The Anthology in Jewish Literature

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The Anthology in Jewish Literature

David Stern, Editor

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS


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Edited by David Stern

1 2004

1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Saõ Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright 䉷 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The anthology in Jewish literature / edited by David Stern. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Ancient Israel and classical Judaism, Anthology in the Torah and the question of Deuteronomy / Jeffrey Tigay—Wisdom and the anthological temper / James Kugel—Order, sequence, and selection: the Mishnah’s anthological choices / Yaakov Elman—Anthological dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud / Eliezer Segal— Anthology and polysemy in classical midrash / David Stern—The Middle Ages. The prayerbook (siddur) as an anthology of Judaism / Joseph Tabory—Yalqut Shimoni and the medieval midrashic anthology / Jacob Elbaum— The Hebrew narrative in the Middle Ages / Eli Yassif—Midrash rabbah and the medieval collector mentality / Marc Bregman—The modern period. Homo anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the anthological genre / Zipora Kagan—Sefer haaggadah: creating a classic anthology / Mark Kiel—The ingathering of traditions: Zionism’s anthology project / Israel Bartal—Gender and the anthological tradition in modern Yiddish poetry / Kathryn Hellerstein—Our poetry is like an orange grove: anthologies of Hebrew poetry in Eretz-Yisrael / Hannan Hever— Anthologizing the vernacular: collections of Yiddish literature in English translation / Jeffrey Shandler— Textualizing the tales of the People of the Book: folk narrative anthologies and national identity in modern Israel / Galit Hasan-Rokem—The Holocaust according to its anthologists / David Roskies. ISBN 0-19-513751-5 1. Jewish literature—History and criticism. 2. Anthologies. 3. Rabbinical literature—History and criticism. 4. Judaism—Literary collections—History. 5. Jews—Literary collections—History. I. Stern, David, 1949– PN842 .A58 2004 808.8'98924—dc22. 2003061137 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

his book began as a workshop entitled, “The Anthological Ontology in Hebrew

TLiterature,” held in May 1995 under the auspices of the Porter Institute of Tel Aviv University and with the special encouragement of its director at the time,

Ziva ben Porat. Some of the papers from that workshop along with numerous others appeared as three special issues of the journal Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History (17:1 [January 1997], 17:2 [May 1997], and 19:1 [January 1999]). I especially want to thank Alan Mintz and David Roskies, the editors of Prooftexts, for lending the journal’s support and resources to the topic. A special acknowledgment of gratitude goes to Cynthia Read, our editor at Oxford, for both her support and her patience; to Robert Milks and Theo Calderara for overseeing a complicated process of publication; and to Patricia Wright for her extremely discerning eye for detail. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude that even an anthology of thanks could not convey to Kathryn Hellerstein, my beloved, and to our children, Rebecca and Jonah, for their constant inspiration and for allowing me occasionally to use the computer.


Contents

Contributors ix 1. The Anthology in Jewish Literature: An Introduction

3

David Stern

I. ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM 2.

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy

15

Jeffrey H. Tigay

3.

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper

32

James Kugel

4.

Order, Sequence, and Selection: The Mishnah’s Anthological Choices 53

5.

Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud

Yaakov Elman

81

Eliezer Segal

6.

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash

108

David Stern

II. THE MIDDLE AGES 7.

The Prayerbook (Siddur) as an Anthology of Judaism

143

Joseph Tabory

8.

Yalqut Shimoni and the Medieval Midrashic Anthology

159

Jacob Elbaum

9.

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages

176

Eli Yassif

10.

Midrash Rabbah and the Medieval Collector Mentality Marc Bregman

vii

196

viii Contents

III. THE MODERN PERIOD 11.

Homo Anthologicus: Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological Genre 211

12.

Sefer Haaggadah: Creating a Classic Anthology 226

13.

The Ingathering of Traditions: Zionism’s Anthology Projects

Zipora Kagan Mark W. Kiel

244

Israel Bartal

14.

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Modern Yiddish Poetry 259

15.

“Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove”: Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael 281

16.

Anthologizing the Vernacular: Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation 304

17.

Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book: Folk Narrative Anthologies and National Identity in Modern Israel 324

18.

The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists 335

Kathryn Hellerstein

Hannan Hever

Jeffrey Shandler

Galit Hasan-Rokem David G. Roskies

Contributors

Israel Bartal is Avraham Harman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Marc Bregman is Professor of Rabbinic Literature, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem, Israel. Jacob Elbaum is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yaakov Elman is Associate Professor of Judaic Studies in the Bernard Revel Graduate School, Yeshiva University. James Kugel is Meisler Professor of Bible at Bar Ilan University. Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kathryn Hellerstein is Ruth Meltzer Senior Lecturer in Yiddish Language and Literature and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennslyvania. Hannan Hever is Professor of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zipora Kagan is Professor of Hebrew Literature Emeritus at Haifa University. Mark W. Kiel is Rabbi at Congregation Bnai Israel in Emerson, New Jersey. David G. Roskies is Sol and Evelyn Henkind Professor of Yiddish Literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary. Eliezer Segal is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada. Jeffrey Shandler is an assistant professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University.

ix

x Contributors David Stern is Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature at the University of Pennslyvania. Joseph Tabory is a professor in the Talmud Department of Bar Ilan, incumbent of the Zoltan and Lya Gaspar Chair for Talmudic Studies. Jeffrey H. Tigay is A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. Eli Yassif is professor of Hebrew Literature at Tel-Aviv University.



1 david stern

The Anthology in Jewish Literature An Introduction

rom the Talmud to the latest collection of contemporary American Jewish

Fwriters in your local bookstore window, the anthology has been a pervasive, ubiquitous presence in Jewish literature throughout its history. The anthology may also be its oldest literary genre—if, that is, one accepts the documentary hypothesis, according to which the Pentateuch is a collection from different literary sources. Even if one does not accept the thesis, it is clear that many biblical books either are themselves collections, such as the books of Psalms or Proverbs, or tend to exhibit what might be called the “anthological habit”—that is, the tendency of gathering together discrete, sometimes conflicting retellings of stories or traditions (e.g., the two versions of the creation of woman, or analogous lists of unrelated commandments and miscellaneous laws) and preserving them side by side as though there were no difference, conflict, or ambiguity between them. Eventually, of course, this tendency assumes its full shape in the many explicit anthologies, or anthology-like works, that populate later Jewish literature. Among these are almost all the canonical texts of the rabbinic period, including the Mishnah and the Tosefta, the classical midrash collections, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, and the siddur (prayerbook) and its offshoots, including the Passover Haggadah. Subsequently, in the Middle Ages the anthology continues to hold its prominent position in the literary spectrum. In addition to the many summae of the classical rabbinic heritage that are compiled throughout the medieval period, the anthology becomes a primary medium for the recording of stories, poems, and interpretations of classical texts original to the period. Finally, in the modern age the anthological genre is transformed into a decisive instrument for cultural retrieval and re-creation, not only in such classic works as Sefer Haaggadah and Mimekor Yisrael but also in innumerable works of the early Zionist project and in modern Yiddish literature. No less important, the anthology has played an indispensable role in the creation of significant fields of research in Jewish studies, including midrash, Hebrew poetry, folklore, and popular culture. And yet, despite the ubiquity of the anthological presence in Jewish literature 3

4 The Anthology in Jewish Literature

and its centrality to that tradition, the genre has hardly been recognized, let alone studied or analyzed. As a literary form, the anthology has typically been shrugged off as the slightest of genres, “a hodgepodge of this and that,” as one well-spoken scholar in the field has put it. This neglect of the genre is not unique to Jewish literary studies. In general literary studies, the anthology has hardly been noted, at least until recently, and even today, when it has become a subject of some critical discussion, that is almost exclusively for its significance for canon formation. This volume hopes to redress this neglect by presenting essays that treat exemplary anthologies in Jewish literature throughout its history and significant moments in the evolution and development of the genre. Among the works treated here are many of the classical foundational texts of Jewish literature. Alongside these canonical works, however, are a number of lesser-known but no less significant works that equally, and sometimes even more revealingly, show how the anthology has played a formative role in the history of Jewish literature and culture. In selecting the primary texts to be treated in these essays under the anthological rubric, I have more or less kept to the dictionary definition of the term as “a collection of choice literary extracts,” although one might quibble with the use of the word “choice,” and I have not limited myself in any way to conventionally literary—that is, belletristic—sources. Surely one of the more striking signs of the genre’s significance in Jewish literature is the fact that, at one point or another, there has been an anthological composition for virtually every discipline and field in the Jewish intellectual and literary heritage. But as the essays in this volume demonstrate, the definition of the form is hardly settled; what is called an anthology is still open to redefinition. In addition to conventional anthologies, I have included such works as the Talmud—even though it may resemble an encyclopedia more than an anthology—precisely because it was a collaborative project that programmatically preserved and systematically collated the traditions of earlier generations. In fact, for such works as the Talmud, which are generically “problematic” precisely because they do not fit neatly into any of the familiar literary genres, the category of the anthology provides an extraordinarily useful heuristic tool for defining literary identity. I have not, in any case, allowed the strict definition of the term to delimit or discourage exploration of the anthology’s generic possibilities. As the essays in this volume repeatedly show, the Jewish anthology has taken numerous forms and played many different roles; all in all, it has shown itself to be far richer and more flexible than anyone might initially suppose. Furthermore, precisely because its features may appear so antithetical to many of our usual assumptions about literary form, authorship, and genre formation, the anthology offers a splendid opportunity to test and expose the boundaries of our conceptions about literature. Although it is customary in an introduction of this sort for the editor to offer a kind of summary of the essays that follow, it may be more worthwhile here— because of the absence of an existing “theory” of the anthology—to offer some prefatory remarks on significant theoretical issues that are raised by the subject of the anthology in Jewish literature.1 Of these, there are at least five worth mentioning.

An Introduction 5

The first is the anthology’s own literary form. Although this would seem to be an obvious fact, it is important to acknowledge that not all anthologies collect and organize their contents identically. One needs to distinguish, for example, between compilations in which the editor or compiler chooses relatively small units of preexisting material and then recombines and revises them to create essentially new compositions, and anthologies that consist of larger blocks of material that the editors have not tampered with but simply combined with other large blocks, sometimes even with entire works so as to form what are in effect small libraries.2 (In contrast, the Hebrew Bible, which analogously combines whole books, is a large library.) This is a useful distinction, but it is not entirely adequate, since even anthologies that simply present texts “as they really are” (to paraphrase Ranke) can radically alter and shape their readers’ reception and understanding of their contents according to how they are placed within the anthological context. For example, a poem by Bialik juxtaposed with a Rabbinic aggadah will have a different meaning than when it is juxtaposed with another poem by Tchernichowsky. Unlike beauty, which lies in the eyes of its beholder, the meaning of an anthologized text always lies in the mind of its compiler. Or to put the same point in more jargon-laden terms, there is no anthological organization devoid of an ideological orientation. In the anthology, literary form, organization, even sequence, are all ideological subjects.3 A second distinction one might make in regard to literary form is that between “explicit” and “implicit” anthologies—that is, works that present themselves overtly as collections of preexisting sources and traditions, like the classical midrashic collections, and those that don’t, like certain books in the Bible or the Talmud or some medieval collections of narratives or even a modern work like Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, a monument of twentieth-century Jewish scholarship that retells the biblical narrative by reweaving nearly every strand of extrabiblical lore its author could gather into a single narrative cloth.4 Whether to consider these last examples under the formal rubric of the anthology is less crucial than to recognize those elements in them that have been shaped by the collecting-andpreserving needs of the anthological habit. The “explicit” anthologies, on the other hand, may profitably be viewed as forming a kind of continuum along whose trajectory we might characterize different works by the strength of their principle of selection. Accordingly, one might distinguish between an “archive,” which claims to have no significant principle of selection except for the wish to preserve material; a “collection,” which is determined by a clear and acknowledged principle of selection although the sheer desire for preservation still remains its primary motivation; and an “anthology proper,” in which a very strong principle of selection regardless of desire for preservation is the operative criterion of inclusion. These gradations in anthological “strength” are only a small indication of the varieties of anthologies, and of the different kinds of choices and decisions that stand behind the historical genre. But what, then, are the primary principles of selection that have historically determined the genre? Is it possible to discern explicit, or even implicit, conventions according to which anthologists have dealt with their materials? Do these conventions or principles themselves form a tradi-

6


tion that is in any way continuous? And how has the anthology as a literary genre changed, and to what extent have those changes been shaped by the gentile, nonJewish host cultures in the many lands of the Diaspora in which nearly all Jewish anthologies were composed until the Zionist renaissance in the modern period? The study of the anthology as a literary genre leads to the second issue raised by the genre, namely, the study of the “anthologist” and “editor” or “redactor” as a literary agent and persona in his own right, and the mechanics of anthologizing. How have anthologies actually been produced? What have been their compositional and publication histories? What causes and motives have led their authors to compile them, and how have the editors looked upon what they have done? How have the processes of their production related to the nature of the material collected, that is, the politics of anthologizing? Have Jewish anthologies in different cultural centers and historical periods been influenced by comparable models or processes in the non-Jewish host culture? In responding to these questions, scholarship in other areas of Jewish studies and related fields often proves helpful. For example, Bible scholarship has long concerned itself with the processes of redaction, and some of it has touched upon questions related to the anthologizing process.5 In a different vein, contemporary scholarship on Jewish manuscript culture in the Middle Ages and on the history of the Jewish book in the early age of printing has demonstrated the often highly creative and formative role that scribes, correctors, and early printers played not only in silently transmitting Jewish texts and their traditions as passive agents of intellectual commerce, but in actively shaping the contents and forms of those texts and traditions and thereby determining the ways in which they were read and disseminated.6 The editors and anthologists of Jewish literature were no less creative and formative; indeed, even such seemingly passive acts as the decision to copy several discrete texts within a single codex—which may be considered a rudimentary form of the anthology— may have given shape to a major moment of literary history, as we are just now beginning to understand. What, then, can we learn from our anthologies about their often anonymous creators, and what can such knowledge about anthologizers and editors teach us about Jewish literary culture? The question of the anthologist/editor brings us to the third issue of interest raised by the genre of the anthology, namely, its function. Surely the most (and often the only) discussed aspect of the anthology has been its role as a medium of canonization, its service in authorizing, sacralizing, and legitimating certain works and in marginalizing, delegitimating, and anathemizing others. Some of these canonical questions have been raised by contemporary critics in respect to modern Hebrew and Yiddish literary anthologies, but outside this specific area the topic has hardly been treated.7 Even when the subject has been treated, little attention has been paid to the special valence that the concept of canon possesses in Jewish tradition and the different natively Jewish ways in which the act of canonization has historically been exercised in traditional Jewish literature (such as through the composition of authoritative interpretations and commentaries). But how has the canonizing process changed as it moved from the classical sacred tradition to the modern, more secularized realm? How do certain anthologies not

An Introduction 7

only canonize and authorize the traditions they choose to preserve, but become themselves canonical documents? The fourth area of theoretical interest is perhaps the most singular Jewish trait of the anthology: its role in serving as a medium for the transmission, preservation, and creation of tradition. In his seminal essay “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories in Judaism” (published in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays), Gershom Scholem demonstrated how the commentary genre has served as a medium for innovation in Jewish religious tradition precisely by pretending merely to present the “original” meaning of earlier, more ancient, and typically canonical texts when, in fact, the commentary has regularly presented some of the most radically new ideas in Jewish thought. A similar argument can be made for the anthology that pretends merely to present, quote, and select sources from earlier authoritative works. In fact, the very act of selection can be a powerful instrument for innovation; juxtaposition and recombination of discrete passages in new contexts and combinations can radically alter their original meaning. This is certainly the case with implicit anthologies—the Talmud is easily the best example—but it is also true of explicit anthologies in classical, medieval, and modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In modern Jewish culture, the anthology has also explicitly served an additional function. This is the fifth and final area of special interest: the anthology’s role as an agent in the creation, or re-creation, of Jewish culture and community. Not only has the anthology functioned as a medium for retrieving and re-creating tradition—the most famous case is Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Sefer Haaggadah—but it has also served as a figurative, idealized space for imagining new communities of readers and audiences, for transforming the past into a new entity through conscious fragmentation, literary montage, and collage. In these works, political and cultural ideology takes on material form in the shape of the anthology, and inevitably these examples of the literary form most insistently raise the question of the relation between ideology and literary production. Whether we are talking about early Zionist anthologies or more recent attempts to anthologize the Holocaust, it is in their writing that the anthology as a genre meets history. While the seventeen essays in this volume do not cover every aspect of the anthology in Jewish literature, let alone every anthology, they touch upon most of the major topics I have just delineated.8 The essays are arranged chronologically in three sections, devoted to Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism (through Late Antiquity), the Middle Ages, and the Modern Period. The five essays in the first section, on anthological compositions in the Bible and in the classical literature of the Rabbinic period, together constitute a powerful argument for the anthology as perhaps the single most important literary genre in early Jewish literature. By making this argument, of course, the authors in this section are using the term “anthology” broadly. As Jeffrey Tigay suggests in his essay on Deuteronomy and anthology in the Torah, the anthological dimension is partly to be found in how we imagine the redactor thought; on the other hand, Tigay also makes a strong case for viewing anthologization as a compositional device in putting together even a “single” passage like Moses’ first speech. In his


essay on Proverbs and the wisdom literature, James Kugel follows an analogously double-pronged approach to what he calls “the anthological temper.” As Kugel argues, the anthological form of this literature is intrinsically connected to its basic assumption: that there exists a divine plan behind human reality in all its chaos. Further, it is understood that even if a sage might never know everything, it is still possible for him to compile a collection of what he does know, and that is decidedly not—as the collections demonstrate—an idle activity. Kugel’s insight about the cultural value of the anthologizing activity in the ancient world finds direct application in the three essays devoted to the anthology during the classical Rabbinic period—Yaakov Elman’s study of the Mishnah, Eliezer Segal’s essay on the Babylonian Talmud, and my own exploration of the subject in relation to the various midrashic collections. As all three essays acknowledge, the literary works they focus upon are all sui generis—that is, each is difficult to define independently in ordinary generic terms. To give only the most obvious example: What is the Mishnah? Is it a law code, study collection, or textbook? Or a gathering of lecture notes, or a philosophical work? Different scholars have proposed each of these possibilities. By focusing upon its anthological dimension, it is possible for one to avoid the necessity for a monolithic or single answer to the question of the Mishnah’s identity; it is also easier to isolate its “ungeneric” features and thereby to identify its salient features. The same is true of other Rabbinic texts. Even if in the end it is impossible to arrive at a satisfactory or conclusive definition for the documents, the anthological approach helps us articulate “how little these generic categories help us in defining the singularity of a work like the Mishnah,” as Elman writes. Eliezer Segal comes to an even more radical conclusion in his study of the Babylonian Talmud: the final editors / redactor of the BT sought to make their text more than an anthology, that is, more than a mere collection. For Segal, the Talmud challenges our notions of anthology itself, demanding an even more dynamic notion of the genre if it is to prove useful in describing works like the Talmud. Finally, in my own essay on midrash, I use the anthological genre as an avenue for appreciating both the elementary forms of midrashic discourse and the nature of the larger collections, but the very nature of the latter as anthologies also leads me to the conclusion that these were not commentaries to be studied by ordinary readers but essentially source books for professionals. The four essays on the anthology in the Middle Ages begin to show even more dramatically how the genre is a category of cultural as well as literary significance—indeed, how literature and culture are inseparably linked through the medium of anthology. Thus the prayerbook, in its multiple and variegated designs, has historically reflected different communal identities, as Joseph Tabory conclusively demonstrates in his article on the literature of liturgy, and its very anthological dimension points to an inherently communal function. So, too, in his fascinating study of medieval Hebrew story collections, Eli Yassif shows how Eleazar Halevi’s habits of anthologizing in Sefer Hazikhronot, especially his repetitions of the same material, seem to reflect an attempt to present a pluralistic account of the Jewish historical narrative that would appeal to different audiences of readers and thereby link them. Jacob Elbaum’s investigation of late midrashic collections

An Introduction 9

such as Yalqut Shimoni raises the additional question of the “originality” of anthologies. Anthologies are typically conceived as inherently secondary and lacking in originality, but, as Elbaum shows, it is often impossible to distinguish between early and late collections of traditional material and to know precisely how the editors of “late” anthologies like Yalqut Shimoni viewed their work in relation to that of their predecessors. The real question Elbaum’s essay raises is the role of the anthologizer or editor: How active is his (or her) intervention in the act of anthologizing? This question is implicitly advanced in Marc Bregman’s groundbreaking study of the compilation and publication history of Midrash Rabbah, which was, as Bregman shows, essentially the creation of a printer who joined a number of disparate midrashic collections together to make a more marketable commodity, thereby creating a new community of readers as well. Bregman’s study transports us out of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period, but he also shows how the abiding problematics of the earlier period survive into the later one. Fittingly, the final section, devoted to the Modern Period, is also the lengthiest. The first three essays—Zipora Kagan’s study of Berdyczewski and his many anthologies, Mark Kiel’s treatment of Bialik’s Sefer Haaggadah, and Israel Bartal’s essay on the Zionist kinnus anthologies—all vividly demonstrate the multiple functions of the anthology in modern Hebrew literature: on the one hand as a primary medium for the retrieval and transmission of past tradition, and on the other as a force of cultural consolidation and community building. In all three cases the very act of anthologizing and anthology making comes to possess a virtually ontological status. The next two essays in the section—Kathryn Hellerstein’s survey of Ezra Korman’s anthology of Yiddish women’s poetry against the backdrop of other Yiddish poetry anthologies, and Hannan Hever’s treatment of modern Hebrew poetry anthologies—both demonstrate unequivocally the power of anthologies as canonizing labors. Hellerstein’s study connects the act of canonization to the politics of gender, Hever’s to the politics of Zionism. The final three essays in the section extend the cultural reach of anthologies in modern Jewish culture in three very different directions. Jeffrey Shandler shows vividly how anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation essentially saved and transmitted different visions of Yiddish culture for English-speaking, primarily American, audiences. Galit Hasan-Rokem’s study of Dov Noy and the Israel Folklore Archive shows how the act of anthologizing played a formative role in creating both notions of modern Israeli identity (by, paradoxically, reflecting the diversity of Israeli society) and (perhaps less wittingly) the scholarly discipline of Jewish folklore—and how these two were inseparably connected as well. Finally, David Roskies’s treatment of various Holocaust anthologies offers a compelling demonstration of the abiding power of anthologies to shape contemporary Jewish culture in its own self-understanding by presenting and authorizing different ideological visions of the most horrible trauma in Jewish history and its impact. If nothing else, this collection of essays should show readers that, to paraphrase Horatio, there exist more types of anthologies in Jewish literature than you have ever dreamt of. One of the more famous literary adages of our age proclaims: “The meaning of a literary work is always another literary work.” The anthology, perhaps


more literally than any other literary work, realizes the truth of this formulation through its very existence. Yet the same recognition has also enabled us to appreciate the anthology as a literary form and to make it such an invaluable key for unlocking the enigmatic identities of so many classic, foundational Jewish texts. More than being simply a subject of literary interest and value, the anthology as a form and genre seems to touch upon essential aspects of the Jewish imagination: its desire always to incorporate opposites, to preserve multiplicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel traditions rather than impose orthodoxy by accepting one version and excluding the other. These aspects, along with the anonymity and collective nature of the genre, its fragmentary yet collage-like effect, and above all, its utopian dream to gather in the dispersed sparks of Jewish literary creativity, all make the subject of the anthology a uniquely fitting vehicle for broaching new questions about the meaning and shaping of Jewishness. By reinserting the anthology into the Jewish literary tradition, it is hoped that this anthology of essays on the Jewish anthology will stimulate such questions.

Notes This essay was adapted from Prooftexts 17 (1997):1–7 and Prooftexts 19 (1999):83–86, by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. While there is as yet no definitive book on the theory of the anthology, see pro temp Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford, Conn.: 2001); cf. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), esp. Barbara A. Shailor, “A Cataloger’s View,” pp. 153–67, and James J. O’Donnell, “Retractations,” pp. 169–73. The classic work on the medieval anthology remains Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: 1979), esp. pp. 3–92. 2. On compilations, see Sara Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Commentaries in the Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought and History, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany, N.Y., 1993), pp. 98–130. I want to thank Marc Bregman for calling my attention to this essay as well as the one in the next note. 3. Lucia Re, “(De)Constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry,” Modern Language Review 87 (1992):585–602. 4. On Ginzberg, see my introduction to the new edition of the Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 2003). 5. See Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia, 1985), esp. Tigay’s introduction, pp. 1–20; and his essay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” pp. 53–96. 6. For a good survey of the current state of scholarship in this emerging field of Jewish scholarship, see the proceedings of the conference “Artefact and Text: The Re-creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts,” published as a special issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (autumn 1993), esp. the essays of Israel M. Ta-Shma, Malachi Beit-Arie, and Stefan C. Reif.

An Introduction 11 7. See, for example, Abraham Novershtem, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” Prooftexts 8 (1988):355–63; Kathryn Hellerstein, “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish,” in Handbook of Jewish-American Literature: An Analytic Guide to Themes and Sources, ed. Lewis Fried (New York, 1988), pp. 195–237; “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthologies,” Shofar 9 (1991):9–23, reprinted in Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit, 1995), pp. 136–52; and Hellerstein’s essay in this volume. See also James Kugel’s review essay of T. Carmi’s Penguin Anthology of Hebrew Verse in Prooftexts 2 (1982):209–26; and David G. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3 (1983):109–14. The reader may also find relevant a number of the essays in the special issue of Prooftexts 15 (January 1995), “The Role of Periodicals in the Formation of Modern Jewish Identity,” esp. Alan Mintz’s insightful introduction, “The Many Rather Than the One: On the Critical Study of Jewish Periodicals,” pp. 1–4. 8. I would like to mention two important essays that appeared in Prooftexts (19, no. 1 [January 1999]) and that, for reasons of space, could not be reprinted here: Marjorie Lehman, “The Ein Yaaqov: A Collection of Aggadah in Transition,” and Boaz Huss, “The Anthological Interpretation: The Emergence of Anthologies of Zohar Commentaries in the Seventeenth Century.” The reader interested in additional aspects of the Jewish anthology will find much of significance in both essays.


i

ANCIENT ISRAEL AND CLASSICAL JUDAISM


2 jeffrey h. tigay

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy

nthologies go back to the oldest stage in Jewish literature.1 The Bible consists

of twenty-four distinct books according to the Jewish count, and the very term A “Bible,” though singular in English, goes back to the Greek plural ta biblia, “the

books.” The original separateness of the Bible’s components was manifest in the fact that prior to the adoption of the codex (by Christians in the second and following centuries and by Jews after the talmudic period) it was, physically, a group of scrolls rather than a single volume.2 Accordingly, early writers had no name for the collection as a whole and could use only descriptive phrases such as “the Law, the Prophets, and the other books” (Prologue to the Greek of Ben Sira [Ecclesiasticus]) and “the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). Several of the names eventually adopted also reflect the Bible’s anthological character: not only rabbinic haSefarim, “the books” (cf. Daniel 9:2) and Kitvei haKodesh, “the sacred writings,” but the names used in the Middle Ages even after the codex was adopted: Esrim ve-arbah or Kaf-dalet, “the twenty-four (books),” and Tanakh, the acronym for Torah, Neviim uKetuvim, “the Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” Note as well Bibliothe¯ca, “collection of books,” used by Jerome and others.3 In this sense the Bible as a whole is what David Stern calls an explicit anthology.4 The same is true of certain of its individual books, which explicitly contain the works of different writers, such as Psalms, Proverbs, and Trei Asar, “the Twelve” (i.e., the Minor Prophets, which were written on a single scroll).5 The term “anthology” also refers to a collection of the works of a single author. This sense applies to most of the individual books of the prophets, which consist of the collected speeches of the prophets whose names they bear. Other books are implicitly anthological, combining materials from originally separate sources without explicitly saying so.6 A few prophetic books seem to contain the speeches of two or three different prophets, such as Isaiah, Hosea, Micah,7 and Zechariah. The best-known implicit anthology in the Bible is the Torah, as 15

16 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism

its composition is understood in modern scholarship. In the next section we look more closely at its composition.

The Torah The Torah presents a running narrative of Israel’s early history composed of materials from originally separate sources. Its evolution was a process of composition followed by conflation. That is, three variant narratives of early Israelite history (called J, E, and P by scholars) were each created by the combination of originally separate materials; they are each, in other words, composite. Subsequently, these three variants were interwoven, or conflated, with each other, and a fourth source (D) was added, thus creating the Torah essentially as we know it today. Sources A typical view would summarize the process of composition more or less as follows.8 The original literary units underlying the Torah were narratives about the early Hebrew tribes and their leaders. Such narratives were for the most part created, and at first transmitted, orally, some think in poetic form. In the course of time some of them were gathered into cycles dealing with various individuals (e.g., Abraham, Jacob) or other common subjects (e.g., the Egyptian bondage, the Exodus); the cycles were later linked together into lengthier narrative series (such as the patriarchal period), and, later still, these series were linked into comprehensive historical epics (such as the history of Israel from the patriarchs through the death of Moses or the conquest, or later). Apparently from one such epic (what Martin Noth termed “G,” for gemeinsame Grundlage, the “common basis”) there branched off separate versions which then in the course of transmission developed their own unique characteristics in terminology, style, ideology, and content. These versions are called the Yahwistic, Elohistic, and Priestly sources, or J (from German Jahwistisch), E, and P, respectively.9 By this stage the narrative was in prose. Whether G itself was written is debated, but in the view of most critics, J, E, and P were. By this time certain older written documents had also been incorporated into the narratives, such as the book of the Covenant (Exod. 21–23) and quotations from “the Book of the Wars of YHWH” (Num. 21:14). Other traditions about early Israelite history were omitted from these written sources. Some disappeared forever while others survived, either orally or in other written forms, for centuries and in some cases were picked up in postbiblical literature. When the old narratives about early Israelite history were gathered into larger complexes, they were organized by the itineraries and genealogical links of the patriarchs and the Exodus generation and held together by the theme of the divine promise to the patriarchs of land, progeny, and protection. This promise was probably an original part of at least some of the old traditions. In any case, many of the original narratives had nothing to do with this theme; each had a meaning and function of its own. Once drawn together, however, these narratives were transformed into episodes on the way to, or threatening, the fulfillment of the

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 17

promises. Literary topoi were pressed into service to this end: for example, the promise was threatened by the repeated barrenness of the patriarchs’ wives, and the future deliverer, Moses, was endangered and hidden in infancy and saved in a basket in a river. The smaller cycles within the larger complex also have their own subthemes. The biography of Abraham, for example, appears as a story of personal growth from loyalty to God based on an expected reward to loyalty even when that reward is threatened. This theme, too, is not present in all the individual narratives, but it is imparted by the literary frame (note how Genesis 12:1–4 is echoed in 22:1–3) and the recurrent promises appearing in the narratives. Redaction After developing independently for a time, the two main offshoots of G (J and E) were ultimately conflated into a single running narrative, one serving as the basis of the new narrative, with selections from the other supplementing it. Later, two other elements were added to this complex. One was the P source, which was now spliced into the combined JE much as J and E had been joined. The fourth element, D, was placed near the end of the account of the desert period because for the most part it was not a variant account of the earlier history, parallel to J, E, and P, but dealt with Moses’ last days. The relative order in which P and D were composed is debated. Most scholars have considered P the latest element, while a minority regard P as roughly contemporary with or earlier than D and think that P and D were joined to JE simultaneously. Recently a new approach has been suggested: the author(s) of the “Holiness Document” (H)—which was previously thought to be an older source embedded in P—represent a separate priestly school later than P; it was he / they who edited and rewrote P and blended it with the other sources, producing the Torah as a whole.10 By the time these documents were to be joined, their texts had become largely fixed, and the redactors did not have, or at least did not exercise, much freedom to revise them. Rather than rewrite the sources in their own words, they strove to incorporate them essentially as they found them, using the documents’ own wording, making only such modifications as were necessary for fitting the various extracts together, or for other purposes they hoped to achieve with the new version. Where the two versions extensively duplicated each other, one version would be dropped, except for significant variants which were maintained alongside the other version. Depending on the nature of the materials or the redactors’ intentions, the separate versions of the same episode might be interwoven to present what was taken as a more complete account of it (e.g., the account of the flood, where the doublets are presented as different moments in the unfolding sequence of events),11 or left apart and treated either as separate events (as in the case of the three stories in which a patriarch presents his wife as his sister) or as a main account and a partial recapitulation with greater detail (as in the two creation accounts in Genesis 1–2). The redactors added their own connective and transitional phrases between the passages and often achieved fine artistic effects simply


by skillful arrangement of the material. Somewhere in this lengthy process, material deemed objectionable or not suitable for the traditionists’ purposes was omitted, but on the whole they seem to have preserved as much as they could. This summary is far from encompassing the complete range of opinion on the subject, but it gives a fair impression of the kinds of processes that most critical scholars think were involved in the evolution of the Torah. While the role of these processes in the case of the Torah is hypothetical, inferred from contradictions, doublets, and other phenomena identified by reading between the lines of the text, it can be documented, by the comparison of older and younger versions of many ancient texts that such processes regularly operated in the development of ancient literature.12 The Redactors’ Thinking That the redactors who combined the Torah’s source documents preserved so much of the sources’ original wording and contents, even when doing so caused inconsistency or redundancy, appears to be due to the status of the sources when they received them. The comparison of older and younger copies of certain ancient texts shows that in the earlier stages of a work’s development, when it was not yet considered classical or sacred, editors felt free to rewrite almost at will, and early revisions of a work show very few inconsistencies even when new matter has been added to them. But once a work acquired sacred or classical status, it became increasingly difficult for editors to revise it even in order to remove inconsistencies. The inconsistencies in the Torah are due to the fact its source documents were combined at a time when they already had a quasi-canonical status, and the compilers did not feel free to do much more than juxtapose or interweave the sources and add some transitional phrases. Probably they resolved the inconsistencies exegetically in their own minds but did not feel free to add their explanations to the text.13 Some of the harmonistic interpretations of the Rabbis may well be similar to those of the editors. It is hard to be certain exactly what the redactors thought made their sources almost inviolable even when they were inconsistent with each other. It could have been the authority of their respective authors. Talmudic and post-talmudic literature records numerous instances of liturgical texts created by combining the wording proposed by different rabbis because the authorities refused to choose between the differing views.14 Their thinking seems nicely expressed by a latter-day authority, Rabbi Jacob Emden, who explained how he resolved the disagreement over which version of Kol Nidrei to recite, the older one, which nullifies vows made from last year to this, or Rabbenu Tam’s version, which refers to vows made from this year to the next: The statements of the ancients of blessed memory, that the wording was formulated with reference to the past, are convincing, and I have no doubt at all about that. Nevertheless, in deference to the statement of Rabbenu Tam, since it comes from the mouth of that tzaddik, my custom is to say it in both formulations and to conflate the wording: “[vows] that we vowed and will vow, swore and will swear, with which we bound ourselves or will bind ourselves, etc. from last Yom

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 19 Kippur [to this and] from this Yom Kippur to [the next], etc.” so as to satisfy both views.15

But it could also have been the redactors’ belief that elu veelu divrei Elohim hayyim, “these and those are the words of the living God,” that all of their sources were divinely revealed and hence were all valid, or at least potentially so. This phrase, in which the Talmud characterizes conflicting opinions of different sages,16 may be applicable as well to the redactors’ evaluation of their sources. In either case, the redactors seem to have felt that no one version of the past, of a law, or of a belief necessarily preserved the whole truth, and where they felt unable to decide, they preserved what they had received, harmonized inconsistencies as well as they could, and left the rest to posterity. As one nineteenth-century scholar observed, “It is this way of writing that makes the Bible history so vivid and interesting,” for no book written by the modern technique of digesting and rewriting the sources “could have preserved so much of the genuine life of antique times.”17 By not imposing unity and consistency on the sources, the compilers preserved the variety and richness of ancient Israelite belief, tradition, law, and literature.

