Author: Yitzchak Schwartz

“Every Man is a Quotation from all his Ancestors:” Ralph Waldo Emerson as a Philosopher of Virtue Ethics

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date August 20, 2018

By guest contributor Christopher Porzenheim

Even the smallest display of virtuous conduct immediately inspires us. Simultaneously we: admire the deed, desire to imitate it, and seek to emulate the character of the doer. […] Excellence is a practical stimulus. As soon as it is seen it inspires impulses to reform our character. -Plutarch. [Life of Pericles. 2.2. Trans. Christopher Porzenheim.]

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson has been characterized as a transcendentalist, a proto –pragmatist, a process philosopher, a philosopher of power, and a even “moral perfectionist.” While Emerson was all of these, I argue he is best understood as a philosopher of social reform and virtue ethics, who combined Ancient Greco-Roman, Indian, and Classical Chinese traditions of social reform and virtue ethics into a form he saw as appropriate for nineteenth-century America.

Reform, of self and society, was the central concern of Emerson’s philosophy. Emerson saw that we as humans are by nature reformers, who should strive to mimic the natural and spontaneous processes of nature in our reform efforts. As he put in one of his earliest published essays, Man the Reformer (1841):

What is a man born for but to be a Reformer, a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imitating that great Nature which embosoms us all[?]

Reforming oneself, with models of moral and religious heroes from the past, and through one’s own example, others, and eventually society itself, was the idea at the center of Emerson’s philosophy. He would often echo the virtue ethicist Confucius’s (551–479 BCE) advice that “When you see someone who is worthy, concentrate on becoming their equal; when you see someone who is unworthy, use this as an opportunity to look within yourself [for similar vices].” [A.4.17.]

For example, in the essay History (1844), Emerson wrote that “there is properly no history; only biography” and argued that this “biography” exists to reveal the virtues and vices of exceptional individuals character:

So all that is said of the wise man by Stoic, or oriental or modern essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character of the wise man. […] A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions personal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in every word that is said concerning character[.]

For Emerson, the task, of all literature and history, was offering people enjoyable and memorable examples of virtue and vice for them to pattern their own character, relationships, and life by. “The student is to read history, actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.” History is a biography of our own potential character.

The logical result of these beliefs, was Emerson’s later work, Representative Men (1850) a collection of essays which provided biographies of “wise men,” “geniuses” and “reformers” each illustrating certain virtues and vices for his readers to learn from.

Plato for example, represented to Emerson the virtues and vices of a character shaped by philosophy, Swedenborg a mystic, Montaigne a skeptic, Shakespeare a poet, Napoleon a man of the world, and finally Goethe, a writer.

Representative Men was in part a direct response to the work of Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship & The Heroic in History (1841). But both men’s works shared a common ancestor well known to their contemporaries, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

A bust of Plutarch in his hometown of Chaeronea, Greece

Plutarch (46-120 CE), a Greco-Roman biographer, essayist and virtue ethicist, who was deeply influenced by Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, wrote a collection of biographies (now usually called The Lives) and a collection of essays (The Morals) which would both serve as a models for Emerson’s work.

Plutarch’s Lives come down to us as a collection of 50 surviving biographies. Typically in each, the fate and character of one exceptional Greek individual, is compared with those of one exceptional Roman individual. In doing so, as Hugh Liebert argues, Plutarch was showing Greek and Roman citizens how they could play a role in shaping first themselves, and, through their own example, the Roman world. In an era that perceived itself as modern, chaotic, and adrift from the past; Plutarch showed his readers how they could become like the heroes of the past by imitating their virtuous patterns of conduct.

Plutarch’s Lives provoke moral questioning about character without moralizing. They give us a shared set of stories, some might say myths, by which we can measure ourselves and each other other. They show in memorable stories and anecdotes what is (and is not) worth admiring; virtues and vices.

We might, for example, admire Alexander the Great’s superhuman courage. But, what of the time he “resolved” a conflict between his best friends by swearing to kill the one that started their next disagreement? Or, even worse, what of when he executed Parmenion, one of his oldest friends? The Lives are not hagiographies.

Instead, they are mirrors for moral self-cultivation. For Plutarch, the “mirror” of history delights and instructs. It reflects the good and bad parts of ourselves in the heroes and villains of the past. The Lives are designed as tools to help reform our character. They help us see who we are and could become because they portray the faces of virtue and vice, as Plutarch put it at the start of his biography of Alexander the Great:

I do not aim to write narratives of events, but biographies. For rarely do a person’s most famous exploits reveal clear examples of their virtue and vice. Character is less visible in: the fights with countless corpses, the greatest military tactics, and the consequential sieges of cities. More often a person’s character shows itself in the small things: the way they casually speak to others, play games, and amuse themselves.

I leave to other historians the grand exploits and struggles of each of my subjects – just as a painter of portraits leaves out the details on every part of his subject’s body. Their work focuses upon the face. In particular, the expression of the eyes. Since this is where character is most visible. In the same way my biographies, like portraits, aim to illuminate the signs of the soul. (Life of Alexander. 1.2-1.3. Trans. Christopher Porzenheim)

Eighteenth-century European depiction of Confucius

Emerson was in firm agreement with Plutarch about the relationship between our everyday conduct, virtue and character. In Self Reliance (1841), he wrote that “Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.” This idea is axiomatic for Emerson. Hence why, in his essay Spiritual Laws (1841), he quotes Confucius’ claim: “Look at the means a man employs, observe the basis from which he acts, and discover where it is that he feels at ease. Where can he [his character] hide? Where can he [his character] hide?” [A.2.10] For Plutarch and Emerson, our character is revealed in the embodied way we act every moment; in the way we relate to others – in our spontaneous manners, etiquette, or lack thereof.

As Emersons approval of Confucius suggests, Plutarch’s Lives, and Greco-Roman philosophy in general was merely one great influence on Emerson ideals of self and societal reform. It is to these other influences, from Confucian philosophy in particular, that we will turn in a subsequent post, in order to clarify Emerson’s philosophy of virtue ethics and social reform.

Christopher Porzenheim is a writer. He is currently interested in the legacy of Greco-Roman and Classical Chinese philosophy, in particular the figures of Socrates and Confucius as models for personal emulation. He completed his B.A. at Hampshire College studying “Gilgamesh & Aristotle: Friendship in the Epic and Philosophical Traditions.” When in doubt he usually opens up a copy of the Analects or the Meditations for guidance. See more of his work here.

