in this context I think “subjectivity” better captures what the Hazon Ish is trying to convey. 22. EB 3:6. The last clause might be better translated as “as that which becomes his nature.” Here I think the Ḥazon Ish is claiming that submission of one’s subjectivity—or the certainty that we can assess correctly and act in a proper matter—to Torah through law accustoms our subjective selves to act habitually in the way of Torah. But this is after the emptying of the subjectivity before submission. This sounds very much like some musar teaching, especially of the Novardok School to which the Ḥazon Ish was particularly opposed. The Ḥazon Ish, however, thinks that the way to do this is not through extensive musar exercises but through a simple decision of submission, which is then implemented by love of the law and its application (piskey halakhah). 23. One of the only places I found the term is in Shmuel Bornstein of Socochov’s Shem Me-Shmuel on Leviticus, which originally appeared in 1911. See Shem Me-Shmuel on Leviticus (Jerusalem, 1992), 29–33. 24. On the notion of original sin in earlier Jewish sources, specifically kabbalistic ones, see my From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbalah (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 34–74. 25. Englander, “Understanding of the Human,” 185. 26. See Jeffrey K. Mann, “Luther on Reason: What Makes a Whore a Whore?” Seminary Ridge Review 18, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 1–17. 27. KI 1:15; see also KI 3:133. 28. On these terms see KI 1:44 and EB 4:17. “One cannot comprehend Torah merely in the mind (tsiur ha-makhshavah) but must only by those who ‘toil’ in it. (le-amalim bah).” On



Notes to Pages 141–143

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‘amalim be-torah, see Rashi to Leviticus 26:3. “You should go [in my statutes] you should be ‘amalim be-Torah.” Siftei Ḥakhamim explain Rashi in the following way: “The Torah reads you should go and not ‘you should learn.’ This comes to teach you that you should follow the teachings of the sages.” The Ḥazon Ish’s use of the term ‘amal seems to fit nicely into his larger understanding that Torah study is all geared toward halakhah (the law) and not study for its own sake. 29. The view of reason as dangerous when it functions autonomously is not limited to the Ḥazon Ish. We see it in other contexts; for example, in the traditional defense of the authority of the rabbinic sages against the critique of rabbinic innovation. And in one case, we see it in the defense of the antiquity of kabbalah against its critique in Judah Aryeh (Leon) of Modena’s Ari Nohem. See Yizhak Eisek Ḥaver’s Magen ve-Zina (Jerusalem: n.d.), 5: “It is known that human reason can never be quite sure of the truth of a thing because it is always fluctuating, more or less, between truth and falsehood, according to one’s humanness and desirous inclinations.” Here Haver gestures to what the Ḥazon Ish finds troubling in regard to the yetser ha-ra‘ and self-interest influencing autonomous reason. On Modena, see Yaakov Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 30. R. Yisrael Salanter, Ohr Yisrael, ed. R. I. Blaser (Vilna, 1900), Letter #30. 31. The implication here may be a referring to a state of depression. 32. See the discussion in Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 149. 33. EB 4:1. Simplifying the enterprise of tikkun ha-middot leads the Ḥazon Ish into a binary. Choosing the law, which is always directed toward the good, creates the conditions for true tikkun ha-middot. Busying oneself with particular character traits may be useful for the sick or for those who require immediate relief from some psychological malady such as depression, but is unnecessary for the healthy. This sentiment is similarly expressed in R. Ḥayyim of Brisk’s response to R. Isaac Blaser regarding the attempt to implement the study of musar in the Volozhin yeshivah. In Halakhic Man (trans. Lawrence Kaplan [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983], 75–76), Joseph  B. Soloveitchik cites R. Ḥayyim as follows: “We in Volozhin, thank God, are healthy is spirit and body, are whole in our Torah; there is no need here for castor oil. If the [musar] scholars of Kelm and Kovno feel compelled to drink bitter drugs—let them drink to their hearts’ content, but let them not invite others to dine with them.” See also EB 4:14. 34. See also EB 4.14, which argues that spending one’s time reading musar will not necessarily cure one’s bad traits. 35. The notion that law goes against human nature exists throughout the Ḥazon Ish’s work. See, for example, EB 3:12. Cf. Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 159. 36. The Ḥazon Ish was as opposed to the Lithuanian style of pilpul (casuistry) and the Brisker method as he was to musar. On Ḥazon Ish’s critique of such Talmud study, see KI 1:12 and Kaplan, “Ḥazon Ish,” 151–57. 37. Kaplan, “Ḥazon Ish,” 155. On the Brisker method, see Mosheh Lichtenstein, “ ‘What’ Hath Brisk Wrought: The Brisker Derekh Revisited,” Torah U-Madda Journal 9 (2000): 1–18; Marc B. Shapiro, “The Brisker Method Reconsidered,” Tradition 31, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 78–102. 38. For the most extensive study of sources and polemics against musar, see Dov Katz, Pulmus ha-musar (Jerusalem, n.d.). This is the additional volume to Katz’s five-volume Tenu’at Musar.

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39. R. Simcha Zissel Ziv of Kelm, Ḥokhmat u Musar (Jerusalem, 1964), 2:340. On this passage, see Geoffrey Claussen, Sharing the Burden: R. Simhah Zissel Ziv and the Path of Musar (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 82–83. 40. There are many studies that deal with Naḥman’s contestation of reason. For some examples in English, see Arthur Green, Tormented Master (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1992), 285–336; my “Doubt and Certainty in Contemporary Jewish Piety”; and my “Through the Void: The Absence of God in R. Naḥman of Bratzlav’s Likkutei MoHaRan,” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 4 (1996): 495–519. 41. KI 1:15. On Ḥazon Ish and his method of study, see Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 315–397. On the covenant being with the oral law, see KI 3:2. For the notion of the oral law as the basis of the devotional life and as even more significant than the written law, see Tosefot “de-omar” to B. Sukkah 3a: “Even though from Toraitic law (d’oraita) one fulfills the mitzvah, since he has not fulfilled its rabbinic obligation, he has not fulfilled the mitzvah.” This refers to the amount of the body that must be inside a sukkah to fulfill the rabbinic prescription. See also Rabbenu Nisim Gerondi in Ḥiddushei ha-Ran on the same talmudic passage: “Even though he fulfilled his Toraitic obligation, since it was not done properly (mitzvah min ha-muvkhar) he has not fulfilled the mitzvah of Sukkah at all (lo kayemet mitzvat sukkah me-yamekha). 42. On pilpul and its impact on medieval Talmud scholarship, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, “The Scope of Talmudic Commentary in Europe During the High Middle Ages,” in Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein, ed. Sharon Liberman Mintz and Gabriel M. Goldstein (New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 2005), 43–52. 43. See KI 3:133. 44. On law (halakhah) as the true musar, see KI 1:37, KI 3:11, EB 4:7. “We see from this that the proper way to tikkun ha-middot—is performing the law (shmirat ha-halakhah).” 45. The example Ḥazon Ish used at the beginning of Part III of EB is a talmudic sugya from B. Baba Batra 21b about teachers from elsewhere entering a city and challenging the livelihood of the teachers already there. He claimed that musar would have sympathy for the city’s teachers against the newcomers, and yet the Talmud decides that when it comes to Torah study the notion of hasagat gevul (prohibiting certain kinds of competition) does not apply. As the Ḥazon Ish wrote (EB 3:1), “In all these actions, the old teachers would be clean from any sin if it was the case that the halakhah was on their side in their desire to prevent the new teachers from working in their city. And the new teachers would be guilty of acting against a law that was given by God to Moses. There would be no prohibition against dispute (maḥloket) or gossip (lashon ha-ra‘) or baseless hatred (sinat ḥinam). This would simply be a holy war (milḥemet mitzvah) to establish the law on its foundations. However, now that it has been established that scholarly competition (kinat sofrim) increases wisdom and that this principle specifically applies to individuals, the guests (new teachers) that arrive are acting in accordance with the law and any who rise up against them are spilling innocent blood. Those that hate them transgress the prohibition do not hate your neighbor. And if they speak against them they are guilty of lashon ha-ra‘. And if they instigate communal protest [against them] they transgress the prohibition not to be like Korah. And if they seek revenge by concealing goodness they transgress ‘do not rise.’ Without the law, the decision, basing itself on emotions, may lean toward the old teachers and yet this would counter the law, and thus divine will.” 46. See Lawrence Kaplan, “ ‘Da’as Torah’: A Modern Conception of Rabbinic Authority,” in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Moshe Sokol (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), 1–60.