Deuteronomy Deuteronomy, on the explicit level, is an anthology of speeches by Moses, connected by brief narrative passages. The speeches are the three main discourses (1:6– 4:40; 5:1–28:68; 29–30) and the poem and blessing of Moses (Ha’azinu in 32 and Ve-zo’t haBerakhah in 33).18 Deuteronomy is also anthological on the implicit level. First of all, it contains some material from the non-Deuteronomic sources, JE and P as well as other sources independent of those, including the two poems just mentioned.19 Further, even some of the Deuteronomic narrative material seems to come from different hands within the Deuteronomic “school.”20 But here I wish to raise the question of whether one may also view Moses’ first two discourses as implicitly anthological, that is, whether each of them consists of shorter, originally separate speeches. The Analogy of Prophetic Literature Before turning to these speeches, it is worth looking more closely at prophetic literature, which is analogous to Deuteronomy because it, too, consists of speeches. As was noted, most of the books of the classical prophets are clearly anthological. They consist of speeches by the prophets, and since most of them were active for many years (as is indicated in their headings), their books consist of different speeches uttered on different occasions during their careers (whether they also include interpolated matter not written by the prophets will not concern us here). The book of Jeremiah (36:2) says explicitly that God had him dictate to Baruch Ben Neriah “all the words that I have spoken to you . . . from the time I first spoke to you in the days of Josiah [the thirteenth year of Josiah, 627 b.c.e., according to Jer. 1:2] to this day” (in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, 605), and Jeremiah remained


active until after the exile began in 586. Many of his speeches, and those of other prophets, contain headings, often dated, indicating that they are separate speeches. Moreover—and this is why the subject is pertinent for present purposes—many scholars believe that these “speeches” are actually not single speeches, publicly delivered in their present form, but “literary speeches,”21 collections of shorter oracles, uttered on different occasions, that have been secondarily gathered together in the larger entities of which they now form parts.22 The demarcation of the putatively independent units is based on such criteria as introductory and concluding formulas, changes of subject, grammatical person or number or literary genre, different function, abrupt shifts, completeness and independence of thoughts, and above all, the obliviousness of one unit to another. This approach is controversial because the testimony of such criteria is not always unequivocal, and some scholars deny the validity of at least some of them. We cannot be certain that what we perceive as logically unconnected would have been perceived the same way in antiquity.23 The approach is especially problematic if one becomes so “programmed a priori to discover small separate units” that one ignores the units’ present context (regarding it as both chronologically and qualitatively secondary) and the meaning that it imparts to them, effectively ignoring the character of the prophetic book qua book.24 Increasingly, scholars have shown that the prophecies are arranged in ways that show careful design, being grouped into complexes that share common subjects or extrinsic similarities (such as key words) and arranged in esthetic patterns (such as chiasmus) and framed by similar opening and closing verses, and that have meaning as wholes.25 These groupings may sometimes be secondary, but after one reads the books over repeatedly in light of such studies, it can become increasingly difficult to be sure that these groupings are secondary.26 On the other hand, ignoring the possibility of original separateness brings its own dangers, particularly the likelihood of forced interpretations and rationalizations that can be no less subjective than the criteria used for identifying separateness. Those criteria at least have the heuristic value of focusing attention on each unit’s potential discreteness and forcing the attentive reader to ask how it fits into its present context, a question that can stimulate one to discover the design of the context as a whole. Furthermore, even though separateness may be difficult or impossible to prove, it is also difficult or impossible to disprove, and as a historical question it is worth considering the possibility of original separateness and secondary arrangement as a working hypothesis to see how much clarity it brings to our understanding of a literary work. The Units Underlying the Homiletic Speeches in Deuteronomy Returning to Deuteronomy,27 we can observe that in some places the homiletic speeches in 1:6–4:40 (the first discourse) and 5–11 (the nonlegal prologue and preamble to the second discourse) look as if they have incorporated brief sermons or teachings, or prećis of such, that were originally composed for oral delivery28 and at least some of which were originally separate from each other (whether


composed by the same author or different ones).29 More important, many of the smaller sections within these speeches have no inherent connection to each other and are largely oblivious of each other. They could easily be moved elsewhere without the reader feeling that something is missing from their present context or that they are extraneous in their new context. Frequently, after a few verses the text seems to have reached a conclusion and then changes topics, sometimes without any transition. All of these phenomena are illustrated by Deuteronomy 4:1–8.30 Note first that although all of vv. 1–40 are a discrete unit within the first discourse of Deuteronomy, both vv. 1 and 5 have introductory formulas (“Hear” in v. 1 and “See” in v. 5; similarly, introductory formulas appear four times in chaps. 5–11, though they are presently part of a single discourse: “Hear” in 5:1; 6:4; and 9:1; “See” in 11:26). Vv. 1–4 read as follows: And now, O Israel, give heed to [lit. “hear”] the laws and rules that I am instructing you to observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers, is giving you. You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, but keep the commandments of the Lord your God that I enjoin upon you. You saw with your own eyes what the Lord did in the matter of Baal-peor, that the Lord your God wiped out from among you every person who followed Baal-peor; while you, who held fast to the Lord your God, are all alive today.

In this paragraph the consequences of the Baal Peor incident demonstrate that observing the laws, particularly the law prohibiting worship of other gods, is essential so that Israel may live to enter the Promised Land. Then in the next paragraph (vv. 5–8), the argument that observance is a matter of life and death is dropped and replaced by the argument that Israel should observe the laws because they are uniquely just and uniquely effective in securing God’s closeness, hence following them will demonstrate Israel’s wisdom to the nations. See, I have imparted to you laws and rules, as the Lord my God has commanded me, for you to abide by in the land that you are about to enter and occupy. Observe them faithfully, for that will be proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples, who on hearing of all these laws will say, “Surely, that great nation is a wise and discerning people.” For what great nation is there that has a god so close at hand as is the Lord our God whenever we call upon Him? Or what great nation has laws and rules as perfect as all this Teaching that I set before you this day?

The two arguments are of very different character. The first, rooted in an experience in which gentiles lured Israelites to sin (Num. 25), is historical and is focused on a specific law. The second, unrelated to the first, refers to all the laws. It appeals to national pride and sounds almost contemporary in its contention that the Torah is uniquely just and will win Israel the respect of the gentiles, who are portrayed positively as appreciating justice and prepared to give Israel credit. Logically this argument has nothing to do with vv. 1–4 or the following verses (9–31) and, if moved elsewhere, would not be missed. In fact, vv. 5–8 would fit very nicely in chapter 6, before or after vv. 4–9 or 20–25. Finally, the arguments in 4:1–4 and 5–8


are brief and virtually beg for elaboration, suggesting that they are outlines or prećis of longer speeches. As in the prophetic books, in Deuteronomy units such as these appear as parts of larger groups that share common subjects, vocabulary, and themes and are arranged in esthetic patterns and framed by similar opening and closing verses (see below). It is these arrangements that may be secondary. Again, as in the case of the prophetic books, the original separateness of these units is difficult to prove. They are not overtly contradictory, inconsistent, or characterized by a different worldview, style, or vocabulary the way that J, E, and P are. If they were originally separate from each other, they may still have come from one writer or school of writers who shared the same worldview, style, and vocabulary.31 But the occasion of viewing the Bible through the conceptual prism of anthologies suggests that we give this theory a try and see how much this perspective clarifies. 1. Deuteronomy 6:4–25. This passage (beginning with the introductory formula shema ) is divided by the traditional parashah breaks into four units, (A) vv. 4–9, (B) 10–15, (C) 16–19, and (D) 20–25. A calls for exclusive love and loyalty toward YHWH, taking His instructions to heart and teaching them to future generations. B warns Israel, after they take possession of the Promised Land and its infrastructure, not to forget YHWH and turn to other gods, lest he wipe Israel out. C warns not to try the Lord but to do what is right and good in order to thrive and capture the land from the Canaanites. D calls on people to answer their children’s inquiries about the meaning of God’s commandments by telling about the Exodus and explaining how observing the commandments will bring merit. Although these four paragraphs share certain themes, they are themes common to much of Deuteronomy; they do not bespeak a closer connection between these paragraphs than between any one of them and many others in the book. The later paragraphs in the chapter do not build on the earlier ones, and they show no particular awareness of them. In fact, paragraph B seems to put the cart before the horse: its perspective is after Israel has already conquered the land, while paragraph C states that loyalty to YHWH is a precondition for successfully doing so. Furthermore not “try[ing] YHWH . . . as you did at Massah” in paragraph C refers to an incident when Israel lacked water (Exod. 17:1–7), a warning that fits oddly after paragraph B, which refers to the time when Israel will settle in a land full of bounty, including cisterns, vineyards, and olive trees. Not only could these four paragraphs appear separately in many other places in the book without seeming out of context or being difficult to understand, but in view of the incongruities between paragraphs B and C, some other locations might make those paragraphs easier to understand. Notwithstanding the seeming disparateness of its components, however, as a unit 6:4–25 can also be shown to possess a chiastic, symmetrical structure and certain shared themes well suited to its location in Deuteronomy. Paragraphs A and D mirror each other in referring to teaching God’s words and instructions to one’s children; paragraph B refers to God’s providence and C warns against testing His ability to provide. B’s warning not to forget God can be seen as continuing A’s exhortation to recite and teach His words constantly. In addition, C and D, emphasizing the rewards for obedience and the role of the laws in expressing and


inculcating reverence for God, echo the first paragraph of chapter 6, vv. 1–3, which, depending on the perspective from which it is viewed, can be seen as the concluding section of the previous masoretic parashah, 5:19–6:3, or as the introduction to the preamble to the laws given in Moab starting in 6:4.32 Deuteronomy 6:4–25 also suits its location following the Decalogue because allusions to the Decalogue, especially the first commandment, appear throughout the chapter. Vv. 4 and 14 restate the first commandment, “you shall have no other gods beside Me,” and vv. 12, 21, and 23 echo its introduction, “I the Lord am your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.” In v. 15 the injunction against worshiping other gods is backed with a warning about God’s jealousy, just as we find after the first two commandments. The exhortations to love God and keep His commandments in vv. 5 and 17 echo the Decalogue’s description of God as showing kindness to “those who love Me and keep My commandments.” V. 18 echoes the reward promised for observing the fifth commandment, “that it may go well with you” (vv. 2–3 also echo both rewards promised in that commandment). In light of these allusions, the exhortations to love God, to remember Him, to teach children about His words and deeds, and all the other themes of chapter 6 can be regarded as a sermonic reflection on the first commandment, explaining what must be done to carry it out. Thus, although the individual units of 6:4–25 do not relate directly to each other, they all relate in some way to the Decalogue of the preceding chapter. 2. Deuteronomy 11:1–25. This passage consists of three self-contained arguments for obedience to God’s commandments: (A) vv. 1–9 (which are a natural continuation of 10:12–22),33 (B) 10–21, and (C) 22–25. Like 6:4–25, they share certain common Deuteronomic themes34 but have no inherent connection to each other. In A Moses argues from history that Israel should obey God’s commands because, having witnessed His punitive acts against Egypt and rebellious Israelites, which he enumerates, this generation is able to understand better than any future generation that success, both in conquering the land and in remaining in it, depends on obedience. In B he argues for obedience on the basis of nature and topography: the mountainous Promised Land, unlike Egypt, depends on rain, without which Israel would perish, and God will dispense the rain only if Israel is loyal and obedient. In C he urges obedience on the strength of a promise: if Israel is loyal and obedient, God Himself will dislodge the Canaanites for them. These arguments for obedience are independent of each other. A and C refer to military success while B refers to avoidance of starving. The three paragraphs make distinct points and none refer to each other or build on each other. Nevertheless, these three paragraphs share many features and complement one another. Each calls for “loving the Lord your God” (vv. 1, 13, 22) and “keeping/ obeying the commandment(s) which I command you (this day)” (vv. 1, 8, 13, 22; the verbs shamar, “keep,” and shama, “obey,” sound alike). The first two paragraphs share the themes of “the land which you are about to cross into/invade and occupy” (vv. 8, 10, 11)35 and “enduring long upon the soil which the Lord swore to your fathers to give to them” (vv. 9, 21). They complement each other in that the first and third section deal with God’s power as manifested in historical events, while the second deals with His governance of nature.36 In context, B and C


explain the two conclusions of A (success in conquering the land and in surviving in it) in reverse order. All three paragraphs fit nicely as a sequel to 10:12–22. In the latter, having reviewed the Israelites’ history of faithlessness during the wilderness wanderings, Moses summed up God’s demand for loyalty and obedience, the central theme of Deuteronomy (10:12–22). In 11:1–25 he seeks to persuade Israel that its future depends on compliance with this demand. He frequently refers to it, urging Israel “to walk in all His ways,” “to love Him,” “to serve Him with all your heart and soul,” “to keep/obey all His commandment(s) which I enjoin upon you this day,” and “to hold fast to Him” (11:1, 8, 13, 22), echoing the same phrases in 10:12–13 and 20. 3. Deuteronomy 4:1–40. This speech, part of which has already been discussed, consists of four main sections, each arguing in its own way for obeying God’s laws and rules: (A) vv. 1–4, (B) 5–8, (C) 9–31, and (D) 32–40. Section A calls for obedience, prohibits adding to or subtracting from the commandments, and backs up the prohibition by a reference to the worship of Baal Peor and its disastrous consequences. B appeals for obedience on the ground that it will earn Israel the admiration of its neighbors, who will perceive the justice of the laws and the nearness of God that Israel enjoys because of obeying them. C is a lengthy argument for obeying the prohibition of idols. It shows that this prohibition is based on the Exodus and particularly the encounter with God at Horeb, and it backs up the prohibition with the threat of exile. D argues on the basis of the Exodus and Horeb experiences that there is no other God but the Lord (YHWH) and that His laws should therefore be obeyed. Logically each of these sections is self-contained. They do not refer to each other or rely on each other for their effectiveness and, in fact, any of them could be removed without the others losing any of their force. They are very different in character. A and B are short and skeletal, each appealing for obedience to all the commandments and briefly stating a reason for it. They read like prećis rather than speeches or even parts of a speech. Unlike the others, B is based not on history but on the justice and effectiveness of the laws. C is a lengthy argument for the commandment against worshiping idols and heavenly bodies, based on a somewhat detailed narrative and warning of the long-range consequences of disobedience. D is an appeal, of intermediate length, to consider history and realize the truth of monotheism, followed by an appeal to obey all the commandments. In context these four sections are held together by a frame in which Moses urges obedience to God’s laws so that Israel may live to occupy the land and remain in it indefinitely (vv. 1, 40). This message is underscored within the chapter by a warning that failure to observe the law against idols will lead to banishment from the land (vv. 23–28). The four units of the chapter have numerous features in common, both thematic and verbal, which reflect the sermonic, didactic character of Deuteronomy. In all of them Moses refers to the laws he is teaching or commanding and to the land Israel is about to enter.37 In three of the units Moses bases his argument on history. In A he argues that history shows the consequences of obeying or disobeying the commandments. In C he argues that history justifies the prohibition of images. In D he argues that history proves that the Lord is the only true God. Each unit opens with an appeal to the mind: “hear,” “see,” “do


not forget,” and “inquire” (vv. 1, 5, 9, 32). The themes of seeing and hearing— the senses through which Israel experienced history—are mentioned throughout,38 as are teaching and learning (l-m-d),39 knowing and making known (y-d- ),40 forgetting,41 wisdom and understanding.42 In each unit Moses lends immediacy to his words by referring to ha-yom (“today,” “this day,” “as is now the case”).43 B and D show that Israel and its laws are unparalleled among the nations and the Lord is unparalleled among the gods.44 C and D refer to the theophany at Horeb and the Exodus, and both speak of heaven and earth.45 The four units of the chapter are arranged in reverse chronological order, based on their allusions to the past: A alludes to the recent incident at Peor (v. 3), C to the theophany at Horeb, the Exodus, and the division of nations (vv. 10–14, 19–20), and D to the creation and the patriarchs as well as the Exodus and Horeb (vv. 32–34, 36–37) (the order within each unit is not chronological).46 Unlike 6:4–25 and 11:1–25, 4:1–40 as a whole doesn’t have many similarities to the preceding chapters. Its first unit, referring to the Baal Peor incident, does connect nicely with 3:22, which locates Israel at Peor. But the other events in the chapter have nothing to do with that incident, and although chapters 1–3 revolve around the issue of obedience and disobedience, the point of 1–3 is the importance of obeying God’s orders about conquering the Promised Land, whereas the emphasis of 4:1–40—and the rest of Deuteronomy—is obedience to God’s laws as a way of life in the land, not to ad hoc orders. Hence the transitional “And now” in 4:1 looks like an editorial link, and despite the many similarities and connections between these two sections, they may have had separate authors.47 I do not believe that phenomena that lend unity and design to each of the three sections described are strong enough to argue that the units comprising them were originally composed to stand with the others as they now do. These phenomena consist primarily of simple patterns of arrangement (chiasmus, frames, reverse chronological order) that are not integral to the contents of the units, and common Deuteronomic themes and formulas. They do not overcome the disjointed impression that these sections make on the reader. For the sake of contrast, consider how different these sections are from chapters 7, 8, and 9–10. Each of these sections develops a single theme, and when another theme is introduced, it develops naturally from the main theme. Chapter 7, for example,48 is concerned with the conquest. Its first section (vv. 1–6) states the requirement to eradicate the Canaanites and their religious artifacts, and its final section concludes with that theme (vv. 17–26). Since v. 1 refers to the Canaanites as more numerous than the Israelites, the second section (vv. 7–16) uses this statement as the occasion to warn Israel against delusions of numerical importance (v. 7) but promises that if Israel obeys God’s commandments, God will increase its numbers (v. 13). The last section urges Israel not to be discouraged by the Canaanites’ numerical superiority (v. 17), since God will defeat them. The surface unity of the chapter is supported by the fact that it is based on the covenant documents in Exodus 23:20–33 and 34: 11–16 and that allusions to those documents are found throughout the chapter.49 In view of this contrast between smooth-reading sections such as chapter 7 on the one hand and more disjointed sections such as 4:1–40, 6:4–25, and 11:1–25, a


plausible case can be made that the latter consist of originally separate units, many of them sermon prećis, brought together by a compiler who arranged them in their present patterns. If this is indeed the case, it represents another sense in which Deuteronomy is anthological. Whether the smooth-reading chapters 7, 8, and 9–10 should also be seen as originally distinct works is a question that will have to be left to another occasion.

Conclusion We have seen multifaceted aspects of explicit and implicit anthologies in the Bible, with special attention to the Torah, and to Deuteronomy in particular. Anthology is not only a literary phenomenon but an intellectual one as well. As David Stern has written, the anthology as a form and genre seems to touch upon essential aspects of the Jewish imagination: its desire always to incorporate opposites, to preserve multiplicities of traditions, to incorporate parallel traditions rather than impose orthodoxy by accepting one version and excluding the other.50

The viewpoints of the various books gathered together in the Bible vary widely. The four main sources of the Torah not only have different views about the details of Israelite history and law, but—particularly Deuteronomy and the priestly materials—markedly different ideologies on such matters as God, sacrifice, the Temple, and holiness.51 Even within the priestly materials, recent scholarship has shown pronounced differences between H (the Holiness Document) and the rest of P.52 Similarly, Chronicles covers much the same ground as Samuel and Kings from the perspective of very different interests and ideology.53 On key issues, such as eschatology and the relative status of ritual and morality, the classical prophets see things differently than the Torah and the Former Prophets do.54 Wisdom literature differs from the Torah and prophecy regarding “the source, the ground, and the bearers of moral responsibility,”55 while at the same time within wisdom literature Job and Ecclesiastes see the question of reward and punishment very differently than Proverbs, and the prose framework of Job has a different approach to that question than do the poetic sections of the book. The Bible’s “anthological habit” set the pattern for subsequent Jewish thought about the Bible, as it did for many other aspects of Judaism, as is manifest in every chapter of this volume. The midrashic works of talmudic and later times bring together the teachings and sermons (or prećis thereof) of numerous sages, both named and unnamed, along with the explicit and implicit views of their redactors.56 A more recent case is the Mikraot Gedolot, in which separate commentaries “of diverse authorship, provenance, dating and exegetical approaches, often mutually incompatible and contradictory . . . coexist within the confines of a single page, all accommodated within the framework of a single tradition” (N. M. Sarna).57 Ever since the Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524, no Rabbinic Bible has ever contained a biblical book accompanied by only one commentary, and different editions vie with each other to claim the largest number of commentaries on


their title pages (e.g., 32, 50, and even 120 commentaries).58 As B. Barry Levy has observed, this practice is a forceful statement about the multi-dimensional approach to Scripture put forth by the collective rabbinic tradition and the limitations inherent in approaching the text through the eyes of a single commentator.59

The conviction that “these and those are the words of the living God” has thus followed both the composition and the interpretation of Scripture throughout history.

Notes 1. The vast majority of biblical books are anthologies, composed, according to M. Haran, to preserve the remnants of ancient Israelite literature and with the aim of becoming “canonical” or “scriptural.” See M. Haran, HaAsupah HaMikrait (The Biblical Collection) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute and Magnes Press, 1996), pp. 5, 7, 39–40, 92, 308 (Hebrew). 2. See N. M. Sarna, “The Order of the Books,” in C. Berlin, ed., Studies in Jewish Bibliography, History and Literature (New York: Ktav, 1971), pp. 407–8. 3. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Bible,” etymological section. 4. David Stern, introduction to this book, p. 5. Stern observes, by the way, that “in the anthology, literary form, organization, even sequence, are all ideological subjects” (p. 3). Although this is not always the case (the components of an anthology can also be ordered by mechanical criteria, e.g., chronologically, by length, by similarity of phraseology or theme, etc.), it is nicely applicable to the differing organizations of the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish and Christian canons. The order described in b. Baba Bathra 14b ends with Chronicles, indicating that “for Jews, the canon of Scripture ends with a narration of the return of the Jewish community to its homeland” (M. Signer, “How the Bible Has Been Interpreted in Jewish Tradition,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. L. Keck et al. [Nashville: Abingdon, 1994], 1:65; essentially the same effect is achieved by ending with Ezra– Nehemiah, as in St. Petersburg [Leningrad] Codex b19A and related manuscripts). Christian Bibles, on the other hand, follow the order of the Septuagint, which places the prophets last so that they immediately precede the Gospels, thereby reflecting the Christian view that the primary significance of the “Old Testament” is found in its prophecies of the Messiah. 5. N. M. Sarna, Ancient Libraries and the Ordering of Biblical Books (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1989), pp. 9–10. 6. It is not clear whether and how the various royal chronicles and prophetic writings cited in Kings and Chronicles were used by the authors of those books. The text does not identify them as sources but as places where further information is found, but it is conceivable that the writers extracted information from them and perhaps even incorporated parts of them in their own texts. For a recent discussion see M. Haran, “The Books of the Chronicles ‘of the Kings of Judah’ and ‘of the Kings of Israel’: What Sort of Books Were They?” Vetus Testamentum 49 (1999):156–64. 7. The cases of Isaiah and Zechariah are well known and discussed in the standard biblical introductions and encyclopedias. On Hosea see Y. Kaufmann, Toledot ha Emunah haYisreelit (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv: Mosad Bialik/Dvir, 1955), 3:93–107, 319 (Eng. trans. by M. Greenberg, The Religion of Israel [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], pp. 368–

28 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 77); H. L. Ginsberg, “Hosea, Book of,” EJ 8:1010–22. On Micah see Ginsberg, The Israelian Heritage in Judaism (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1982), pp. 25–30. 8. The following several paragraphs are drawn from my “The Evolution of the Pentateuchal Narratives in the Light of the Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic,” pp. 22–25, in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. J. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). Interested readers will find fuller documentation there. 9. The names Yahwistic and Elohistic are based on the fact that in the J source the divine name YHWH is known to humans throughout the patriarchal period, whereas in the E source it is first revealed to Moses and until then God is called Elohim. The Priestly source is so called because it includes extensive cultic rules and even its narratives reflect the concepts and terminology found in those rules. Some scholars think that the priestly material was not a fully developed source document but rather a redactional strand produced by a priestly writer or school that edited JE and supplemented it with extensive priestly lore. For bibliography on, and a refutation of, that view see B. J. Schwartz, “The Priestly Account of the Theophany and Lawgiving at Sinai,” pp. 103–134 in M. V. Fox et al., Texts, Temples and Traditions. A Tribute to Menahem Haran (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1996). It has long been recognized that the priestly materials are also not all of one cloth. The “Holiness Code,” or H (Lev. 17–26 and some related passages), is generally thought to constitute a distinctive work; both it and P seem internally composite as well. The relationship of H and P is debated; see n. 10. 10. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). See further H. T. C. Sun, “Holiness Code,” Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 3:254–56; J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 1, 13–42. 11. See Tigay, “Conflation as a Redactional Technique,” in Empirical Models, pp. 53– 89 and the comments of M. Greenberg cited there, p. 54. 12. See Tigay, Empirical Models. 13. Cf. Tigay, “Evolution,” in Empirical Models, pp. 44f., and the comments of Greenberg cited there. 14. Tigay, “Conflation,” in Empirical Models, pp. 84–85. See also D. Sperber, Minhagei Yisrael (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1989—), 1:39–45; 2:23–75, 203. Examples include various blessings, including the different versions of Modim Anahnu Lakh, the different answers to the Four Questions in the Haggadah shel Pesah (that is, the answers of Samuel and Rab, respectively—namely, Avadim Hayyinu and Mitehfi illah Ovedei Avodah Zarah, b. Pesahim 116a), and Ahavah Rabbah vs. Ahavat Olam. Not only what is recited, but physical practices as well are sometimes “anthological,” combining different versions of what a practice ought to be, sometimes intentionally trying to satisfy multiple opinions; one well-known example is the practice of wearing two different sets of tefillin, each made in accordance with a different view of how the texts in them should be arranged. See further Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy (Devarim) (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996), p. 241, comment to Deuteronomy. 26:10. As Sperber notes, some Jewish practices are conflate because they are based on books of customs that are anthological. 15. Sheelat Yaavetz, no. 145, cited by Y. Weingarten, HaMahfi zor HaMeforash, Yom Kippur, Nusahfi Ashkenaz (Jerusalem: Gefen, 5747 / 1986–87), Introduction, p. 25. 16. B. Eruv. 13b; Git. 6b. See D. Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 116–19; A. J. Heschel, Torah Min Hashamayim 3 (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), esp. chap. 4. While the issue in Eruvin is halakhic, that in Gittin deals with the interpretation of a biblical narrative and provides an

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 29 instructive example of exegetical harmonization. R. Abiathar (a third-century Palestinian Amora) and R. Jonathan debated the reason why the Levite’s concubine deserted him (Judg. 19:1–2). The former held that it was because the Levite had become angry at finding a fly in his food, while the latter held that he had found a hair. R. Abiathar met Elijah and asked him what God thought of the matter, and Elijah answered that God had quoted both opinions. When R. Abiathar questioned whether God could have doubts, Elijah answered that both opinions are the words of the living God and went on to explain (harmonistically) that the Levite first found a fly but had not become angry, but later found a hair and did. By indicating that both opinions reflected different moments in the same episode, God had removed any conflict between them and enabled them to coexist, exactly as redactors do in arranging conflicting details of the same event (see earlier, text to n. 11, and “Conflation,” in Empirical Models, p. 76). 17. W. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 3d ed. (New York: Appleton, 1892), pp. 328–29. For the evidence see Tigay, ed., Empirical Models, chap. 1. 18. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. xii. 19. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. xxiv–xxvi, 494–97, 502–07, 510–13, 518–21, 522–24. 20. Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 504. 21. This phrase is modeled on “literary homily,” a phrase used by J. Heinemann to describe the final stage in the redaction of homiletic midrashim, as he understood the process (J. Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 [1971]:141–50; “The Art of Composition in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah,” HaSifrut 2 [1971]:808–34). 22. The existence of short oracles does not depend on the now discredited evolutionary assumption that prophecy originally consisted of short oracles and only later of longer ones. Short oracles are actually attested, both early and late. See, for example, J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 624, texts e, f, and g (note the contemporaneous longer prophecies on pp. 623, 625–26); 1 Kings 20:13; 22:11, 17; Jonah 3:4; Josephus, War, 6.301, 304, 309. 23. Cf. M. Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Anchor Bible 22; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 5–6. 24. A. Berlin, Zephaniah (Anchor Bible 25A. New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. 17–23 (the quoted phrase is from p. 21). 25. See, for example, Greenberg, Ezekiel, Berlin, Zephaniah, and S. Paul, Amos (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 11–15; M. Haran, “Amos, Book of Amos,” Entsyklopedia Mikrait 5, cols. 275–76. 26. The difficulty is nicely expressed in Steven Fraade’s description of a similar problem in analyzing the composition of midrashic compositions: Do the apparently disjunctive way in which individual traditions have been combined and the internal incongruities reflect the conscious creativity of the “storyteller” or rhetor who works such tensions into his narrative so as to hold his audience in suspense, or the haste of a collector/preserver of traditions who does not get to ironing out all such “seams”? . . . At what point does relative formal and thematic unity such as we have witnessed cease to reflect the redactor’s conscious intent and begin to be simply the text’s effect on the mind of its reader/ listener? Here the line between the relatively objective literary criteria and more subjective impressions becomes blurred and our task of describing and evaluating the redactional activity which produced such a midrash meets its limits. For the more we read and reread this kind of text and it becomes lodged in our minds,

30 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism the better its pieces seem to fit together, the more its language seems to echo, and the more its messages seem to coalesce. The historian must be careful to recognize the limits of such inquiries into midrashic redaction, distinguishing always between controlled analysis and intuitive impressions. It is all too easy when searching for a consistent “mind” behind such a collective text to find it, but only after having read too much between the lines. Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composition?” HUCA 54 (1983):292–93. 27. Much of the following is drawn from the pertinent sections of J. Tigay, Deuteronomy, where interested readers can find fuller documentation. 28. Cf. C. Brekelmans, “Wisdom Influence on Deuteronomy,” in D. L. Christiansen, ed., A Song of Power and the Power of Song (Winona Lake, Ind: Eisenbraun’s, 1993), pp. 125– 27. 29. The tannaitic chronological work Seder Olam Rabbah implies that the five main speeches of Deuteronomy actually consist of several shorter speeches. The Seder Olam says that Moses expounded (peresh) the entire Torah—that is, delivered the speeches of Deuteronomy (ending at 31:14, hen qarevu yameikha lamut, “the time is drawing near for you to die”)—over a period of 36 days, from 1 Shevat through 6 Adar. See Seder Olam Rabbah 10 (ed. Ratner, p. 41, re: Deut. 1:3). This implies that Deuteronomy contains 36 days’ worth of speeches, in other words that it consisted of units that were smaller and more numerous than what is implied by the headings in the book. This view leaves room for the possibility that the present arrangement is secondary and not in the order in which the speeches were originally given (ein muqdam umeuhfi ar baTorah). 30. The translation that follows is based on Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985) (slightly modified). 31. See M. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). 32. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 74. 33. Together, 10:12–11:9 are printed in siddurim as Parashat haYir’ah. 34. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, p. 109. 35. Yarash, “occupy,” is also echoed in the third paragraph, where it and its derivative are rendered “dislodge” and “dispossess” (v. 23), and in the assonant noun tirosh, “wine” (v. 14). 36. For the juxtaposition of these two themes, see Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 237–38. 37. Vv. 1, 5, 14, 21, 26, 40. 38. What Israel saw, or did not see, with its own eyes (vv. 3, 9, 12, 15, 34–36); the impression observance will make in the eyes of the nations (v. 6; see also 5, 19, 28); hearing (vv. 1, 6, 10, 12, 28, 30, 32, 33, 36). 39. Vv. 1, 5, 10, 14. 40. Vv. 9, 35, 39. 41. Vv. 9, 23, 31. 42. V. 6. 43. Vv. 4, 8, 20, 38–40. 44. Vv. 7–8, 33–34. Both of these units refer to “great” things (vv. 6–8, 32, 38). 45. See vv. 10–12, 26, 32–33, 36, 39. 46. This arrangement contrasts with that in Deuteronomy. 1:6–3:29, which begins with the departure from Horeb and progresses chronologically up to the encampment at Peor (see 1:6; 3:29) (N. Lohfink, cited by J. Levenson, “Who Inserted the Book of the Torah?” HTR 68 [1975]:203, 204). 47. See M. Noth, The Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield, England: Sheffield University, 1981), pp. 13–14, 33–34.