Tags History of Philosophy, Philosophy

Think Piece

The Problem of Democracy: Radical Political Traditions in the Revolutions of 1848

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date March 7, 2018

By guest contributor Pamela C. Nogales C.

Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848

Prompted by the experience of the second world war, historian Lewis Namier described the undemocratic birth of modern republics in his 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1944) and warned of the unintended consequences of nineteenth-century liberal ideals. On the process of nation-making, he wrote, “States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes;” rather, “nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty and tomato-sauce; violence is the instrument of national movements.” He reminded historians that forging national democracies had required men of influence and wealth, who were capable of combining their force to create a government and to defend it against imperial bayonets. Thus, if successful, the government of a democratic nation was composed of those who were victorious in seizing the political leadership of a new state and using its executive force to fight hostile forces—both from outside and within. While their final aim was a world without war, European liberals of the nineteenth century imagined that this end required a national government ready and willing to defend itself against armed invasion and domestic insurrection. It was common, for example, for liberal papers in Prussia to call for war against the Russian Empire in order to secure the success of democratic republics. Thus, already by 1848, the contest for democracy was bound up with the problem of executive force and raised difficult questions about the appropriate means to an end.

Liberals’ strategic orientation toward state governments corresponded to the political realities of 1848. The Austrian, Prussian and Russian Empires, the pillars of the old eighteenth-century “Holy Alliance,” aimed to extinguish any spark of national revolution. And in the end, they were successful—this time, with the help of the soon-to-be French emperor, Louis Bonaparte. In the German states, the Frankfurt National Assembly was dissolved, and revolutionary governments and rebellions were crushed by Prussian troops; Bonaparte dismantled the French National Assembly in Paris, reestablished the monarchy and helped to restore Papal rule in the Italian peninsula; and the republican Magyar government in Hungary was toppled by a joint army of Russian and Austrian forces. This international defeat was among the most formative, political experiences of an entire generation of reformers and it signaled a split in the liberal tradition in Europe and beyond. Political demarcations shifted and became considerably more pronounced after the failure of the revolutions. The republicans, socialists and anarchists of this generation drew different lessons from these conflicts. But at the center of their disputes was the role of the nation in creating a democratic society.

Ferdinand Schröder’s caricature of the suppression of the revolutions of 1848 (published in the Düsseldorfer Monatshefte, August 1849)

While the initial American response to the 1848 revolutions was overwhelmingly positive, the excitement over the French revolution was short-lived in the American capital. The Polk administration sustained the recognition of the new French republic by the U.S. Minister in Paris, Richard Rush, but several government officials preferred a mere congratulatory message—if any. South Carolina’s John Calhoun suggested that the Senate withhold their esteem until a new French Constitution was drafted and a permanent government was installed. Only then would it be possible to know if the national government deserved the Senate’s approbation. A cautious attitude was required because, as Whig Congressman Samuel Phelps of Vermont noted, “when the wheel of revolution begins to revolve, who can…tell where it will stop.”

Walt Whitman’s poem “Resurgemus,” paying tribute to the Revolutions of 1848 (published in the New York Daily Tribune, June 21, 1850).

While Calhoun prioritized the stability of the American republic above the risky upheavals of the Parisian workers, abolitionist Fredrick Douglass argued that to abandon the people of France because they demand freedom, jobs and better wages, amounted to a betrayal of America’s revolutionary roots. But Calhoun’s perspective was more representative of the majority of the Senate than those held by the radical abolitionists.

Ambivalence toward the European socialists was common among the liberals in the United States. Of special concern were the French National Workshops, a state program designed to facilitate the employment of all laborers. Whig Senator Daniel Webster commented on the new constitution, which guaranteed “to all Frenchmen, not only liberty and security, but also employment and property.” For Webster this was an impossible task, “How can any government fulfill such a promise?”

The New Orleans Daily Picayune wondered why the French would riot after they were given the vote. Why rebel against their own constituent assembly? Charles A. Dana, a Boston novelist and European correspondent for the New-York Tribune, offered a radical interpretation. He explained that the Revolution of 1789 aimed to destroy feudalism, while the new revolution was “to destroy the moneyed feudalism and lay the foundations of social liberty.” New England poet James Russell Lowell shared Dana’s interpretation when he called 1848 the first social revolution of the modern world. Lowell wrote that the “first French Revolution was only the natural recoil of an oppressed and imbruted people.” In contrast, “the Revolution of 1848 [was] achieved by the working class,” and “at the bottom of [it] lies the idea of . . . social reorganization and regeneration”.Faced with armed citizens in the streets of Paris, the French liberals were forced to confront the “social question” squarely.

The forceful confrontation with the social question was provoked from outside liberal circles. Outside of France, European liberals were supporters of constitutional monarchies, that is, they were the defenders of parliamentary sovereignty over the dynastic power of kings. But they displayed outright contempt for the uneducated masses and had no intention of giving working people the vote. During the revolutions of 1848, it was those who fell under the label “social democrats” who were alone in demanding the extension of the franchise beyond the propertied classes. Among them was a motley crew of utopian socialists, Christian communists and “red Republicans” who rejected an elite democracy for a greater vision of political participation. These radicals were also in conversation with anarchists of different stripes, as well as women like George Sand, the revolutionary French socialist, who included women’s emancipation as part of her utopic demands. These radicals targeted the problems posed by the “hungry ’30s,” the rampant famine in the countryside, the rise in unemployment among city laborers and the decline of the artisan system of production. They argued that contemporary social inequality was hardly a natural outcome of talent, rather, it was a problem of society and thus could be resolved if made subject to politics. The disparate political tendencies grouped under social democracy were thus connected by the belief that the democratic revolutions of previous centuries promised a vision for human emancipation yet to be realized, but one that was receding from view amidst the changing social relations of the nineteenth century. While trying to recover past promises, radicals began to demand a future otherwise unimaginable from the perspective of European liberals alone.

What is the role of the modern nation in the long battle to achieve democracy? This was the question posed in 1848. Liberals, anarchists, and socialists all attempted to answer this question in thought and political practice. Their ideological differences did not correspond to sociological demarcations—they did not “express” a class position. Rather, the differences between these traditions must be found in their intellectual histories as well as their political practice. And we can hardly understand the meaning of these differences without a grasp of the shared concerns across these traditions.