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47. See, for example, KI 1:31, 1:194, and 1:207. On the Ḥazon Ish’s view of psak, see Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 315–97. 48. On this, see Sefer Ḥazon Ish on Rosh Ha-Shana 140c and Brown, Ḥazon Ish, 385–87. The first volume of Dikdukey Sofrim, on B. Berakhot, was published in 1868. Subsequent volumes were published in the following years. Many of the great Torah sages weighed in on the merits of the work; some, like the Ḥazon Ish, were very critical and even saw it as dangerous to the study of Talmud. The Ḥazon Ish’s view was that it simply did not have any real impact on the printed Talmud, which he believed remained authoritative. 49. On this see Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 19, 20, 23. For more on the comparison to Soloveitchik, see Kaplan, “Ḥazon Ish,” 149–56; Englander, “Understanding of the Human,” 194–99. 50. See 1 Samuel 8:3. R. Jacob ben Asher, Tur Shulḥan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat, 1, “Laws of Judges,” 1b. On the question of certainty in musar, see Eliyahu Dessler, Mikhtav mi-Eliyahu; Dessler, Strive for Truth, trans. Aryeh Carmell (New York: Feldheim, 1985), 2:219–36. 51. The only other mention of ’ahavat ha-halakhah I found appears in R. Menachem Mendel of Sklov, Likkutim, 385. 52. On this, see Shlomo Yosef Zevin, Ishim ve Shitot, 298. 53. On ḥumrah in Ḥazon Ish, see Brown, Hazon Ish, 477–496. On ḥumrah as contra human nature, see Kaplan, “Ethics of Submission,” 484. 54. See Rashi to Gen.18:17: “I called him Abraham, the father of a multitude of nations. Now, can I destroy the sons without informing the father, who loves Me? Cf. Genesis Rabbah 49:2; Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer chap.25. Also see B. Sanhedrin 6b where the language of justice (tzedakah) refers to law (mishpat). 55. See EB 3:8, 3:9, 4:8, 4:10, 4:11, 4:19. 56. See EB 4:18. 57. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah 1:1. 58. G. E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939), 273–300. See also Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1:12–24. I want to thank Martin Kavka for pointing me to this study. 59. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 1969), 13e (#86). 60. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 39e (#308) (emphasis added). 61. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 27e (#194). 62. I want to thank Ben Pollock for this nuance. 63. There is, of course, a veritable library of scholarship on this. Much discussed are Maimonides’s use of the term knowledge (da‘at) in “knowing that there is a First Cause,” his “Laws on the Foundations of the Torah,” chapter 1, and his use of the term “belief ” (le-h’amin) that there is a Creator in the beginning of his Sefer Ha-Mitzvot. See Howard Kreisel, “Maimonides on Knowledge of God, Pedagogy, Philosophy and Law,” in Torah and Wisdom: Studies in Jewish Philosophy, Kabbalah, and Halacha—Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (New York: Shengold Publishers, 1992), 95–113; and Daniel Lasker, “Love of God and Knowledge of God in Maimonides’ Philosophy,” in Écriture et réécriture des textes philosophiques medievaux: Volume d’hommage offert à Colette Sirat, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and Olga Weijers (Turnhour: Brepols, 2006), 329–45.

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64. See Kaplan, “Ethics of Submission,” 496: “Legal decisions are not dependent on answering all the relevant questions. All the questions in the world will not change the law agreed upon by the rishonim (medieval sages).” 65. See Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 87. 66. See Terence Penelhum, God and Skepticism: A Study of Skepticism and Fideism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981). 67. I discuss this at length in Magid, “Doubt and Certainty.”

chapter 8 1. Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004). 2. For a nuanced account of these debates within the subaltern studies collective, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 3. See for example the different positions adopted in Saba Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 58–94; and Andrew March, “Speaking About Muhammad, Speaking for Muslims,” Critical Inquiry, 37, no. 4 (2011): 806–21. 4. See Mahmood, “Religious Reason and Secular Affect”; Talal Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Is Critique Secular? 14–57. 5. Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 9. 6. See Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: New York University Press, 1993). 7. Compare Feiner’s depiction of Jewish secularization to Leora Batnitzky’s significant reframing of questions of Jewish modernity and emancipation in How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 8. See, for example, Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002). For a less emphatic description of this relationship between modernization and rationalization, although still implicit, see Michael A. Meyer, Judaism Within Modernity: Essays on Jewish History and Religion (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 9. See David Fishman, Russia’s First Modern Jews: The Jews of Shklov (New York: New York University Press, 1995), where Fishman outlines the beginnings of Jewish acculturation and modernization in the mode of European Enlightenment ideals in the early 1780s. Similarly, Steven J. Zipperstein, in Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999) suggests that the role of the heder for many Jews in the later nineteenth century was to provide an ethos of Jewishness rather than any substantial intellectual focus. Both suggest that Jews in the nineteenth century were indeed “modern” but fail to observe the degree to which this same modernity in the Haskalah of Shklov or Odessa remains thoroughly enchanted. Zipperstein comes close when acknowledging Yaa-