Anthology in the Torah and the Question of Deuteronomy 31 48. Chapters 8 and 9–10 display similar integrity. See Tigay, Deuteronomy, pp. 91–92, 96–97. 49. See A. Rofe´, The Belief in Angels in the Bible and in Early Israel (Jerusalem: Makor, 1979), pp. 289–97; Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 34, 46. 50. Stern, “Introduction” to The Anthological Imagination in Jewish Literature, Prooftexts 17, no. 1 (January, 1997):6. 51. Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School, pp. 179–319; “Theological Currents in Pentateuchal Literature,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 1969, 117–39. 52. I. Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995). 53. S. Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and Its Place in Biblical Thought (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 54. Kaufmann, Toledot 1:23–44 (Eng. trans., The Religion of Israel, pp. 157–66). 55. Kaufmann, Toledot 3:557–87 (Eng. trans. The Religion of Israel, pp. 316–27). 56. The redactional techniques of the midrashim are the subject of lively discussion. See, for example, Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash”; R. Hammer, “Section 38 of Sifre Deuteronomy: An Example of the Use of Independent Sources to Create a Literary Unit,” Hebrew Union College Annual 50 (1979):165–78; R. Hammer, “Complex Forms of Aggadah and Their Influence on Content,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 48 (1981):183–206; Steven D. Fraade, “Sifre Deuteronomy 26 (ad Deut. 3:23): How Conscious the Composition?” Hebrew Union College Annual 54 (1983):245–301; J. Neusner, Judaism and Scripture. The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Deuteronomy has more in common with midrash than its anthological character. Its argumentation resembles that of midrash in that it builds its arguments on specific premises much as midrash uses biblical verses as the premises of its arguments. In Deuteronomy the “texts” that serve as the premises of arguments are not verses of sacred writ but historical events (such as the Exodus, Horeb, the manna, the Golden Calf and Baal Peor incidents), the topography of the Promised Land, the justice of God’s laws, and other phenomena; these play a role analogous to that of biblical verses in midrash. When historical events are mentioned, for example, they are not narrated in full or for their own sake as they are in Exodus and Numbers, but in order to prove a sermonic point: the Exodus and Horeb events are cited to show that the Lord is the only true God and that Israel should therefore obey His laws and shun idols (4:9–20, 32–40); the journey from Horeb to the Promised Land is cited to point out that Israel’s faithlessness caused an entire generation to perish in the wilderness (1:1–46); when the manna is mentioned, it is to show that God controls nature and can make anything He chooses nourishing, for which reason Israel should always obey Him (8:1–6). In this way Deuteronomy can be seen as a kind of forerunner of the homiletic exposition of biblical verses in the midrashim. 57. N. M. Sarna, Studies in Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2000), pp. 69, 258–59. 58. See Mikraot Gedolot im l″b peirushim (New York: Pardes, 1951); H fi umash q″k peirushim (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, n.d.); Sefer Keter HaTorah. Ha″Taj″ HaGadol . . . kolel hfi amishim mefarshim . . . , ed. Y. H fi asid (Jerusalem, 5730/1970). 59. B. Barry Levy, “Rabbinic Bibles, Mikra’ot Gedolot, and Other Great Books,” Tradition 25 (1991):69.

3 james kugel

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper

here existed in ancient Israel a particular notion, “wisdom,” which uniquely

Tfavored the anthology genre; the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes present the clearest examples of the anthological character of wisdom within the Jewish canon. Indeed, wisdom was an international pursuit, and wisdom anthologies are found elsewhere as well in the ancient Near East, constituting among the oldest surviving literary texts from that region.1 Before examining how these anthologies emerged in Israel, however, it will be necessary to explain what it is about wisdom that is inherently anthological. The word “wisdom” (Hebrew hfi okhmah) does not generally designate in the Bible a person’s capacity for understanding or insight, though it can sometimes be used in this sense. Principally, however, “wisdom” designates a body of knowledge. So, for example, the Bible’s assertion that Solomon’s wisdom “was greater than the wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” (I Kings 5:10 [some books, 4:30]) does not seek to compare his power of understanding with that of the sages of other nations, but refers to the greater body of learning that he had acquired. (For this reason, indeed, the text goes on to specify what that body of learning consisted of: 3,000 proverbs, 1,005 songs, plus a knowledge of plants, animals, birds, reptiles, and fish [I Kings 5:12–13].) So similarly, when Qohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, speaks of acquiring wisdom, it is clear that he does not mean increasing his potential for understanding, but coming to possess some actual body of learning: “I had gotten more and greater wisdom than all who ever ruled before me over Jerusalem, and my mind had come to know much wisdom and knowledge” (Eccles. 1:16). Wisdom usually designated things known. Those things, however, were neither infinite nor random, for in the ancient world, knowledge was conceived to be an altogether static thing: whatever a person might come to know belonged to a defined corpus of things; it was this finite body that “wisdom” designated. This defined corpus of insights was deemed to play a special role in the world: it underlay all of reality, constituting the great set of 32

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 33

master plans by which the world—the natural world, of course, but also human society—was governed. In biblical Israel, as indeed elsewhere in the ancient Near East, this meant that wisdom had a divine character.2 Wisdom was, in an oft-stated biblical view, the set of plans with which God had created and continued to run the world: By wisdom the Lord founded the earth, by understanding He established the heavens. Prov. 3:19 How great are your works, Lord, you made them all with wisdom, the world is full of your creations. Ps. 104:24 How great are your works, O Lord, deep indeed are your plans. One who is a fool cannot know this, nor a boor understand it. Ps. 92:6–7

God, in other words, had established a set of highly detailed rules by which His world would be governed: the sun would rise in the east and set in the west, precious metals would be hidden inside rocks and extracted therefrom with fire, storks would roost in fir trees, and so on. Such rules as these three were obvious enough. Other parts of the divine plan, however, were hidden; however finite, the totality of wisdom, of the divine plan, was somehow beyond the grasp of any human being. In alluding to this circumstance, the Bible offers various explanations for it. One, certainly, was that God had intentionally hidden the rules by which the world worked, leaving it up to this or that sage to discover individual pieces of the puzzle: It is the glory of God to conceal things, and the glory of kings to find them out. Prov. 25:2 If only God would speak, if only He would open His lips to you, then He would tell you the secrets of wisdom, [reveal] understanding twice over; Yea, God would make you forget your suffering! But can you grasp God’s insights? Can you probe to the Almighty’s limit? Job 11:5–7 But where does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? She [⫽ wisdom, understanding] is hidden from the sight of all the living, and concealed [even] from the birds of the sky . . . God [alone] knows the path to her, yea, He knows her place. Job 28:20–23

On the other hand, how could a mere human being even hope to discover all of wisdom? After all, the paltriness of human life was a byword among Israel’s sages:

34 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Since his [mankind’s] time is apportioned, numbered by You [God] down to the months, who have set his portion irrevocably, Leave him alone, desist, and let him finish out his day like a hired hand. Job 14:5 The time of our lives is but seventy years, or if mightily [doled out], then eighty, and most of them [are consumed in] toil and fatigue. . . . Ps. 90:10

It is only toward the very end of life that human beings can begin to grasp God’s ways: Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days. With [God] are wisdom and might; He has counsel and understanding. Job 12:12–13

And so, finite though it might be, the corpus of knowledge underlying the world could hardly be mastered in a single human lifetime. For we are from yesterday, and [therefore] know nothing, our time on earth is a fleeting shadow. Job 8:9

Indeed, sometimes the two motifs—God’s hiding of wisdom, and man’s brevity on earth—were combined to explain human ignorance: [God] creates everyone nicely in His time, but He puts something hidden in their hearts, so that man cannot find out what God has created from beginning to end. Eccles. 2:11

Given these fundamental circumstances, what indeed could a human being hope to discover of the great rules governing life on earth? It is here that wisdom literature comes in. For if human beings could not discover the whole of the divine plan underlying reality, surely parts of it were indeed given to discovery. Already mentioned were those elements of the natural world—sunrise and sunset, the phases of the moon and movements of the stars, plus the ways of animals and birds and plants—that could be understood through careful observation. If it is true that observations such as these scarcely had a place as such in biblical wisdom literature, well, this is in itself an important datum (to which we shall return). But it is nonetheless the case that such “scientific” matters certainly formed part of the theoretical corpus of wisdom known to biblical sages, as the above-mentioned passage detailing Solomon’s wisdom (I Kings 5:10 ff) attests on one end of the biblical time line. On the other, there is the figure of the biblical sage Enoch, to whom is attributed, in a section of the relatively late (third century b.c.e. and later) treatise bearing his name, observations about the length of the solar year as opposed to the lunar year and other complex astronomical and me-


teorological calculations (I Enoch 72–82). So what we think of as science was certainly part of the ancient sage’s domain. But it was only part; the other part had to do with human affairs, with how people behaved with one another and how God (sometimes in consequence) treated human beings. In the wisdom mentality, such matters were, no less than the path of the stars, subject to careful observation and formulation—and so these too were, from ancient times, set down, formulated, fixed. The manner in which such insights were formulated was itself fixed. For while the “wisdom mentality” infuses all manner of different compositions and genres within (and outside of) the biblical world—from the biblical narrative of Joseph to the prophecies of Amos to a good number of biblical psalms—wisdom itself was typically imparted through one literary form alone, the mashal, or proverb. A biblical mashal is a brief sentence consisting of two parts, A and B. This two-part construction is hardly an incidental detail: it is the very genius of the form, for the relationship between A and B is often quite subtle. A good example might be a biblical mashal whose subject is, as a matter of fact, meshalim (that is, the plural of mashal): A thistle got stuck in a drunkard’s hand, and a proverb [mashal] in the mouth of a fool. Prov. 26:9

Drunkards in the Bible are known not particularly for their boisterousness or meanness or insensitivity to pain, but for their lack of balance: they are often depicted as “staggering” and falling to the ground (Isa. 19:14, 24:20; Ps. 107:27; Job 12:25, etc.). So, apparently, the drunkard in this proverb: he must have fallen to the ground and, in groping around, thrust his hand into some sort of thornbush or briar and so gained possession, as it were, of a thistle or thorn: it got stuck in his hand. The event described in part B, the proverbist asserts, is of a similar character: a fool may quote proverbs, but this does not mean that he has purposely set about learning them, nor that he truly understands, or lives by, their wisdom. Like the drunkard’s thorn, the fool’s proverb has been acquired quite by accident. Part B, as is usually the case, is thus the whole point of the mashal here, and part A, as frequently, is an image or specific case to which B is being compared. But of course, to say only that is to pass over the little details, the poetry, of the comparison. Certainly it is important that the fool of part B is being compared to an utterly senseless drunk in part A, and still more that the proverb mentioned in part B is implicitly compared to something sharp and prickly in part A—since, in the biblical world, proverbs were proverbially sharp (Eccles. 12:11, also Deut. 28: 37, I Kings 9:7, etc.).3 The aptness, the associatedness, of likeness and likened in both cases seems to confirm the truth of the mashal well beyond the matter of accidental acquisition, which is its overt common term. And so, yes, a proverb in a fool’s mouth is indeed just like a thistle in a drunkard’s hand—isn’t it obvious once you think about it? It is noteworthy that the comparison in this proverb is not formally stated: the mere juxtaposition of two assertions is sufficient for us to understand that one is being compared to another. So similarly:

36 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Gold ring in a pig’s snout, a beautiful woman of errant sense. Prov. 11:22

Here, too, the genius is all in the details—the fact that, in this proverb’s syntax, we first glimpse the gold ring and only afterward its repugnant setting, so to speak, is meant precisely to duplicate the onlooker’s experience of glimpsing first the woman’s beauty and only later that beauty’s unfortunate, larger context. What is more, the proverb’s assertion that the “beautiful woman of errant sense” is fundamentally inappropriate, conjoining two things that don’t, or at least shouldn’t, go together, does not mean that they are opposite equals. On the contrary, the woman’s physical beauty ends up being submerged and overwhelmed by something much bigger, a dirty, sloppy, wallowing: it becomes a small detail, an insignificant little glint of gold quite lost in or dwarfed by her piggish behavior. Proverbs like these were certainly pondered, studied. I do not mean to imply that biblical sages were literary critics, or that they would have formulated their thoughts precisely as I have above; but if a proverb was to be truly understood (and not simply picked up like a thorn), it had to be savored for its full implications. Better is a name than scented oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s birth. Eccles. 7:1

Part A seems quite indisputable: one’s name, one’s reputation, is better than any material possession, better even than the precious oils that, in biblical times, were scented with rare spices and imported from distant regions at great cost. Valuable as such oils might be, they could, in the world of biblical wisdom, scarcely match in value the worth of a person’s own name. Indeed, the truth of part A is only driven home by the near-perfect chiasmus of its sound, bwj !mXm ~X bwj. But what about the second half of the proverb: how is the day of death better than the day of one’s birth? Birth is almost always a happy occasion and death almost always a sad one; in what sense can the day of one’s death be “better”? More overtly than most, this mashal is a riddle. Yet a biblical sage would probably say that every mashal is a riddle in that it needs pondering in order to reveal its full sense. Here the precious oil mentioned in the first half of the proverb provides the clue. Such oil was valuable, so valuable that it was usually kept stoppered in little vials to protect it. In such vials it could survive for some time. Even so, precious oils could, would, eventually go bad. As Ecclesiastes itself later mentions, “flies of decay,” tiny fruit flies, can get into the oil and become the proverbial “fly in the ointment,” causing it suddenly to turn and go bad (Eccles. 10:1). And if it were not such a fruit fly, then the mere passage of time would eventually do the same thing; no matter how valuable the oil, sooner or later it would turn, and what was worth hundreds of dollars one day would be quite worthless the next. So is it with the human being, or at least the human body. Sooner or later our physical existence gives out; this does not necessarily happen all at once, but eventually what had once been vigorous and full of strength begins to deteriorate,


and the way of all flesh leads to the grave. Quite the opposite, says Ecclesiastes, is a person’s name (by which he means, I think, not only a person’s reputation— what other people know about him or her—but rather, more abstractly, the sum total of a person’s accomplishments, what can be said afterward, a kind of condensation of everything that he or she has done). A name, in this sense, is not acquired at birth: the newborn baby quite literally has no name, and even after it has lived for a time, it has no name in the sage’s sense: that name begins to be acquired only as the person does things on earth, starts to show the world what he or she is made of. The more a person lives and does, the more that name grows and becomes more detailed and specific. Quite unlike the body, a person’s “name” in this sense is altogether immune to the inroads of time. A name—in this abstract sense of the sum total of all a person’s deeds—is immutable, so that eventually that name is all that remains of our earthly existence; years, centuries after our death, the name—in this abstract sense—is what we are, what our life has amounted to. For this reason, the proverbist says, the day of a person’s death may be a sad day, but it is indeed better in the sense that the process of building that name, which only began on the day of birth, is now at last complete. Just as you concede, says Ecclesiastes, that a good name is better than precious oil in the sense that the precious oil is bound to go bad but the name is immune to decay, so you must also admit that the day of death, although the precious substance of the body has at last gone, is nonetheless better than the day of birth, for on this day the person’s “name” is now complete and set for eternity. Similar sentiments are found in the Book of Proverbs: In the goodness of the righteous a city rejoices, and when the wicked disappear there is gladness. Prov. 11:10

At first one might think that this proverb simply presents a straightforward contrast: a city rejoices in the life of its righteous citizens and in the death of its wicked ones. But that is not quite the point: if such had been the Hebrew sage’s intentions, I think he would have written something more like: In the lives of the righteous [and not in their “goodness”] the city rejoices, and when the wicked die [and not “disappear,” which is not precisely a synonym of death] there is gladness.

The fact that the proverbist avoided this obvious, and rather simple-minded, bit of parallelism, writing instead goodness and disappear, suggests a different interpretation. As a matter of fact, everyone in this proverb is already dead. The proverb’s claim is that, even after their deaths, the righteous leave a legacy of goodness to the world, a goodness (in biblical Hebrew the word can, in fact, mean “abundance” or “wealth”) from which people will continue to benefit long afterward, whereas the wicked, however harmful they may be during their lifetime, do not merely perish at the end but disappear without a trace: they leave no legacy. In other words, this proverb’s sentiment is quite the opposite of Marc Antony’s


in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The evil that men do, it says, can scarcely outlive them: as soon as they die they are powerless to harm us. The good that people do, on the contrary, lives on after them, so that generations not yet born will reap the benefits of that good. The city that rejoices, in this proverb, thus stands for all our fellow human beings: our true achievement is in what we are able to leave to them, whereas wickedness (which in Proverbs is often a synonym for selfindulgence or even foolishness) simply spends itself out and leaves nothing. The mashal form, , . A B was thus the basic building block of wisdom. True wisdom, that is, any true insight into the great divine plan underlying all of reality, could be, and was, packaged in this two-part sentence. This form was, in fact, used for many things other than wisdom: from earliest times all manner of laws, prophecies, songs, and other carefully constructed pronouncements had been put into pithy, two-part utterances like this. It is important, therefore, to distinguish the wisdom mashal from its close cousins, namely, most of the rest of what has been called the “poetry” of the Bible (all the more so because the spirit of wisdom truly does inform much of the Book of Psalms, a good part of the prophets, and even some legal sections of the Bible). The wisdom mashal is essentially an independent insight, a great general rule about the way the world works, packaged in a two-part sentence of the type seen here. It stands on its own, a one-line poem, and invites our contemplation. Despite their modular form, these individual insights were, from earliest times, gathered into collections. The reason is not hard to find. As was already mentioned, the sage was one who had acquired wisdom—the wisdom set down in proverbs—and acquiring wisdom meant, quite literally, coming to possess (whether orally or in writing) a large stock of proverbs.4 So it was altogether natural that sages themselves would assemble such collections and pass them on to their pupils. Indeed, here and there within the biblical corpus are clear signs of the anthologist at work. Sometimes meshalim are organized within an individual book according to some mechanical principle, like the bwj sayings of Ecclesiastes 7:1– 18, with their recurrent “Better X than Y. . . .” Often individual meshalim are juxtaposed in the Bible because they deal with the same or related subjects. It is clear, for example, that chapter 26 of Proverbs methodically deals first with the subject of fools (vv. 1–12), then that of lazy men (13–16), then that of quarrels: One who grabs a dog by the ears, a passerby who meddles in a dispute not his own.5 Like a jester6 who shoots [real] firebrands, arrows, and death, so is one who cheated his fellow and said, “I was just joking.” Without wood the fire goes out, and without [third-party] slanderers, the quarrel is quieted. Charcoal to embers and wood to fire, a quarrelsome man to a heated dispute. The words of a slanderer are gulped up fast, but they end up in one’s guts. Prov. 26:17–22


Such thematic organization notwithstanding, it seems likely that these proverbs originated independently, or at least were composed as individual units rather than as continuous discourse. Indeed, the anthologist of the just quoted passage is scarcely bothered by the repetition of images (wood added to fire) or specific terms (the roots for “slander” and “quarrel”) in it, precisely because each verse is an independent unit; each can, and probably did, travel on its own before being anthologized here. So it is no accident, for example, that the last mashal of the passage appears elsewhere in the same book, Proverbs 18:8. The tendency to bring together meshalim of similar subject or importance is still more pronounced in the late wisdom collection of Ben Sira (early second century b.c.e.), which consists principally of miniature treatises, each made up of individual meshalim dealing with such subjects as friendship, honoring of parents, or divine providence. Beyond this phenomenon are passages of what is called biblical “wisdom literature,” which are only formally meshalim but which in fact present a continuous, developing argument. Even a unit as large as chapters 1–9 of Proverbs, it has been argued, may be a consciously composed whole, however much it may here and there appear to be a collection of individual proverbs.7 Whether or not one accepts this particular argument for chapters 1–9, it is certainly beyond dispute that, for example, chapter 7 is a narrative, though written in the two-part, mashal form: And now a woman meets him, dressed as a harlot, wily of heart. She is loud and wayward, her feet do not stay at home; one step outside, then a step to the market, and at every corner she lies in wait. She seizes him and kisses him, and with impudent face she says. . . . Prov. 7:10–13

But again, that is just the point: so much was the one-line mashal the vehicle of wisdom, the accepted form by which wisdom insights were expressed, that this author, in wishing to dramatize the dangers of a smooth seductress (herself, apparently, representative of “foreign wisdom”), had little choice but to tell his story in two-part bursts, adopting the familar rhythms of wisdom-speak to narrate his young hero’s downfall.8 Wisdom meant the mashal. The anthological character of wisdom in the ancient Near East thus derives directly from the various considerations just outlined. It begins with the belief that nothing that happens in the world is random: everything occurs in keeping with a highly detailed set of (divinely established) rules, divine “wisdom.” No single human being can hope to discover or master the whole of the divine rule book, for God has hidden at least part of His plans far beyond human discovery, and, in any case, human life is much too short to allow a single sage, no matter how discerning, to understand everything. But parts of the divine plan have been grasped by sages past, and they have formulated their insights and set them down for later generations. Their understanding, packaged in individual meshalim, might best be compared to sets of coordinates on a graph. While the detailed totality of the graph is beyond human ken, a number of specific insights—forty-seven squares


to the right, five squares up, or again seventeen units to the left, three units down— had already been established for all time. One who wished to know at least some wisdom had thus to master these fixed points on the graph, master meshalim, and in so doing one could gain, in addition to the specific insights, a feel for the existence of the divine plan in its entirety. But these meshalim, the encapsulation of divine wisdom, hardly constituted a single individual’s, or even an individual nation’s, undertaking. Some points on the wisdom graph, like stars in the stratosphere, had been glimpsed only once, by this or that sage in a distant land ages past. Charting wisdom was thus inevitably a collective, international enterprise, and one who wished to acquire wisdom had willy-nilly to learn from all true sages everywhere. (It is thus scarcely surprising that Sumerian proverbs were translated into Akkadian,9 or Egyptian ones into Hebrew,10 nor yet that the Hebrew Bible can unashamedly speak, as we have seen, of the “wisdom of the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt” [I Kings 5:10].) By the same token, one who wished to transmit wisdom to one’s students would be foolish to limit them to one’s own insights. However much he may have reformulated old truths in his own idiom, however much the individual sage weighed and studied and made many proverbs Eccles. 12:9

his stock-in-trade consisted of the timeless, collective insights of all sages everywhere. By definition, then, any sage was an anthologist, any wisdom book a bouquet de penseés gathered from here and there.11 One might think it unlikely, given the anthological character of wisdom literature, that it would end up possessing a particular character or espousing a particular point of view: after all, it had been assembled from here and there, formulated by sages of every nation and ideology. But, of course, any student of anthologizing knows better. Anthologies are often, and quite consciously, tendentious, the hand of the anthologizer visible in every act of inclusion or exclusion. And even when such conscious Tendenz is not apparent, there are the “rules of the game” observed by all players, sometimes quite unconsciously; in our case, the common background and training and literary experience of all those who contributed to the wisdom undertaking could not but make itself felt in what they had to say. It might thus be appropriate, at this point, to say something about the overall character of biblical wisdom and, in particular, the ideology that stands behind the Bible’s wisdom collections. The first element of that ideology has already been mentioned, the belief in a great set of divine plans underlying all reality. To those trained to read the Bible through the lens of later Judaism or Christianity, the idea of such a set of plans might seem to be pan-biblical: is not God’s control of all of reality everywhere assumed? It is necessary, therefore, to be precise: it is not merely God’s control of reality that this ideology postulates (though even that idea is hardly attested universally in the Bible), but the existence of the great, preestablished pattern. In a sense, God Himself is subject to that pattern (though He is, of course, frequently


presented as its author), since everything that He does or will do must obey its general stipulations. This is hardly an assumption shared by every biblical writer. Indeed, the author of Hannah’s song of celebration in I Samuel 2 seems to glory in just the opposite notion, that God breaks all the rules: The bow of the mighty goes slack, but the ones who were weak now triumph. Those who had plenty are hired out for food, while the formerly hungry are feasting. A barren woman gives birth to seven, and she who had many is left alone. The Lord can kill and bring back to life, send down to Sheol and lift up again. The Lord can make poor and make rich, humiliate or exalt. He picks the needy up from the dust, lifts the destitute out of the scrapheap, Yea, sets them up next to princes, grants them a glorious throne. I Sam. 2:4–8

Not so in the world of wisdom: here everything is regular, and almost everything is predictable. It was remarked earlier that the wisdom included in the Hebrew Bible contains very little of what we would call “science”: the materiae of the natural world may be alluded to in catalogs such as Job 28, but the setting forth of such learning is decidedly not the purpose of biblical wisdom literature. This, too, seems to be an ideological statement: biblical wisdom is not so much out to educate as to inculcate. Not startling new facts, but timeless old verities, is what the biblical sage wishes to pass on, and his clever formulations stand in contrast to the obvious character of what he has to say: tread the straight and narrow, resist all excess, be good, wait for your reward. That is why inculcating—pounding, grinding, the ideas in—is what he is all about: his point needs to be driven home again precisely because it has been heard, and ignored, so often in the past. It should be observed in this connection what an abstract, spiritual world is that of biblical wisdom: it is a place of essences and ideal states. The previously cited Proverbs 11:10 could not be more eloquent in this regard. Shakespeare, who lived nowhere but on this earth, knew all too well about the power of the wicked to continue to affect our lives long after their own demise; they rarely just “disappear.” Perhaps the biblical proverbist knew this too. But if so, he chose nevertheless to maintain the opposite, for that is the way things ought to be, that is what would suit the great divine plan underlying all events. Indeed, it is this same otherworldly, abstract sense of things that caused wisdom writers to divide all of humanity into the two groups mentioned in Proverbs 11:10 (and almost everywhere else in wisdom writings), the “righteous” and the “wicked”—though “good” and “bad” might be a better translation, providing at least a feel for how these paired opposites usually function. Anyone who inhabits terra firma knows full well that few human beings belong entirely to one category or another; why, then, does wisdom literature insist on assigning all of us to one of these two groups? It is, I think, because in that severe eternity of spiritual essences, there really is no room for, no point in, nuance and shadow: the great


choices are made in the depths of the human soul, far from the sunlight. In this sense, the world of biblical wisdom is very much akin to that of medieval European painting or medieval and Renaissance allegory: here is no attempt to render realistically the human form or the ordinary events of this world, since that reality is, in any case, trivial. What counts is what is underneath, the true significance of ordinary things, and so everything turns into heraldry and symbolism; life happens in slow motion. For the same reason, the mentality of biblical wisdom could never be translated into, for example, ordinary cinema; but animated cartoons—there is a medium suitable for its spirituality. In that domain of primary colors, there are no shadows, and if the sun is seen at all, it is as a big yellow circle with squiggly rays shooting out of it. Only such a medium can capture the inside events of the soul, such as the time when the (wicked) cat, out to trick the (righteous) mouse, quickly sketches a picture of a tunnel and tacks it up onto a brick wall. Along comes the mouse on his motorcycle, heads straight for the picture, and drives on through it—it is a tunnel! Then the cat, in hot pursuit, heads his motorcycle toward the same spot, but craaash! It is back to being a picture of a tunnel tacked to a brick wall. This is wisdom’s world as well, in which the testimony of the senses is by definition suspect and treacherous, and everything that happens obeys a set of higher moral laws. Indeed, the human being depicted by orthodox wisdom is not so much man as little man, that small, sometimes laughable little fellow glimpsed from above, as if from the divine perspective.12 This is how the poor fool of Proverbs 7 first appears: For at the window of my house, through my lattice, I looked down. There, among the foolish ones, I glimpsed amidst the boys a senseless lad, passing in the street next to her corner, now striding up toward her house. Prov. 7:6–8

It is from this same perspective that a wisdom-imbued psalmist could assert: From the heavens the Lord looks out, seeing all of humanity. From the place of His dwelling He looks down on all of earth’s inhabitants. He who made the hearts of all of them [likewise] perceives their every deed. No king will escape through force of arms, no mighty man through power. The cavalry’s useless for victory, no matter its force, it will not be saved. But the Lord’s eye is turned to those who fear Him, who trust in His beneficence. Ps. 33:13–18

Just as little man’s vaunted powers are as nothing before God, so his little plans are meaningless in the presence of the Great Plan, the underlying “wisdom” that guides all the world’s affairs. This same psalmist likewise asserts: The Lord overthrows the nations’ plans, undoes the peoples’ designs. The Lord’s plan stands forever, the designs of His heart for every age. Ps. 33:10–11


Similarly: The Lord knows human designs—that they are a breath [i.e., passing, futile]. Ps. 94:10 A man’s mind may plan his path, but it is the Lord who will determine his steps. Prov. 16:9 Many are the designs in a man’s mind, but the Lord’s plan—that is what will stand. Prov. 19:21

The divine plan is not, however, indifferent to little man, for all his smallness. On the contrary, what happens in human affairs, no less than the great cataclysms of nature, is determined by God’s underlying set of rules. So it is that the theme of reward and punishment is also a crucial one in wisdom literature. As orthodox wisdom would have it, the righteous will inevitably be rewarded for their goodness, while the wicked will just as inevitably be punished. Indeed, one might call this— beyond the very existence of the divine plan—the great theme of wisdom writings: since the world is fundamentally divided into the righteous and the wicked, there can be no doubt that their Maker will, in the course of events, apportion to each group its just deserts. Here, however, reality intrudes. The author of Ecclesiastes was certainly not the first to observe that Sometimes the righteous receive what befits the deeds of the wicked, while the wicked sometimes receive what befits the deeds of the righteous.13 Eccles. 8:14