Thibault, “Barricades After the Attack, Rue Saint-Maur” (June 26 1848)

It has become commonplace over the course of the twentieth century to imagine the political traditions of anarchism and socialism as fundamentally opposed to classical liberal values. From this perspective however, it is impossible to understand why an insurrectionary anarchist like Louis-Auguste Blanqui spoke of the French liberal Benjamin Constant as “one of the firmest upholders of French freedom”; why Karl Marx felt indebted to Adam Smith and John Locke for their conception of civil society; why during 1848 and ’49, the red flag was carried sometimes in opposition to but sometimes as a supplement to the tricolor of French republicans; or why the radical tailors of the 1840s reading Gracchus Babeuf out loud in their Parisian workshops still supported small-property ownership as a fundamental right of all free citizens. What we miss by setting up a strict antinomy between these political traditions are their embedded intellectual histories and their entanglement in the revolutionary history of the nineteenth century. We overlook how these ideas were tested, reconfigured and revised in response to the on-going attempts to transform society. And we do a disservice to intellectual history by treating political ideas as static concepts (as hardened “ideology”), rather than deriving their hermeneutic force from the transformative potential they carried at the time of their articulation.

Pamela C. Nogales C. is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at New York University, working on radical political thought on both sides of the Atlantic, with a special interest in the mid-nineteenth century crisis of democracy, the social question, and the contributions by nineteenth-century European political exiles in the United States. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Reform in the Age of Capital: The Transatlantic Roots of Radical Political Thought in the United States, 1828–1877.” She is based in Berlin and can be reached at pam.nogales@gmail.com

Tags History of Political Thought, Political History

Think Piece

The First of Nisan, The Forgotten Jewish New Year, Part II

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date October 4, 2017

By guest contributor Joel S. Davidi

In my last post on the history of the first of Nisan as a Jewish new year I discussed the history of this now mostly forgotten holiday into the tenth century. Until this point, this festival was celebrated among the Jews of Eretz Israel as well as their satellite communities across the Middle East (including a small “Palestinian-rite” contingent in Iraq itself). Over the next one hundred years, however, the celebration of the first of Nisan became the domain of only a very small minority of Jews. In a large measure, this was due to the long standing disagreements between the two great centers of Jewish learning at the time, Eretz Israel and Babylonia/ Iraq.

All in all, the competition between Babylonia and Eretz Israel ended in a decisive Babylonian victory. This was due to several factors not least of which is the fact that Babylonian Jewry experienced much more stability under Sassanian and later Islamic rule while its Eretz Israel counterpart was constantly experiencing persecution and uprooting. The final death knell for Minhag Eretz Yisrael was delivered in July of 1099 when an army of Crusaders broke through the walls of Jerusalem and massacred the city’s Jewish inhabitants, its Babylonian-rite, Palestinian-rite communities and Karaite communities. With the destruction of its center began the decline and eventual disappearance of many unique Eretz Israel customs. It is only due to the discovery of the Cairo Genizah that scholars have become aware of many of those long-lost traditions and customs. At this time Babylonia’s prominence began to decline as the Sephardic communities of the Iberian Peninsula and the Ashkenazic communities of France and Germany were increasingly on the ascendancy. Both of these communities, however, maintained the Babylonian rite. (As Israel Ta Shma points out in his book on early Ashkenazic prayer, both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic rites have Eretz Israel elements. These are more evident in the Ashkenazi rite, probably due to the ties between the proto Ashkenazim and the Palestinian academy Academy in Byzantine Palestine.)

The latest evidence the celebration of the first of Nisan comes to us from the 13th century and it would seem that even by this time it was all but stamped out by those who were determined to establish the primacy of the Babylonian school. This period coincides with the increased activism of Rabbi Abraham Maimonides, the son of Moses Maimonides, the great Spanish codifier of Jewish law. Rabbi Abraham, who championed standardization based on his father’s codification, exerted great pressure against the Synagogue of the Palestinians in Fustat, Old Cairo to bring their ritual into line with Babylonian standards. He was for the most part successful but, as we have already seen, this unique custom was retained (albeit in diminished form) among Egyptian Jews to this very day.

In an April 20, 1906 article for the English Jewish Chronicle, Herbert Loewe provides an eyewitness account of an Al-Tawhid ceremony in the fashionable Abbasiya neighborhood of Cairo. Two years later, a more detailed description was recorded by the Chief Rabbi of Egypt, Refael Aharon ben Shimon in his book Nehar Misrayim (p. 65-6).

I reproduce it here (courtesy of Hebrewbooks.org):

After extolling this “beautiful custom”, ben Shimon laments how the custom had become so weakened and how so many had become lax in keeping it. He states that this was largely due to the fact that the city had experienced such large scale expansion and many members of the Jewish community had relocated to the suburbs. He concludes on an optimistic note with the hope that the custom will experience a renaissance in the near future.

Two other North African Jewish communities that I know of retain more pared-down versions of the celebration of the first of Nisan. In the communities of Tunisia and Libya, the ceremony is referred to as bsisa (and also maluhia). Bsisa is also the name given to a special dish that is prepared for this day which is made of wheat and barley flour mixed with olive oil, fruits and spices. Several prayers for the new year are recited whereupon the celebrants exchange new year greetings with each other. Many of these prayers contain similar themes to the Egyptian-Jewish Tahwid prayers I discussed in part I of this article. (For example: “Shower down upon us from your bounty and we shall give it over to others. That we shall never experience want– and may this year be better than the previous year.”) As in the Egyptian community, however, the new year aspect of the celebration is not especially stressed. As the eminent historian and expert on North African Jewry Nahum Slouschz points out in an article in Davar (April 7, 1944), “It is impossible not to see in these customs the footprints of an ancient rosh hashanah which was abandoned with the passage of time because of the tediousness of the Passover holiday and in favor of the holiness of the traditional [Tishrei] Rosh Hashana.”

(For more on the roots and contemporary practice of bsisa and maluhia see here, here, here, and here. For videos of the bsisa/ maluhia ceremony see here, here, and here.)