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kov Fichman’s own “spiritual journey” on the train to Odessa, “ ‘ beside an open train carriage window breathing the fragrance of the dark, vast southern steppe.’ . . . ​He feels joy, fear, ambition, overpowering expectation: he steps off the train into the night air smelling of greenery” (80–81). In other words, Fichman is enchanted: he is affectively drawn into a spiritual realm he imagines to be saturated with the books and poems of Bialik or Ahad Ha’am and the sensations of a “modern” Jewish spirituality. And yet Zipperstein nevertheless contrasts this with Fichman’s origins, “a primitive place with few good books, some camaraderie, much darkness.” 10. Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 18. 11. For a nuanced account of the intertwining of emotion, affect, and reasoning, see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 204–33. 12. For the translation of lomdus as “conceptualism,” see Yosef Blau, ed., Lomdus: The Conceptual Approach to Jewish Learning (Jersey City, NJ: Ktav, 2006); Chaim Saiman, “Legal Theology: The Turn to Conceptualism in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Law,” Journal of Law and Religion, 21, no. 1 (2006): 39–100. 13. In many ways what I am seeking to uncover is similar to what Maoz Kahana has suggested, in his study of R. Yehezkel Landau and R. Moses Sofer, unsettles narratives about the development of modern halakhic thought. In Kahana’s interpretation, Landau, in particular, demonstrates the kind of intellectual sensibility that reflects a changing ideological conception of halakhah in light of the Haskalah and scientific research, which I am similarly attempting to trace in and around the establishment of the yeshivah of Volozhin. See Maoz Kahana, Mi-node’ah bi-yehuda le-Ḥatam Sofer: Halakha ve-hagot le-nokhaḥ itgarey ha-zman (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2015). 14. See my “Wissen und Lomdus: Some Nineteenth-Century Philosophical and Rabbinic Responses to the Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (2017): 393–420. 15. In a manner similar to Shmuel Eisenstadt’s observation that westernization and modernization need to be decoupled to understand the various transformations of the plural account of modernities, multiple accounts of the secular exist simultaneously. See S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” in Multiple Modernities, 1–30; see also Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, xx, 38–39. 16. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975– 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 59–62. 17. See Jeremy Brown, New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 18. The construal of “science” as opposed to traditional rabbinic thought is yet another example of a problematic binary. For examples that seek to push beyond this binary see Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Rabbinic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). For an overview of diverse and changing views toward the European scientific worldview leading up to period in question, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 19. R. Ya’akov David ben Ze’ev Wilovsky (Ridbaz), Introduction to Teshuvot Beit Ridbaz (Jerusalem: 1908), 5. Cf. Chaim Saiman, “Legal Theology.” 20. See Maoz Kahana’s depiction in Mi-node’a bi-yehudah of the hermeneutic strategies of negotiating between maskilic and traditionalist sensibilities in addressing the proliferation

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of Lurianic customs and the transformations of halakhic practice in the late eighteenth century. 21. Yehezkel Kotik, Mayne zikhroynes (Tsveyter teyl) (Warsaw, 1914), 245–46, cited in Natan Meir, “From Pork to ‘Kapores’: Transformations in Religious Practice Among Jews in Late Imperial Kiev,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 626–27. 22. See also Maoz Kahana’s discussion of the shifting public culture in Prague during the eighteenth century and its impact on conceptions of halakhic practicability, in “Shabbat be-beit ha-kafeh shel kehilat kodesh Prag,” Zion 78, no. 1 (2013): 5–50. 23. Biyur ha-Gra le-sefer ha-Zohar, Parashat Bo, 41b. Cited in Allan Nadler, The Faith of the Mitnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 18. 24. Nadler, Faith of the Mitnagdim, 19. 25. See Shaul Magid’s assessment of this immanence in R. Hayyim of Volozhin in “Deconstructing the Mystical: The Anti-Mystical Kabbalism in Rabbi Ḥayyim of Volozhin’s Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 9, no. 1 (1999): 21–67, which, as Allan Nadler has noted, permeates Mitnagdic thought more generally. See Nadler, Faith of the Mitnagdim, 11–28. 26. Nadler, Faith of the Mitnagdim, 24. 27. Nadler, Faith of the Mitnagdim, 25. 28. Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake in the Works of R. Ḥayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (New York: Ktav, 1989), 104–5. 29. Lamm, Torah Lishmah, 81; cited at Nadler, Faith of the Mitnagdim, 152. 30. Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim, Shaar 4:26. 31. Menahem Mendel of Shlov, Drushim ‘al seder ha-hishtalshelut, 278; cf. Mayim Adirim, 55–56. 32. Mayim Adirim, 15. 33. Mayim Adirim, 15. 34. Mayim Adirim, Be’er Yitshak, 123, n. 86. 35. Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Kilayim, 10:27. 36. Shelomoh ben Avraham Ibn Aderet, Torat HaBayit 4:1. 37. Aryeh Leib Ha-Kohen Heller, Ketsot ha-ḥoshen (Zholkva, 1831), introduction. 38. Heller, Ketsot ha-ḥoshen, introduction. 39. My thanks to James Diamond for conversations that stimulated this insight. Although Diamond suggests this may be a polemic against medieval philosophy, assuming Heller’s knowledge of philosophy to have been limited, I nevertheless believe that even as a critique of certain monistic or mystical accounts of a singular divine truth, it is an accurate reading. 40. Heller, Ketsot ha-ḥoshen, introduction. 41. Heller, Ketsot ha-ḥoshen, introduction; Heller, Shev shema‘teta, intro. Cf. Louis Jacobs, “R. Aryeh Laib Heller’s Theological Introduction to his ‘Shev Shema‘tata,’ ” Modern Judaism 1, no. 2 (1981): 184–216. 42. Indeed, the principles of sefek sefeka, of combined axes of uncertainty, that render otherwise potentially prohibited items permissible, are a staple of talmudic and medieval commentary and garnered sufficient attention from Shabbatai ben Meir HaKohen (1621–62) to warrant a separate mini-treatise within the printed editions of the Shulḥan Arukh. 43. Heller, Ketsot ha-ḥoshen, introduction.



Notes to Pages 171–173

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44. As Heller notes in the Shev shema‘teta, the conception of Oral Torah as a human possession stretches back to the mysticism of R. Judah Leib ben Bezalel Löw, the Maharal of Prague (ca. 1512–1609); Heller was likely exposed early on to the Maharal because he descended from one of the Maharal’s principal students, R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller (1579–1654). In his Tiferet Israel (chapter 68), the Maharal describes how both the Written and the Oral Law are accessed through reason (sekhel) and that the ability for human beings to grasp the meaning of mitzvah in its rational form is limited to their material intellects. The purpose of written Torah is to provide a distinct form for rational comprehension. Oral Torah, by contrast, transforms that rational form into meaning and explains how the one who receives the commandment (hamekubal ha-mitsvah) ought to act. Oral Torah is without any absolute end (beli takhlit). But the paradigm unveiled by the Maharal’s statement is that Oral Torah still manifests a face of reason, which is perhaps better described as thinking precisely because of its orality, its living character. It is, however, but one expression of a Janus-faced concept: reason is both dynamic and static, both complete and incomplete, both transcendent and efficacious in the immanence of this world. The tale of reason, it turns out, is an unfinished story. The dynamic life of thinking is found in interplay, dare we say in a dialectic, between the finite and the infinite, the whole and the partial, the determinate and the immediate. But the connection between thinking and Torah, between the Oral Law and its dynamic discussion and unfolding in historical time, takes shape most familiarly to Jewish traditionalists as a received tradition. In other words, to the extent that human beings have a finite reason (sekhel lo-gamur) they participate in an unfinished reasoning process that constitutes the rationality of Torah (ha-sekhel ha-gamur). This dialectic between an incomplete reasoning and a complete reason occurs because Oral Torah is a tradition and therefore requires instruction and reception (mekubal) (Tiferet Yisrael, 68). Orality, and the capacity to explain the written Torah through this kind of thinking, is therefore the unique covenantal ability of Israel, and it is the shape of the covenant with Israel (b. Gittin 60b). This is Israel’s uniqueness— to have received the covenant in word, in the Oral Torah, which alone makes the written Torah intelligible. Hence, according to the Maharal, this connection between God and Israel manifests in speech, and the mouth of the human being locates Oral Torah in human hands and not in the hands of the heavenly author: “The parchment of the Oral Torah is not in writing, it is only in the mouth of the human being” (Tiferet Yisrael, 68). The connection between thinking and speech is therefore the inscription on a living parchment. 45. On the role of doubt in the contemporaneous works of R. Moses Sofer, see Kahana, Mi-node’a bi-yehudah, 421. 46. See Ilan Fuchs, “The Yeshivah as a Political Institution,” Modern Judaism 33, no. 3 (2013): 357–80. On the developing social circles and consciousness of these emerging communal structures, see Immanuel Etkes and Shelomoh Tikochinski, Yeshivot Lita: Pirkei zikhoronot, (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2004). 47. See Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning, trans. Lindsey Taylor-Gudhartz (London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012), 93, 143. 48. Nefesh Ha-Ḥayyim, 4:3. See Avinoam Fraenkel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum: Rabbi Chaim Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChaim with Translation and Commentary (Jerusalem: Urim, 2015), 1:642–43. 49. On the style of learning advocated by R. Hayyim of Volozhin at the time of the yeshivah’s founding, see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas; Tzvi Kaplan, “Le-Darko shel Rabbenu