Even in the ideal world of wisdom, one could not hide from the fact that boorish fat cats drive around town in limousines while wellborn professors must take the bus (Eccles. 10:6–7). So it is that patience is the cardinal virtue of the sage: since he knows that all happens according to the divine plan, the apparent triumph of the wicked must be only temporary. In the end, right will win out, so it is necessary simply to wait. What one waits for is not the world to come or a reward after death, but something in this world: eventually, right here on earth, the wicked of each generation will get what is coming to them, and so will the just. Therefore, patience meant not just waiting for the divine equilibrium to be established, but waiting patiently: Better is the end of a thing than its beginning; better is patience than a haughty spirit. Eccles. 7:8

Once again, a mashal’s coordinated assertions really stand in the relation of “Just as A, so B,” or “You agree with A, now therefore admit B.” The wisdom of A here is indeed undeniable. Anyone would concur that something completed is far better than something that is merely in the planning stage, its final outcome far from


sure; the difference is that between unarguable fact and laudable intentions. Just as this is so, says the sage, so patience, a willingness to take the long view, is better than haughtiness. For if you are not willing to hold off until the thing is completed, your “I will not allow this to happen” or even “How can this happen to me?” will always be off the mark, a reaction to something-in-potential rather than something that really is. There is only one of Israel’s ancestors who is described as “wise,” and that is Joseph (Gen. 41:39); not only is he so described, but he does precisely those things—interpreting dreams, advising the king—that were typical of the ancient Near Eastern sage.14 So it is hardly surprising that the cardinal virtue of patience characterizes this wise hero’s action at every turn. Sold as a slave by his brothers, he does not despair but soon rises to the top of Potiphar’s household staff; even his next reversal—when he is cast down into a dreary dungeon because of a false accusation by his master’s wife—does not break Joseph, because, like any sage, he knows that righteousness in the end will win out. And so it does: he becomes, through a series of divinely manipulated events, viceroy of Egypt. The divine plan is thus not only something Joseph believes in; it is something that his whole life story demonstrates. For everything here had indeed been plotted in advance, the seven years of plenty followed by the seven years of famine; God in fact communicates this plan to Joseph, using Pharaoh as a mere conduit to the true sage’s powers of understanding. Then, set in his justly deserved place of honor, Joseph never seeks to repay his brothers the ill that they caused him—since, in any case, all has happened according to the Great Plan. As Joseph himself tells them, “You are not the ones who sent me down here, but God” (Gen. 44:8), and later, “As for you, you planned evil against me, but God planned it for the good, so as to keep alive a mass of people, as indeed has happened” (Gen. 50:20). Being patient is related, in Latin as in Hebrew, to bearing and suffering. The ancient Near Eastern sage’s patience included, prominently, his ability to suffer, to take it, knowing as he knew that his pains were either the just punishment for some sin he had committed, or part of some divinely instituted test; in either case, if the divine plan means that the righteous will ultimately be rewarded, what harm could there be in a few bumps along the way? “Are your sufferings pleasing to you?” asks one exponent of Rabbinic Judaism—the most direct heir of the biblical wisdom tradition in postbiblical times—to another (b. Ber. 5b). It is a reasonable question if you believe, as he did, that human suffering is ultimately a way of setting things right again between the sufferer and God—indeed, a down payment for future rewards. But if a toothache is always the true test of one’s philosophy, then Israel could scarcely be said to have passed that test with distinction. However much patient suffering was part of the ancient Near Eastern sage’s ideology, it is hardly the dominant note sounded in Hebrew Scripture, and surely it is indicative that even of the three biblical wisdom books mentioned, only one—Proverbs—might be said to subscribe to the rigors of “orthodox” wisdom in this crucial regard. The Book of Job, as is well known, is actually an Israelite’s own view of what he considers this strange, eastern philosophy. Even Job himself, who speaks for


the book’s author, is not an Israelite, but one from the land of Uz, and all his comforters are similarly identified as foreign sages, graduates of the elite academies of wisdom far from the Israelite west coast. So when Job is struck down, these easterners come up with the pat wisdom answer: everything goes according to the divine plan, therefore your sufferings must be deserved. Indeed, their words are not so much intended to “comfort” Job (though this is a common misunderstanding of the book) as to bring him to the state called, in mishnaic Hebrew, !ydh qwdyc, that is, the acceptance of the justice of God’s unfavorable decree. The ritual of repeatedly refusing to accept the assertion of friends and loved ones that the world makes sense despite the pain, that God’s decree must have been fair—a ritual called “refusing to be comforted” (Gen. 37:35)–was part of the mourning process; “accepting comfort” (!ymwxnt tlbq in mishnaic Hebrew) meant finally giving in. But Job will not. Despite his years of training and mastery of the wisdom idiom, he will not stand by (or rather, sit, since that is what mourners did) and allow black to be called white. The comforters’ words are full of high sentence and a bit obtuse, but behind them it is not hard to glimpse an Israelite author of, probably, the exilic or early postexilic period who, for all his own fascination with wisdom, cannot quite make his peace with patient suffering. Nor, of course, would it be correct to call his book a “wisdom anthology.” It is more like a drama written by someone who can sound like a sage—indeed, who peppers his speech with just enough recherche´, usually foreign, words and roots so as to give it an altogether alien flavor—but who is actually rather short on meshalim. His point is to sound like a sage in order to protest the flawless simplicity of the sagely view of suffering. If, paradoxically, he himself ends up justifying God’s decrees in rather classical wisdom fashion—hence justifying, in no uncertain way, wisdom itself— well, the paradox is the point: he wants wisdom to be true but cannot stand the smugness of its orthodox exponents. The Book of Ecclesiastes presents a rather more complicated situation. Many early wisdom collections from the ancient Near East had taken the form of, for example, a master’s instructions to his pupil, or a father’s words to his son15 —but these were by and large a literary fiction for the anthologist, a framing device. In Ecclesiastes the literary fiction has become fact, to the point that it compromises the very abstract, ideal world of wisdom that it seeks to inhabit. Ecclesiastes is apparently a real person. The name Qohelet (“Ecclesiastes” is but a misguided attempt to render this name in Greek)16 comes from a relatively rare root qhl, which means “argue” or “harangue,”17 and it probably was indeed the man’s real (by)name or, possibly, a very thin persona through which a real man spoke. A sage of probably the fifth or fourth century b.c.e., he was a wealthy Jerusalemite who apparently served for a time as governor of the Jews there, an office he describes, perhaps a bit grandiloquently, as “king” (Eccles. 1:12).18 The very fact that we know these things about him, the fact that he recounts at length (Eccles. 1:12–2:11) his youthful pursuit of self-indulgence (“all for the sake of science, of course,” Eccles. 2:3) and details further stages of his life, is indicative of how far this book is from the idealizing, inner spirituality of Proverbs. Qohelet is a man of this world, and his particular time and place intrude into the world of


wisdom he constructs like a ray of afternoon sunlight seeping in under the screening-room door. Indeed, one phrase that he repeats and repeats, a linguistic tic that reveals his true frame of mind, is “under the sun” or “under the heavens” (Eccles. 1:3, 9, 12, 14, etc.); he is down here, out here, making deals, bemoaning the cruelties of fate, growing older. He is a sage, irredeemably so, yet he frequently holds the received wisdom of sages up to the light and finds it wanting. This he reports without joy, since, as he has discovered, there is no alternative to the path of wisdom. If only things were different! But how can you maintain that a person’s “name” is imperishable (Eccles. 7:1) when you know perfectly well that those of former times have no remembrance and even those who live in time to come will have no remembrance with those that come after them. Eccles. 1:11

His discontent is reflected in the very style of the book. Gone are the seamless, measured niceties of the mashal: there are meshalim, of course, plenty of them, but they are interrupted here and there by bits of autobiography, transitional sentences, sidelong glances. What Qohelet particularly likes is to quote an established mashal and then argue with it, or merely comment, “This also is unfair” (Eccles. 6:9; in the same sense, Eccles. 2:15, 21, 23, 26; 4:4, 8, 16, etc.). He takes a perfectly good mashal such as Two are better than one, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken

and, instead of just citing it, interrupts it with a long, prosy parade of illustrations: Two are better than one, since they will surely profit from their work. For if they should fall, one of them will pick up the other, but if there were only one and he fell, the second would not be there to pick him up. Likewise, if two people lie down together, they will keep warm, but one person alone cannot stay warm. And if one of them is attacked, the two will be able to withstand it; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Eccles. 4:9–12

It is almost as if Qohelet cannot stand the symmetry, the poetry, of wisdom.19 It would be inexact to call this brief book an “intellectual autobiography,” but the little intrusions of Qohelet’s life represent a clever strategy on the anthologistauthor’s part. At the beginning of his composition, Qohelet is young, vigorous, planting gardens, building himself a pleasure palace without equal: he tells us, in the language of wisdom’s eternal verities, how the world looked to him then (Eccles. 1–2). But time passes and he reaches new conclusions: “Then I turned to consider” (Eccles. 2:11), “I understood [or “saw, considered”]” (Eccles. 2:13, 14; 3: 10, 14, 16; 4:4, 15; 6:1; 9:1, 13, etc.), “I thought to myself” (Eccles. 1:16; 2:1; 3:17, 18, etc.), “I returned and saw [that is, “I reconsidered”]” (Eccles. 4:1, 7; 9:11, etc.), “Here is what I myself have seen” (Eccles. 5:17), “Here is what I have found out” (Eccles. 7:27, 29), and so forth. These personal references are not merely little reminders of the man behind the mashal, but a way of encompassing a host of


different, sometimes jangling, bits of wisdom in one book. What was obvious back at the beginning, when the sage was relatively young, no longer holds by the end, when he is old. Names may be forgotten, but a name is nonetheless all that remains; woman may be all traps and snares (Eccles. 7:26–28), but “enjoy life with the woman whom you love” (Eccles. 9:9); sages and fools may meet the same end, “so why should I be wise?” (Eccles. 2:15), but still, “a sage’s mind is his right hand, a fool’s his left” (Eccles. 10:2), “there is nothing better for a man than that he eat and drink and enjoy what he has gotten” (Eccles. 2:24); nonetheless, “know that God will bring you to judgment concerning all these things” (Eccles. 11:9). To Qohelet well applies the French barb, Il se contredit pour avoir tout dit (“He contradicts himself in order to have said everything”). An anthologist could scarcely aim higher. The wisdom tradition in Hebrew hardly ends with Qohelet: after him follow Ben Sira, the anonymous author of 1 Baruch, and a host of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic writers of the Second Temple period, culminating in the anthologized wisdom sayings of the mishnaic tractate Abot. But Abot is something of a selfconscious throwback, an attempt to resurrect one last time the old wisdom anthology genre at a time when the very nature of wisdom in Israel had changed radically, and with it the whole role of the anthology in Jewish writings. What changed was that, sometime before the start of the second century b.c.e., “wisdom” came to include Torah. It is a striking fact that nowhere among the wise sayings of Proverbs, Job, or Ecclesiastes is there the slightest reference to anything from the Bible—not a mention of Israel’s illustrious ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, nor of Moses or the great Sinai revelation, nothing! One could scarcely doubt that relatively late sages like Qohelet or the author(s) of at least the later sections of Proverbs were keenly aware of Israel’s glorious past, nay, knew parts of its sacred library of texts by heart; yet they give not the slightest evidence of such knowledge in their own writings. The reason is not hard to discover: references to biblical Israel or to individual figures or events in its history surely must have seemed to violate the international, eternally valid character of wisdom. Abraham or Jerusalem were far too particular, too earthly, too historical; wisdom’s domain was the general and ethereal and eternal. As time went on, however, Jewish sages began to view things differently: the Torah was not merely a single people’s book, a record of that people’s past history and laws, but a divine guidebook, the text in which the Great Plan finds its most complete expression. Thus, after having praised the figure of wisdom very much in the fashion of earlier sages, Ben Sira (a wise man of the early second century b.c.e.) relates that at a certain point she (wisdom) left heaven in order to dwell among men: [Wisdom says:] “Then the Creator of all things gave me a commandment, and the One who made me assigned a place for my tent. He said: ‘Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inherited property.’ ” Sir. 24:8


Wisdom’s coming to dwell in Israel’s midst is no idle boast on Ben Sira’s part. What he means is that the Torah, Israel’s sacred book, is nothing less than eternal wisdom come down to the human realm: All this [wisdom] is the book of the covenant of the Most High, the Torah that Moses commanded us as an inheritance to the congregation of Jacob. Sir. 24:23 (cf. Deut. 33:4)

In the same fashion, another Jewish sage some decades later could assert about wisdom:20 He [God] found the whole way to knowledge, and gave her to Jacob His servant, and to Israel whom He loved. She is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endures forever. Bar. 3:36–4:1.

It is important to spell out the consequences of the change heralded by such pronouncements. For where wisdom had previously consisted of contemplating the natural world and the social order and deducing from them the general plan by which God conducts the world, it was now more and more Scripture that was to be contemplated in order to understand God’s ways. And so the sage, who had previously walked about the world or stood at his window looking out, now sat down at his table and opened the Book. The Book, even more than the world, was the place in which God’s will and God’s ways were expressed—but it required much thought and contemplation in order to understand fully the sacred messages contained therein. Thus, starting in the early second century b.c.e. (or conceivably still earlier), sages began to add to their repertoire of ancient proverbs and sayings other texts, biblical laws and narratives and prophecies, which likewise embodied discrete formulations of the Great Plan. Not surprisingly, however, their approach to analyzing texts remained basically unchanged. That is, schooled in the ways of meshalim, in the careful comparison of part A with part B and the search for all the hidden nuances, these sages quite naturally applied the same techniques to the rest of Israel’s literary heritage. Were not its other words just as likely to be cryptic, esoteric, in need of sustained contemplation in order to be fully understood? Likewise, the very conception of Scripture as a great corpus of divine instruction whose lessons, therefore, are relevant to every age—a notion that underlies all of ancient biblical interpretation—was not this also merely a projection of the sage’s assumptions about wisdom literature onto all of Israel’s variegated corpus of ancient writings? The treatment of various biblical figures as examples, models of proper conduct, is similarly a sagely construct. Indeed, it is certainly significant, in light of wisdom literature’s polarized division of humanity into the righteous and the wicked, the wise and the foolish, that a similar polarization takes place in ancient exegesis: biblical heroes are altogether good, with any fault airbrushed away, whereas figures like Esau or Balaam are altogether demonized—as if their neithergood-nor-evil status in the Bible itself is somehow intolerable.21 (The most convincing instances of such polarization occur with figures like Lot or Enosh, si-


multaneously demonized by one group of interpreters while pronounced altogether righteous by another. Apparently they could go one way or another, but not remain in the intolerable ambiguity of the middle.) Thus the ancient sages of Israel’s past now became interpreters of Scripture. This is quite literally true of Ben Sira, who devoted not a little of his book to the elucidation of biblical laws and narratives, and who concluded it with an extensive—six chapters long!—review of Israel’s biblical heroes, replete with allusions to well-known biblical phrases and a considerable body of interpretive material. The anonymous sage who authored the Wisdom of Solomon (first century b.c.e.) did no less, devoting chapter 10 of that work to a similar catalog, and a good deal of the remaining chapters to exploring the wisdom contained in, specifically, the Exodus and desert-wandering narratives of the Pentateuch. This author did not simply retell Scripture, but included the fruits of interpretive research, his own and that of earlier sages, in its every word. Thus, in retelling the events of the Exodus, he observed: She [wisdom] gave to holy men the reward of their labors; she guided them along a marvelous path, and became a shelter to them by day and a starry flame through the night. She brought them over the Red Sea and led them through the deep waters; but she drowned their enemies and cast them up from the depth of the sea. Wisd. 10:17–18

Quite a bit in these two sentences testifies to the advanced state of biblical interpretation at this time. For example, the biblical account presents the Israelites as having borrowed silver, gold, and other precious items from the Egyptians before leaving, and so having “despoiled” them (Exod. 12:36). Wisdom of Solomon is quick to explain that this was not thievery or even deception, but “the reward of their labors”; that is, it was only fair of the Israelites to take these items in recompense for all the years of slavery in which they had served the Egyptians without being paid. As for the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire that accompanied the Israelites on their way out of Egypt (Exod. 13:21), Wisdom of Solomon here explains what the book of Exodus somehow had not, that while the nighttime pillar was made of fire in order to guide them in the dark, the purpose of the daytime pillar of cloud was to give shelter to the Israelites from the sun—hence two pillars were necessary. Moreover, this same author specifies that, after drowning Israel’s enemies, Wisdom “cast them up from the depth of the sea.” This is no gratuitous flourish, but an attempt to resolve an apparent contradiction in the Exodus account, which at one point specifies that the Egyptians “were drowned in the Red Sea, the floods covered them, they went down into the depths like a stone” (Exod. 15:4–5) but on the other hand says that the Israelites “saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore” (Exod. 14:30). Where were they, on the seashore or at the bottom of the sea? This author’s answer is that they at first sank to the bottom of the sea but then were “cast up” to the shore again to be seen by the Israelites. In short, wisdom’s course took a sharp new turn in Israel at this time. Henceforth the sage would be a Schriftgelehrte before all else, and his stock-in-trade would


include most prominently the Torah itself, written by the greatest of sages, Mosesour-teacher. It is thus no exaggeration to state that the true Rabbinic continuation of the biblical wisdom tradition is not so much Mishnah Abot as the Mekhilta deR. Ishmael or Genesis Rabbah, those anthologies of pithy explanations of individual, isolated verses from Scripture. Surely there is no mystery in the fact that these and so many other midrashic collections of the opening centuries of the Common Era are anonymous anthologies rather than authored commentaries (such as appeared among Christians in the same period). The Jewish sages (called, in fact, hfi akhamim, “sages”) responsible for these early midrashic works were, consciously or otherwise, continuing an anthological tradition of wisdom that stretched back centuries and centuries into the distant past, back to the time when humans had first concluded that, while no one can know all that is worth knowing, a sage, mastering a thousand discrete insights handed down from here and there, can nevertheless assemble them into a single book and so pass on to future generations something of the great divine order by which the world is run. Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):9–32. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. From Old Kingdom Egypt (third millennium b.c.e.) come such collections as the “Instruction of Ptah-hotep” and the “Instructions from Kagemni”; see R. O. Faulkner, E. F. Wente, and W. K. Simpson, The Literature of Ancient Egypt (New Haven, Conn., 1972). Old Sumerian proverbs survive from early in the second millennium b.c.e.: S. N. Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (New York, 1959), pp. 119–26. 2. As has been frequently pointed out, this notion of wisdom is to be connected with the Egyptian concept of maat, the divine order; see A. Volten, “Der Begriff der Maat in den a¨gyptischen Weisheitstexten,” in Les sagesses du Proche-Orient ancien (Paris, 1963), pp. 72–102; E. Wu¨rtwein, “Egyptian Wisdom and the Old Testament,” in J. Crenshaw, Studies in Ancient Israelite Wisdom (New York, 1976), pp. 113–33. 3. This subject is developed further in my Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 11–12. 4. For this reason Ecclesiastes complains, in a famous phrase that is almost always mistranslated, “there is no end to the collecting of books, and much study wearies a person” (Eccles. 12:12). On s´h in the sense of “collect” or “gather” in Ecclesiastes (parallels Phoenician p l): J. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 51 (1989):34–35n. 5. The point, of course, is that the dog will end up biting the hand that grabs him— that is, one cannot remain an uninvolved, or uninjured, meddler. But beyond this obvious lesson, it seems that the proverbist takes delight in the fact that, while the passerby begins with the dog’s ears—namely, speaking to the ears of the disputants—he ends up getting it from their mouths. 6. Reading, conjecturally, mithalhel. 7. On the subject of larger compositional units in Proverbs there is a substantial scholarly literature, some of it quite delirious: see P. Skehan, “The Seven Columns of Wisdom’s House,” “A Single Editor for the Whole Book of Proverbs,” and “Wisdom’s House,” all collected in his Studies in Israelite Poetry and Wisdom (CBQ MS 1) (Washington, D.C., 1971), pp. 9–45; Christa Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9: Eine form- und motivgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1966); G. E. Bryce, “Another Wisdom-Book in

Wisdom and the Anthological Temper 51 Proverbs,” JBL 91 (1972): 145–57; B. Lang, Die weisheitliche Lehrrede: Eine Untersuchung von Spru¨che 1–7 (Stuttgart, 1972); B. Lang, Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: An Israelite Goddess Redefined (New York, 1986); T. Hildebrandt, “Proverbial Pairs: Compositional Units in Proverbs 10–29,” JBL 107 (1988):207–24; Daniel Snell, Twice-Told Proverbs and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs (Winona Lake, Ind., 1993); J. Goldingay, “The Arrangement of Sayings in Proverbs 10–15,” JSOT 61 (1994):75–83. On the same question with regard to Qohelet: W. Zimmerli, “Das Buch Qohelet: Traktat oder Sentenzensammlung?” VT 24 (1974):221–30; S. Glender, “Ecclesiastes—a Collection of ‘Diverse’ Sayings or a Unified Worldview?” Beit Miqra 26 (1981):15–23. 8. The same thing may be said of the Book of Job, another wisdom composition with a story to tell. True, the mise-en-sce`ne here has been entrusted to normal, straight, narrative style (chapters 1–2 as well as the conclusion, 42:7–17). But what occurs in the middle is not so much an exchange of individual insights as an argument framed in the idiom of wisdom sages, a kind of drama in mashal form; see later. 9. J.J.A. van Dijk, La Sagesse sume´ro-accadienne (Leiden, 1953); W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford, 1960). 10. The Egyptian origin of Proverbs 22:17–24:34 was first argued by A. Erman, “Das Weisheitsbuch des Amen-em-ope,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 27 (1924):241–52; see also J. M. Plumley, “The Teaching of Amenemope” in Winston Thomas, Documents from Old Testament Times (London; 1958), pp. 172–86; R. J. Williams, “The Alleged Semitic Original of the Wisdom of Amenemope,” JE 47 (1961):100–106; and Diethard Romheld, Wege der Weisheit: die Lehren Amenopes und Proverbien 22:17–24:22 (Berlin, 1989). Further on Egyptian and biblical wisdom: B. Gemser, “The Instructions of Onchsheshonqi and Biblical Literature,” Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 8 (1960): 102–28; Kayatz, Studien zu Proverbien 1–9; F.-J. Steiert, Die Weisheit Israels (Freiburg; 1990); Nili Shupak, “Where Can Wisdom Be Found?” The Sage’s Language in the Bible and Ancient Egyptian Literature (Go¨ttingen; 1993). 11. To be sure, some collections of wisdom in the ancient Near East were presented as the Teachings of X, So-and-so’s words to his son, etc. This format is found very early in Egypt: “The Instruction of Ptah-hotep,” “The Instruction of Amen-em-he´t for His Son Sesostris I,” “The Instruction of the Scribe Cheti,” etc.; see Gemser, “The Instructions of Onchsheshonqi,” pp. 103–4. Nevertheless, it is clear that these are collections of individual proverbs, anthologies. 12. Such is, of course, also the effect achieved by depicting human beings as talking animals, whether in animated cartoons or Aesop’s fables or the reasoned moralities of Marie de France or La Fontaine. 13. Jeremiah, for example, asked the same question: Jer. 12:1–2. 14. This was discussed by G. von Rad in his “Josephsgeschichte und a¨ltere Chokhma,” Vetus Testamentum Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 1 (1953):120–27. I do not believe that the foundations of his argument have been undermined by more recent examinations; see G. W. Coats, “The Joseph Story and Ancient Wisdom: A Reappraisal,” Catholic Bible Quarterly 35 (1973):285–97. 15. See n. 11. 16. “Man of the assembly,” as if the Hebrew were derived from qahal, “assembly.” Later, of course, the Greek ekklesia became the Christian “assembly,” the Church, whereupon Ecclesiastes became “the preacher.” 17. See Nehemiah 5:7, and the Arabic and Syriac cognates of qhl—all of which were pointed out by E. Ullendorf, “The Meaning of Qohelet,” Vetus Testamentum 12 (1962):215. To these examples might be added Numbers 16:3, 17:7, and Job 30:28, where the word clearly means “complain.”

52 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 18. Kugel, “Qohelet and Money,” pp. 47–48. 19. A different view of this passage (and of the phenomenon it represents): R. Gordis, “Quotation in Wisdom Literature,” in Crenshaw, Studies, pp. 220–44. 20. Note in the same connection a wisdom text from Qumran that asserts that God has granted wisdom “to Israel, He gives her as a gracious gift,” (4Q185) Sapentiential Work 2:10. 21. Particularly suggestive in connection with this topic is B. Otzen, “Old Testament Wisdom Literature and Dualistic Thinking,” VTS 28 (1974):146–57. “Dualistic thinking” in his definition includes the polarization of humanity not only into good and evil or wise and foolish, but as well such dualisms as the “sons of light/sons of darkness” and “two spirits” found at Qumran. See also such texts as Ben Sirah 15:14–20; Testament of Asher 1: 3–5; Philo of Alexandria, The Worse Attacks the Better, pp. 82–84; as well as R. A. Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (Leiden; 1970).

4 yaakov elman

Order, Sequence, and Selection The Mishnah’s Anthological Choices

n the tenth century, nearly 800 years after the Mishnah’s “publication,” R. She-

Irira Gaon described how Rabbi Judah the Prince, the Mishnah’s editor, “compiled . . . and added to it what was in his time, and reconciled it[s difficulties] properly.”1 In reconstructing the Mishnah’s formation, R. Sherira repeatedly emphasized Rabbi’s faithfulness to his sources—primarily the earlier compilation of R. Meir—and the faithfulness of the latter to his sources. “And not in his own words [lit., “from his [own] heart”] did Rabbi compile them,” or, “nothing was omitted or added but for a few places”—this theme recurs in his description of the process, along with a detailed series of proofs for his contention.2 The motive for this emphasis is clear: the anti-Karaite polemic which underlies R. Sherira’s history of the Oral Torah. Whatever may be its historical value today, Sherira’s monograph was the first to seek to understand Rabbi Judah’s motives and methods.3 This investigation has been renewed each time the authority or authenticity of the Oral Torah has been called into question and, with the emergence of the modern critical study of Rabbinic literature, has gained particular force since the middle of the nineteenth century down to our own time.4 R. Sherira employs four verbs to describe the process of compiling the Mishnah: liqqet, tereiz, osif, and hibber—“collect,” “solve [its difficulties],” “add,” and “formulate,” respectively.5 R. Sherira emphasizes that, before Rabbi’s time, the existence of differences of opinion made it impossible “to recite it with one voice and in one formulation.”6 The implication would seem to be that Rabbi’s intention was to produce a code of Rabbinic halakhah as it existed in his time. A few lines further on he adds that “the words of the Mishnah were like [those that] Moses enunciated from the mouth of the Most High.” Rabbi’s code was based on earlier sources, in particular the views of R. Akiva and his disciples, as formulated by R. Meir. In responding to the implicit question of why minority opinions were cited as well, R. Sherira quotes the view of R. Judah b. Ilai, that this was done “in order 53


to invalidate them” should a person wish to decide a dispute in favor of the minority view.7 The Mishnah is thus both authentic and authoritative, a conclusion that the polemic needs of his time—that is, the Karaite challenge—required. Less than a century before Sherira, another of the gaonim, R. Saadiah, dated the beginning of the redaction of the Mishnah to the early years of the Second Temple period. His motives were the same: in order to assert the antiquity, authenticity, and authority of the Oral Torah against Karaite claims to the contrary.8 R. Sherira, however, was the first to devote a monograph to the subject and, in doing so, to set the agenda for the discussion of such matters for the next millennium.9 The debate surrounding Rabbi’s motives and the purpose for which the Mishnah was composed has continued into our own time. As Eliezer Segal writes elsewhere in this volume, “a long-standing dispute has focused on whether the Mishnah was intended to serve as a normative codex or corpus iuris, or as a digest or encyclopedia of sources for theoretical instruction.”10 In fact, many more theories of the Mishnah’s genre have been proposed in the last century and a half, and many of them reflect the religious polemic of the nineteenth century.11 And nearly all of these theories relate to David Stern’s second area of concern in regard to anthologizing: the question of its genre, and the distinctions he draws between an “archive,” a “collection,” and an “anthology proper.”12 In regard to the Mishnah’s genre, we can begin by saying that no one argues that the Mishnah was composed de novo.13 The Mishnah is clearly an anthology of some sort, a collection of previously existing sources. The question is the purpose of this collection. Among the many definitions that have been proposed for its genre we may single out five: (1) a code, (2) a collection of halakhic sources for study, (3) an introductory textbook of halakhah, (4) Rabbi’s lecture notes, and (5) a philosophical work. Let us briefly consider each one separately and then return to the problems raised by each definition. The first two views of the Mishnah—that it is a code or a source collection— have a long history. Both views assume that the Mishnah was intended from the beginning to be authoritative. As we have already seen, R. Sherira considered the Mishnah to be an authoritative collection of halakhic sources, that is, a code. So too did Maimonides, the Codifier par excellence. In the introduction to his Commentary on the Mishnah and elsewhere, he accounts for a number of its features in terms of that assumption. The third view—that of the Mishnah as a “textbook of halakha”—is of more recent invention and was proposed by Abraham Goldberg. The precise meaning of the term “textbook” is somewhat ambiguous. A legal textbook is authoritative, but only in the pedagogical sense, not in the legal sense: it is not meant to be a code, or even an immediate source for working lawyers. The fourth view—that the Mishnah was “Rabbi’s lecture notes”—was a popular notion in the nineteenth century, when Maimonidean ideas of order and arrangement were taken as all but normative even by “enlightened” scholars, and it has more recently been revived by Abraham Weiss. This view attempts to explain the Mishnah’s anthological features; it does not directly address the question of

Order, Sequence, and Selection 55

authoritativeness, although it could be used as an argument for the Mishnah’s authority despite its somewhat disordered state. On the other hand, this argument is something of a double-edged sword; it could as easily be employed against such a view. Finally, there is Jacob Neusner’s view of the Mishnah as a philosophical work. The critical term here, of course, is the word “philosophical,” which Neusner uses in his own, somewhat idiosyncratic way. We shall examine his view in greater detail, but in light of the thumbnail historiographical sketch, the apologetic thrust of this view should be sufficiently clear. None of the views just set forth can dispense with a consideration of the Mishnah’s structure and contents. All views of the Mishnah as a code or as an authoritative legal work must deal with at least three problems: (1) its lack of cohesiveness and particularly its inner contradictions and unresolved disputes; (2) its lack of comprehensiveness, namely, the areas of tannaitic halakhah that it does not cover; and (3) its shortcomings in organization, particularly its duplications and its noncontextual arrangement of material. Thus, some sections are famously heterogenous, like Megillah 1:4–11, Pesahim 4, and all of Eduyot. Usually these problematic sections are explained as having resulted from oral transmission and are used as evidence for the view that Rabbi did not or hardly altered his sources. This view, however, is the opposite to Maimonides’, at least according to the account of Isadore Twersky. According to Twersky, Maimonides glowingly praises the Mishnah’s “comprehensive scope, muscular method, apodictic form, brief yet mellifluous style,” and Rabbi’s “nearly perfect wisdom, unexceptionable piety, personal austerity . . . , unrivaled mastery of Hebrew.”14 Nothing of its arrangement was left to chance—least of all, its contents and the order of its tractates. Whether or not Maimonides was correct in this view, his discussion essentially set the terms of the modern debate over the Mishnah’s form and structure, and permutations of his views make their appearance in virtually every theory that has been proposed to date. Two aspects of the Mishnah’s form—its arrangements and its omissions—were of particular interest to Maimonides, both for what they told him about the Mishnah’s place in the history of the Oral Torah and for his own codificatory efforts. Because of the systematic cast of his thought, Maimonides preferred philosophical/theological explanations to literary or historical ones. This preference is no more apparent than in his discussion of the Mishnah’s arrangement which, as we shall see, is closely tied to the question of its genre. Consider, for example, Maimonides’ explanation for the order of the different tractates in Seder Moed, the Order of Appointed Times. The Order begins with Shabbat, the tractate dealing with the Sabbath, because of the latter’s “precedence in sanctity; the fact that it recurs every seven days and so occurs frequently in the course of time; and that Scripture begins with it in its list of festivals (in Lev. 23: 3).” Maimonides thus explains the placement of the tractate in separate theological, sociological/personal, and scriptural terms. Eruvin comes next in the Order because of its obvious thematic relationship to Shabbat. Pesahim follows “because it was the first mitzvah the Israelites were commanded by Moses, and also because it is adjacent to the Sabbath in the [scriptural] section on festivals.” To explain the placement of the next tractate, Sheqalim, Maimonides again turns to scriptural


order as the reason, but in this case he shifts the focus to another part of Scripture, Exodus 30:11–16, which follows the exposition of the Passover laws in Exodus 12. To do so, however, he skips over the mention of all the pilgrimage festivals in Exodus 23, aside from shifting back from Leviticus 23. Thus, because a theological/ philosophical explanation will not serve in all cases, Maimonides must fall back on scriptural order, even when that “order” is itself not “orderly”! Yoma then follows because, according to Maimonides, the scriptural description of the service of the Day of Atonement occurs in Leviticus 16—although he again ignores the passages in Leviticus 23:23–27, where the order is different. Indeed, were the Mishnah to have followed the order of Leviticus 23, all the Pentateuchal festivals would have been presented in the order in which they occur through the year. Maimonides’ explanation for the order of tractates is also not the only possible explanation. The Babylonian Talmud itself uses scriptural order to explain the order of mishnayot within a tractate15 but in some cases attributes the arrangement of tractates to the amount of material to be covered (and related matters).16 In other cases, it explains their order on the basis of a law’s derivation (e.g., from Rabbinic exegesis),17 and in one case it even raises the possibility that tractates could follow a causal, quasi-midrashic rationale. Thus, R. Judah explains that the reason the scriptural passages detailing the laws of the Sotah precede those of the nazirirte (Num. 4:11–5:21) is that “one who sees a suspected adulteress in her degradation will withhold himself from wine [by becoming a nazirite]”—a homiletic explanation. In the Mishnah, however, the order of tractates relating these two laws is reversed. In response to why this is so, the Talmud explains: Since the Tana taught [Tractate] Ketubot [Marriage Settlements] and taught [the laws governing] “one who imposes a vow upon his wife,” he next teaches [Tractate] Nedarim [Vows]; and since he taught [Tractate] Nedarim, he proceeded to teach [Tractate] Nazir, which is analogous to Nedarim [because a Nazirite undertakes a vow to observe the Nazirite prohibitions], and then [the Mishnah] continues with the Tractate Sotah for the reason given by Rabbi.18