Although the observance of the First of Nissan is no longer as prominent as it once was in rabbinic Judaism, the two most prominent non-rabbinic Jewish communities, the Karaites and the Samaritans, have maintained the holiday into recent times. The Cairo Genizah contains leaves from a Karaite prayer book containing a service for the first of Nisan. This custom eventually fell out of the Karaite textual record as Karaite traditions fell in line with Rabbanite ones over the later middle ages. In his monumental study of the now extinct European Karaite community, historian Mikhail Kizilov discusses how Eastern-European Karaites underwent a gradual process of “dejudaidization” and “turkification” in the 1910s-20s. This was largely due to the work of their spiritual and political head, Seraya Shapshal, who, aware of growing Anti-Semitism in Europe, was determined to present his flock as genetically unrelated to the Jews (claiming instead that they were descendants of Turkic and Mongol tribes). He likewise sought to recast Karaism as a syncretistic Jewish-Christian-Muslim-pagan creed. Among the reforms instituted by Shapshal was the changing of the Karaite calendar. Although the Karaites of old began the calendar year on Nisan, as per Exodus, they had long assimilated the Rabbinic custom of beginning the year in Tishrei. Shapshal sought to avoid a lining up of the Karaite and Rabbanite new years which is why he switched the Karaite new year to March-April, thereby ironically reverting back to the ancient Karaite custom. This particular reform never took off and the community continued to celebrate the new in year in Tishrei. Even the official Karaite calendars printed that date (which like the Rabbanites they called “Rosh Hashana”). Currently, Karaites do not actually celebrate this day or recite any special liturgy, however they do nominally recognize this day as Rosh Hashanah and they will exchange new year tidings.

Samaritans preserve the most extensive observance of this day. According to the Samaritan elder and scholar Benyamim Sedaka, the Samaritans celebrate the evening of the first day of the first Month – The Month of Aviv – as the actual Hebrew New Year. They engage in extended prayers on the day followed by festive family gatherings. They likewise bless one another with the traditional new year greeting “Shana Tova” and begin the observance, as the followers of the Palestinian rite once did, on the Sabbath preceding the day. The entire liturgy for the holiday is found in A. E. Cowley’s “The Samaritan Liturgy.” The fact that the Samaritans, who have functioned as a distinct religious community from Jews since at least the second century BCE, observe this tradition is the greatest indicator of its antiquity. The antiquity of this custom is also suggested by the fact that the springtime new year is likewise celebrated by many other ethnic communities from the Middle East including the Persians and Kurds (who call it Nowruz) and also, much closer to Jews linguistically and culturally, the Arameans and Chaldeans/Assyrians who call their New Year Kha (Or Khada) B’nissan (the first of Nissan) .

Siddur Eretz Yisrael, published by Machon Shiloh

Minhag Eretz Israel is now effectively extinct. Today, however, there is a small community of predominantly Ashkenazic Jews in Israel who seek to reconstruct this rite. Using the work of scholars who have labored to piece the Palestinian rite together based on the Cairo Genizah, this community endeavors to put it back into practical usage. Among many other customs, they celebrate the First of Nisan. The flagship institution of this movement is called Machon Shiloh and its founder and leader is an Australian-Israeli Rabbi named David bar Hayyim. In correspondence with me, Yoel Keren, a member of Machon Shilo, stated that his community observes the festival in the manner prescribed by the Geniza fragments. On the eve of the first of Nissan, the community waits outside to sight the new moon, then recites the kiddush prayer and finally sits down to a festive meal. The community has also recently published a prayer book called Siddur Eretz Yisrael, which is based on the ancient rite. You can listen to some prayers recited in this rite here, here, and here.

For an interesting interview with Rabbi Bar-Hayyim about the rite and its contemporary usage see here.

Appendix to Part I

Since publishing my original post about the first of Nissan’s history as a Jewish holiday a few other sources have come to light about the history of the day’s significance. Here are a few of the earliest sources that mention the day as a holiday (my thanks to Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein for bringing some of these to my attention).

The earliest of these comes from the book of Ezekiel (45:18-19):

Thus saith the Lord GOD: In the first month, in the first day of the month, thou shalt take a young bullock without blemish; and thou shalt purify the sanctuary.

Ezekiel contains numerous laws and festivals that are not found in the Pentateuch. Many interpret these as being meant for a future (third) Temple. Ezekiel does not explicitly describe the first of Nissan as a celebration of the new year per se but this description is nonetheless the earliest evidence of the day having special significance.

We find a similar reference in the Temple Scroll (11Q19) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Temple Scroll describes the ideal Temple of the Qumran sectarians. The Festival of the first day of the first month (Nissan) is one of three additional extra-biblical festivals that are mentioned in this work:

On the first day of the [first] month [the months (of the
year) shall start; it shall be the first month] of the year [for you. You shall
do no] work. [You shall offer a he-goat for a sin-offering.] It shall be
offered by itself to expiate [for you. You shall offer a holocaust: a
bullock], a ram, [seven yearli]ng ram lambs [without blemish] …
[ad]di[tional to the bu]r[nt-offering for the new moon, and a grain-
offering of three tenths of fine flour mixed with oil], half a hin [for each
bullock, and wi]ne for a drink-offering, [half a hin, a soothing odour to
YHWH, and two] tenths of fine flour mixed [with oil, one third of a hin.
You shall offer wine for a drink-offering,] one th[ird] of a hin for the ram,
[an offering by fire, of soothing odour to YHWH; and one tenth of fine
flour], a grain-offerin[g mixed with a quarter of a hinol oil. You shall
offer wine for a drink-offering, a quarter of a hin] for each [ram] …
lambs and for the he-g[oat] .

Portion of the Temple Scroll

Joel S. Davidi is an independent ethnographer and historian. His research focuses on Eastern and Sephardic Jewry and the Karaite communities of Crimea, Egypt, California and Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming book Exiles of Sepharad That Are In Ashkenaz, which explores the Iberian Diaspora in Eastern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He blogs on Jewish history at toldotyisrael.wordpress.com.

Tags Book History, Jewish Studies, Religious History

Intellectual history

Fathers Strike Back: The Revenge of Zoharic Trinitology

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date July 16, 2017

by guest contributor Mark Marion Gondelman

In 1713, a rebellious Kabbalist named Nechemiah Chayun published a book called ‘Oz le-Elohim. The tract immediately incited a scandal: In it, Chayun argued, in good Rabbinic Hebrew and on the basis of established Kabbalistic sources, that the main secret of the Zoharic conception of the Godhead was a trinity. Chayun was working within the conception of the Divinity of the Zohar, which sees God as comprising various emanations or sefirot that interact with the creation in different ways. According to Chayun, the emanations of Atiqa Qadisha, Malqa Qadisha, and Shekhinah animate the other sefirotic entities and comprise “three that are one” (‘Oz le-Elohim, p. 60). The compatibility of this idea with the Orthodox Christian notion of the trinity was not lost on Chayun’s contemporaries. What contemporaries and scholars have not noted, however, is that Chayun’s interpretation of the Zohar was rooted in a teaching by a more well-known kabbalist, Abraham Miguel Cardozo, who has been the focus of many scholarly studies over the last decade. Interestingly, while this teaching functions in Cardozo’s work as part of his polemic against Christianity, it somehow came back around in Chayun’s teaching as a means of making Christian and kabbalistic conceptions of God compatible.