222

Notes to Pages 173–181

Ḥayyim mi-Volozhin be-Halakha” Sinai 69 (1971): 74–79; Mosheh Tzinovitz, Etz Ḥayyim: Toledot Yeshivat Volozhin, (Tel Aviv: 2002); and Shelomoh Tikoshinsky, “Darkei Ha-Limud be-Yeshivot Lita be-Meah ha-Tisha’ Esrei,” Avodat musmakh, ha-universitah ha-ivrit, (Jerusalem, 2004). 50. As Shai Wozner notes, the net effect of emulating the style of learning of the Ashkenazic Rishonim, or talmudic glossators, and the Spanish school of talmudic commentators, was not lost on the conceptualists such as R. Ḥayyim Soloveitchik and R. Shimon Shkop. See Wozner, Ḥashivah mishpatit be-yeshivot Lita: ‘Iyyunim be-mishnato shel ha-Rav Shimon Shkop, (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016), 40–41. See also the descriptions of R. Hayyim and R. Yitshaq Velvel Soloveitchik, in Shelomo Yosef Zevin, Ishim ve-shitot: Shurat ma’amarim ‘al-ishey halakhah ve-shitoteyhem ba-torah (Jerusalem: Qol Mevaser, 2007). 51. Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas, 105–6. 52. Israel Bartal, “Jewish Autonomy in the Modern Age: What was Destroyed? What Remains? What More?” [Hebrew], in Kahal Yisrael: Jewish Self-Rule Throughout the Ages, Vo. 3: The Modern Era, ed. Yisrael Bartal (Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2004), 9–16. 53. Stampfer, 144–45. 54. Ḥayyim Nachman Bialik, “Ha-Matmid,” in Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik, revised, ed. Israel Efros, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Bloch Publishing Company for Histadruth Ivrith of America, 1999), 34; 44–45 55. Stampfer, Lithuanian Yehivas, 106, 159. 56. Yosef Dov Ha-Levi Soloveitchik, She’elot u-Teshuvot Beit Ha-Levi (Vilna, 1863), 1. 57. “Soloveitchik to the Madrikh Pressburg, 1882,” in Iggerot mi-Beit Ha-Levi (Bnei Brak: Pardes Bnei Brak, 1993). 58. Yosef Dov Ha-Levi Soloveitchik, She’elot u-Teshuvot Beit Ha-Levi, 1. 59. Yosef Dov Ha-Levi Soloveitchik, She’elot u-Teshuvot Beit Ha-Levi, 1. 60. Zalman Epstein, Yeshivot lita: Pirkey zikhronot, 73, 77; see also Elyakim Krumbein, “Piety at Volozhin: A Diminished Presence,” http://etzion.org.il/en/shiur-11-piety​-volozhin​ -diminished-presence. 61. Cf. R. Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, Ha’emek Davar commentary on Exodus 24 and 31:34. 62. On the developing discourse about law and legal science in the context of Lithuanian talmudic thought, see Yosef Lindell, “A Science like Any Other? Classical Legal Formalism in the Halakhic Jurisprudence of Rabbis Isaac Jacob Reines and Moses Avigdor Amiel,” Journal of Law and Religion 28, no.  1 (2012–13): 179–224. See also Saiman, “Legal Theology,” where the parallel shift in German legal history is cited as an analogy, although Saiman does not make explicit what legal knowledge means. Cf. Shai Wozner, Legal Thinking in the Lithuanian Yeshivas: Concepts in the Work of Rabbi Shimon Shkop (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2016). On the conscious effort to transform the yeshivah into a political organization, see Fuchs, “Yeshivah as a Political Institution,” 357–80. 63. On the specific meaning of idealism and idealization that I use to describe lomdus, see my “Wissen und Lomdus.” 64. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 221. 65. I intend to provide a more sustained discussion of Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man in a forthcoming essay. 66. See Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (New York: Seth Press, 1986), 85–101.

Contributors

Anne C. Dailey is Evangeline Starr Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective (Yale UP, 2017). She has a special interest in the comparative study of American and Jewish law. John Efron holds the Koret Chair in Jewish History at the University of California at Berkeley. He specializes in the cultural history of modern German Jewry. Yael S. Feldman, professor emerita of New York University, was the Katsh Chair of Hebrew Culture and affiliate professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies. She is the author of six books and more than one hundred articles and reviews. Her No Room of Their Own: Gender and Nation in Israeli Women’s Fiction (Columbia UP, 2000) and Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and National Narrative (Stanford UP, 2010) were National Jewish Book Award finalists. Her Lelo heder mishelahen (2002) won the Avraham Friedman Memorial Prize. Galit Hasan-Rokem is professor emerita of Literature and Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among her books and edited volumes are Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (2000); Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity (2003); The Wandering Jew—Essays in the Interpretation of a Christian Legend (with A. Dundes 1986); The Defiant Muse—Hebrew Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present: A Bilingual Anthology (with T. Hess and S. Kaufman 1999); and A Companion to Folklore (with R. F. Bendix 2012). Martin Kavka is a professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. The author of Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy (Cambridge UP), which won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the Association for Jewish Studies in 2008, he has also done extensive editorial work, including coediting the Journal of Religious Ethics from 2011 to 2021. Lital Levy is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary scholar of Middle Eastern and Jewish literatures and Sephardi/Mizrahi intellectual history, she is the author of Poetic Trespass: Writing Between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (Princeton UP, 2014), which won the MLA First Book Prize, Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, and Salo Baron Book Award. Shaul Magid is a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest book is Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical (Princeton UP, 2021). His forthcoming book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Ayin Press, 2023).

224 Contributors Eva Mroczek is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (2016) and other work at the intersection of ancient Judaism and book history. Paul E. Nahme is the Dorot Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Hermann Cohen and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Enchantment of the Public Sphere (Indiana UP, 2019), which was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. Eli Schonfeld is a senior lecturer at Shalem College in Jerusalem where he teaches modern Jewish philosophy and contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Wonder of Subjectivity: A Reading of Levinas’ Philosophy (Resling, 2007) and The Apology of Mendelssohn: The Birth of Modern Jewish Philosophy (Verdier, 2018, for the French version; Carmel, 2019, for the Hebrew version). Shira Stav is a senior lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where she teaches Hebrew literature. She is the author of Reconstructing Daddy: Fathers and Daughters in Modern Hebrew Poetry (2014) and The Return of the Missing Father: A New Reading of a Chain of Stories from the Babylonian Talmud (2018, with H. Weiss).