The reason for their sequence, in other words, is partly thematic and partly the result of causal connections. Over a century ago Abraham Geiger suggested still another reason for the order of tractates within an Order of Mishnah. In Abraham Goldberg’s summary of Geiger’s argument: The logic of the arrangement is purely external: it is according to the size of the tractates, the largest being first and the smallest last. . . . The only exception to this principle of arrangement is the first Order, according to its traditional sequence. Yet even here certain manuscripts preserve a more basic arrangement, as does the Vienna MS of the Tosefta. Here the arrangement is as follows: Berakhot (9 chaps.), Pea (8), Demai (7), Terumot (11), Sheviit (10), Kilayim (9), Maasrot (5), Maaser Sheni (5), Halla (4), Orla (3) and Bikkurim (3). In this arrangement there are two distinct frames with a descending order, the second starting with Terumot. What we really have, then, are two sub-orders. Indeed, the first three tractates are a unit by themselves, differing from the rest of the Order which deals either with hallowed or with prohibited agricultural products. As the

Order, Sequence, and Selection 57 first three tractates could hardly make up an order by themselves, they were placed with no change in their own sequence together with the tractates making up the other “sub-order.”19

The logic of the order, then, was neither thematic nor scriptural but virtually “material,” that is, based on the actual size of the tractate. In his own Code, Maimonides followed still another logic in arranging its topics—a logic which, as Isadore Twersky showed, Maimonides chose while fully aware of the other options, including that of the Mishnah, that were available to him.20 As Maimonides wrote in a letter, “I follow neither the order of the Talmud nor the order of the Mishnah, but I have collected all the laws, wherever they have been formulated, relating to every subject.”21 While Maimonides used some of the Mishnah’s principles in arranging topics in the Mishneh Torah itself, his avowed rejection of the Mishnah’s principles of order is noteworthy. Maimonides seems to be saying, as Twersky writes, that “even if my explanatory insights [of the Mishnah’s order] are correct and valid, the [Mishnah’s] scheme itself has too many conceptual lapses and superficial links.”22 In rectifying these lapses, Maimonides subdivided and rearranged the Mishnah’s ordering and sequence; the result is a reclassification of the Mishnah’s six orders into fourteen books. Thus, the Mishnaic Orders of Seeds, Appointed Times, Women, and Purities find their equivalents in the Maimonidean books of Seeds (with the exception of Berakhot), Times, and Women. Damages is subdivided into Damages, Acquisition, Statutes, and Judges, while Holy Things is divided between the Temple Service and Sacrifices. But Maimonides also created several new classifications. Sanctity (Qedushah) included laws regarding the sanctity of marriage and food; Hafla’ah covered laws that in the Mishnah were divided between Nedarim (vows) in Seder Nashim and Shevuot (oaths) in Seder Neziqin. Finally, Maimonides created an introductory book which had no precedent in any order or even tractate in the Mishnah: Fundamentals of the Torah. This book included both theological principles and fundamental laws: rules relating to human behavior and the laws pertaining to idolatry and blasphemy. The Book of Love (Ahavah) deals with liturgy, including prayers and blessings, and thus replaces the mishnaic tractate Berakhot, but it also includes the laws of circumcision, which have no formal place in the Mishnah.23 Thus, Maimonides’ code differs from the Mishnah not because of its certain codificatory intent as against the Mishnah’s possibly anthological one, for the subject of each work is legal exposition; Maimonides’ Code differs from the Mishnah in omitting disputes, and in its introduction, which lays out a programmatic theological/historical foundation for the entire work. In essence, though, both are legal expositions, and the arrangement of rules, rituals, and laws in the Mishnah is not dependent on whether it was composed as a code or as a collection; in either case, pedagogical or expository needs take precedence. The question of what constitutes a code relates more to the manner of presentation than to its arrangement. Generally speaking, we expect a collection to contain divergent opinions, whereas a code does not (or ought not to). The fact that the Mishnah does contain many such divergent opinions is problematic. Indeed, the very fact that the Mishnah seems to contain an attempt to explain why


it preserves divergent opinions (in Mishnah Eduyot 1:5) seems to indicate that the Mishnah’s redactor himself felt that the practice had to be explained.

The Question of Codification The question of the Mishnah’s intended genre is closely bound up with the question of its purpose. Here the matter is somewhat clearer, since the Mishnah’s concentration on legal material limits the choices to essentially two. Was it intended to be an authoritative collection, that is, a code, or “merely” a guide or textbook?24 These seemingly simple alternatives, however, mask a far more difficult and ambiguous question, since both codes and textbooks can take different forms that may even meld into one another, as the appropriation of Gaius’s Institutes as a prologue to Justinian’s Code illustrates—a case to which I will return. Still, a code is by definition legally authoritative, whereas other genres of legal material, whatever prestige or authority they may possess, are not authoritative in the same sense. It is thus no wonder that much of the debate over the presumed function of the Mishnah has centered around the question of whether it was intended as a code. Several features of the Mishnah seem to belie codificatory intent. First is its scope: it is manifestly incomplete, as we shall see. Moreover, it contains alternate views of important matters and does not explicitly decide between them. If we assume that opinions cited anonymously are meant to be authoritative, we must ask why an anonymous opinion in one place is disputed in another. In this respect and in others, the Mishnah seems to contain contradictory material, surely not the mark of an authoritative code. Numerous scholars have dealt with these questions, but because modern Rabbinic scholarship began in the nineteenth century, there has been an unfortunate tendency to transmute these essentially literary questions into historical/sourcecritical ones, chiefly the question of the Mishnah’s sources. Yet because the Mishnah is also the earliest surviving collection of Rabbinic material, it was impossible for scholars to pursue comparative work in the usual sense. Instead, Mishnah scholars based their work mainly on internal evidence in the Mishnah, aside from occasional talmudic obiter dicta that assumed historical importance far out of proportion to their actual significance. Thus, Zechariah Frankel, in his Darkei haMishnah, claimed that Rabbi had “critically reviewed” the Mishnah he had produced. This claim was based on Frankel’s understanding of a talmudic statement that R. Ashi, the presumed redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, had produced two editions of his work, a statement that Frankel assumed was also true of Rabbi Judah, even though there is no textual support whatsoever for it!25 Nonetheless, Frankel used this rationale to explain the existence of contradictions in the Mishnah which, he argued, resulted from R. Judah’s change of mind over time. And in order to explain why Rabbi himself did not eliminate these contradictions, Frankel proposed that he could not because the Mishnah had already begun to circulate in oral form. From this one example, one can see how certain sourcecritical assumptions, once accepted, generated wide-ranging conclusions about the nature of the Mishnah without, however, much evidence to back them up.


The classic period for the adoption of source-critical methods in researching the Mishnah was the generation before World War II. Hanokh Albeck and Y. N. Epstein exemplified this trend, the former in his early volume Untersuchungen ueber die Redaktion der Mischna,26 the latter in the lecture notes that were edited and published by E. Z. Melamed as Mevo’ot le-Sifrut ha-Tanna’im.27 Albeck and Epstein had virtually opposite understandings of the Mishnah’s redaction. According to Albeck, Rabbi Judah did not alter his sources in the least; according to Epstein, he did. Albeck based his view on the twin facts that the Mishnah contains duplications, contradictions, and differences in style, all manifestations of a collection built on earlier sources. He explains that the duplications are sometimes identical as a result of Rabbi’s policy of not changing or modifying his sources. On the other hand, when duplications occur in different formulations, Albeck explained, the reason is that they stem from different schools, while contradictions were to be seen as representing the views of different authorities.28 Similarly, Albeck used the large blocks of texts that deviate from the Mishnah’s order by subject matter— mini-collections of diverse, unrelated laws all attributed to a single early authority,29 or passages in which disparate laws share identical literary formulations such as “no less than . . . nor more than. . . . ,”30 or “the only difference between. . . .”31 —to prove that these passages were incorporated from earlier collections without change. The Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness, however, was more of a problem for Albeck to explain. Why, for example, does the Mishnah omit views cited in the parallel Tosefta passage? Albeck argued that Rabbi’s Mishnah began to circulate among his disciples before it was complete and, as a result, Rabbi had not been able to include certain views as yet. This explanation is hardly sufficient to explain the absence of a specific rule that was the subject of a tannaitic dispute. This is especially so in cases (which are not uncommon, as in M. Sheviit 3:2 and T. Sheviit 2:14) where R. Meir’s view is omitted. After all, according to Albeck, R. Meir was the author of the putative version of the Mishnah which is said to have played a part in Rabbi’s redaction.32 Further, and more seriously, Albeck’s explanation of premature circulation did not explain why a number of important matters never receive systematic treatment in the Mishnah; indeed, some are missing almost entirely. Among these are discussions of ritual objects like phylacteries and ritual fringes, and systematic expositions of the laws and history of the festival of Hanukkah. Although Albeck tried to argue that these omissions were also due to the premature circulation of the Mishnah,33 it is difficult to imagine that Rabbi would have sanctioned the release of his work without these matters being treated at some point, either then or later. Albeck’s explanation also does not account for another of the Mishnah’s signal characteristics, namely, its tendency to devote great attention to subjects that were not practically relevant in Rabbi’s own time; indeed, probably more than half the Mishnah is devoted to laws dealing with either the Temple service or ritual purity (which was truly relevant only to priests actively involved in the Temple service) and to the laws of agricultural tithes (although some of these were still being


collected after the destruction of the Temple, at least in the land of Israel). How could Rabbi treat these matters in exquisite detail and leave out systematic expositions of tefillin, tzitzit, and Hanukkah? What, in other words, was Rabbi’s plan for his work, his purpose in carrying it forward? Maimonides, in his introduction to his Commentary on the Mishnah, suggested that the Shavuot festival was not treated in the Mishnah because its observance did not involve any rituals peculiar to it,34 and so the exposition of the general laws of festivals in Tractate Betza were sufficient. This explanation, however, does not explain why the laws of Hanukkah never made it into the Mishnah. In contrast to Albeck, Epstein attempted to show that Rabbi had, in fact, altered and edited his sources. Whereas Albeck, to prove his point (that Rabbi had not altered his sources), pointed to duplicate mishnah-sections in which no alterations were made, Epstein, in good source-critical style, seized on infelicities of expression which, he explained, were the result of Rabbi’s editing. Similarly, Epstein claimed that the anonymous opinions in the Mishnah were anonymous because Rabbi preferred those opinions, not because they were really anonymous.35 Albeck, in contrast, insisted that these opinions had come down to Rabbi anonymously. To capture the flavor of the debate between the two scholars, it is worth citing some of Albeck’s arguments in his own words. (Epstein’s side does not survive in his own words.) Albeck describes in exemplary fashion the ways in which the Mishnah’s structure and style lend themselves to a source-critical analysis, and how this explains the Mishnah’s repetitions, contradictions, changes of style, and so on. Albeck emphasizes the importance of his contention that Rabbi did not edit his sources and ends on a distinctly apologetic note.36 According to current concepts (lit., “in our own generation”) we must admit that had Rabbi not proceeded in this manner, but would have changed his sources according to his own judgment, his production would have been deficient (hayah be-maasehu pegam), and it would have been said that he “traduced” the traditions, that he did not say things in the name of the one who said them— and not only that, but that he put words in the mouths of people who did not say them but never thought of them—as those who attribute to Rabbi changes, omissions, and additions. . . . How was he permitted to choose what seemed plausible in his eyes and to reject early views or change them according to his own judgment? On the contrary! His entire goal in the redaction of the Mishnah was to preserve their words with exactitude so that they would not be forgotten, and to mention even the opinion of a single individual [who differed] with the majority in case “a court sees the words of the individual it may rely on him” (Eduyot 1:5).37

Mavo la-Mishnah was published in 1959, two years after the publication of Epstein’s lecture notes on these matters by E. Z. Melamed,38 and it is difficult not to see Albeck’s harsh words as a reference to Epstein, Albeck’s erstwhile colleague. It is revealing that Albeck rejected Epstein’s conclusion on ultimately apologetic grounds rather than on scholarly ones. According to Albeck, Epstein had in some sense impugned the Sages by asserting that Rabbi had changed his sources and had thus undermined the authority of the Mishnah, the foundation of halakhah.


Recently Shamma Friedman has attempted to demonstrate that the origins of certain difficult texts and of problems in the arrangement of the Mishnah may at times be traced to Rabbi’s desire for concision.39 Consider, for example, Mishnah Shabbat 16:1 and its parallel in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. In the Mishnah, which is much shorter than the formally parallel toseftan passage,40 the order of exposition begins with the requirement to save scrolls of scriptural texts from a fire that has broken out on the Sabbath, even though such activity (i.e., taking objects out of one’s personal domain into the public domain) is generally forbidden on the Sabbath. Appended to this general rule are two other laws. The first is the stipulation that these scrolls must be saved whether or not they are used as texts for the public reading of the Torah, and the second is that even though the scrolls may be written in languages other than Hebrew, they still must be stored away in a respectful manner. This mishnah text then concludes with a somewhat gnomic explanation for why such texts are not read: “Why are they not read? Because of the neglect of the study hall.” As Friedman notes, the parallel Tosefta is more topically arranged, beginning with various rules regarding the reading of scriptural texts in 13:1 and continuing with an exposition of the rules of storing them away in 13:2. The two passages are joined by the term kitvei qodesh, “holy writings,” which is deployed in two different ways. In Tosefta Shabbat 13:1, as in Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, the term refers to Scripture in general, “the holy writings,” but the last clause of the mishnah refers to kitvei qodesh (without mentioning them explictly) in the sense of Hagiographa— those writings that may be not be read on the Sabbath at the time that the legal and ritual expositions are presented in the synagogue. The purpose of this rule is to discourage people from staying home to read the stories in the Hagiographa rather than attend these study sessions. Friedman continues: The redactor of our mishnah, that is, Rabbi, taught the text regarding the saving [of scriptural scrolls] (Shabbat 13: 1–7). If [these] early mishnayot, which were recited before Rabbi, were formulated in the style of the halakhot before us in the Tosefta, it is clear that Rabbi wanted, on the one hand, to include some reference to the halakhah that one may not read sacred writings [⫽ Hagiographa] on the Sabbath. On the other hand, he did not want to leave it as an isolated addendum unto itself in his new compilation without building it into the flow of the chapter. In order not to relinquish this halakhah, and also in order to retain the tight structure [of the new Mishnah], he combined this halakhah with the primary one, by interleaving their cases one within the other.41

Friedman thus attributes the lack of clarity in the rule to the impact of these conflicting desires on Rabbi’s part. The assumption underlying this chain of reasoning is that Rabbi had before him not only the halakhot that now appear in Mishnah Shabbat 16:1, but also those in Tosefta Shabbat 13:1–2. Friedman’s claim, however, is somewhat problematic, since even the synoptic chart of these halakhot that he provides shows hardly any overlap between the two groups of laws, except in the most general way. Moreover, if Rabbi’s desire for concision led to the lack of clarity which Friedman rightly laments, what may we say of Rabbi’s redactional


skills? Even if the process of oral transmission generally leads to such condensation,42 conscious editing on the part of a careful redactor can hardly be the cause for such a result. Nonetheless, Friedman opens up what is potentially a highly fruitful method of gauging Rabbi’s intentions and purposes, for if the Tosefta is the compilation from which Rabbi worked, the differences between it and the Mishnah must be a result of his planning. However, Friedman’s argument cannot be fully evaluated until he has presented a far larger number of examples in which the two texts are parallel. In this case, as his own synoptic table shows, there is hardly any overlap except in general subject matter. Still, the argument that Rabbi consciously edited the Tosefta to produce his Mishnah bespeaks his desire to produce a concise text. The question is whether concision is more the mark of a code or of an anthology. For the present moment, this question must remain moot. In either case, there is no question that concision would have been looked upon with favor in the world of late antiquity however the Mishnah was transmitted, orally or in written form. This last point brings us, in turn, to a question that Friedman’s source-critical predecessors hardly ever considered: the cultural context within which the redactional activities that produced the Mishnah took place. The long-time debate over whether the Mishnah was originally redacted from written or oral sources, and whether it was intended to be transmitted in written or oral form, is too involved for us to enter here.43 In passing, it is worth noting only that oral transmission somewhat more adequately accounts for the existence of texts whose brevity makes them difficult for us to understand. In any case, it is a better explanation for the Mishnah’s recurrent obscurity than the alternative— namely, that their editor was incompetent. Albeck and Epstein carried on their debate over whether the Mishnah was intended as a code or an anthology, but now that debate has subsided, perhaps because most contemporary scholars have felt that neither Albeck nor Epstein produced a decisive argument for his position. Scholars today seem to assume a priori that the Mishnah is one or the other but without considering the other possibility. For Abraham Goldberg, the Mishnah is a textbook anthology; for Dov Zlotnick and David Weiss Halivni, the Mishnah was intended as a code.

The Mishnah as Pedagogical Text As was noted earlier, two theories have sought to show that the Mishnah was originally composed as a pedagogical text of one sort or another. According to Avraham Weiss, the Mishnah represents the material that Rabbi employed in his lectures, a collection of his “lecture notes,” in other words. In this way Weiss attempts to explain, or explain away, the various problems of the Mishnah’s order. In the nature of the matter, a lecturer does not present the material, or the variants, which serve as the basis for the lecture. On the other hand, it may occur that in one circumstance or another he will present a particular source in one version, and in another circumstance, when discussing another issue, he will cite

Order, Sequence, and Selection 63 this material in another version. Likewise, he will present not only the material that fits his position. It is probable that he will present that material in the form it is in [even when he disagrees with it—Y. E.], and his own position he will enunciate during his analysis. . . . In essence, the selection of material and its form of presentation will certainly demonstrate the trend of his own thought and his own position. From here [we can understand how] the early amoraic theory [could] see in the Mishnah, as it were, a collection of Rabbi’s legal decisions, that could be relied on for legal decisions, [and this] even though in essence the Mishnah is really only a collection of sources used as the subject of analysis in [Rabbi’s] lectures [italics added].44

More recently, Avraham Goldberg has argued a similar theory, but to the exact opposite effect. Goldberg, who has produced detailed commentaries on a number of the Mishnah’s tractates,45 proposes that the redactor had a precise set of pedagogical rules according to which he presented the opinions in the Mishnah. The Mishnah, according to Goldberg, more than being simply a collection of halakhic opinions, is a “textbook of the Halakha.”46 Where Weiss sees disorder in its structure, Goldberg sees order, with a strong pedagogical intent. The Mishna consists of several layers of legal teaching corresponding to consecutive generations of teachers. Later layers often are a presentation of possible interpretations to unspecified teachings given in an earlier layer. The chief aim of the final editor was to present the gamut of possible interpretations, and not to compile a definitive, canonical code of Pharasaic law. In particular, as we shall see, the editor is interested in presenting the teachings of R. Akiva as they become reflected in the interpretive teachings of his prime pupils.47 In essence, Goldberg’s theory is not so very different from Weiss’s view that the Mishnah is a set of Rabbi’s lecture notes, except that he goes much further than Weiss does in investigating the means by which the pedagogical goal was reached. According to Goldberg, the Mishnah’s editor employed the following principles in arranging his textbook: 1. The anonymous opinion is usually that which comes closest to the generalized teaching of R. Akiva. 2. In an extended discussion, different points of view will be introduced in the course of the discussion. 3. Ease of presentation determines the place where a certain opinion will be introduced. 4. A single point of view will be taught where it serves most easily as a starting point from which differing points of view may be apprehended. 5. Topical arrangement of subject matter often calls for a selection from a variety of sources. This last principle applies even if the differing points of view mentioned in number 4 are not represented in the Mishnah itself but in Tosefta, as he suggests in discussing this principle.48 What then becomes of the Mishnah as a “study book of the Halakha”? Did the editor expect students of the halakhah to resort to Tosefta as a supplementary resource? Given the vastly larger size of the Tosefta, and the


material independent of the Mishnah that it contains, this would be a cumbersome enterprise. The editor should have incorporated the relevant toseftan material into the Mishnah in accordance with the principles that Goldberg himself has laid down! Indeed, the final principle (number 5) makes precisely this point, and thus it conflicts somewhat with the preceding three principles. The essential problem with Goldberg’s view of the Mishnah is that he views the Mishnah in two different, not entirely consistent ways: first as a “textbook,” and apparently an elementary one, of tannaitic halakhah; and second as a record of the teaching of four successive generations beginning with the generation of the Yavneans, who are responsible for “the primary, but very shortest layer of the Mishnah . . . , comprising late Second Temple teachings as formulated by the first Yavneh generation.”49 These separate views of the Mishnah conflict, because historical survey and effective pedagogy do not necessarily coalesce. Thus, at one point Goldberg states, “the truth is that the Mishnah can be properly understood and interpreted only when the relationship between each layer remains clearly recognizable. . . .”50 Elsewhere, however, he writes that, for pedagogical reasons, “the editor will obviously seek the most striking opinion,” in accordance with principle number 4, and from this Goldberg asserts that “differing views will not be hard to fathom.”51 These separate conclusions are not entirely consistent. Perhaps even more difficult to determine is how “the” editor managed to juggle these principles, synchronic, diachronic, and pedagogical, all at once. It is little wonder that Goldberg concedes that “it is very hard to find a single mishna with all four [generational] layers”52 and that most often only two opinions or layers are presented. How then is the range of opinion to be fathomed, especially when it is often a representative position that is given pride of place and not, say, two extreme positions? Indeed, given the problem of coordinating these various conflicting goals and editorial principles, one wonders if one overriding intention guided the redactional activity that went into the Mishnah’s formation. Do these conflicting goals represent the work of different compilers or redactional circles? Did the final editor intend the Mishnah to be no more than a compilation of sources, as Albeck suggested, without the active editorial intervention that Goldberg assumes took place? Goldberg himself attempted to resolve some of these problems by adverting to the historical context in which the Mishnah was composed to explain its literary nature. [The] contemporary Hellenistic climate where systematic and well-thought-out programs and theories of education played important roles. On the other hand, some of them may seem quite modern. Thus a good textbook of necessity needs to be selective in the presentation of the material, in order to offer the student a maximum of information in a minimum of text. Moreover, it would not have a stereotyped approach to every issue, but rather employ a variety of patterns of presentation, each in that context where it would be most effective.53

Goldberg never demonstrates how all this all fits into Hellenistic theories of pedagogy. But if the features Goldberg cites—like stratification and the various pedagogical principles he lists—can be said to fit the Mishnah as we now have it,


something else must have been at work that melded history and pedagogy. This may have been something like Neusner’s scheme of halakhic evolution, since such a scheme would allow for a development from simple to complex, as may be required for pedagogical purposes. Goldberg, by insisting that R. Akiva’s disciples were merely interpreting his views and not recasting or altering them, seems to reject this approach. In a large sense, Goldberg’s scheme is merely an adaptation of R. Yohanan’s principle that the major tannaitic compilations, as he and we know them, were “all according to the opinion of R. Akiva.”54 Whether the solution works as an explanation of the Mishnah’s purpose and arrangement is another question. Thus, for a number of reasons, Goldberg’s scheme is unconvincing. But the other “pedagogical” theory—that of Weiss, who argues that the Mishnah was constituted from Rabbi’s “lecture notes”—is no less problematic. For one thing, Weiss, by attempting to use the lecture-note theory to explain the Mishnah’s disordered structure, makes it more difficult for himself to explain those not insignificant instances of order that he himself finds in the Mishnah. Furthermore, Weiss at times contradicts his own view of the Mishnah’s disorder by explaining difficulties as the result not of a lack of order but of the combination of two differing and well-conceived “proto-tractates.” For example, he argues that the differing amoraic views of the meaning of the word maveh—one of “the fathers of damages” and a major category of the Rabbinic tort system—was the result of the inclusion of two large blocks of material now found together in Bava Qamma but originally separate collections of categories of damages, one made up of what is now BQ1:4–3:5 and the other BQ3:8–6:6. Each of these blocks had a separate view of the meaning of the word maveh, and each, according to Weiss, was systematic and orderly in itself.55 The two collections are, in Weiss’s opinion, parallel in their exposition of the four “fathers of damages,” except that the first interprets the opaque category, maveh, as referring to the damages done by a human being, while the second collection interprets it as shen, “tooth.” If so, the ambiguity in 1:1 is built in, so to speak, or rather we may say that the ambiguity gave rise to two complete “prototractates” that were then combined. If one were to accept this type of explanation in many cases, the difference between Albeck’s position and Weiss’s would be minimal, while, in contrast, Goldberg seems to envision Rabbi as a far more active redactor than does either Albeck or Weiss.

Roman, Persian, and Syriac Parallels As we have seen, Goldberg suggests in passing that Hellenistic ideas of education served as the Mishnah’s—that is, Rabbi’s—model.56 Unfortunately, he offers few details about his suggestion, and there are both cultural and historical reasons to question whether such influence or connection was possible. In the first place, Hellenistic education was literary and cultural in the general sense, philosophical in some sense, but not legal.57 For legal parallels one must look to Roman law, and, in particular, to its classical period, which is, however, slightly earlier than the mishnaic. Gaius’ Institutes, which was intended as an introductory textbook of Roman law and eventually served as the preface to Justinian’s Code, was pub-


lished about 160 c.e., a generation before Rabbi edited the Mishnah. Further, the actual impact of Gaius’s work is uncertain. Roman jurisconsults, certainly those who were Rabbi’s contemporaries, resisted the systematization of Roman law58 and, in his own time, Gaius was not particularly celebrated; while Justinian called him Gaius nostra, we do not even know his patronymic. Further, Gaius lived and taught in Rome, and although he may have had provincial connections (perhaps to Asia Minor), it is not clear how the Rabbis would have known of his work. Nevertheless, his approach to systematization of Roman law resembles at least some tendencies manifested in the Mishnah; he and Rabbi lived approximately at the same time and both were, generally speaking, members of the same cultural world. As a result, a comparison of the Institutes and the Mishnah is not without grounds. Even so, we must bear in mind that Gaius was concerned only with civil and criminal law and not at all with religion or ritual per se. But this is true of most law books that have survived from late antiquity, including the Syriac law books produced by various Nestorian ecclesiastics of the seventh and eighth centuries, such as those of the patriarchs Henanisho Mar Abba, and especially that of the Persian archbishops Jesuboht and Simon. Jesuboht’s “Corpus Juris” actually provides the closest parallel to the Mishnah, since it is not restricted to one subject (e.g., inheritance or marriage law) as are the others. It contains sections on marriage, inheritance and contracts and obligations, as well as an introductory “Institutiones.”59 This is true as well of the Sasanian law collection, Madayan i Hazar Dadestan (“The Book of a Thousand Decisions”) of Farroxmard i Wahraman, which dates to the beginning of the seventh century but clearly contains extracts from earlier works.60 A number of scholars have recently investigated the connection between the Rabbinic corpus and various Hellenistic late antique legal compositions. Lee Levine offers an admirably balanced summary of the current consensus: The timing of certain developments within rabbinic society, especially with regard to internal organization and compilation of various corpora, both aggadic and halakhic, has interesting parallels with what was transpiring at the time in Roman and later Byzantine society. Is it coincidental, for instance, that the earliest Pharasaic schools of Hillel and Shammai crystallized at the time of Augustus, when legal training was becoming formalized in Rome in the early Roman law schools founded by Labeo and Capito? Or that R. Akiva and his colleagues began collecting and organizing rabbinic traditions under Hadrian, when Julianus, Celsus Pomponius, and others were actively involved in making similar compilations in Rome? Or that Rabbi Judah the Prince compiled and edited his Mishnah, and tannaitic midrashim were collected under the Severans, at a time when Gaius, Papinianus, Paulus, and Ulpianus were likewise compiling codices and responsa of Roman law and commenting on earlier material? The argument that these recurring parallel activities in Roman and Jewish societies might be related is more compelling when we realize that both Roman jurists and the rabbis centered their activities in schools of higher learning, and that at least one of the most famous Roman schools was located in Berytus, not far from the center of rabbinic activity in the Galilee.61

Whether or not we posit any direct connection or influence between the Rabbinic and the classical Roman legal enterprises,62 the synchronic juxtaposition of these


two phenomena is tantalizing. And still more important for our purposes is the usefulness of the Roman, Syriac, and Persian law collections of late antiquity in setting out the parameters of what an ancient or Late Antique legal genre would consist of.63 We begin with the following lengthy excerpt from Gaius’s description of Roman marriage: 108. Now let us examine those persons who are subordinate to us in marriage. This also is a right peculiar to Roman citizens. 109. While it is customary for both men and women to be in power, only women fall into marital subordination. 110. Formerly there used to be three methods by which they fell into subordination: by usage, by sharing of bread, and by contrived sale. 111. A woman used to fall into marital subordination by usage if she remained in the married state for a continuous period of one year: for she was, as it were, usucapted by a year’s possession and would pass into her husband’s kin in the relationship of a daughter. The Twelve Tables therefore provided that if any woman did not wish to become subordinate to her husband in this way, she should each year absent herself for a period of three nights, and in this way interrupt the usage of each year. But this whole legal state was in part repealed by statute, in part blotted out through simple disuse. 112. Women fall into marital subordination through a certain sacrifice made to Jupiter of the Grain, for which reason it is also called the sharing of the bread. . . . This legal state is still found in our own times; for the higher priests, that is the priests of Jupiter, of Mars, and of Quirinus, as also the Sacred Kings, are chosen only if they have been born in marriage made by the sharing of bread, and they themselves cannot hold priestly office without being married by the sharing of the bread. 113. Women fall into marital subordination though contrived sale, on the other hand, by means of mancipation, that is, by a sort of imaginary sale; for in the presence of not less than five adult Roman citizens as witnesses, and also a scaleholder, the man to whom the woman becomes subordinate ‘buys’ her. . . . 115a. Formerly a contrived sale used also to take place for the purpose of making a will; for at one time women, with certain exceptions, had no right to make a will unless they had made a contrived sale and been remancipated and manumitted. But on the proposal of the Emperor Hadrian, the Senate remitted this requirement of making a contrived sale. . . . 116. It remains for us to describe what persons are in bondage. 117. All children, whether male or female, who are in the power of their father can be mancipated by him in the same way as slaves can. 118. The same rule applies to persons in marital subordination; for women can be mancipated by the other parties to the contrived sale in the same way as children by their father.64

Gaius continues by providing us with a detailed description of mancipation, bronze scales and all. Now while Gaius certainly used sources in compiling his Institutes—in this short passage he refers to the Twelve Tables, to legislation of Hadrian, and to


senatorial decisions—he presents a summary of these sources rather than citing the original texts themselves. In this respect his Institutes is really a textbook rather than an anthology. Again, while he refers to, and even describes, practices that have fallen into disuse, these do not take up a large part of the work. Compare, however, the opening sections of Tractate Qiddushin in the Mishnah: 1. A woman is acquired [in marriage] in three ways and acquires herself in two. She is acquired by money, by deed, or by intercourse. “By money”: Beth Shammai maintain, a denar or the worth of a denar; Beth Hillel say, a perutah or the worth of a perutah. And how much is a perutah? An eighth of an Italian isar. And she acquires herself by divorce or by her husband’s death. A yevamah (i.e., a childless widow subject to levirate marriage) is acquired by intercourse, and acquires herself by [the ceremony] of halitzah (as mandated in Deut 25:7–10) or by the levir’s death. 2. A Hebrew slave is acquired by money and by deed, and acquires himself by years (i.e., after six years of service, as mandated by Exod. 21:2), by the jubilee, and by deduction from the purchase price. A Hebrew maidservant [is more privileged] in that she acquires herself by signs [of puberty]. [A slave] whose ear is bored (i.e., one who refuses freedom at the end of six years of servitude; see Exod. 21:5–6) is acquired by boring, and acquires himself by the jubilee or his master’s death. 3. A heathen slave is acquired by money, deed, or by hazaqah (i.e., taking possession, by ordering him to do the master some personal service), and acquires himself by money through the agency of others, and by deed. . . . 4. Large cattle are acquired by “pulling”; small cattle by lifting: this is the opinion of R. Meir and R. Eliezer, but the sages rule: small cattle are acquired by “pulling.” 5. Property which offers security (i.e., real estate) is acquired by money, by deed or by hazaqah. [Property] which does not offer security (i.e., moveables) may be acquired in conjunction with property which provides security by money, deed, or hazaqah, and it obligates the property which provides security, to take an oath concerning them.