Chayun was a member of the Sabbatian movement, a movement of Jews in the seventeenth-to-eighteenth century that held the Turkish-Jewish mystic Shabtai Tzvi to be the messiah. Tzvi was a tortured soul who, in 1665, had sought out the mystic Nathan of Gaza to seek a remedy for his inner turmoil. Contrary to Tzvi’s expectations, Nathan claimed that his insight into the root of Tzvi’s soul revealed that Tzvi was the messiah and was destined to travel to the court the Sultan Mehmed IV the Hunter and turn him into his slave by the power of his songs and words. Tzvi amassed a tremendous following and Jews as far as Eastern Europe sold their properties to finance their imminent return to Israel. However, when Tzvi was taken before Mehmed IV the Hunter in the summer of 1666 and was offered a choice between the death and Islam he chose the latter. Despite Tzvi’s Tzvi’s conversion, a large minority of Jews, led by Nathan of Gaza and others continued to see him as the messiah.

Chayun’s mentor was another renegade Kabbalist who devoted himself to Shabtai Tzvi, Abraham Miguel Cardozo. Cardozo was born a Marrano Catholic family in Spain and converted to Judaism as an adult once he left the Iberian Peninsula. However, both Cardozo’s critics in his lifetime (including his own brother) and scholars today assert that Cardozo was never able to fully leave behind his Christian theological background.

Unlike the Dönmeh Sabbatians, who converted with Tzvi to Islam, Cardozo never left Judaism. Immediately after Tzvi’s conversion he warned both his friends and enemies that they must stay within the Jewish fold and to cease following Tzvi (though they still considered his teachings authoritative). His subsequent writings continue to use a conceptual framework based on Tzvi’s teachings and often criticize Christianity. I believe that Chayun’s theology is grounded in a previously untranslated and unnoticed passage by Cardozo that shows the latter’s dependency on– and betrays his efforts to grapple with– Christian Trinitology.

In his massive work Raza de-Razin, “Secret of the Secrets,” which I will quote here as it appears in manuscript JTS 2102 (from the Dropsie collection, Ms. Deinard 315), the old lone wolf Cardozo, just several years before his death, continues longstanding feuds with two sworn enemies: Shmuel Primo, the former secretary of Shabtai Tzvi, and his student Haim Angel. He accuses these two of having developed strange doctrines that are incompatible with Raza de-Mehemanuta, Shabtai Tzvi’s theological compendium. He therefore chrages them with heresy. (In fact, Cardozo, composed the work himself — Jewish mysticism scholar Yehuda Liebes demonstrates that Raza de-Mehemanuta is a forgery). Cardozo acknowledges, however that his own theology differs from Tzvi’s on a crucial point: He writes that he believes that the First Cause did not create the God of Israel and the Shehinah together, but that they both follow from another entity. The reason Cardozo gives for this conclusion is the dictum, “from the simple follows the simple.” Therefore, he argues, a twofold essence that comprises the God of Israel together with the Shehinah could not possibly follow from The First Cause:

And before all [other] things, I will write down accepted principles: The first is that from simple follows simple and there is no sage of the sages of the truth who will not agree with that and so you will find in the Pardes [Rimonim] of R. Moshe Cordovero and the Ar”i (blessed be his memory!) and Avraham ben David of Posquieres in his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah gave us a [principle] that form the Infinity (Ein Sof) necessarily follows an infinitely simple Intellect that bears no difference to the First Cause (Sibah Rishonah), except this is cause and this is effect [ze ‘ilah we-ze ‘alul].

The principle min ha-pashut yotzeh pashut is not a very commonly applied principle but it is invoked by several other Jewish scholars in their writings, among them Shabtai Sheftel Horowitz, the author of the book called Shefa‘ Tal and Maimonides. Cardozo’s wording shows that he relied on Horowitz’s work and his omission of Maimonides’ example shows that he was probably unaware of the similar dictum in the latter’s Guide to the Perplexed. Indeed, Maimonides uses a different wording to express the idea and voices doubt about this principle. Both Maimonides and Horowitz use this idea to explain how God is connected to the intermediaries of the creation — sefirot in Horowitz’s vision and intellects in Maimonides’. Cardozo, on the other hand, uses this principle to elucidate the problem of internal theogony, i.e. how the twofold bipolar and bigender. God of Israel is created the nature of his inner workings. Cardozo is far from the only Jewish thinker to ruminate on the workings of God but no other conventional Jewish thinkers propose that He is created.

Cardozo then goes farther, arguing that God must emanate from two distinct essences based on another idea, namely that “from two simple things follows a complex thing:”

And there is another principle that from two simple things, (i.e. from the first simple and from the second [thing] that exists from the first) if they produce an existing [thing], it will not be a simple, but complex (Hebrew: meshutaf) and this way from the Primordial light that is from the second simplex sparkle together two lights and they are Bright Light and The Brightest Light (or tzah we-or metzuhtzah) like geonim and R. Shimon Bar Yohai told: that the Cause of Causes that extends from the simple Cause Above All Causes and it is not a simple intellect, but a complex one. Despite that “from the simple follows simple” and the Cause Above All Causes is simple like Upper Infinity (Ein Sof ha-`Elyon) that is the root of all roots, because it does not exist only from the Cause Above All Causes, but from the unity with the Infinity.

To Cardozo then, the First Cause, the God of Philosophers who has no interest in our world, creates the second cause. The twofold entity of God of Israel/ Shechinah emanates from this second cause.

Cardozo’s analysis here reflects a similar analysis in Augustine’s De Civitas Dei, which is the only text I’ve found that deals with this problem. In describing the creation of the Trinity, Augustine writes:

“Created,” I say, — that is, made not begotten. For that which is begotten of the simple Good is simple as itself and the same as itself. These two we call the Father and the Son; and both together with the Holy Spirit are one God; and to this Sprit the epithet Holy is in Scripture as it were, appropriated.