Index

Abraham, 148–49 Abrams, Daniel, 62 Abudirham, David, 125, 127 Adorno, Theodor W., 28, 41 affect. See emotion/affect Agnon, S. Y.: background on, 16; contingency in the work of, 11; and the Holocaust, 6, 16, 19–31; irony in the work of, 15, 20, 22–23, 25–27, 30–31; and knowledge/desire, 2, 3, 6–8; and martyrdom, 6, 16, 19–31; the overt and the covert in the work of, 32–33, 35–38, 41, 46–49, 51–53; scholarship on, 32 Agnon, S. Y., works: “At the Outset of the Day,” 2, 3, 6–7, 11, 33–53; The Book of Deeds, 38, 191n20; “The Cantors,” 52; A City in Its Fullness, 51, 189n64; The Fire and the Wood, 23, 24; “Forevermore,” 7–8, 24, 29–30, 58, 66–69, 188n62, 191n38; A Guest for the Night, 6, 11, 19–24, 29–30; “ ‘Ido and ‘Enam,” 52; “In the Prime of Her Life,” 48, 49; “Mea­sur­ing Gain by Pain,” 6, 19, 23–30; Shirah, 19, 24, 29–30, 185n23, 188n62; “The Sign,” 23; “The Tale of the Scribe,” 49 ‘Akedah (martyr tradition), 6, 17–21, 23–27, 31 Albertus Magnus, 90 Alfonse X, king of Spain, 99 allegory, 34–36, 40–41, 43, 46, 48, 51, 190n12. See also interpretation Allegro, John, 69–70, 72 Ami, R., 117 animals, religious ­Others associated with, 91, 201n57. See also Judensau antisemitism: Christian, 2, 3, 70, 75–101; smell linked to, 75–101 Arabs, 7–8, 44, 60–62, 68, 70. See also Bedouin

Aramaic, 26–28 Aristotle, 102, 105 Asad, Talal, 156 Ashkenazic Jews, 99, 100 Athanasius, Saint, 18 Augustine (saint), 103 Auschwitz, 9, 28, 104, 105, 107, 109–10, 118, 121. See also Holocaust/Shoah Babylonian Talmud, 47, 117 Bahat, Ya’akov, 38 Bais Yaakov movement, 4 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 110–11 Bar Kokhbah, 58–59, 69 Bartal, Israel, 173 bar Yochai, Shimon, 60, 62 Bataille, Georges, 184n4 Batra, B. Baba, 61 Bayless, Martha, 86 Bedouin, 58, 60–62, 69–70, 72. See also Arabs Bell, Catherine, 179–81 Ben-­Gurion, David, 66, 137; “The Tanakh Shines with Its Own Light,” 66 Benjamin, Walter, 41, 115 Ben Sira, 63 ben Yosef, R. Yechiel, 88 Ben Zakai, Rabban Yohanan, 44–46 Berdyczewski, Michah Yosef, 174 Berlin, R. Naftali Tzvi Yehuda (Netziv), 177 Bialik, Ḥayyim Naḥman, “Ha-­Matmid,” 173–74 Bible. See Hebrew Bible body: Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” and, 6–7, 35–37, 42–43, 46–53; desire in relation to, 7; Jews associated with, 3, 8, 77, 94–95; martyrdom and, 20; mind/ soul in relation to, 3, 42–43; spoilage of, 77; of w ­ omen, 91. See also materiality

226 Index Bourdieu, Pierre, 181 Boyarin, Daniel, 114 Brenz, Samuel Friedrich, 93–94, 99–100 Brown, Benjamin, 213n10, 213n16 Buber, Martin, 123–24, 209n19 butchers, 96–97, 202n78 Cairo Genizah, 63 Camus, Albert, The Plague, 28–29 Caravaggio, 18 Carlebach, Elisheva, 93 certainty: in adjudication of halakhah (law), 144–45; knowledge in relation to, 151; limits of, 11–12, 136, 140, 143–45, 151; love of the law as source of, 12, 135–36, 138, 141, 145, 150, 152, 154; in musar and other pietistic traditions, 10, 135, 142–43, 147, 152; objective vs. subjective, 10, 150, 151–52; reason in relation to, 168–71, 179; Torah study and, 10–11, 168–71, 179; truth in relation to, 150–51; Wittgenstein on, 10, 150–52. See also doubt; truth Chris­t ian­ity: anti-­Jewish sentiments of, 2, 3, 70, 75–101, 109; discoveries of sacred texts of, 56, 61, 63–65, 70; Geiger’s critique of, 4; and martyrdom, 17, 18; and pain-­k nowledge equation, 18; and smell, 80–82; and the Wandering Jew, 8–9 consolation, 9–10, 12, 116, 119–32, 207n56 contamination: Jews associated with, 8, 56, 101; of meaning, 8, 56–57; paratextual role of, 58–59, 74, 193n6; of texts, 1, 3, 7, 56, 58–72; transmitted by sacred objects, 58 contingency, of knowledge, 5, 11–12, 14, 62–63, 72, 74 conversion, of Jews to Chris­tian­ity, 77, 82, 93, 96, 100 Cooper, John, 99 Corbin, Alain, 97 Cordovero, Moshe, 7, 54, 57, 60, 62 Cover, Robert, 13 Cuffel, Alexandra, 90–91 Dead Sea Scrolls, 7, 59–61, 66, 69, 72–73 Dead Sea Scrolls Conservation Laboratory, 72–73 de Leon, Moshe, 60 De Man, Paul, 43 Derrida, Jacques, 184n4 Descartes, René, 150–51

desire: the body and physicality in relation to, 7; incestuous, 2, 3, 7, 35, 48–50, 192n50; knowledge in relation to, 5–6, 12–14; methodological significance of, 13; in scholarly studies and pursuits, 13–14. See also emotion/affect Deutero-­Isaiah, 123–25, 208n13, 209n22 Deutsch, Yaakov, 93 de Vaux, Roland, 72 devekut (cleaving to God), 136, 142, 149, 154, 163, 164, 172–73 Devil, Jews associated with, 82, 85, 88, 90, 92 dirt. See contamination of diseases, associated with Jews, 88–90 disenchantment. See enchantment/ disenchantment disgust: butchering as source of, 96–97; as Christian response to Jews, 2, 3, 77; evoked by contamination and decay of texts, 57, 59; ­Others as source of, 90–91 Donin, Nicholas, 88 doubt: evil inclinations associated with, 135, 140, 143, 149; intrinsic to the self, 133, 140–41, 143, 147; love contrasted with, 135–36, 138. See also certainty; skepticism drash (method of interpretation), 41, 45–46, 191n34 Durkheim, Émile, 184n4 Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, 157, 159, 173 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 18, 47 ecotypes, 105–6, 113 Efron, John, 2, 3, 8 Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, Entdecktes Judentum, 94 Elberg, R. Simha, 31 Elior, Rachel, 51 emotion/affect: connected to texts, 55–56, 62; God’s expression of, 10; Hasidism and, 214n17; Jews associated with, 3; in scholarly studies and pursuits, 55–57, 59, 73–74 enchantment/disenchantment, 11, 155–65, 167, 170–74, 176–81 En­glander, Yakir, 140, 213n10, 213n16 Enlightenment, 78, 157, 171. See also Haskalah Epstein, Zalman, 177 ethnography, 79, 85, 89, 93–97, 100, 104, 201n63 Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis, 17