There is no reference here to ancient practices or to the history of the Mishnah’s laws. If the texts in the Mishnah derive from earlier sources, the editor does not identify or even refer to them. A more exact parallel to Gaius’s practice would be those mishnayot in which obsolete practices or decisions of early courts are briefly described. These include, most famously, the mishnayot that begin with the formulaic “at first” (of which the Mishnah contains nearly two dozen65) and other forms as well.66 We do not know if the reasons that motivated Gaius and Rabbi to include such references to earlier practices were similar. The eternal character of a divine law might naturally lead a compiler to include such matters so as to better define the interplay of divine law and human legislation, whereas Gaius’ excursions may involve nothing more than a certain antiquarian temperament on the part of the author. Even so, a cursory comparison of the two passages indicates that whereas Gaius takes pains to define and describe the practices he reviews (e.g., usage, sharing of bread,


mancipation, etc.)—presumably for the benefit of the student using the Institutes as a textbook—the Mishnah assumes a level of legal knowledge that Gaius does not (even if it is also concerned to define areas of dispute or minimum requirements). The number of bracketed comments appended to the translation gives an indication of how much knowledge the Mishnah assumes on the part of its reader. The Mishnah cannot, and did not, stand on its own as a “textbook of the Halakha,” and it clearly was not meant as an introduction to the field for students of Rabbinic law. On the other hand, even though he occasionally notes that the two schools are in dispute on an issue, Gaius seldom refers to disputes among the jurists. 196. Guardianship ends for boys when they reach puberty. Sabinus, Cassius and others of our teachers certainly think that a boy shows he has reached puberty by physical development: that is, he is capable of begetting. However, in the case of those who cannot reach puberty such as eunuchs, regard must be had to the age at which puberty is normally reached. The authorities of the other school think that puberty should be reckoned in years: that is, they judge anyone who has reached the age of fourteen as having reached puberty.67

Gaius clearly identifies himself as a Sabinian, and in opposition to the Proculians, whom he calls “the authorities of the other school.” In contrast, the Mishnah contains an infinitely greater number of disputes, but nowhere does its editor explicitly identify his allegiance; indeed, this objective stance is maintained even when the debates between the Pharisees and the Sadducees are reported, as in Yadayim 8. Roman law preserves several genres of legal collections that may be pertinent to categorizing the Mishnah: textbooks such as the Institutes of Gaius, codes such as Justinian’s, early collections such as the Twelve Tables, and responsa literature. Sasanian law preserves one important survival; the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan, which, while certainly not a code, is nonetheless a large collection of laws (comprising some fifty chapters in its two parts) on major areas of civil law.68 Yet none of these contains the wealth of disputational material that the Mishnah does, even if their authors register conflicting opinions and sometimes present a short history of the law on a particular point. Other ancient collections, such as the ninthcentury Zoroastrian encyclopedia, the Denkard (“Acts of Religion”), contain—like the Mishnah and even more like the Talmud—a variety of material, history and legend, ritual, and a smidgen of civil law, but also do not contain disputational material. Likewise, the Videvdat and the Pahlavi Vendidad (“Law Against Demons”)69 —the part of the Avesta that deals with purity laws—does not contain such material. As we have seen, it is unlikely that a code would have been composed in this way, and all these other ancient codes and legal books are testimony to that fact. That the Mishnah was eventually viewed as authoritative does not mean that it was originally intended to be a code, since, as far as we can tell, it never was looked upon as the last word in legal decision making. Nor, as we have seen, does it serve particularly well as a textbook. On the other hand, all of this may be a matter of degree. The Mishnah contains a registry of disputes but not all that much disputational material, espe-


cially compared with the talmuds or the midreshei halakhah. On the other hand, Gaius, Justinian, and the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan do contain varying but not insignificant amounts of divergent opinions—the reason being, perhaps, as Macuch notes in her introduction to the first volume of the Madayan,70 that The author of the lawbook was not interested to explain simple relationships, nor to provide some sort of definition for the legal terms he employs. Apparently, he conceived of the work as a sort of aid to decision making for jurists, for he assumes an exact knowledge of all of these legal institutions.71

There is, however, another significant difference between these works and the Mishnah. All the other works have introductions. Justinian, as we have seen, appropriated Gaius, and Jesuboht, in the thirteen chapters of Book One, provides his law collection with an introduction reminiscent of Gaius that provides a framework for understanding the means and purposes of law, both in a legal and religious context, and the place of law within an eschatological context, and that contrasts human law with nomos, the ideal law. Possibly Jesuboht provided this introduction in order to provide his flock with an understanding of the place of “rendering up to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” on the one hand; he may also have been influenced by Justinian’s appropriation of Gaius. Farroxmard also provides something of an eschatological and doxological introduction to Madayan, but one that does not take up any legal issues whatsoever. Generally, he does not discuss basic rules or simple cases (although such rules or cases can be extracted from the precedents he does provide). Nevertheless, as Macuch makes clear in her introduction, the Madayan was certainly a collection of legal decsions that was compiled for the guidance of jurists who were obligated to enforce the laws. Historians of Roman law have emphasized the unique and unusual nature of Gaius’s Institutiones. Roman jurists were not legal theorists in the larger sense nor particularly interested in generalizations. As has been noted, Gaius was a not particularly successful law professor in his own time. It is therefore noteworthy that Justinian’s committee chose precisely his textbook as a prologue to its own code. It may be that the lack of alternatives forced this choice on them; there were not many other such overviews of the law. Ironically, the uniqueness of Gaius’s work makes the absence of such a prologue in the Mishnah, along with the paucity of definitions of legal terms in it, more in line with general Roman practice and less problematic in its own terms. In any case, it is clear that the inclusion of divergent views and the lack of clear definitions are irrelevant to the question of whether a particular work was intended as a code. Gaius composed a textbook, not necessarily meant for legal decision making in the proximate sense, which was later appropriated into a code. Farroxmard compiled a collection (not unlike the Mishnah’s), which was intended to be authoritative. Justinian’s Code, also intended as authoritative, contained elements of both the authoritative code and the textbook. Given the absence of a real parallel to Gaius’ Institutiones in Rabbinic literature, or, for that matter, in Roman or Sasanian law, we may conclude that there is no reason not to believe that Rabbi wished to provide a collection that could be used for both study and decision making.


The Mishnah as Philosophy The fifth and final view of the Mishnah that has been proposed by modern scholars is as a philosophical treatise. The foremost proponent of this view has been Jacob Neusner, who has also pursued what is certainly the most extensive contemporary attempt to view the Mishnah in its own right and to define its characteristic traits in their own context. That is, he avoids viewing the Mishnah through the lens of other ancient Rabbinic (and non-Rabbinic) documents. By comparing the Mishnah’s and the Tosefta’s respective treatments of Seder Tohorot (Purities), Neusner has carried out an exhaustive study of the forms and formulary patterns of that Seder and its redaction. He summarizes his findings as follows: Tosefta to Mishnah Seder Tohorot both correlates with, and presents a striking contrast to, Mishnah. . . . Tosefta’s cognitive units (⫽ Mishnah-sections) are formulated out of phase with [the] formal patterns characteristic of Mishnah. In particular they ignore Mishnah’s stress on highly patterned syntactical formulations, carefully grouped units of threes and fives, and disciplined declarative sentences, one following the next in large-scale blocks of formal and conceptual intermediate divisions (⫽ roughly, chapters). Indeed, it is in Tosefta that the redactional formulations become fully apparent. Here, in the document generated by Mishnah, we see little of Mishnah’s interest in imposing structure upon intermediate units and formal patterns upon small ones. . . . When we eliminate Tosefta’s cognitive units and intermediate divisions which cite or gloss Mishnah, we are left with intermediate divisions and cognitive units which in the main form a mass of mutually indistinguishable, generally unbalanced and unpatterned declarative sentences.72

From this uniformity of language and style Neusner concludes that the Mishnah was redacted by a small group of people over a short period of time; a longer duration or a more heterogeneous group or groups of redactors could not sustain such uniformity.73 “Despite its socially diverse foundations and categories of interest, the Mishnah expresses itself in one mode of thought and expression and through one manner of speaking.”74 Moreover, there is very little “history” to the Mishnah’s own composition. History itself plays almost no role in the Mishnah. From the fact that its rules are formulated in the present tense, Neusner concludes that “after all, what the Mishnah really wants is for nothing to happen. . . . It portrays a world fully perfected and so fully at rest. . . . There is room only for a description of how things are: the present tense, the sequence of completed statements and static problems.”75 And again: “The whole corpus of prophecy and history is neglected by the Mishnah. . . . When the philosophers [of the Mishnah] confronted the sizable heritage of Israel and made the choice to ignore most of what had been done since the formation of the Mosaic codes . . . , they made a stunning comment. . . . Their judgment was that nothing of worth had happened from the time of Moses to their own day.”76 Partly because of this lack of concern with history, Neusner speaks of the


Mishnah’s authors as “philosophers” and defines the Mishnah as “philosophy.” As E. P. Sanders puts it in a trenchant review of Neusner’s work on the Mishnah, Neusner proposes that the authors were philosophers and intended to construct a metaphysical and anti-historical world view. . . . He makes the fundamental assumption that the contents of the Mishnah tell us all that the authors want to say “about their view of the world as they see it or as they want to see it” (p. 15). . . . Since he assumes that the Mishnah is metaphysical philosophy, Neusner marvels at the things which are not there and which would be there if it were ordinary metaphysics. . . . But the things that are not there . . . are not there because they are not subject to legal discussion.77

In other words, the Mishnah’s genre cannot of course be determined by a formcritical study of its language. As Sanders points out, use of the present tense is generally characteristic of legal and semi-legal writing, as is neglect of historical data. Likewise, this accounts for its relative neglect of theology.78 Along the same line, Sanders argues, “laws characteristically do not give historical preambles and eschatological conclusions. Prophecy is entirely missing.” As an example of what the British Highway Code does not contain, he suggests the following: “Once upon a time Britain had no Motorways, until the great minister . . . arose, who built the M1, at which time there was only one. And now we look forward to the time when all Britain will be paved and, besides Motorways, there will only be slip roads.”79 Nevertheless, the inclusion in the Mishnah of large bodies of material—Qodashim and Toharot—that were all but completely inapplicable in Rabbi’s time points to its utopian character. G. Stemberger, in his revised edition of Strack’s Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, concludes his discussion of this issue with the following suggestion: Given today’s knowledge, it is no longer possible unequivocally to determine whether M[ishnah] was originally conceived as a collection, a teaching manual or a law code. Indeed, this alternative probably arises only for modern readers; what is more, it fails to account sufficiently for the utopianism of M[ishnah], its idealized order of the perfect harmony of heaven and earth, and the underlying philosophy. For in principle the ancient tradition is of course regarded as law which must be transmitted in teaching—and thus the three concepts almost coincide.80

Both Sanders and Stemberger are essentially correct, but even their characterizations of the Mishnah are not entirely accurate. Pace Stemberger, the Mishnah is hardly unique in containing elements of a code, a collection, and a teaching manual. Further, some law codes do contain historical summaries, as we have seen with Gaius, Justinian, and Madayan. As to the last of these, we may illustrate its historiographical dimension with an example from its very beginning: It is said: Until the reign of Wahram people were considered slaves whose fathers were slaves, (and) not those whose mother was;81 in contrast, Soshans said: “The child belongs to the father,” and now we say: “The mother.”82


Any number of parallels from the Mishnah come to mind,83 as do examples from Gaius84 and Justinian.85 It should also be noted that any reference to an earlier authority—a practice common to all these collections—is in a sense historical. Sanders’s assumption that a philosophical work will not contain historical references is itself something of a non sequitur. Such historical references are not necessarily inappropriate in a law collection, a ritual text, or even a philosophical work. The same is true of eschatological conclusions. In Farroxmard’s somewhat rambling and repetitive introduction to Madayan, preserved in one manuscript which at this point has suffered losses in transmission, we find the following assertions. Because of the lacunae in the manuscript, and the loose syntax, it is difficult to follow the arguments exactly, but the general drift is clear. In the name of Ohrmazd, the lord of spiritual and earthly being [ . . . the Good Religion] of Mazdanaysians. This book is [called] the Book of a Thousand Decisions, in that it [shows] the greatness, goodness, and worth of people, aside from the qualities which they by their [own] effort [as well as] the gift of the gods, achieve in their own essence. The book is that instrument [of] efficacious power that the creator, in [his] omniscience, in order to ordain the destruction of the Lie, and the restoration to one’s own [domain], to ordain the organization of creation, the non-opposition [to the good], the undying bliss, the ever-enduring light, and to ordain [his] total sovereignty in the [eschatological] end of time, that has endured to such an extent as an essential [ability]. For the sake of the existence of that nature of mankind is that achievement praiseworthy, on account of which God created man. In the era of the [eschatological] end of time was the “preservation of the existence” of wisdom, insight, power of discernment, and understanding (perceived, taken advantage of?). . . . As one may come to perceive, from the religion of the gods, through searching and asking, to make one’s own person free of sin [is] the way to the realization of one’s own proper function, of [Good] Thinking, Speech and business dealings, keeping oneself [ritually] pure through integrity, I, Farrohmard i Wahraman, . . . this highest well-being. . . .86

Whether this introductory statement (which, it should be noted, appears as a separate section after chapter 32 of 50) was intended by the compiler as part of his work, or whether its placement is due to the vagaries of transmission, is not clear. As it stands, however, it may argue against Sanders’s point that legal works do not normally contain eschatological or philosophical discussions. The essential question is the definition of “philosophical” in this context. Neusner himself concedes that “the Mishnah’s is a philosophy in an odd and peculiar idiom to be sure.” He goes on to assert, however, that, properly studied, “it will emerge as a work of systematic thought on a sustaining program of issues that, in the Mishnah’s authorship’s time and place, other philosophers addressed and people in general [addressed] as philosophical.” When Neusner details his somewhat idiosyncratic use of the term “philosophical,” however, it becomes much less vulnerable (at least in part) to the criticism that Sanders mounts against it. He writes that the philosophical issues addressed in the Mishnah include the rules of classification and generalization, the issues of mixtures, the resolution of doubts, the relationship of the actual to the potential (chicken, egg), the role

74 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism of attitude or intention in the assessment of an action and its consequences . . . and the like—these abstract issues of general intelligibility turn out to form the intellectual program of considerable portions of the Mishnah as well.87

Neusner insists that these concerns take the Mishnah beyond the usual range of the term “philosophy of law” because they involve two additional criteria: First, they are principles that can apply to a considerable range of specific topics. Second, they are subject to generalization (“generalizable”) even beyond the limits of the law, for instance, in matters of metaphysics or physics (as with mixtures and connection), in matters of ethics (as with intentionality), in matters of the fundaments of philosophical inquiry (as with the interplay of potential and actual, which meant so much to Aristotle).88

Thus defined and circumscribed, Neusner may have a point, though if intentionality is a criterion, we may say that Farroxmard’s work also meets that requirement, as would most law books. Implicit in nearly all manuals of ritual are principles that parallel the Mishnah’s concern with mixtures and connection (e.g., sympathetic magic) without being the least bit “philosophical.” To this last point, Neusner would probably respond that what differentiates the Mishnah from nonphilosophical works is also its methodology, as in the matter of resolving issues of doubt.89 On this point, too, however, jurisprudential systems have their own “rules of statutory construction.” The real problem with Neusner’s philosophical approach to the Mishnah is that, in the end, categorizing the Mishnah as a philosophical work does not assist us in understanding its immediate, social purpose, or its redactional history and intent. It has always been read as a legal work of some type. No one, until Neusner, ever thought of reading it as a philosophical work—not even Maimonides! But can the form-critical differences that Neusner noted between the Mishnah and the Tosefta aid us in defining the Mishnah nonetheless? Sanders’s critique of Neusner on precisely that point appears sound. The matters of style that Neusner adduced as characteristic of the Mishnah as a philosophical work are typical of Tosefta as well. There may, however, be other differences which would help us in defining the nature of the Mishnah more precisely. Among these differences is the Tosefta’s inclusion of prooftexts to a far greater degree than in the Mishnah, an observation that even a cursory examination of both collections will confirm. This also accords with the much greater quantity of nonlegal material incorporated into the Tosefta than within the Mishnah. Tosefta’s redactor(s) clearly had a broader purpose in mind than did those of the Mishnah. This point is also reflected in the comparative sizes of the two works: Tosefta is about three times the size of the Mishnah. Its focus is also somewhat different—for example, it contains a number of very detailed expositions of the parameters of various ritual obligations, reminiscent of Maimonidean style, but even more of Sefer Hahinnukh. In this respect, then, Tosefta resembles a code more than does the Mishnah! Perhaps most telling, however, is the fact that Tosefta does not systematically make good on the Mishnah’s omissions. There is no tractate in the Tosefta on


phylacteries, on ritual fringes, on the laws of Hanukkah or Shavuot, nor does Tosefta contain a detailed exposition of the Jewish calendar. To some extent, it may be that omissions of this type mirror the difficulties of describing in words rituals that are more easily transmitted mimetically. Nevertheless, one must inquire as to why the Mishnah (and the Tosefta) concentrate on some matters and not on others. To the extent that a clear rule cannot be formulated, we must accept the possibility, at least as a working hypothesis, that, as Albeck insisted, the Mishnah was not complete. In turn, since it now exists as a commentary on the Mishnah, Tosefta too must be incomplete. Both characteristics of the Mishnah—its excurses, on the one hand, and its omissions on the other—detract from its usefulness as a code. But an incomplete legal anthology also loses something of the usefulness of a complete register of sources, perhaps even more so since we expect greater “coverage” in an anthology than in a code, which should omit divergent sources. Even Albeck, who rejects the view of the Mishnah as a code and instead considers it as an anthology of sources, nevertheless feels compelled to explain its deficiencies as an anthology as being a consequence of its premature circulation. Still, we expect more of a code than from a collection of sources. A religious code that for some reason fails to cover matters of daily ritual can hardly be said to have fulfilled its purpose. In the end, therefore, the Mishnah’s manifest incompleteness remains a puzzle, whether we consider its redactors’ intention as having been to produce a code or an anthology. Nevertheless, our examination of parallel collections in other literatures of late antiquity has demonstrated that the division between a code or an anthology was not as great as nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars imagined. Nor was the division between a formal legal work—code or anthology—and a study text. The difficulty in categorizing the Mishnah as one or the other is a powerful example of how little these generic categories help us in defining the singularity of a work like the Mishnah. Notes 1. Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon, ed. B. M. Lewin (Haifa: n.p., 1921, repr. Jerusalem, Makor, 1972), p. 29. The translation follows both the “Spanish” and the “French” versions, without one addition in the French version. See Margarete Schlueter, Auf Welche Weise wurde die Mischna geschrieben? (Tuebingen: J. C. Mohr, 1993), p. 97, nn. 2 and 3. Most MSS have leqateih, but O2198 has neqateih, “he took it,” which may have influenced Schlueter’s preference for nahm R(abbi) sie auf as opposed to sammelte in translating the former. On the question of the two versions, see Schlueter, pp. 24–30, and the literature there cited, and on the various words R. Sherira employs to describe the process, my discussion in the following paragraphs. In this essay, “Rabbi” and “Rabbi Judah the Prince” are terms used to signify the redactor or redactors of the Mishnah, without necessarily identifying the historical Rabbi Judah as the sole or even necessarily the primary redactor. Even R. Sherira, who like his contemporaries and successors, saw redaction in personal terms of nearer to modern ideas of authorship than of selection and editing, describes his effort as the culmination of a three-generations-long process, beginning with R. Akiva, continuing with R. Meir, and

76 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism ending (more or less) with Rabbi. I use brackets within ancient quoted material to indicate restorations and parentheses to indicate explanations, other editorial interpolations, and original language. 2. See Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, pp. 23, 29; the second phrase occurs on p. 29. 3. See Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 376–372, and my comments in my review essay in AJS Review 20 (1995):180–85. 4. On the matter of historicity, see Schlueter, Auf Welche, pp. 360–66, and see my review in AJS Review 20 (1995): 180–85, and D. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 35–43, Y. Gafni, Yehudei Bavel bi-Tqufat haTalmud (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1990), pp. 239–45, and “Le-heqer ha-Khronologia haTalmudit be-Iggeret Rav Sherira Gaon,” Zion 52 (5747), pp. 1–24. 5. For habber as “formulate, fix,” see Shraga Abramson, “Ketivat ha-Mishnah (Al Daat Geonim ve-Rishonim),” in Tarbut ve-Hevrah be-Toledot Yisrael bi-Ymei ha-Benayyim: Qovetz Maamarim le-Zikhro shel Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sason, ed. R. Bonfil, et al. (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1989), pp. 27–52, but compare M. Friedman, “Al Terumat ha-Genizah leHeqer ha-Halakhah,” Madaei ha-Yahadut 38 (1993): 277–301. On the whole issue, see Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 156–61. On the question of the exact relation of some of these terms to the vexed question of whether Rabbi actually produced a written text, see most recently my “Orality and the Redaction of the Babylonian Talmud,” Oral Tradition 14/1 (1999): 52–99, and in particular, pp. 65–67, and see S. Lieberman, “The Publication of the Mishnah,” Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1950), pp. 83–99; B. Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (Copenhagen: C.W.K. Gleerup and Ejnar Munksgaard, 1961 (repr. by W. B. Eerdman’s, 1998, with a foreword by Jacob Neusner); J. Neusner, The Memorized Torah: The Mnemonic System of the Mishnah (Chico, Cal: Scholars Press, 1985); and J. Neusner, Oral Tradition in Judaism: The Case of the Mishnah (New York: Garland, 1987), among many other contributions. See Martin S. Jaffee, “Oral Tradition in the Writings of Rabbinic Oral Torah: On Theorizing Rabbinic Orality,” Oral Tradition 14 (1999): 3–32, as well as Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, “The Fixing of the Oral Mishnah and the Displacement of Meaning,” in the same issue, and Jaffee’s new book, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200– 400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 55–83. 6. Lewin, Iggeret Rav Sherira, p. 23. 7. Lewin, p. 30, based on the statement in mEd 1:5. 8. S. Schechter, ed., Saadyana: Geniza Fragments of Writings of R. Saadya Gaon and Others (Cambridge: Deighton and Bell, 1903), p. 5. 9. On the relation of R. Sherira’s Epistle to Seder Tannaim va-Amoraim, written about a century earlier, see Brody, The Geonim, p. 278. 10. Eliezer Segal, “Anthological Dimensions of the Babylonian Talmud,” Prooftexts 17 (1997): 33–61; the quote appears on p. 34. 11. This shows up in large and small ways; see my comments in “Nahmanides and the Search for Omnisignificance,” Torah Umadda Journal 4 (1993):6–7, esp. n. 32. 12. See Stern’s introduction to this volume, p. 5. 13. Jacob Neusner’s rejection of source-critical methodologies should not be taken as a rejection of the existence of “sources” in Rabbinic documents; his avoidance of such methods is heuristic, since, as he often puts it, “we do not know what we cannot show.” See, for example, his discussion of the redaction of Mishnah and Tosefta in The Tosefta: Its Structure and Its Sources, Brown Judaic Studies 112 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), pp. 1– 8.

Order, Sequence, and Selection 77 14. Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 238. 15. Thus, bBer 2a accounts for the placement of the rules dealing with the evening Shema before those of the morning Shema because of their respective placement in Deuteronomy 6:7. 16. See, for example, bNaz 2b. 17. See bYev 2b, 3a; B.Q. 17b; B.B. 108b; Zev 48a. 18. bSot 2a. 19. See Abraham Goldberg, “The Mishnah—A Study Book of Halakha,” in Shmuel Safrai, ed., The Literature of the Sages, First Part (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum), Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987, pp. 211–252; the observation quoted is on pp. 233–234. 20. See Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 4, “Classification,” pp. 238–320. See most recently Haym Soloveitchik, “Hirhurim al Miyyuno shel ha-Rambam be-Mishneh Torah: Beyot Amitiyyot u-Medummot,” Maimonidean Studies 4 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2000), pp. 107–15 (Hebrew numbering). 21. Kovetz Teshuvot ha-Rambam ve-Iggerotav, ed. A. Lichtenberg (Leipzig, 1859), p. 26a, quoted in Twersky, Introduction, p. 242, n. 8. 22. Twersky, Introduction, p. 243–44. 23. Twersky, Introduction, p. 286. 24. From this point of view, Avraham Weiss’s view (at least at one stage in his life) of the Mishnah as Rabbi’s “lecture notes” is a variation on the latter theme; it differs from the view of the Mishnah as a collection chiefly in that it attempts to explain the Mishnah’s lack of strict order, as will be discussed. 25. See Zechariah Frankel, Darkei ha-Mishnah (1859; repr. Tel Aviv, Sinai, 1959), p. 228, esp. n. 6; the Bavli’s remark about R. Ashi is found at bB. B. 157b. Modern scholarship does not interpret the comment in this way; see Avraham Weiss, Hithavvut haTalmud bi-Shelemuto (New York: Kohut, 1943), pp. 245–46. 26. Hanokh Albeck, Untersuchungen ueber die Redaktion der Mischna (Berlin: C. A. Schweitschke & Sohn, 1923); a pale reflection of this work appears as part of his Mavo laMishnah. 27. J. N. Epstein, Mevo’ot le-Safrut ha-Tannaim: Mishnah, Tosefta u-MidresheiHalakhah, ed. E. Z. Melamed (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1957). 28. See Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 14–61, for dozens of examples. 29. Albeck points, inter alia, to the enactments of Rabban Yohanan b. Zakkai in mR.H. 4:1–4, or those of Yohanan the High Priest in mSot 9:6 and mM.S. 5:15. 30. mAr 2:1–6. 31. mMeg 1:4–11. Albeck, Mavo la-Mishnah (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 5727), pp. 88– 89, assembles a large number of such examples. 32. See his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 99–101. 33. See his discussion of this matter in his Mehqarim ba-Baraita ve-Tosefta ve-Yahasan la-Talmud (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1969), pp. 180–84. 34. See Y. Kafih’s translation, Mishnah im Perush Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 5729), vol. I, c. 14b. 35. So the Bavli’s use of the phrase satam lan Tanna . . . at Bez 2a, Yeb 11b, Ket 43b [satam lan Tanna ke-Rabbi], Qid 54b, Sanh 27b, Bek 11a, Tem 34a. 36. Albeck’s arguments are to be found in two places: in the chapter devoted to the question of the sources of the Mishnah in his Mavo la-Mishnah, pp. 88–98, and in his Untersuchungen, esp. pp. 78–88.