Augustine and Cardozo’s theologies in these two texts are quite different: Cardozo would not accept the idea that God is actually the simple Good itself (in other words that the God of Philosophers is trifold). Indeed, as historian David Halperin notes in his biography of Cardozo, Cardozo charged in his works that Christianity misunderstood the true trinity that exists in Judaism. There is, however, an important point of proximity in these two texts in that both treat the problem of the emergence of God’s personae and both employ the same philosophical principle to explain technical aspects of this emergence.

Cardozo’s opposition to Christianity was part of his own painful process of overcoming the trauma of his Marranism and his teachings were an attempt to create a Jewish theology. Chayun’s own theological research makes them visible. Later, Chayun’s ideas evolved into something which was much more grim: they were used by Yakov Frank during the famous dispute of 1759 in Kamieniec where he and his adherents demonstrated that Zohar’s true Judaism, as opposed to “false Talmudic” is about Trinity, and therefore, Jews must embrace Christianity.

Mark Gondelman was born in Riga and has lived in Moscow and Jerusalem. He is now based in New York where he is a doctoral fellow at NYU in Hebraic and Judaic Studies focusing on early modern Jewish mysticism. Mark is currently working to understand Abraham Miguel Cardozo’s legacy within the broader context of early modern thought, philosophy and Jewish and Christian mystical traditions.

Think Piece

How the Nineteenth Century Misplaced the Samaritans

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date June 20, 2017

by guest contributor Matthew Chalmers

“Are the Samaritans worth a volume of 360 pages?” Thus pondered an anonymous reviewer of James A. Montgomery’s The Samaritans: The Earliest Jewish Sect (1907). Today, specialists in Samaritan Studies are still arguing that they deserve broader attention—most recently in Reinhard Pummer’s 2016 survey of Samaritan history. Despite the low profile of Samaritans when compared to “world religions” like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, they are an intriguing case: a Torah-observant group tracing their origins, like Jews and Christians, to ancient Israel, but worshiping God on Mount Gerizim near Biblical Shechem rather than in Jerusalem. Travelling back in time we see that our gloomy anonymous reviewer stood at the end of another arc in European scholarship, at the beginning of which Samaritans had provoked curiosity from an antiquarian as prestigious as Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609).

How did Samaritans go from being sought after by some of the most influential early modern intellectuals to being the afterthought of an early twentieth-century scholar? The answer tells us something about how ideas gain and lose academic worth. What does it mean for a scholarly project to be valued—and how can change in that valuation reveal or occlude possibilities for writing history with our archives? To answer that question it is instructive to begin by looking to what intrigued scholars about Samaritans in the early modern period.

In 1581, the famous Dutch antiquarian Joseph Scaliger confronted a problem of chronology. He knew, like the medieval and late antique chronographers before him, that the genealogies in the Samaritan Pentateuch’s version of Genesis reported the chronology of the biblical patriarchs differently from the Masoretic text used by Jews. He also grew intrigued by Samaritan Hebrew’s preservation of characters more similar to the ancient Hebrew alphabet—the alphabet he thought they shared with the Phoenicians—rather than the square script of contemporary Jews. What if the remaining Samaritan communities preserved undiscovered manuscripts capable of upending the standard view of ancient Israel, just as their chronology sometimes contradicted that of ancient Jews?

Scaliger asked his contact Claude Dupuy to write to their friend Gian Vincenzo Pinelli to ask his Jewish contact in Constantinople to acquire a Samaritan calendar. When the Samaritans responded, sending him a calendar, he reached out directly to their communities in Cairo and Shechem. Unfortunately for Scaliger, the answers were lost in the wreck of the ship carrying them back to France, the St. Victor, and he died before their recovery. Fortunately for posterity, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), an antiquarian based near Marseilles, the home port of the St. Victor, managed to recover the responses. They contained—to Peiresc at least—a treasure-trove of information and curiosities. He then spent substantial time and attention trying to obtain Samaritan manuscripts. Subsequent generations of scholars shared his interest (as Peter Miller has explored).

Peiresc and Scaliger’s search for Samaritan secrets is partly explained by how post-Reformation battles between Christian scholars incentivised control over the biblical past and spurred debate about its variant versions. Mastery of Bible manuscripts served as a primary qualification of expertise within these scholarly contests. The Samaritan Pentateuch, as Scaliger had noticed, sometimes agreed with the Greek version of those five books over against the Masoretic text, and sometimes contradicted both. A Catholic scholar such as Jean Morin (1591-1659) could thus argue that the Samaritan Pentateuch proved Protestant appeals to a pure Hebrew original were a basic mistake. Moreover, emphasizing the skills of manuscript study permitted well-connected scholars to emphasize mastery over the Bible with their superior access to the manuscripts perceived to embody the history of a text. The Samaritan Pentateuch, for this reason, found itself incorporated into two Polyglots (Paris 1628-45; London 1657). These prestigious and expensive collaborative projects printed multiple versions of the biblical text side-by-side, thus displaying the expertise of the editors while also undermining the appeal to any one ancient version (tacit: the Hebrew). For more than a century, then, the Samaritans—whilst never gaining the degree of attention granted to the great ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Israel—mattered.

How, then, did Samaritans go from this relative prominence to almost total neglect at the turn of the twentieth century? As Arnaldo Momigliano has demonstrated, antiquarianism, and its fractal approach to the historical past, never really went away. Nor did the attachment of scholarship to Christian goals. But the world of learning had been reconfigured. Research into Samaritans, for instance, calls for some expertise in Hebrew and Arabic as well as the languages of Mediterranean antiquity. This antiquarian combination jarred with the philological segmenting of the nineteenth-century university (except for German Jewish scholars who, as Susannah Heschel has tracked in her research on Abraham Geiger, were increasingly excluded by anti-Judaism).

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, moreover, antiquarianism proved no match for political, national, and racial logic in incentivizing the selection of material for study. During the global expansion of European power, “religion” came to function in what David Chidester has called an “empire of religions.” Scholarly approaches framed religious history vis-à-vis tension between universal “civilization” and “the primitive” as a means to formulate universally applicable difference between European Christians and non-Europeans, between proper Christians and deviant Christians, or between European Christians, Jews, and Arabs. In turn, such intellectual practices encouraged methods best able to order taxonomies of knowledge according to progress towards a universal prototype embodied in an imagined “modern” or “Christian” Europe. The Samaritans, a small group which most commentators expected to disappear, whose historical appearances are intermittent enough to resist smooth narrativization, made too small a splash in a research space dominated by universals with all-encompassing scope.