Index Eve, 149–50 evil: prob­lem of, 117–19, 121–25, 129; the self ’s inclination ­toward, 10, 11, 136, 138–41, 143, 145–47, 149–50, 153 excrement, 2, 64–66, 70–72, 76, 79, 88–91 Ezra, 63 Ezrahi, Sidra, “Agnon Before and ­A fter,” 23 faith and fideism, 118–19, 134–36, 140, 143–44, 150, 152–53 Farissol, Abraham, 99 Feiner, Shmuel, 156–57 Feldman, Yael, 6, 11; Glory and Agony, 16 Felman, Shoshana, 28 Feuchtwanger, Lion, Jud Süss, 106 Fichman, Yaakov, 218n9 Fishman, David, 218n9 Fletcher, Angus, 35–36 folklore, 97–98, 204n7 food, laws and customs related to, 98–99, 202n78 Foucault, Michel, 18, 160 Frank, Jacob, and Frankism, 50–51 Freud, Sigmund, 42, 48, 116, 207n56 garbology, 64 garlic, 94, 98–100, 203n95 Geiger, Abraham, 4 Geiler von Kaysersberg, Johann, 90 Genesis, Book of, 19 Genette, Gerard, 58 Germany, antipathy t­ oward Jews in, 8, 75–76, 79, 83–88, 93, 201n63. See also Nazism ghettos, 95–97, 101 Gibson, Margaret, 63 gloves, 59, 72–73, 193n6 God: cleaving to (devekut), 136, 142, 149, 154, 163, 164, 172–73; comforting presence of, 3, 9–10, 125–32; impotency/vulnerability of, 129–32, 211n31; lamentations directed to, 208n11; Mitnagdic vs. Hasidic conceptions of the relation of the world to, 162–64; and the prob­lems of evil and suffering, 117–19, 124, 129, 210n29, 211n31; smell linked to, 81–82; transcendence of, 10 Goebbels, Josef, 101 GRA. See Vilna Gaon Green, Deborah, 80 Grenfell, Bernard, 65–66 Grodzinski, R. Hayim Ozer, 137

227

Ha’aretz (newspaper), 23 HaCohen, Ruth, 79 haftarot, 9–10, 120, 124–31, 207n7, 209n22 Hagbi, Yaniv, 39, 191n38 halakhah (law): adjudication of, 137, 144–46, 152; limitations of, 135; love of, 3, 10–11, 135–54; meta-­, 133–35, 142–43, 153; reason and enchantment in, 11, 157, 159, 162–81; self in relation to, 10, 134–54; theology in relation to, 133–34 halakhic totalism, 135, 143, 150 Halbertal, Moshe, 208n10 Harpham, Geoffrey, 18, 29 Harrison, Tony, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, 65–66 Harvey, Susan, 80 Hasan-­Rokem, Galit, 2, 3, 8, 11–13 Hasidism: acosmism of, 162–64; conception of God in, 149, 162–64, 172; conceptions of reason and the self in, 142, 171; and the emotions, 214n17; Ḥazon Ish and, 213n11; Mitnagdic tradition in relation to, 162–64; and this-­worldly concerns, 160, 162 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 157–59, 161, 218n9 Hayyim, R., of Brisk, 215n33 Ḥayyim ben Yitzḥak, R., of Volozhin, 172–73; Nefesh Ha-­Ḥayyim, 163–66, 172 Ḥazon Ish (R. Avraham Karelitz), 11, 12, 134–54; Emunah u-­bitaḥon (EB), 10, 135–42, 145, 147–49, 153–54, 213n10 Hebrew Bible, 47, 56, 66, 99 Heller, R. Aryeh Leib Ha-­Kohen, 11, 167–70, 172, 178, 180–81, 221n44; Ketsot ha-­ḥoshen, 167, 169, 170; Shev shema‘teta, 167, 168, 170 Henry of Brussels, 90 Heschel, Susannah, 4–5, 14 Hess, Ernst Ferdinand, Juden Geissel, 96–97, 100 Hiemer, Ernst, Der Jude im Sprichwort der Volker, 75, 79 Holocaust/Shoah: Agnon and, 6, 16, 19–31; Camus’s The Plague as parable about, 28; murder of Kiš’s ­father in, 9, 104–5, 107, 109; Nazi perpetration of, 8, 101; and smell, 75. See also Auschwitz Hubert, Henry, 184n4 Hundert, Gershon, 157 Hunt, Arthur, 65–66 Hurwitz, Yosef Hoisel, of Novardok, 135, 153

228 Index ibn Aderet, R. Shelomoh (Rashba), 168 Ibn Gabriol, 23 imagination, 2, 102, 115–16 incest, 2, 3, 7, 35, 48–50, 192n50 interpretation: Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” and, 32–33, 39–44, 46–49, 53; Agnon’s “Forevermore” and, 58, 66–69, 191n38; Jewish methods of, 45–46, 191n34; original meaning or completeness as goals of, 43, 46, 56–57, 66, 71; paratexts’ role in, 58–59; significance of pro­cess of, 42–43, 191n38. See also allegory; meaning irrationality. See nonrational, the Isaac, 17–19, 21, 24–26 Isaac of Acre, 60 Isaiah, Book of, 10–12, 120, 122–31, 209n16, 209n19. See also Deutero-­Isaiah Islam, 17, 21 Jeremiah, 123, 209n16 Jerusalem Talmud, 47 Jesus: in hell, according to a talmudic passage, 88; Jewishness of, 4; Jews’ attitudes ­toward, 9, 91, 93–94; Jews blamed for crucifixion of, 97, 103; redemptive power of, 124; suffering servant identified with, 209n20; the Wandering Jew and, 9, 102–3, 109 Jews: associated with contamination, 8, 56, 101; associated with emotions and irrationality, 3; associated with pigs, 82–88, 91–92, 199n30; associated with smell and uncleanliness, 2, 3, 8, 9, 75–101; associated with the ancient past, 56; associated with the body and sensuality, 3, 8, 77, 94–95; Christian antipathy ­toward, 2, 3, 70, 75–101, 109; converts to Chris­tian­ity, 77, 82, 93, 96, 100; diseases associated with, 88–90; Eastern Eu­ro­pean, 157, 159, 173; identity of, 9, 105–6, 112, 114–15; and martyrdom, 6, 15–16, 18–31, 185n20; and modernity, 156–62, 174, 178–80; Nazi/German antipathy t­ oward, 8, 75–76, 79, 83–88, 93, 101, 201n63; physical features of, 94–95; secrecy associated with, 92–93; textual tradition of, 56, 62, 73–74 John Chrysostom, 80, 81 Jonas, Hans, 130 Joyce, James, Ulysses, 106