78 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 37. Albeck, Untersuchungen, pp. 107–8. 38. Epstein, Mevo’ot. It may not be without significance that Magnes, which ultimately published not only Epstein’s lecture notes but also three volumes of his collected papers (Mehqarim be-Safrut ha-Talmud uvi-Lshonot Shemiyot, also edited by E. Z. Melamed [1983– 1988], and which reprinted (along with Devir) his Perush ha-Geonim le-Seder Toharot (1981/ 2), did not reprint this article in the three-volume collection. 39. See his article, “Tosefta Atiqta,” Tarbiz 62 (1993): 314–38. 40. I say “formally parallel” because Tosefta is generally arranged according to the order of the Mishnah, and in this case the topics are roughly parallel. It is the discordance between them that draws Friedman’s attention. 41. “Tosefta Atiqta,” pp. 320–21. The translation is mine. 42. See my Authority and Tradition (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1994), pp. 83– 86. 43. See the literature cited in n. 5. 44. Avraham Weiss, Diyyunim be-Bava Qamma (New York: Feldheim, 1966), pp. 29– 30. 45. See his commentaries on Mishnah Shabbat and Eruvin, Perush la-Mishnah: Masekhet Shabbat (Jerusalem: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1976), and Perush la-Mishnah: Masekhet Eruvin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1986). 46. See n. 19 for the volume; the article, “Ve-kulhu aliba deRabbi Aqiva,” Tarbiz 38 (1968/9): 231–54. Another article, Goldberg, “Darko shel R. Yehudah ha-Nasi be-Hibbur haMishnah,” Tarbiz 28 (1958/9):260–69 is also relevant. 47. “Ve-kulhu,” p. 214. 48. Ibid., p. 225. 49. Ibid., p. 216. 50. Ibid., p. 219. 51. Ibid., p. 226. 52. Ibid., p. 219. 53. Ibid., p. 223. 54. bSanh 86a, cited by Goldberg, p. 223; indeed, the title of his Tarbiz 38 article is simply a reprise of this statement. 55. See A. Weiss, Al Hamishnah: [Osef Maamarim], (Ramat Gan: Bar Urian, n.d)., pp. 1–15, esp. pp. 4–6, originally published as “Ha-Palugta be-Ferush ha-Millah Maveh beMishnah, ba-Bavli, uvi-Yrushalmi,” Hatzofeh le-Hokhmat Yisrael (Budapest, 1926), pp. 144– 58. 56. Goldberg sees the fourth and final layer of the Mishnah as having been “formulated under the aegis of R. Yehudah the Patriarch” (“Ve-kulhu,” p. 217). 57. See Martin Goodman, The Roman World: 44 BC–AD 180 (London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 149–56. Note in particular the following, from p. 154: “A cultured Greek speaker [by the time of Augustus] would be expected to know Homer well and the plays of the great tragedians, which ensured familiarity with the Greek myths. He or she could be expected to have some acquaintance with Herodotus and Thucydides, and with the greatest of the orators, such as Demosthenes and Aeschines.” 58. See Alan Watson, The Spirit of Roman Law (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 1–9, 201–03, 181–93, 117–45, and O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman Law (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 102–27. 59. See Eduard Sachau, Syrische Rechtsbuecher, 3 vols. (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1907– 1914). Jesuboht’s Corpus constitutes the largest section of the third volume and covers a hundred pages of Syriac text. 60. See now the comprehensive edition of Maria Macuch, Rechtskasuistik und

Order, Sequence, and Selection 79 Gerichtspraxis zu Beginn des siebenten Jahrhunderts in Iran: Die Rechtssammlung des Farrohmard i Wahraman (Iranica 1) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrossowitz, 1993) and Macuch, Das Sasanidische Rechtsbuch “Matakdan i Hazar Datistan (Teil II) (Wiesbaden: Deutsche Morgenlaendische Gesellschaft-Franz Steiner, 1981). For a recent translation of the Russian edition of A. G. Perikhanian, see Perikhanian, The Book of a Thousand Judgements (A Sasanian Law-Book) (Costa Mesa, Cal: Mazda Publishers, 1997). 61. Lee I. Levine, Judaism & Hellenism in Antiquity: Conflict or Confluence? The Samuel & Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), pp. 134–35; see also the article on education and the appended bibliography by Robert Kaster in G. W. Bowersock et al., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 421–24. For the later period, see Catherine Hezser, “The Codification of Legal Knowledge in Antiquity: The Talmud Yerushalmi and Roman Law Codes,” in Peter Schaefer, The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, vol. II (Tuebingen: Mohr-Siebeck 1998), pp. 581–641. For the earlier period, see Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 83–86. Lest I be accused of an unheeding parallelomania, see Levine’s measured cautions on pp. 112–13, though for a very different view on this point, see Louis H. Feldman, Jew & Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 62. Or whether we may posit any connection, however remote, between that of the redaction of the Bavli and various Sasanian law books, for that matter. 63. It is perhaps not inappropriate to note here Jacob Neusner as far back as 1969 called for the study of Madayan i hazar dadestan as “at least as interesting for comparative purposes as Justinian’s Code.” See his History of the Jews in Babylonia, IV. The Age of Shapur II (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), p. 432. 64. The Institutes of Gaius, trans. with an introduction by W. M. Gordon and O. F. Robinson, with the Latin text of Seckel and Kuebler (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 75, 77. 65. mShevi 4:1; M.S. 5:8; Bik 3:7; Sheq 1:2, 7:5; Yom 2:1; Suk 3:12; R.H. 2:1, 2:2, 2:5, 4:3, 4:4, 4:9; Ned 9:6, 11:12 (twice); Git 4:2 (twice), 6:5; Bek 1:7; Ar 9:4; Nid 10:6; T.Y. 4:5 (twice). It is perhaps noteworthy that the orders of Qodashim and Toharot, which might be expected to contain a great deal of such material, contain nearly no such reports. 66. Thus, see mShab 1:4–8 or Yad 4:1–4. Sot 5:2–5, which are described as occurring bo ba-yom, “on that day” that R. Gamaliel was deposed from being patriarch. 67. See Gordon and Robinson, Institutes, p. 121. 68. Judging from other collections, including the Syriac law books edited by Sachau and the tenth-century Rivayat i Hemit Ashavahishtan, no major area of law is omitted from the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan. However, this impression may be due to the paucity of our sources. For a discussion of the sources of Farroxmard’s collection, see Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, pp. 11–15. It is noteworthy, however, that only the Dadestan Namag would seem to have been comprehensive in this regard. The other works Macuch lists on p. 14 are clearly partial, along the lines of the praetorian edicts of Roman law. 69. See Shaul Shaked, Wisdom of the Sasanian Sages (Denkard VI), Persian Heritage Series 34 (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1979), and for an old and not altogether reliable translation, see Dinkard, ed. and trans. P. B. and D. P. Sanjara, 19 vols. (Bombay, completed in 1928). 70. That is, the most recently published volume. 71. Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, p. 2. 72. Jacob Neusner, The Tosefta, p. 201. This was first published in vol. 21 of his A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities: Volume 21: The Redaction and Formulation of the

80 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism Order of Purities in Mishnah and Tosefta (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 235. See my reviews of his work in “The Judaism of the Mishna: What Evidence?” Judaica Book News 12, no. 2 (1982): 17–25, and “Neusner’s Tosefta,” Jewish Quarterly Review 78, no. 1 (July 1987):130– 36. 73. J. Neusner, Purities, vol. 21, p. xiii. 74. J. Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 241. 75. Ibid., pp. 235–36. 76. Ibid., pp. 169–71. 77. E. P. Sanders, “Jacob Neusner and the Philosophy of the Mishnah,” in Sanders, Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah: Five Studies (London: SCM Press, 1990), pp. 313– 14. 78. Ibid., pp. 314–17. 79. Ibid., p. 315. 80. H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. Markus Bockmuehl (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), p. 154. 81. I have simplified the syntax somewhat. 82. See Rechtskasuistik, pp. 22 and 24, and Macuch’s long discussion on pp. 27–31. 83. See, for example, the famous mishnah in B.M. 4:1 and the talmudic discussions in both Bavli and Yerushalmi. The term ba-rishonah, “at first,” appears some eighteen times in the Mishnah, introducing a rule or procedure that had been applied at one time and was no longer the case (see mShiv 1:1; M.S. 3:7; Sheq 1:2, 7:5; Yom 2:1; Suk 3:12; R.H. 2:1, 2:2, 4:3, 4:4; Ned 9:6, 11:2; Git 4:2, 6:5; Bek 1:7; Ar 9:4; Nid 10:6; T.Y. 4:5); in a famous case, an earlier rule is contrasted with the procedure followed by a later court (bet din shel ahareihem). Conditions from the time of the “early prophets” (nevi’im rishonim) are introduced at Yom 5:2. Many more such points are raised in various contexts; see, for example, Martin Jaffee, “The Taqqanah in Rabbinic Literature: Jurisprudence and the Construction of Rabbinic Memory, JJS 41 (1990):204–25. 84. See the quotation from I.111, reproduced previously. 85. See Hezser, “Codification of Legal Knowledge.” 86. Macuch, Rechtskasuistik, pp. 16. 18, 19, 21. Compare also Nina Garsoian’s translation of Anahit Perikhanian, The Book of a Thousand Judgements (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1997), pp. 193, 195. 87. Jacob Neusner, The Philosophical Mishnah: Volume One: The Initial Probe, Brown Judaic Studies 163 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), p. 1. 88. Ibid., p. 226. 89. Ibid.

5 eliezer segal


he Babylonian Talmud defies attempts to categorize it according to the stan-

Tdard literary genres of Western literature. Even when we take care to define it on its own terms, the undertaking is likely to be frustrated by the realization that the classification is susceptible to many different possibilities, depending on the vantage from which it is approached. To complicate the efforts even further, talmudic scholarship itself is often in disagreement over fundamental issues related to the Talmud’s purpose and composition. Let me begin by surveying the principal models that have been proposed as frameworks for understanding the Talmud’s distinctive literary character, taking note of the divergent scholarly approaches that have been applied to them.

The Talmud as Commentary The fact that the Talmud is not an independent work but is arranged as a commentary on an earlier work, the Mishnah, sets obvious limits to its contents. It has no real structure of its own but follows the order of the Mishnah, adding comments by later authorities or comparative material from earlier sources, provided that these sources relate directly or indirectly to matters mentioned in the Mishnah.1 Nevertheless, it is immediately apparent that the Rabbinic conception of a commentary is a much more flexible one than we are used to in the Western tradition. The straightforward elucidation of the meaning and intention of the commented texts is only one of the purposes of the Talmud’s commentary on the Mishnah, and not necessarily the most prominent among them. The talmudic sugya tackles an infinite spectrum of topics that bear only peripheral or indirect connections to the Mishnah, including comparisons with (apparently) conflicting sources and new applications of legal principles.

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The Talmud as Legal Literature Since legal literature knows its own distinctive literary forms,2 it is not necessary to evaluate the Talmud according to the esthetic and formal criteria that would be applied to more conventionally “literary” genres. In particular, a long-standing dispute has focused on whether the Mishnah was intended to serve as a normative codex or corpus iuris, or as digest or encyclopedia of sources for theoretical instruction. Though it would have to be reformulated,3 a corresponding argument could be applied to the Talmud as well. Viewing Talmud through this lens as a type of legal literature might allow us to understand and appreciate heretofore inexplicable or unrecognized features. For example, legal literature is universally renowned for its hairsplitting casuistry and careful logical argumentation. Although we do not customarily value such dialectic as literary activity, there is no prima facie reason not to do so. There is an undeniable esthetic enjoyment involved in the experience of a beautifully crafted mathematical theorem or scholarly thesis.4 The authors of the Talmud appear to have been conscious of the esthetic dimension of their undertaking.

The Talmud as an Anthology The Talmud assembles material from diverse schools and over many generations. The sources preserved in the Talmud are distributed between the two major Jewish population centers of Palestine and Babylonia. The citations and stories attributed to Babylonian Rabbis appear to have undergone simultaneous redactions in several different schools.5 This situation suggests the existence of synchronic parallel redactions that were afterward combined into a unified Babylonian Talmud.6 Further, the citation of traditions of Rabbis from successive generations suggests an image of each generation adding its newer stratum to a literary heritage left by its predecessors.7 Clearly, these two models for the Talmud’s evolution, one synchronic, the other diachronic, are not mutually exclusive. To appreciate the two preceding models, it is also important to understand that the Talmud was studied orally and not set to writing until much later in the history of its development. Whatever the original grounds for the Rabbis’ prohibition against writing down the teachings of the Oral Tradition (referring, essentially, to anything other than the Bible and Megillat taanit), it is clear that the prohibition remained in force throughout the talmudic era,8 and the transmission of the sources was through memorization. Other than some discernible effects on the rhetorical character of talmudic expression, it is not immediately clear how this fact affected the literary character of the Talmud. Although it is possible that the Talmud’s redaction was carried out in writing, there is considerable evidence to the contrary.9 Our understanding of the redactional process has been altered decisively by recent scholarship. Until well into the present century, research into the study of the Talmud’s redaction remained bound to an agenda that had been formulated by Sherira and Maimonides, who had perceived the redaction of Rabbinic compendia as the work of individuals. Basing themselves on questionable anecdotal


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traditions, scholars continued to rehash old attempts to identify the Rav Ashi and Ravina mentioned by the Talmud as “the end of instruction.” Twentieth-century research has preferred to concentrate on careful analysis of the contents and structures of individual sugyot.10 From a clearer understanding of textual transmission, enriched by newly available geonic texts and manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, it has become evident that the text of the Talmud remained fluid for centuries after the traditional dates of its redaction.11 A new paradigm emerged that emphasized the distinction between formal statements in Hebrew attributed to specific Rabbis, and anonymous Aramaic explanatory materials in which the dicta are embedded. According to the prevailing theory, the anonymous Aramaic sections are the work of the Talmud’s redactors. Although some scholars have reserved judgment on the precise chronological provenance of these texts, allowing for the possibility of continuous redactions, the widespread opinion is that they are the contribution of the saboraim, an obscure group of Babylonian sages whom Sherira located between the talmudic and geonic eras and whose activities had been hitherto perceived as confined to a few minor additions to the Talmud text.12 In light of the vastness and importance of the anonymous stratum, it would now appear that these saboraim should actually be credited with shaping the Talmud into its present form. A radically different formulation of the relationship between the redactors and the individual traditions that make up the Talmud has been proposed by Jacob Neusner.13 With respect to the issue of the Talmud’s composite nature, Neusner’s most far-reaching assertions are the ones that deal with the relationships between individual traditions, dicta and stories, and so on, and the works in which they are contained. Beginning from the premise that the units were included only in order to serve the agendas of the completed documents, and taking into account that many of those units have no historically verifiable or recorded existence outside those completed documents, Neusner arrives at the conclusion that any attempt to deal with the units is futile and ultimately misleading. According to Neusner, the focus of study must be the “document” as a whole—in the case of the Babylonian Talmud, for example, the entirety of the Talmud. In response to this assertion, the following can be said: While there can be no denying the importance of examining the incorporation of the units into their respective “documents,”14 Neusner fails to convince that this is an either-or proposition. The certainty that no attributed dictum is reliable is as dogmatic as the certainty that all of them should be believed uncritically—and there seems to be less plausibility to an approach that views the entire Talmud as no more than a sixth-century work of fiction. At all events, philological method has long recognized that the meanings of texts can be studied without prior commitment to their historical veracity.15 Furthermore, in the specific instance of the Babylonian Talmud, the many attempts by current talmudic research at interpreting attributed dicta independently of their redacted, anonymous contexts have produced an impressive and consistent body of evidence demonstrating that the original authors of those dicta meant something different from what emerges from the context of the redacted talmudic sugya. The original meanings of the dicta are frequently found to correspond with the simple sense of the Mishnah, with the interpretations


of the Tosefta, or with the Palestinian Talmud.16 Furthermore, it seems entirely inconceivable that the supposed authors of cogent and consistent documents would have knowingly introduced into their works indications of discrepancies between the whole and the parts.17 Finally, Neusner is less than persuasive in his assumption that the main agendas of the various documents, which dictated the criteria for inclusion of their component materials, were ideological or theological. As we shall see, this view largely runs counter to the common-sense reading of the documents themselves, which are, after all, compendia of technical legal argumentation directed to specialized judges and jurists (in the case of the Talmud) or of Bible-based homiletics (in the case of the aggadic midrash)—not of theology or philosophy. Neusner himself contends that to posit a nonideological program for the publication of a religious work would relegate that work to triviality. But this argument is no more compelling. Once we have accepted the fact that a given body of tradition (such as halakhic argument or midrashic homiletics) was deemed valuable by the community that produced it, then the preservation of those traditions can also be accepted as a fully legitimate purpose in its own right. It follows from this that purely literary or functional considerations can provide adequate criteria for the structuring of Rabbinic compendia. And despite Neusner’s arguments, there is no reason to warrant an abandonment of investigations into the composite structure of the Babylonian Talmud, or of any other rabbinic collection. In the remainder of this essay, I wish to elaborate upon the anthological model by considering some talmudic material that did not originate as Mishnah commentary. It is this type of material that best highlights the anthological dimension of the Talmud, and that we shall be focusing on in the present study. Since all works in the Rabbinic corpus present themselves to us as collections of opinions and dicta ascribed to several generations of Rabbis, it follows that the redactors of each of these works were acting as anthologists when they assembled the particular traditions that were to be included in a given compendium. This applies not only to the final products, the compendia that were acknowledged by posterity as completed works worthy of study and authoritative standing, but also to whatever earlier collections might have been utilized by the redactors of later works. In most instances, modern Rabbinic scholarship regards that process of assembling traditions as a creative one: the selected sources and traditions were not only gathered together as they would be according to the conventional definitions of the anthologizing process, not merely juxtaposed to one another in order to elicit new associative meanings; but it would appear that the redactors took a more dynamic role in rewording the received traditions, or in deconstructing them and reassembling them into original literary creations. The anthological character of the Talmud must also be understood from within the context of amoraic literature in general. The surviving literature of the amoraim suggests that the Rabbinic curricula of the time were more varied than what came to be reflected in the overriding structures of the completed Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Although both Talmuds are organized as commentaries


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on the Mishnah, giving the impression that the Mishnah was the sole subject of amoraic study and that all other types of material were included by virtue of their direct or indirect bearing on the exposition of the Mishnah, it is evident that much of the material that came to be included in the Talmud did not originate in Mishnah study but developed elsewhere. Allowing that some extraneous tannaitic compilations (baraitot) might have been integrally connected to the elucidation of the Mishnah,18 it is very hard to make such arguments convincingly with respect to large “foreign bodies” whose links to the Talmud are indirect or nonexistent. Some of my own research has focused on two such nonmishnaic components of the Babylonian Talmud, namely, the anecdotal records of Rabbinic legal decisions and court cases,19 and the units of aggadic midrash.20 With respect to both those instances, it is likely that most of the material was originally collected and arranged in separate venues (perhaps through the court system or synagogues, respectively) and was incorporated into the Talmud at an advanced stage of its development. The formal links that connect such passages to the main body of the Talmud are rarely to the Mishnah or to its direct explanations, but usually to peripheral topics that were introduced associatively in the course of the amoraic discussion. Similar methods characterize the editorial inclusion of several other types of talmudic passages, such as lists of practical legal decisions, anecdotal aggadah, and magical recipes.21 Whereas the tannaitic era has bequeathed us a rich and multifaceted “library” of distinct Oral Torah compendia, covering all conceivable permutations of the fundamental categories of halakhah/aggadah and midrash/mishnah,22 the amoraic era in the land of Israel, especially its earlier, “classical” phase, seems to have produced only two genres of Rabbinic literature: the Talmud embodied the tradition of scholastic halakhic discourse as applied to the Mishnah, whereas the aggadic midrash (to books from the Pentateuch, “five Scrolls,” and special readings) were principally related to the homiletical exposition of the Bible in the synagogues. Whatever additional categories were considered worthy of preservation had somehow to be connected to one or the other of these two genres. The situation of Babylonian Oral Law literature was, of course, even more limited. The single literary monument that was left of their religious learning was the Babylonian Talmud,23 and it was into this work that the redactors chose to include all that was to be preserved of the Babylonian Rabbis’ contributions to Rabbinic scholarship. Underlying this decision was their conviction, probably selfevident to them, that the intricacies of talmudic legal debate constituted the most valuable form of religious discourse. There are several indications that this description of the Talmud’s scope reflects a deliberate policy on the part of the Babylonian Jewish sages to produce a veritable “encyclopedia” of the Oral Law. It is particularly discernible in their treatment of materials for which no obvious bond can be found with the Mishnah (or at least with those sections of it that were selected for inclusion in the Babylonian Talmud).24 Thus, special mini-tractates, as it were, were incorporated into artificially chosen locations in order to deal with topics like Hanukkah, mezuzah, and tefillin, for which traditions existed but which had no natural home in the Mishnah. Several scholars have observed how, when confronted with mishnayot


or baraitot from tractates that lack an amoraic commentary (e.g., Zeraim and Toharot), the Talmud makes a point of assembling as much material as it can find on the topic, well beyond the requirements of the current pericope.25 A similar pattern may be perceived in connection with biblical interpretations and homiletical expositions. Unlike their Palestinian colleagues, the Babylonian Rabbis never composed separate compendia of aggadic midrash, and consequently they sought all manner of intricate and devious ways to justify linking their biblical commentaries to the talmudic Mishnah commentary. With respect to the above source types, as with other nonmishnaic components of the Talmud, we often find that their formal connection to the larger body of the Talmud is not to the Mishnah, or even to the exposition of the Mishnah, but rather to extraneous issues and sources that were themselves drawn in through circuitous chains of reasoning. All this leads us to the view that the inclusion of these materials in the Talmud was part of an overall redactional project belonging to the later strata of its literary evolution. As such, it can be characterized as a sort of anthologizing, designed to expand the scope of the Babylonian Talmud from its narrow definition, as a record of the amoraic discussions of Rabbi Judah the Prince’s Mishnah, and to make it a repository of the full heritage of Babylonian Rabbinic lore. If we adopt the prevailing view of current talmudic scholarship, the lion’s share of the Talmud’s anonymous Aramaic dialectical framework (the setama digmara) can be ascribed to post-amoraic (saboraic or “stammaitic”) redactors, and the redactors themselves were dynamic and creative anthologists. Only on rare occasions were the Talmud’s editors satisfied merely with gathering materials and juxtaposing passages in appropriate locations. Rather, they expended considerable imagination in creating literary links to the host pericopes. In keeping with the dialectical character of talmudic discourse, this was frequently done by invoking the external source, or a portion of it, as a prooftext in a debate or in the clarification of a halakhic question. I will survey some representative passages from Ketubot in which the editors have incorporated elements that do not relate directly to the local mishnah, and presumably did not originate in the study of that mishnah. My principal interest will be in reconstructing the process of the incorporation: I will be attempting to determine where (i.e., in what institutional setting or literary context) the material originated, why it was included in its current setting, and what literary techniques the editors employed in order to connect it to the new setting. Example 1: Transposition of Materials Relating to Other Mishnayot (Ketubot 2a–3a) The structure of the opening pericope of Ketubot is peculiar. Ostensibly, it comes to elucidate the ruling in Mishnah 1:1 that A virgin is married on Wednesday and a widow on Thursday. Because on two days of the week, the courts convene in the towns: on Monday and on Thursday.


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For if he should have a charge to bring regarding her virginity, he would proceed early to the court.

At the outset of the talmudic passage attached to that mishnah, we find the following passage: Says Rav Joseph: Says Rav Judah: Says Samuel: For what reason did they say “A virgin is married on Wednesday”? Because we have learned in the Mishnah (Ketubot 5:2): If the time26 arrived and they were not married, they are entitled to support from his property and from terumah.27

Rav Joseph is thus reported as citing a tradition of Samuel that interpreted the Mishnah (which assigns specific weekdays for the holding of weddings) in light of Mishnah 5:2, where a twelve-month deadline was established for the betrothal period (by which time, in other words, the man had to complete the marriage ceremony), with the bridegroom-to-be becoming subject to various obligations if he failed to meet that deadline. This leads the Talmud to a series of discussions that would have been more plausibly attached to Mishnah 5:2 (57a–b in the Talmud). Our current pericope, then, is primarily concerned not with the elucidation of the local mishnah, but with a quite unrelated matter, a lengthy examination of the conditions under which an unavoidable delay would be accepted as a valid reason for not fulfilling a time-defined obligation.28 This examination leads in turn to a discussion, cited in two versions, that is based on a dictum of Rava, which draws a comparison between cases of marriage and of divorce. According to the first version, Rava states that, although unavoidable delay is taken into consideration where it involves the postponement of a wedding, it is not accepted as an excuse for nonfulfillment of a condition attached to a divorce. According to the second version, Rava does not differentiate between the cases of marriage and divorce and allows the plea in both cases. An identical series of tannaitic and amoraic prooftexts is adduced for each version. As applied to the first version of Rava’s statement, the texts are presented as attempts to identify the source on which Rava based his ruling; all are rejected as incomplete, and the Talmud concludes that Rava did not base his opinion on any source, but on logical considerations. As applied to the second version, the same prooftexts are treated as contradictions to Rava’s opinion, each of which is ultimately resolved. It appears, then, that the main elements of this passage were indeed transposed from an original location in chapter 5. Conversely, the talmudic commentary that is currently attached to 5:2 deals with the exegetical roots of the twelve-month deadline and with the issue of the fianceé’s rights to partake of terumah,29 but not with any of the topics that are discussed in the opening pericope. This situation indicates that the final redactors made a decision to expand the tractate’s opening pericope at the expense of the pericope on 5:2, a practice that is consistent with the acknowledged “saboraic” tendency to construct elaborate introductory passages in which tannaitic and amoraic dicta from diverse parts of the tractate, or of the Talmud, are woven into a complex dialectical fabric.30 Although the present pas-


sage, founded on attributed sayings of Samuel, Rav Joseph, Abaye,31 Rav Ahfi ai,32 and perhaps Rav Ashi,33 does not fully conform to that model, it is nonetheless possible to discern features of the typical saboraic introductory pericope in the redactors’ linking together of diverse sources and themes. If the intention of the redactors had been merely to elucidate the local mishnah and to collect the relevant tannaitic and amoraic sources, the passage would have been considerably more compact and focused, skipping over all the discussion that now intervenes between Rav Joseph’s initial comment and the dictum of Rav Samuel Bar Isaac at the bottom of folio 3a. However, by thus choosing to divert the pericope away from a narrow interpretation of the prescribed dates for weddings, as defined at the beginning of Ketubot 1:1, the redactors fashioned a flexible framework that permitted them to assemble a diverse selection of sources that would otherwise not have been included in the Talmud. The editors, then, were guided by a wish to connect and include as many sources as possible in the pericope. The product of such editorial activity can legitimately be regarded as a modest form of an “anthology.” In the discussion that follows these passages about the legal consequences of unavoidable delays on the fulfillment of contractual conditions, some twelve talmudic sources are adduced. In an appendix, I have listed these sources, and the reader is invited to refer to them. The first source records an attempt by Rav Joseph to reformulate the initial version of Samuel’s tradition that he had earlier traduced, and following several other passages that respond to this reformulation, a pericope is cited that relates a comment by Rava to M. Ketubot 5:2. Following this, the Talmud records seven additional passages in its quest for a source for Rava’s ruling, drawing these passages from various texts connected mainly to Mishnah Gittin 7:7–8. We see then, that by means of inventive manipulation of a brief original pericope to M. Ketubot 1:1, which in its original form might well have consisted of no more than Rav Joseph’s citation of Samuel’s dictum, the talmudic redactors provided an intricate literary framework in which they were able to embed a remarkable range of talmudic sources, including mishnayot, baraitot, amoraic statements, and a case precedent. In most of the instances, the individual source units had already been incorporated into composite pericopes prior to their being utilized by the redactors of the present passage. A number of different objectives were achieved by this tactic, not the least of which was the desire to assemble and analyze all the known talmudic materials that bear on the question of deadlines missed because of unavoidable delay. However, the beginning of Ketubot still strikes us as an implausible place in which to situate such a discussion.34 Probably, the redactors were simply determined to have Ketubot open with a suitably elaborate opening pericope. Beyond this, however, one of the important objectives that guided the redactors of the pericope was precisely their urge to “anthologize.” In the present context, this meant to collect as much material as they could reasonably conjoin to the text from the Mishnah. Characteristic of the organizational esthetics of the Babylonian redactors is their preference for devising intricate paths that incorporate the sources as part of the argumentation (e.g., as evidence for an objection, in


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order to illustrate a halakhic principle, or to demonstrate a fine legal distinction that resolves an apparent contradiction), rather than merely cataloging sources that have a straightforward connection to the topic matter of the local mishnah. In this example, which is typical of the more advanced (“saboraic”) stages of the redactional process, the editors have enhanced the specific pericope but have not augmented the total quantity of materials that are included in the Babylonian Talmud, since all the components are being copied from other locations in the Talmud, and all of them have natural affinities to topics raised by the Mishnah. Moreover, it seems that the redactors of the pericope were making use of material that had already been incorporated into composite passages in their previous locations. Nevertheless, the understanding of the sources was substantially enriched by their juxtaposition and by their inclusion in a novel setting.

Example 2: An Anthology of Aggadic Sayings (Ketubot 5a) As we saw, Mishnah Ketubot 1:1 stipulated that weddings of virgins should be scheduled for Wednesdays so as to shorten the time between the couple’s first act of intercourse and the traditional Thursday session of the court, in case a question should arise concerning the bride’s virginity. In connection with this ruling, the Talmud inquired anonymously (using the ibba’aya leho form) whether the Mishnah understood “Wednesday” literally, i.e., even before sundown, or if it actually referred to the following evening, which would normally be considered part of Thursday, but which would better satisfy the Mishnah’s concern for shortening the interval before the convening of the court. In connection with this query, the Talmud cites the following tradition: Come and hear: For Bar Qappara teaches [de-tanei]:35 A virgin is married on Wednesday and has intercourse on Thursday, since that is when the blessing was said for the fish.36 A widow is married on Thursday and had intercourse on Friday, since that is when the blessing was said for humans.37

The Talmud proceeds to discuss in an anonymous passage the implications of Bar Qappara’s teaching with respect to the question under discussion. In typical Rabbinical fashion, they examine the validity of the arguments and their consistency with other rulings. Now having introduced one teaching of Bar Qappara that has obvious relevance to the interpretation of the Mishnah, the Talmud goes on to cite additional traditions in his name that have no such relevance:38 Bar Qappara expounded [darash]: The deeds of the righteous are greater than the creation of the heavens and the earth, for with regard to the creation of the heavens and the earth it is written, “Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand hath spanned the heavens” (Isa. 48:13), whereas concerning the deeds of the righteous it is written, “The place, O Lord, [which] thou hast made for thee to dwell in, [in] the Sanctuary, O Lord, [which] thy hands have established” (Exod. 15:17).


The Talmud appends to this tradition an objection raised by “a certain Babylonian, Rabbi H fi iyya by name,” and a final resolution of the difficulty by Rav Nahfi man bar Isaac. Afterward, it brings a third tradition of Bar Qappara: Bar Qappara expounded: What is it that is written, “And thou shalt have a peg upon thy weapon” (Deut. 23:14)? Do not read azenekha (“weapon”), but rather, oznekha (“ears”), implying that if a person should hear anything improper, he should insert his finger in his ears.

To this exposition the Talmud also attaches a number of related traditions, in the names of Rabbi Eleazar, the tanna of the school of Rabbi Ishmael and an anonymous baraita (tannu rabbanan). As is true with several talmudic lists of aggadic dicta, it is not clear why these particular items were grouped together. Evidently, they were so grouped in an original list that was utilized by the pericope’s redactors. The mere fact of Bar Qappara’s authorship does not provide a satisfactory criterion, since Rabbinic literature contains many other traditions introduced by the formula “Bar Qappara expounded.” Nor are the three statements grouped together anywhere else in the literature. The first tradition is, however, cited in Palestinian sources in connection with our mishnah in Ketubot:39 Bar Qappara says:40 Because in connection with them [i.e., Wednesday and Thursday] a blessing is written. But the blessing is written only in connection with the Thursday and the Friday, on Thursday for the birds and the fish, on Friday for Adam and Eve.41 R. Yose´ says: Bar Qappara’s reasoning is that42 Wednesday [means] the evening of Thursday, and Thursday [means] the evening of Friday.43

A tradition similar to the second of the Talmud’s three homilies is found in the Mekhiltas of R. Simeon ben Yohai44 and of Rabbi Ishmael,45 though without the attribution to Bar Qappara: “The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established”—Beloved is the Holy Temple before Him Who spoke and the universe came into being. For when the Holy One created His universe, He created it by means of only one of His hands, as it is said: “Yea, My hand hath laid the foundation of the earth.” But when He came to construct the Holy Temple, as it were, it was with both His hands, as it is said: “The sanctuary, O Lord, which Thy hands have established.”46 “The Lord shall reign”—When?47—You shall construct it with both your hands. This is expressed in a parable. . . .

In spite of the striking general resemblance between the two traditions, it is evident that Bar Qappara’s dictum is not identical to the passages in the Mekhiltas, and the precise relationship between the two traditions remains obscure.48 Are they to be viewed as two versions of a single tradition, or are we to suppose that Bar Qappara was familiar with the Mekhilta’s homily in praise of the Temple, which he was consciously expanding in a slightly different direction?