Even the biblical basis for Samaritan prominence that drove the interest of scholars like Morin fell on hard times. Wilhelm Gesenius, one of the primary contributors to Semitic language pedagogy, had little patience for the potential priority of the Samaritan Pentateuch. His 1815 De Pentateuchi Samaritani origine, indole et auctoritate commentatio philologico-critica demonstrated to the satisfaction of most Bible scholars that the potential of the Samaritan text to witness an earlier version of the Hebrew Bible was a pipe dream. Similarly, his grammar—first published in 1813 but used even today as a pedagogical touchstone—dismisses Samaritans as a minor subset of north-west Semites, characterized by ethnic and linguistic mixture. In the first decades of the twentieth century scholars like Paul Kahle and Moses Gaster attempted to rehabilitate the Samaritan Pentateuch as worthy of scholars’ time. But it was too little to retain Samaritans within the Biblical Studies mainstream.

The publication of Samaritan texts continued, but contemporary scholars increasingly criticized those publications as amateurish. Thus, Samaritan literature fell prey to a double attack: on the one hand, published in editions slated for their poor quality, plagiarism, and lack of professional attention; on the other, attacked by academics whose choice of research topics had judged Samaritan Hebrew too insignificant to receive more expert attention. A savage review in the 1902 Journal of Near Eastern Studies of an enthusiast’s attempt to provide a Samaritan grammar embodied both ways of thinking. “Our universities do not maintain professorial chairs for Samaritan,” the author wrote, “and not one of the many widely advertised series of world-literature extracts contains a single citation from Samaritan literature. The world has judged rightly. There is nothing in this literature to tempt anything higher than an antiquarian…”.

Since this early twentieth-century nadir, Samaritans have seen much more attention. The Societe d’Études Samaritains was founded in 1989, and has met semi-regularly ever since. Although much of the scholarship published in the burgeoning field of Samaritan Studies is in Hebrew or German, we now have a comparative critical edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic text (reviewed here by Emanuel Tov) in English. Stefan Schorch, Abraham Tal, and others have worked hard to make core Samaritan documents accessible to European scholars (especially in De Gruyter’s Studia Samaritana series). An ongoing project at the University of Manchester currently headed by Katharina Keim examines Moses Gaster, whose archive includes hundreds of letters that he composed in Samaritan Hebrew. My own research examines the representation of Samaritans in Late Antiquity, modifying our histories of the period as one of religious polarization and using the Samaritans to render visible the selectivity of modern historians.

So, what do we learn from this about how ideas gain or lose value over time? Samaritan Studies remains a very small field disconnected from disciplines with which it could share closer links such as Biblical Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies, Religious Studies, History. From the vantage point of Samaritan Studies we can perceive particularly sharply how the spectre of the nineteenth-century professionalization, nationalization, and universalization of academic research haunts contemporary frames of reference. In particular, we can see the power of habit in pre-selecting our areas of academic research, the questions we ask, and the sources that we use to answer them and how much the manufacturing of history relies on such habits of selectivity even with respect to a group who share much of the past of Christianity and Judaism. By noting such habits and looking past them, we can begin to fray the edges of the stories we have learned to tell—and render them more able to surprise us.

Matt Chalmers is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the manufacture of identities through control of the past, and his dissertation explores often overlooked representations of Samaritans in late antique Christian and Jewish sources. He tweets with occasionally alarming regularity from @Matt_J_Chalmers.

Tags 19th Century, History of the Academy, Metahistory, Religious History

Think Piece

The First of Nisan, The Forgotten Jewish New Year

Post author By Yitzchak Schwartz
Post date May 29, 2017

by guest contributor Joel S. Davidi

It is late March and the weather is still cold. The sounds of Arabic music and exuberant conversation emanate from an elegant ballroom in Brooklyn New York. No, it’s not a wedding or a Bar Mitzvah. A Torah Scroll is unfurled and the cantor begins to read from Exodus 12: 1, “And God spoke to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, ‘This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.’” The reading is followed by the chanting of liturgical poetry based on this Torah portion, “Rishon Hu Lakhem L’khodshei Hashanah”… Yom Nisan Mevorakh….” “The first month shall it be for you for the months of the year… the month of Nisan is blessed.”As they leave the event, men and women wish each other “Shana tova,” happy new year.

Something seems off. It is a Monday night and Rosh Hashanah, the traditional Jewish new year, is still six months away. Why the celebration and talk of a new year? This ritual is very familiar, however, to the members of Congregation Ahaba Veahva, a Synagogue that follows the Egyptian-Jewish rite. It is a vestige of a very ancient, almost extinct Jewish custom called Seder Al-Tawhid (Arabic, Seder Ha-Yikhud in Hebrew, the ritual of the unity). This ritual takes place annually on the first of Nisan. The name denotes a celebration of the unity of God and the miracles that he wrought during this month surrounding the Exodus from Egypt. The way the congregation celebrates it and how this custom survived illuminates important dynamics of how Jewish ritual has been standardized over time.

Ahba Veahva’s members celebrate Rosh Hashanah in September like other rabbinic Jews. The Seder al-Tahwid, however, is a remnant of an ancient custom of the Jews of the near East (variably referred to as Mustaribun or Shamim) to commemorate the first day of the Jewish month of Nisan as a minor Rosh Hashanah as per Exodus 12:1. On their website, Congregation Ahaba Veahva explains the celebration as follows:

The Great Exodus of Egypt:
On Rosh Chodesh (the first of the month of Nisan), beni Yisrael (the children of Israel) heard the nes (miracle) that they were going to be redeemed on the night of the 15th, later in that very month. We hold this evening to remember the miracles and the hesed (kindness) that Hashem (God) does for His nation.
“In Nisan we were redeemed in the past, and in Nisan we are destined to be redeemed again.” (a midrashic quote (Exodus Rabbah 15:2) asserting that just as the Exodus from Egypt took place in Nisan so too will the ultimate messianic redemption)
We hold this evening to put everyone in the correct spiritual mindset- to realize with all their might that this could be the month of the Geulah (messianic redemption).

tuhid — The Alexandrian pamphlet describing the Seder al-Tahwid liturgy.