Judas Iscariot, 88–89 Judensau, 82–88, 84, 86, 87, 91–92, 199n30 kabbalah, 51, 62, 130, 134–35, 165, 172, 213n11 Kafka, Franz, 113 Kahana, Maoz, 219n13 Kant, Immanuel, 172 Kaplan, Lawrence, 142–43 Karelitz, R. Avraham. See Ḥazon Ish Katz, Jacob, 156 Keller, R. Aryeh Leib Ha-­Kohen, 10 Kirsch, Adam, 15 Kiš, Danilo, 2, 8–9, 102, 104–16; “Birth Certificate (A Short Autobiography),” 105, 106; garden, ashes, 9, 11–12, 107–12; Hourglass, 9, 112–13 knowledge: certainty in relation to, 151; contingency of, 5, 11–12, 14, 62–63, 72, 74; desire in relation to, 5–6, 12–14; materiality of texts as ­factor in, 7–8; and the nonrational, 2, 5; pain in relation to, 18–19, 24; per­for­mance of, 4; scholarly study of, 4–6; senses in relation to, 78. See also certainty and doubt; meaning; truth Kurzweil, Baruch, 34–35, 46 Lamentations, Book of, 120, 122–23, 209n16 Lamm, Norman, 164 Laor, Dan, “Did Agnon Write About the Shoah?,” 23 Laramée, Guy, 72 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 94 law. See halakhah Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 117–18 Leiter, Samuel, 40–41 leprosy, 7–8, 29, 58, 67–69 Levinas, Emmanuel, 11, 117, 118–19 Lewis, Agnes, 63–64 Lithuanian Talmudism, 10–11, 142, 158, 168 liturgy, 3, 9, 23–26, 28, 119–32 lomdus (conceptual method), 158, 159, 168 love, of halakhah (law), 3, 10–11, 135–54 Löw, R. Judah Leib ben Bezalel (Maharal of Prague), 221n44 Luijendijk, AnneMarie, 64–65 Luther, Martin, 85–86, 90 Maccabees, Book of, 21–22 Magid, Shaul, 3, 10, 11, 13, 163 Mahmood, Saba, 156

Index Maimonides, Moses, 9, 140, 150, 152, 168 martyrdom, 15–31; Agnon and, 6, 16, 19–31; and the body, 20; Chris­tian­ity and, 17, 18; critiques of, 17, 22–23, 25–31; economy of, 16–19, 22–28, 31, 184n4; history of, 16–19; irrationality of, 15, 16, 23–24, 31; Islam and, 17; Jews and, 6, 15–16, 18–31, 185n20; and the noble death, 15, 17, 18; and pain, 20, 24–26, 28–29; secular expressions of, 6, 15, 18–19, 29, 31 Mary, Virgin, 91 materiality: Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” and, 7, 35–37, 42–43, 46, 48, 51–53; as basis for allegorical interpretation, 35–37, 40, 42, 48; of language, 39–40, 43, 52–53; meaning and, 7, 36–37, 40, 42, 51, 55–57; narrative framing of, 74; scholarship and, 55–56, 71; significance of, 36, 51; of texts, 3, 7, 54–74; writing privileged over, 8, 55, 61, 71–72. See also body Mauss, Marcel, 184n4 McLuhan, Marshall, 78 meaning: materiality and, 7, 36–37, 40, 42, 51, 55–57; original/complete, as goal of interpretation, 8, 43, 46, 56–57, 66, 71. See also interpretation; knowledge Mendel, R. Menaḥem, of Shklov, 165–67, 170 Mesharshiya, Rav, 68 Mintz, Alan, 23 Mitnagdic tradition, 11, 157–59, 162–71, 177–80 modernity: Jews and, 156–62, 174, 178–80; reason in relation to, 143, 150–51, 155–58, 161; the senses in relation to, 78; Torah and, 159, 174, 179; tradition vs., 155, 157–58, 160–62; Wandering Jew and, 106–7, 113 Moore, G. E., 151 Moses, 148–49 Mroczek, Eva, 2, 3, 7, 12–13 murder. See ritual murder musar, 10, 134–35, 138–43, 145–47, 150, 152–53, 213n10, 213n13, 213n16, 215n33. See also pietism Myers, David, 5 Nadler, Allan, 163–64 Nag Hammadi, 61 Nahman of Bratslav, 143, 153 Nahme, Paul, 10–11, 13

229

nationalism, martyrdom and self-­sacrifice inspired by, 6, 15–16, 18–19, 31 Nazism, antipathy ­toward the Jews of, 8, 75, 79, 101. See also Germany Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 118 noble death, 15, 17, 18 nonrational, the: consolation by means of, 119–20, 131–32; Jews associated with, 3; knowledge in relation to, 2, 5; martyrdom and, 15, 16, 23–24, 31; religion and, 156; theology contrasted with, 118–19, 121–25. See also reason Ofer, Rachel, 41 Ointment Seller, The (Czech play), 89 Ong, Walter, 78 Oral Torah, 11, 161, 166–67, 170–71, 174, 177–80, 221n44 orientalism, 7, 62, 73 original sin, 136, 137, 140 Orthodox Judaism, 4, 10. See also Ultra-­ Orthodox Judaism Osher ‘Akedah (glory of martyrdom), 31 Otto, Rudolf, 129 Oxyrhynchus, 64–66 pain: knowledge and, 18–19, 24; martyrdom and, 20, 24–26, 28–29 paratexts, 58–59, 74, 193n6, 194n7 Pardes, Ilana, 66, 68 Paul (saint), 81 Paullini, Christian Francis, 99–100 Penelhum, Terence, 150, 153 phenomenological hermeneutics, 120, 131 philology. See scholarship pietism, 134, 150, 152, 154, 212n7. See also Ḥazon Ish; musar pigs. See Judensau pilpul (casuistry/analysis), 142, 144, 168, 170, 173, 176 Plantinga, Alvin, 153 pshat (method of interpretation), 41, 46, 191n34 pus, 67–69 Rabinowitz, R. Rafael Natan, Dikdukei Sofrim, 146, 217n48 Rackman, Emanuel, 133 Rashi, 68–69 rationality. See nonrational, the; reason rats, 56, 58–59, 70–71

230 Index reason: autonomy of, 136, 140, 143, 144, 171, 172, 215n29; certainty in relation to, 168–71, 179; creativity of, 142, 159–60, 167, 170–72, 177–78; enchantment/religion in relation to, 11, 156–81; faith vs., 134–35, 140, 150, 153; Ḥazon Ish’s conception of, as being in ser­vice to love, 136, 140, 143–46, 150, 153; limits of, 10, 11, 134–36, 136, 141, 143, 159, 163–72, 180, 215n29; modernity in relation to, 143, 150–51, 155–58, 161; in musar tradition, 141, 143, 145; secularization thesis and, 155–58, 160–62, 178; thinking contrasted with, 181; in Torah study, 10–12, 159–81. See also certainty; nonrational, the; thinking Reform Judaism, 4 religion: and the nonrational, 119; reason in relation to, 156–81; secularization thesis and, 155–58. See also liturgy Riesser, Gabriel, 157 ritual murder, 82, 87, 90, 96 Rosenzweig, Franz, 119, 130 Roth, Joseph: Job, 106; Leviathan, 106 Saad, Joseph, 69 Sadan, Dov, 32 Salanter, R. Israel, ’Or Yisrael, 141–42 Sasson, Gil’ad, 47 Schechter, Solomon, 63 Schenirer, Sarah, 4 scholarship: desire in, 13–14; as discovery, recovery, and preservation of culture, 56, 59–60, 63, 69–71, 193n5; emotion/affect in, 55–57, 59, 73–74; knowledge as subject of, 4–6; material culture as focus of, 55–56, 71; on smell, 77–78 Scholem, Gershom, 39, 50–51 Schonfeld, Eli, 3, 9–10, 11 Schopen, Gregory, 55 Schudt, Johann Jakob, Jüdische Merkwürdigkeiten, 94–97, 99–100, 202n78 Scriver, Christian, 94–95 secularization thesis, 11, 155–58, 160–62, 178 Sefer Yosippon (history of the Second ­Temple), 21–22 Seidman, Naomi, 4–5, 13 self: autonomous, 139, 141, 142; construction of halakhic, 10, 134–54; cultivation of, through Torah study, 162, 172–81; doubt as intrinsic to, 133, 140–41, 143, 147; evil

inclinations of, 10, 11, 136–41, 143, 145–47, 149–50, 153 self-­interest, 136, 143, 145, 153 self-­k nowledge/understanding, 2, 10 self-­sacrifice. See love: of halakhah; martyrdom Shaked, Gershon, 32 Shakespeare, William, 121 Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman, 31 Shapira, Moses, 61 Shoah. See Holocaust/Shoah skepticism, 151. See also doubt smell: of animal slaughter, 97; Chris­tian­ity and, 80–82; classification of ­people by, 78; description of, 78; Holocaust and, 75; Jews associated with, 2, 3, 8, 9, 75–101; moral valence of, 81; properties of, 79; scholarship on, 77–78 Soloveitchik, R. Hayyim, of Brisk, 137 Soloveitchik, R. Joseph B., Halakhic Man, 146, 180–81 Soloveitchik, R. Yosef Dovber HaLevi (Beis Halevi), 174–77, 181; Teshuvot beit ha-­Levi, 176 Sontag, Susan, 25 Spiegel, Shalom, 25 Stampfer, Shaul, 173 Stav, Shira, 2, 3, 6–7, 11, 13 Stern, Elsie, 125–26, 209n22 Stow, Kenneth, 96 Stürmer, Der (newspaper), 75 subjectivity. See self suffering: consolation for Jewish ­people’s, 3, 9–10, 119–32; as philosophical prob­lem, 117–19, 124, 127–28, 210n29, 211n31; questions evoked by, 120–22 suffering servant, 124, 209n20 talmid hakham (Talmudic scholar), 144–45, 175–76 Talmud, 10–11, 69, 99, 137, 140, 142–44, 146, 152, 172. See also Babylonian Talmud; Jerusalem Talmud texts, 54–74; contamination of, 1, 3, 7, 56, 58–72; decay and loss of, 2, 59, 68–69, 71–72; deliberate destruction of, 65; discovery of, 7, 54–55, 57–71, 73–74; emotion/affect connected to, 55–56, 62; fragmentation of, 8, 55–58, 62–65, 72–73; materiality of, 3, 7, 54–74; precarity of, 55, 58, 62, 71–72, 74; preservation of, 7–8, 58, 72–73

Index theodicy, 117–18, 122, 130–31 theology: halakhah (law) in relation to, 133–34; of impotency, 130–31; nonrational responses contrasted with, 118–19, 121–25; and the prob­lems of evil and suffering, 118–19, 121–25, 127–28, 210n22; role of, in Judaism, 133. See also halakhah (law): metathinking: creative, 167, 170–71; enchanted, 155, 159, 162, 165, 171, 179, 181; in engagement with Torah, 159–60, 162, 167–68, 170, 172, 175–76, 178–80; reason contrasted with, 181; ritualization of, 162, 179–80; self-­cultivation through, 159–60, 162, 167, 172–80, 181. See also reason Thomas de Cantimpré, 90 Thompson, Mark, 105, 109–11, 115 Timothy I (bishop), 61 Tisha B’Av, 9, 119–20, 122–23 Toner, Jerry, 81 Torah: in Agnon’s “At the Outset of the Day” and other works, 34, 35, 37, 45–50, 52; contamination of, 68–69, 99; Ezra and, 63; the Frankists and, 50–51; Ḥazon Ish on the study of, 140–45; metaphysical role of, 164–67, 171, 173; and modernity, 159, 174, 179; reason and enchantment in study of, 10–12, 159–81; self-­cultivation through study of, 162, 172–81. See also Oral Torah trash, 59–60, 63–66 truth: certainty in relation to, 150–51; in Jewish theological and philosophical traditions, 135; love of halakhah (law) as guarantee of, 143–46, 150; the senses in relation to, 78, 79, 81–82. See also certainty; knowledge Twersky, Isadore, 133–34, 153

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Ultra-­Orthodox Judaism, 137 Vilna Gaon (GRA, R. Elijah b. Solomon), 162–63, 165, 166, 170 Wadi Muraba’at, 58, 69–72 Wandering Jew: in modern lit­er­a­t ure, 104, 106–7, 113–14; significance and history of legend of, 2, 8–9, 12, 102–4, 115–16; smell of, 9, 76; in works by Kiš, 2, 8–9, 102, 104–16 Wangenseil, Johann Christoph, 99 Weber, Max, 11, 155–58, 161, 178, 181 Weil, Simone, 18 Westermann, Claus, 208n11 White, Hayden, 74 Wise, Michael, 69 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 159 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 150–52; On Certainty, 150–51 World War I, 6, 11, 20 World War II, 18, 19, 23, 24, 28, 35 Yeats, William Butler, 111 yeshivah of Volozhin, 10–11, 161, 172–79 yetser ha­-­ra‘ (evil inclination), 10, 11, 136, 138–41, 143, 145–47, 149–50, 153 Yiddish, 22–23, 27–28 Yuval, Israel, 51 Zacuto, Abraham, Sefer Yuḥasin, 60 Zalman, R. Shneur, of Liady, 163 Zionism, 19 Zipperstein, Steven J., 218n9 Ziv, R. Simcha Zissel, of Kelm, 143 Zohar, 7, 54, 57, 59–66, 69, 170 Zunz, Leopold, 157 Zvi, R. Zalman, Yudisher Teriak, 100

Acknowledgments

The editors and contributors are grateful to the many people and institutions who supported this project. In particular, the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provided both the intellectual home for this collection of “unsettling” essays and the impetus for its development. Steve Weitzman, the Ella Darivoff Director of the Katz Center, stayed with us every step of the way, sharing our belief that these richly diverse essays are connected in novel and important ways and that they make a unique and vital contribution to the field of Jewish studies. We also extend thanks to Natalie Dohrmann and the staff of the Katz Center for their support of the project. Our editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, Elisabeth Maselli, helped guide the project, and we also appreciate the assistance of Kristen Bettcher and David Luljak for their able copyediting and indexing. Jazmin Bello and Naomi Taub delivered key last-minute assistance with assembling the final manuscript. We also are grateful to the two anonymous readers who provided critical feedback that helped us enormously in reframing the conception of the overall volume; their comments on the individual chapters were also very useful. Finally, as editors, we are deeply grateful to the contributors for showing us how Jewish studies might look in the future. Additional funding for the production of this volume was provided by the Katz Center, the University of Connecticut School of Law, Florida State University, and Princeton University. While designing-eye-catching covers for academic books is never easy, the R. B. Kitaj Estate generously allowed us to use a detail of Kitaj’s 2005 painting The Castle for the cover of this volume. Our thanks to Nomi M. Stolzenberg, Tracy Bartley, and the R. B. Kitaj Studio Project for helping us to find just the right image.