The only printed version of the Seder al-Tahwid liturgy is found in an anonymous 10 page pamphlet printed in Alexandria. The prayers focus on many themes found in the Rosh Hashana prayers such as blessing, sustenance and messianic redemption in the year to come. The liturgy is found in a somewhat longer form in a tenth century manuscript fragment from the Cairo Geniza, the repository of documents found in the late nineteenth century in the synagogue in old Fustat.

The celebration of al-Tahwid begins with special liturgy on the Sabbath closest to the day and on the day itself the community refrains from unnecessary labor similar to intermediate days of Jewish holidays. They also recite a Kiddush (a prayer that sanctifies a day, recited over a cup of wine) followed by a festive meal and the recitation of liturgical poetry. One such poem presents a debate among the twelve months to determine which one will have primacy. In one stanza, for example, Nisan argues that the following month of Iyyar cannot be chosen since its zodiacal sign is Taurus, the same species as the golden calf that Israel made in the wilderness. The concluding stanza is a triumphal declaration from Nisan: שליט אנא וריש על כול”ן”
literally, I am the ruler and the head of all of you.
תקיפה עבדי פרוק לעמיה ובי הוא עתיד למפרוק יתהון
or, “A deliverance of slavery did I [Nisan] impart upon the nation and in me [Nisan] is he [God] destined to deliver them [again]” (as per BT Rosh Hashanah 10B). Other prayers more explicitly cast the day as the beginning of the new year. One liturgical poem begins: יהי רצון מלפניך ה אלוהינו ואלוהי אבותינו…שתהיה השנה הזאת הבאה עלינו לשלום, translated as, “May it be your will lord our god and the god of our fathers…that this coming year should come upon us in peace.”

The celebration of the first of Nisan as the beginning of the new year is rooted both in Biblical and Talmudic sources. Exodus 12:1-2 states that Nisan is the first month in the intercalation of the new year and the Mishnah in Tractate Rosh Hashanah 1:1 describes the First of Nisan as one of the four beginnings of the Jewish New Year:

There are four new years. On the first of Nisan is the new year for kings and for festivals. On the first of Elul is the new year for the tithe of cattle. … On the first of Tishrei is the new year for years, for release and jubilee years, for plantation and for [tithe of] vegetables…. On the first of Shevat is the new year for trees…

In an article on the Seder al-Tahwid liturgy, liturgical scholar Ezra Fleischer postulates that the Kiddush ceremony on the holiday was based on an earlier Mishanic-era institution. The Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah 2:7 describes how the Sanhedrin, the high religious court of Talmudic-era Israel, consecrated the new month by declaring “it is sanctified”, at which point the entire assemblage would respond in kind, “it is sanctified, it is sanctified”. This declaration was performed with pomp and publicity in order to make it clear that the final word in the intercalation of the Jewish calendar belonged to the rabbis of Eretz Yisrael and no one else. In the context of the Seder al-Tahwid this ritual serves to highlight Nisan’s role as the first month of the Jewish lunar year, the beginning of this process of sanctifying the new moon.

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If the first of Nisan is such an important date to both the Bible and Talmud then, why is the day celebrated today only by this small Jewish community? To answer this question we must look to the Geonic period of jewish history, corresponding roughly to the second half of the first millennium. Over the past decade, historians increasingly see this period as one in which a number of variations of Judaism were vying for supremacy. These included several schools of Jewish jurisprudence based in different geographic constituencies across the Mediterranean Diaspora. Two of the most prominent were the Babylonian (Minhag Babhel, based in Baghdad) and Palestinian (Minhag Eretz Yisrael) rites, as well as Karaite Jews who did not follow the Rabbis at all but formed their own, non rabbinic madhab or creed.

The Sanhedrin in Jerusalem was abolished in the 5th century by Byzantine decree. Its various successors could not recapture its prestige and the Rabbis of Eretz Yisrael gradually lost their power to sanction the new moon. The Karaites developed their own system of intercalation but within the rabbinic tradition, in the absence of the Sanhedrin, the Babylonians and Palestinians often found themselves at odds.

The most notorious controversy between the two schools involved the often-confrontational Saadiah ben Joseph Al-Faumi, the head of the Babylonian Academy better known as Saadiah Gaon, and Aharon ben Meir, the head of the Palestinian Academy. In 921-923, the two engaged in an extended and very public argument regarding the sanctification of the Hebrew year 4682 (921/22). While the core of this debate surrounded the complicated methods of calculating the Jewish calendar, it became a referendum on which academy and by extension rite would become authoritative in the diaspora. Saadiah emerged victorious (historians Marina Rustow and Sacha Stern argue that his authority on these matters may have resulted from his mastery of Abbasid advances in astronomy).

In Palestine, however, the Jewish community, based in Jerusalem, continued to follow the Minhag Eretz Yisrael, which also exerted influence on other Near Eastern Jewish communities such as Egypt. The heads of the Jerusalem academy still often insisted that the right to intercalate the year rested solely with them. As late as the 11th century, Rabbi Evyatar Ha-Kohen, the head of the Palestinian Academy (partially in exile in Cairo) would declare:

The land of Israel is not part of the exile such that it would be subject to an Exilarch (a title often applied to the head of the babylonian academy) and furthermore one may not contradict the authority of the Prince (a title at times applied to the head of the palestinian academy), on the word of whom [alone] may leap years be declared and the holiday dates set according to the order imposed by God before the creation of the world. For this is what we are taught in the secrets of intercalation.
ארץ ישראל אינה קרואה גולה שיהא ראש גולה נסמך בה, ועוד שאין עוקרין נשיא שבארץ ישראל, שעל פיו מעברין את השנה וקובעין את המועדות הסדורים לפני הקב”ה קודם יצירת העולם, דהכי גמרי בסוד העיבור

In a continuation of this post, I will elaborate as to how the Seder al-Tahwid was likely maintained as well as suppressed during the geonic period, similar practices that are preserved among non rabbinic communities and the ritual’s reception today.

Joel S. Davidi is an independent ethnographer and historian. His research focuses on Eastern and Sephardic Jewry and the Karaite communities of Crimea, Egypt, California and Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming book Exiles of Sepharad That Are In Ashkenaz, which explores the Iberian Diaspora in Eastern Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He blogs on Jewish history at toldotyisrael.wordpress.com.

Tags Ancient History, Cultural History, Jewish Studies, Religious History

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