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The third of Bar Qappara’s expositions, about insulating one’s ears against inappropriate talk, appears to be unique to this pericope. The obvious question that arises here is, how did these three disparate traditions come to be linked together?49 There is no clear answer to the question, but a number of possibilities can be considered.50 For example, we may note that all three dicta have a common connection to the biblical Creation story, though in the last instance, the connection is very indirect.51 The juxtaposition of Isaiah 48:13 and Exodus 15:7 in the second dictum suggests that it might have originated in a proem structure (petihfi ta), according to which the homilist opens from a passage in the Prophets or Hagiographa to conclude with the opening verse of the day’s scriptural reading (usually from the Pentateuch). However, such a reconstruction involves some difficulties, seeing as none of the pentateuchal verses cited in the passage are actually known to have introduced lection units in either the annual (Babylonian) or triennial (Palestinian) cycles and hence would not have served as appropriate proem verses. In many similar instances in the Talmud, we have grounds for surmising that the dicta were originally parts of a single homily.52 In principle, that premise is applicable here. However, since no actual homily of that sort has been preserved in the literature, any attempt at reconstructing such a lost homily would necessarily involve us in unverifiable speculations. One likely possibility is that the dicta belonged to a wedding discourse that dwelled upon the creation of man and woman as the culmination of Creation, and focused on the couple’s obligation to uphold the purity and holiness of their marriage. However we might choose to reconstruct the evolution of the pericope, there is no escaping the fact that the straightforward elucidation of the Mishnah, no matter how liberally we perceive such an elucidation, would not have required the inclusion of any but the first dictum in the series. That all three are in fact found in the Babylonian pericope, which is further enhanced by additional talmudic materials, provides us with further evidence of the redactors’ concern for turning their Talmud into a framework for anthologizing a broad and diverse spectrum of Rabbinic oral tradition. Example 3: Cases and Judicial Materials (Ketubot 91b–93a) Anecdotal traditions and case citations, virtually by definition, cannot have originated in a literary context. Insofar as they record actual events (or at least preserve a “historical kernel”), we must accept that they arose in connection with the random developments of actual life and only afterward were appended to the literary works in which they are now found. In a previous study,53 I proposed as a plausible working hypothesis that most of the cases involving Babylonian Rabbis that came to be included in the Talmud had initially been recorded in court archives, after which they were collected into straightforward lists arranged in accordance with a variety of different organizational criteria.54 Their incorporation into the Talmud occurred at an advanced stage of its evolution, as is evidenced by the facts that (a) many of them connect formally to the dicta of later amoraim;


and (b) relatively few of them are discussed or analyzed in the Talmud, and of those almost all are dealt with only by the anonymous redactors or (in rare instances) by amoraim from the fifth generation and later. Ketubot 91b–93a contains a list of decisions and legal dicta by several Babylonian amoraim. Although, as we shall see, the items in the list are heterogeneous, the mnemonic siman that introduces them indicates that the Talmud’s redactors viewed them as a single, integral collection.55 Of the nine items in the list, only the first three have the appearance of cases, formulated according to the common hahu gavra (“a certain man”) pattern.56 The remainder are theoretical halakhic dicta. However, closer inspection raises some questions about whether even the first three ought to be perceived as actual cases rather than theoretical formulations, since none of them contains the usual clause “He came before [ata leqammeh] Rami bar H fi ama,” which would indicate beyond question that the case had been adjudicated by the Rabbi in question. Although it is not common for the attributed legal dicta of amoraim to be worded in Aramaic, there are exceptions to that rule, including some lists of halakhic rulings that originated in contexts other than the amoraic interpretation of the Mishnah.57 The construction “Rami bar H fi ama considered saying, etc.” (according to which the proposed verdict was refuted while still under consideration) seems more natural to an academic than to a judicial setting.58 Within the collection of nine items we may discern various smaller groupings of two or more units that have some common features. The similarities relate to their content,59 the identities of the presiding judges or sages,60 of the auxiliary or junior scholars who question the original rulings,61 or of the participants in subsequent discussions that focused on the original sources, etc.62 The presence of such patterns suggests that the present collection evolved from a smaller original list, to which additional units were later attached by virtue of associative affinities to the original units. In spite of its daunting heterogeneity, there are a number of general observations that can be made about the collection as a whole: 1. The items in it all deal with a similar theme: namely, the legal position of those who acquire property (whether through purchase or inheritance) vis-a`-vis the creditors who wish to seize the properties in payment of debts incurred by the original owners. 2. This theme is not mentioned at all in the local mishnah.63 The formal link to the mishnah is contained in the fact that it was cited by the Rabbis who adjudicated the first two cases in the sequence. None of the other units has any connection to the mishnah.64 3. These considerations support the conclusion that the collection did not emerge from the study of the Mishnah. On the contrary, it evolved in the domain of judicial institutions and was afterward incorporated into the Babylonian Talmud’s commentary on the Mishnah. The Talmud preserves many examples of materials that appear to have been generated by the judiciary, or at least in a context of legal study that was not directly related to the Mishnah. Such materials are frequently


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collected into series of cases, halakhic rulings,65 or—as in the present instance—combinations of both types. As with the other Rabbinic genres described here, since no separate compendia were created in which to collect them, the editors of the Babylonian Talmud sought ways in which to embed them, through associations of form and content, into the main body of the Talmud. The limited observations I have made in this essay regarding the dynamics of the Talmud’s redaction are consistent with the structural and historical models that have emerged from recent work in Rabbinic philology. Talmudic scholarship in the last generation has become increasingly aware of the fact that the redactional process was a protracted one, extending over several centuries.66 Much of what is conventionally characterized as belonging to the “redactional strata” is the result of later students examining preliminary versions: comparing, contrasting, and resolving discrete traditions from their received text. Although in practice, it might not always be possible to confidently assign particular passages to identifiable editorial stages, we should at least acknowledge the basic theoretical distinctions, noting that large portions of the Talmud as we possess it do not reflect a unified or systematic editorial policy but rather evolved unpredictably through the academic give-and-take of the beit midrash.67 The later phase of editorial activity, usually ascribed to the saboraim, involved the comparison and rearrangement of materials that were already included as part of the corpus68 and hence should not be perceived as an anthologizing activity. It is to an earlier stage of redaction that we should ascribe the intentional and programmatic assembling of Rabbinic traditions that was evident in the examples described earlier. Moreover, the most distinctive achievement of the Talmud’s anthologizing program was directly associated not with its selection of texts for inclusion—as one might imagine would be the case with most anthologies—but rather with the skill and inventiveness with which the individual units were incorporated into the total work. In the present article, I have focused upon instances where heterogeneous elements were grafted onto the main trunk of the amoraic commentary on the Mishnah. Although the techniques are more readily discernible in such examples, it is clear that similar procedures were employed in other contexts as well, with a view to combining the various classes of Rabbinic sources, dicta, and pericopes from different schools or localities into unified literary entities—sugyot. As I have noted elsewhere, there appears to have existed “a general tendency among the redactors and formulators of the Talmud (and we are thinking here of a process which continued for centuries after the official sof horaah, and finds expression in variant readings in manuscripts and medieval citations) not to leave unconnected units, but rather to weave all the sources into a unified fabric.”69

If we limit the investigation of the Talmud’s anthological character to the most limited criteria, it will focus on three areas of editorial activity: (a) the criteria for exclusion and rejection; (b) the criteria for inclusion of additional traditions; and (c) the manner of organization of the material.


As regards the first of these areas—namely, the selection process—in most respects the surviving data prevent us from fully reconstructing what traditions might have been rejected from the Talmud, and on what grounds. We have been left with a final product, with no preliminary versions against which to compare it.70 Of course, it is not unreasonable to assume that a more selective and exclusive process of editing traditions was a primary concern during the amoraic era itself, as individual schools favored specific authorities or halakhic positions. The more advanced stages of the redaction, as exemplified in the passages that were examined in this study, appear to have striven for the opposite result, namely, the assembling of the greatest number of teachings of the previous generations. Perhaps this was done in the assurance that the winnowing of earlier schools had successfully eliminated all the chaff. The dogged determination of the later editors to juxtapose variant versions of the traditions attests to their desire to broaden the corpus of talmudic sources beyond the commentaries to the curricular tractates from the Mishnah. Yet the assertion that the Talmud’s editors may have been striving for comprehensiveness and inclusion does not mean that they intended to produce “little more than a scrapbook, a compilation of this and that.”71 A measure of literary Darwinism must have played its part in ensuring that the only traditions to survive the channels of transmission were the ones that were able to withstand the rigorous logical analysis and challenges of consistency to which traditions were subjected as they were studied in the amoraic schools.72 Even so, the question of what it was that the editors were trying to collect is not really as daunting as it may initially appear to be. No doubt what was ultimately preserved represented what was supposed to be preserved, and the most direct way to reconstruct the selection criteria of the Talmud is by summarizing what actually came to be included in the final product. While the Talmud contains a sampling of diverse genres of Rabbinic discourse, it is evident that preference was given to scholarly dialectical argumentation in the area of halakhah, as exemplified in the discussions surrounding the study of the Mishnah.73 As we have noted, the editors took upon themselves the additional task of anthologizing other areas of Rabbinic activity, such as biblical interpretation, legal decisions, and aggadah. In doing so, it appears that their concern was more with structural appropriateness (i.e., whether the elements could be fit into the talmudic context)74 than with their contents. All the examples that were analyzed in the present study remind us that the standards of thematic and topical uniformity that guide our current classification systems cannot be imposed upon the editors of Rabbinic collections. For those editors, formal analogies or incidental citations of a common biblical verse provided equally valid grounds for grouping texts together.75 The most successful undertakings in talmudic research are those that have built upon this theoretical foundation. Because each unit of talmudic tradition exists in at least two contexts—as it was originally intended by its tannaitic or amoraic author, and as it functions in the context of the redacted sugya76—it follows that a full appreciation of the Talmud must deal with both the parts and the whole. Although we might initially be skeptical about the possibility of recovering the pristine ipsissima verba of the talmudic Rabbis,77 an impressive body of research has by now provided valid grounds for optimism: careful analysis of spe-


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cific sugyot and tractates has indicated with remarkable consistency that the Talmud’s editors refrained from tampering with the wording of the original (usually, Hebrew) statements. Similarly, sophisticated typologies have been formulated for distinguishing between “authorial” and editorial strata.78 Our readiness to classify the cited examples, and the Talmud as a whole, as an anthology is obviously vulnerable to valid objections. The recognized literary definition of “anthology” is a straightforward one, denoting a collection of sources (in ancient literature it would usually consist of epigrams or poems) selected according to some criterion, such as quality, genre, place, or time.79 The classic anthologies of the past have tended to limit the editor’s involvement to selection and arrangement or, at the most, the composing of introductions to the individual selections or to the volume as a whole. If the Talmud’s intricate and ingenious literary intertwining goes beyond the typical borders of the anthological genre, perhaps the literary lexicon requires a literary term that better expresses the kind of dynamic anthologizing that is exemplified in the Talmud. Certainly, world literature knows of many other instances of such works. Virtually all “higher criticism” or synoptic theories posit analogous paradigms of redactors stitching together antecedent documents or oral traditions so as to render the seams indiscernible to all but the most alert of redactional critics.80 The Talmud may simply be more candid in owning up to its composite origins and identifying its constituent baraitot, memras, and so on.81 It follows from this that when we come to define our scholarly objectives in studying the Babylonian Talmud, the alternative topics need not be restricted to either the individual parts or the whole.82 Indeed, one of the most fascinating areas of Rabbinic study is the subtle and dynamic process by which the parts undergo transformation through their incorporation into the whole. That process may be the very nature of the anthologizing process that stands behind the Talmud, and ultimately, by understanding that process in the Talmud, we may also learn something more about the possibilities of anthologizing in general.

Appendix: Talmudic Sources Cited in Ketubot 2b–3a [1.83 “Says Rav Joseph: Lord of Abraham! He makes something which has been taught dependent upon something which has not been taught!84 . . . Rather, if it was stated, it was stated as follows.”85 The alleged logical difficulty that provoked Rav Joseph to reformulate the initial version of Samuel’s tradition is unwarranted, since the two texts are clearly dealing with different questions. Mishnah 1:1 provides a reason (albeit an inadequate one)86 for the establishment of Wednesday as a preferred day for weddings; whereas Samuel is inquiring “teleologically” about additional halakhic implications that result from the choice of a specific day.87 Under the circumstances, it is conceivable that Rav Joseph’s objection and the ensuing emendation of Samuel’s statement are all pseudepigraphic, the work of later redactors, modeled after the similarly structured pericope in Shabbat 22a or Bava Batra 134b.]88 [2. Possibly: Tosefta Ketubot 1:1: “If so, then let her be married on Sunday!—Rather, in order that he might make preparations all week, they ordained that he should marry her on the Wednesday.”

96 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism As noted earlier (see previous item), it is not clear whether the Talmud is attributing this passage to Samuel (according to Rav Joseph’s emendation), or proposing it as a new synthetic reformulation, in which the pericope’s redactors combined Rav Joseph’s original statement with the Tosefta and structural elements from Shabbat or Bava Batra.] 3. M. Ketubot 5:2, along with a talmudic discussion involving Rav Aha89 that might subsequently have been excised from its original location.90 4. A pericope built around Rava’s comment to M. Ketubot 5:2.91 In its quest for a source for Rava’s ruling, the Talmud cites several additional talmudic texts, all of which deal with cases in which a husband is prevented by uncontrollable circumstances from fulfilling a condition attached to a divorce. 5. M. Gittin 7:8: “This is your divorce if I should die . . .” (with explanatory material that is apparently copied from the pericope in Gittin 76b). 6. M. Gittin 7:7. 7. A baraita attached to M. Gittin 7:7: “But our Rabbis permitted her to remarry.” The source is in Tosefta Gittin 5:9,92 though it is cited in other talmudic passages in which the mishnah is cited.93 8. A brief talmudic passage related to the preceding: “Who are ‘our Rabbis’?—Says Rav Judah: Says Samuel: The court which permitted oil.” The text is most likely being quoted from Gittin 76b.94 9. The view of the tanna Rabbi Yose´, that the inclusion of a date on a document implies its retroactivity. Here as well, the tradition is being cited from the talmudic pericope to M. Gittin 7:7 (Gittin 76b).95 10. The continuation of M. Gittin 7:8: “From now if I do not come twelve months from now.” 11. The case of “that man who said to them: If I do not come thirty days from now,” which was adjudicated by Samuel. This case had already been cited in connection with the appropriate mishnahs in Gittin.96 12. The discussion between Rav Ashi and Ravina about the conditions under which the Rabbis might retroactively invalidate a betrothal was probably copied here from one of several places in the Talmud where it also appears, most likely from Yevamot 110a.97

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):33–61. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. An extensive discussion on the broad possibilities of “commentary” in Rabbinic and other literatures is contained in Baruch M. Bokser, Post Mishnaic Judaism in Transition: Samuel on Berakhot and the Beginnings of Gemara (Chico, Cal., 1980). Cf. my review of Bokser’s book in Tarbiz 51 (1982):315–18. 2. For a useful overview of the fundamental types of Western legal literature, including some suggested equivalents in Jewish jurisprudence, see Menachem Elon, Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles, trans. from the Hebrew by B. Auerbach and M. J. Sykes (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 228–30, 1017–19 (where Elon surveys the principal scholarly opinions concerning the codificatory purpose of the Mishnah) and 1057–58. Note in particular the citation from Salmond on p. 1018, n. 3, which deals with the fine distinctions between


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primary historical or legal sources of law, and literary sources, including commentaries and textbooks. 3. The Talmud’s evident encouragement of argument for its own sake, its insistence on arguing for and against all the recorded opinions, and its reluctance to disprove any of the recorded opinions, attest to its generally non-codificatory purposes, which engendered the need for the post-talmudic Codes literature. There are, however, a significant minority of passages that are concerned primarily with practical decision making (and these are not limited to the many interpolations from geonic sources). 4. This undoubtedly accounts in part for the appeal of the detective story and kindred genres, including the ideal of “elegance” in computer code. 5. For purposes of the current question, it is not necessary to take a stand on the precise institutional nature of these “schools”; see D. Goodblatt, Rabbinic Instruction in Sasanian Babylonia (Leiden, 1975). 6. This theoretical model was explored with particular zeal by my late teacher E. S. Rosenthal, who saw himself as continuing a program initiated by Israel Levy of Breslau. 7. The classic description of the Talmud’s gradual evolution “generation after generation” was formulated by R. Sherira in his Epistle. D. Rosenthal, “Early Redactions Embedded in the Babylonian Talmud,” Mehfi qerei talmud 1 (1990): 155–204, contrasts this approach with that of Rashi, who rejects explicitly any redactional activity prior to Rav Ashi and Ravina (in phraseology that bears an uncanny resemblance to Maimonides’ description of Rabbi Judah the Prince’s role in compiling the Mishnah). 8. A concise survey of the literature and main arguments may be found in H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis, 1992), pp. 35– 49. The most exhaustive collection of arguments in favor of the writing of the Oral Tradition during the talmudic era is probably that of J. N. Epstein, Mavo lenosahfi Hamishnah [Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah] (Jerusalem, 1964), pp. 692–705. In spite of his determination to assemble even the most dubious and indirect references to written sources, Epstein acknowledges that such documents were rare exceptions and were not permitted for use in the schools. The widespread claim (which still appears in most textbooks and popular introductions) that Rabbi Judah the Prince rescinded the prohibition in publishing the Mishnah has no basis in the ancient sources, nor is it found in the unabridged text (the so-called French recension) of Sherira’s Epistle, or among the medieval FrancoGerman commentators. Its main proponents were Saadia and Maimonides, whose readings of the sources were presumably influenced by the need to defend the authority of the tradition against the Karaites and Muslims in a culture that venerated written over unwritten traditions. 9. E.g., the need for mnemonic abbreviations to organize units, and the testimony of the geonim that as late as the eleventh century manuscripts of the Talmud could not be used or cited in the Babylonian academies. 10. See the summary in Strack and Stemberger, pp. 219–27. 11. Ibid., p. 225: As its history of redaction shows, BT was not edited by a specific editor or a group of editors at a precisely datable time. Hence we cannot assume a uniform and universally accepted BT text at any time. Not only is it impossible to draw a clear boundary between redaction and text criticism, but the coexistence of two geonic academies will also have prevented the standardization of the textual shape of BT. 12. Ibid., p. 224. Halivni, in particular, has argued that he has yet to find a talmudic passage whose reconstruction would require the positing of an amoraic setam. 13. A recent summary of Neusner’s views (written partly for my benefit), along with a

98 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism bibliography of his previous writings on the question, is included in his The Documentary Foundation of Rabbinic Culture (Atlanta, 1995). 14. Neusner’s division into individual documents does not always seem consistent. On what grounds, for example, must we treat Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta deRav Kahana, or the individual halakhic midrashim from the “School of Rabbi Ishmael,” as separate documents, while we regard “Mishnah-Tosefta” or individual talmudic tractates as belonging to single units? 15. This principle was applied to the domain of Rabbinic textual criticism in Saul Lieberman’s oft-quoted distinction between “textual truth and historical truth”; see his review of L. Finkelstein’s edition of the Sifrei to Deuteronomy, Kiryat sefer 14 (1937):323–24. Neusner is guilty of similar credulousness when he accepts that the sixteenth-century printings (or even their thirteenth-century prototypes) are faithful records of documents composed in the fourth or fifth century. 16. As far as I can tell, Neusner makes no use of the Hebrew-language research that makes up the bulk of current Rabbinic scholarship. One consequence of his limited research is that he seems unaware of the liberties that scribes and commentators were allowed to take with the setama digmara sections, which constitutes strong evidence against the view that the Talmud text was revered as a canonical document. Such a consistent and widespread phenomenon cannot be facilely written off as inconsequential. Until Neusner produces detailed commentaries on specific passages that take into consideration the details of text, redaction, and historical context, his arguments must be treated more as opinion than as scholarship. 17. The closest analogy I can find for Neusner’s reasoning is the claim by some fundamentalists that God intentionally left fossils, complete with their Carbon-14 attributes, when He created the world 5,000 years ago. Intentional pseudepigraphy and forgery never fail to give themselves away through linguistic, chronological, or biographical bloopers (cf. the case of the Zohar)—none of which is evident in significant proportions in talmudic literature. 18. This could apply not only to collections like the Tosefta and analogous (no longer extant) works that were explicitly devised as supplements to the Mishnah, but also to midrashic passages that would have naturally and routinely been cited in connection with relevant sections of the Mishnah. 19. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of the Tractate Neziqin (Atlanta, 1990). See “Example 2” later in this article. 20. The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary, 3 vols. (Atlanta, 1994). 21. In Case Citation, pp. 6–8, 220–21, I survey some of the traditional and modern scholars who have addressed the question of the heterogeneity of the amoraic curriculum and the incorporation of diverse materials into the Talmud-qua-Mishnah commentary. 22. I.e., Mishnah and halakhah converge in the Mishnah and Tosefta; midrash and halakhah in the halakhic midrashim; Mishnah and aggadah in the tractate Avot; midrash and aggadah in Seder olam or in the tannaitic midrashim in which the nonlegal material far outweighs the legal (e.g., Sifre´ Deuteronomy). 23. The only possible exception that comes to mind is the Babylonian-Aramaic (“Onkelos”) Targum. 24. The phenomenon is noted and described in Strack and Stemberger, p. 210. This leads to the conclusion that “the overall character of BT is encyclopedic. Everything was included which was taught in the rabbinic schools and considered worth preserving. . . . Thus BT is less a thematically closed book than a national library of Babylonian Judaism whose structure emulates M.” It seems to me that the “encyclopedia” model brings us substantially closer to the “anthology” being explored in the present volume. For an anal-


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ogous assessment of an aggadic compendium, see Marc Hirshman, “The Greek Fathers and the Aggada on Ecclesiastes: Formats of Exegesis in Late Antiquity,” HUCA 59 (1988): 155–58. (Thanks to David Stern for directing me to this article.) 25. J. Sussman, Sugyot bavliyot lasedarim zeraim vetoharot [Babylonian sugyot to the orders Zeraim and Toharot] (Diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1969); B. M. Bokser, Samuel’s Commentary on the Mishnah: Its Nature, Forms, and Content (Leiden, 1975). 26. I.e., the time referred to in the preceding clause of the Mishnah there: “A virgin is given twelve months from the time when her husband has proposed marriage to her, in order to prepare her belongings. And the same period that is given to the woman is also given to the man to prepare his belongings.” 27. Normally, only priests and their households may eat terumah. If the twelve-month deadline has elapsed owing to the fiance´’s delay, the woman is treated as his wife for purposes of entitlement to terumah (when the fiance´ is a priest), or to support (in all cases), even though the wedding has not actually taken place. 28. The instances that are considered include: (a) the groom fell ill; (b) the bride fell ill; (c) the bride had her menstrual period. According to one version of the passage, all three are accepted as legitimate causes of delay, exempting the husband from financial obligations. A second version deals with each of the instances as a separate and distinct problem, to which a collective solution is proposed by Rav Ahfi ai (discussed later). 29. If the fiance´ is a kohen. 30. See the references to N. Bru¨ll, A. Weiss, and others in Strack and Stemberger, Introduction, p. 24. 31. Abaye is quoted as objecting to the initial formulation of his teacher Rav Joseph’s tradition, on the grounds that the Mishnah contains an explicit reason for its ruling (because of the days of the court sessions), and hence there would have been no need for Samuel to seek an explanation in Mishnah 5:2. In consequence, a revised version of the tradition is offered, in which Samuel is not giving a reason for Mishnah 1:1 but rather extending its indirect implications. Thus, it is explained that Sunday was excluded by Rabbinic enactment as a day for weddings, even though courts convene on Mondays, out of concern for the bride’s presumed desire for an elaborate wedding celebration, in order to allow plenty of time for preparations after the Sabbath. Because this delay is based on a Rabbinic ordinance, the groom is not held financially responsible if it should take him beyond the twelve-month deadline. 32. Rav Ahfi ai claims to prove from a precise reading of the Mishnah’s wording that the groom would be held responsible if the delay were caused by anything less than a Rabbinic ordinance, as in the cases of illness and menstruation already discussed in connection with the version of the passage that presented the issue as a question. The Rashbam’s attempt to argue on form-critical grounds that this Rav Ahfi ai is a post-talmudic figure was justly refuted by his brother R. Jacob Tam (see Tosafot). It is possible that Rashbam’s mention of Rav Ahfi a of Shabhfi a, the author of the She iltot, was inspired at least in part by the fact that the structure of this inquiry conforms to that of a typical She ilta, branching off as it does into various hypothetical possibilities until the normative solution is determined on the basis of a talmudic citation. 33. In the printed Talmuds, Rav Ashi refutes Rav Ahfi ai’s attempt at answering the above question. However, his name is missing from several manuscripts, including two Geniza fragments; see M. Hershler, ed., Masekhet ketubot im shinnuyei nushfi aot [The Babylonian Talmud with Variant Readings: Tractate Ketubot] (Jerusalem, 1972–77), 1:4 lines 7–8, and n. 5. Presumably, if the name were contained in the early French manuscripts, that fact would have been adduced by Rashbam and R. Tam in connection with the identification

100 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism of R. Ahfi a (see later). Cf. H fi . Albeck, Mavo latalmudim [Introduction to the Talmud, Babli and Yerushalmi], p. 514; J. Z. Du¨nner, H fi iddushei hariza″d [Novellae] (Jerusalem, 1983), ad loc. 34. It would have been far more reasonable to attach it to the mishnayot in Ketubot 5:2 or Gittin chap. 5. 35. This is the reading in all witnesses (Hershler, Masekhet Ketubot, p. 21 line 14), though the subsequent statements are introduced as “Bar Qappara expounded.” 36. Genesis 1:22. 37. Genesis 1:28. 38. Thus, Rashi: “It brings it here on account of Bar Qappara, who was quoted previously in connection with an aggadic tradition.” 39. TP Ketubot 1:1 (24d); the passage is also found with variants in Genesis Rabbah 8: 12 (p. 66). There is a virtual consensus among modern Talmud scholars that Bar Qappara’s positing a different reason for the law in the Mishnah proves that the Mishnah of the Palestinian Talmud, at least in its earliest strata, did not include the current rationale about juxtaposing the wedding to the court sessions, the latter explanation being introduced there by R. Eleazar. A similar implication was discerned in Samuel’s (unemended) tradition at the beginning of the Babylonian tractate (see earlier) and in the fact that the Mishnah’s explanation is included in the Tosefta (1:1, p. 56). See the discussions in H fi . Albeck’s Mishnah Commentary (3:345); Lieberman’s long commentary in Kiryat Sefer, p. 185; Halivni, pp. 129–30 n. 4; and literature cited in these works. While there is little room for doubt that tannaitic literature knew of several optional explanations for the ancient customs that governed the days of weddings, the extension of this situation to the amoraic era is at best circumstantial and is contradicted by the unanimous testimony of the Mishnah manuscripts, including those whose Palestinian traditions are considered superior. The Tosefta’s practice of including and explaining long lemmas from the Mishnah is well known, as is the Talmud’s inclusion of baraitot that dispute the positions of the Mishnah. Bar Qappara, in particular, has been accused of maintaining a conscious independence of the Mishnah (see S. Lieberman, Sifrei Zutta [New York, 1968], pp. 11–13, 64, 114ff.). The most explicit of the proofs remains TP’s report about R. Eleazar citing the Mishnah’s rationale for the Mishnah as his own, and the Talmud’s subsequent adducing of a baraita in support of his—rather than the Mishnah’s—explanation. However, Epstein (Introduction to the Text of the Mishnah, p. 294) is able to argue that this is merely one of several instances in which R. Eleazar defends the version preserved in the Mishnah against that of a baraita. 40. Genesis Rabbah does not cite this explanation in the name of Bar Qappara but merely asks, “Why?” The attribution is attached only to the revised interpretation, reproduced here. 41. The explanatory comment “On Thursday . . . and Eve” is missing in Genesis Rabbah. 42. “R. Yose´ . . . is that”—In Genesis Rabbah: “Bar Qappara says.” 43. The TP passage continues to examine the implications to Bar Qappara’s dictum of the fact that Genesis 2:3 also contains a blessing. The pericope leads to a discussion of the question of deflowering a virgin on the Sabbath. The subject of that passage is analogous to the B. passage that commences immediately following the three expositions of Bar Qappara. 44. Mekhilta D’Rabbi Sim’on b. Jochai, ed. J. N. Epstein and E. Z. Melamed (Jerusalem, 1955), pp. 99–100. 45. Mechilta D’Rabbi Ismael, ed. H. S. Horovitz and I. A. Rabin (1930; repr. Jerusalem,


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1970), Shirah 10, p. 150; Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. J. Z. Lauterbach (Philadelphia), 1933), vol. 2, p. 29. 46. Cf. Aboth de Rabbi Nathan, end of chap. 1 (ed. Schechter, 4b): “An alternative explanation: ‘And laid thine hand upon me’ (Ps. 139:5)—From this [it follows] that when Adam and the Temple were created, they were created by means of both his hands. Whence do we know that the Temple was constructed with both his hands?” See the editor’s notes there with references to problems in the order of the passages. Rabbi Josiah Pinto (the “Rif” to the Ein yaaqov), who was evidently unaware of the Mekhilta version, protested: “Seeing as the works of the righteous are equated with the Temple, then it ought to have said ‘Great is the Temple!’ ” 47. The text and translation are difficult to reconstruct. See the text-critical notes in the respective editions. See also Midrash haggadol al hfi amishah hfi omshei torah: Sefer shemot [Midrash Haggadol on the Pentateuch: Exodus], ed. M. Margulies (Jerusalem, 1956), p. 311. 48. The Mekhiltas stress a contrast between the Temple and the created universe, whereas Bar Qappara speaks instead of “the deeds of the righteous.” Nor is it clear how Bar Qappara read that theme into the biblical text. (Cf. Rashi’s suggestion that the midrash is alluding to the fact that the sanctuaries were actually erected by righteous mortals, presumably with divine assistance. However, if that were true, there would be no symmetry between the two elements of the comparison.) Maharsha refers us to the midrashic traditions (which he reads through a kabbalistic framework) about how Bezalel and Aholiab employed supernatural skills in fashioning the Tabernacle. Pinto emphasizes the role played by the righteous King Solomon in the building of the Temple: “Once the Temple had been erected by the righteous, it was a simple matter for the Holy One to establish it, since the merit of the righteous established it in part, and the Holy One completes its establishment. Nevertheless, he had to apply both hands to this task.” It strikes me as possible, though admittedly contradicted by all the textual evidence, that the references to the works of the righteous were introduced here mistakenly under the influence of the discussion later on the theme of “Who shows the handiwork of the righteous” (expounding Ps. 19:2). There, too, the plain sense of the grammatical object of the verse is diverted to refer to the righteous. 49. There are many parallels and similarities between the opening pages of B. Ketubot and the equivalent pericopes in the Palestinian Talmud. These would normally lead us to suppose that the Babylonian editors were expanding upon material that had already undergone a literary redaction in Palestine. Although this possibility is not to be ruled out here, the fact is that both the Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah cite only the first tradition. Thus, the issue is not where (in Palestine or Babylonia) the link was made, so much as how and why. 50. This question is posed by Rabbi Jacob Reischer in his Iyyun yaaqov commentary to the Ein yaaqov. He devises an ingenious, though unconvincing, explanation connected to the linking of wedding days to the blessing of Adam and Eve, rather than that of fish. 51. It assumes that we read it in the light of R. Eleazar’s comment about why human fingers were created with a peg shape. 52. I discuss several such examples in my The Babylonian Esther Midrash: A Critical Commentary. See, e.g., 2:265–309; 3:121, 221–23. 53. Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud: The Evidence of Tractate Neziqin. 54. There, as here, I evaded the question of whether these collections were oral or written. In favor of an oral model, we must note that the general halakhic prohibitions against writing down Oral Torah appear to have been observed consistently throughout the amoraic era, and that the Aramaic dialect in which the cases were preserved is substantially identical to that of the rest of the Talmud, without the telltale signs of written texts (as

102 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism found, e.g., in legal documents or geonic writings). In favor of a written model of transmission, we may observe simply how unlikely it seems that a formal mechanism for oral collection of court decisions (parallel to the tannaim who were charged with the memorization of baraitot) should have existed without that fact’s being mentioned anywhere in our sources. 55. For textual variants, see Hershler, Masekhet ketubot 2:346, to lines 1–2. The siman is found in several manuscripts, though the printed editions seem to preserve the most complete version, and is supported by the readings of Halakhot pesuqqot, Halakhot gedolot, and other geonic works. See E. Hildesheimer, Sefer halakhot gedolot (Jerusalem, 1980), 2: 278. Noteworthy is the reading of MS Vatican 130, in which the siman is subdivided into two discrete units of six and three units. 56. On the distinction between the two main literary types of cases in B., see Stern, Case Citation, pp. 14ff. 57. As noted by Rashbam to Bava Batra 150b (Case Citation, p. 89). 58. The structure is also found in item no. 4 in the sequence, adjudicated by Rami bar H fi ama, as well as in no. 2 (involving Rav Joseph and Abaye). 59. See later. Units nos. 1 and 2 are virtually identical but for the names of the participating. Rabbis and the values of the disputed properties. Some of the traditional commentators (see Shittah mequbbetset) expressed surprise that the Talmud should have included two identical cases. For that reason, several of them (see Meiri, Nahfi manides, Ishbili, Ditrani, etc.) considered the possibility that the two cases were dealing separately with instances where the properties were acquired by a single purchaser, or by two separate purchasers. Du¨nner (H fi iddushei) sees the two cases as variant traditions (lishana ahfi arina). The MSS that read Rami bar H fi ama’s name, rather than Rav Joseph’s, in unit no. 2 are clearly mistaken, since he would not have engaged in an exchange with Abaye. See Hershler, Masekhet ketubot 2:345 n. 44. 60. E.g., the prominence of Rami bar H fi ama in units nos. 1, 4, 5, and 6. Rami died c. 350. For biographical overviews, see Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud, pp. 379–80; Strack and Stemberger Introduction, p. 105. The other main participants are Rava, who decides no. 7 (this reading is probably more reliable than “Rabbah” in the printed editions; cf. Hershler, 2:352, n. 25), and Abaye in nos. 3, 8, and 9. 61. Rava fulfills this role in nos. 1, 4, and 5 (some texts have “Rav Dimi” in the latter; see Hershler 2:344, line 7 and n. 24); Abaye in no. 2. 62. All but no. 4 have some discussion attached. In nos. 3,5,7, and 9, the comments are anonymous (in the last two, variants are presented introduced by the ikka deamerei formula). Each of the first two units is followed by an identical dispute between Ravina and Rav Avira. Presumably, this is the sixth-generation student of Rava. This Rav Avira appears in a dispute with Ravina on Bava Batra 131b. See Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud, p. 416. On the identity of that Ravina see ibid., pp. 420–21. 63. On the other hand, the right of a creditor to collect from property sold subsequently to the contracting of the debt is an issue that crops up in many places in the Mishnah, including Ketubot. 64. Cf. Du¨nner (H fi iddushei): “From here [no. 3] on, the cases were included here only by virtue of two incidental similarities: (a) that they all begin with the formula “a certain man,” and (b) that Rami bar H fi ama, Abaye, and Rava are all involved in the discussions.” As I noted here, the similarities in form and content are actually somewhat more substantial. 65. A complex and methodologically instructive example of such a hybrid collection is analyzed in Case Citation, pp. 94–113.


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66. See earlier. Basic bibliographies for research into the related questions of the development of the sugya and the contribution of the saboraim may be found in Strack and Stemberger, pp. 221–23. Note in particular the contributions of A. Weiss, M. S. Feldblum, S. Friedman, Z. A. Steinfeld, and D. Weiss-Halivni. The apparent impossibility of pinpointing the transition from redactional to textual history has been noted in many studies by E. S. Rosenthal, S. Friedman, D. Rosenthal, and others. 67. In view of the length and complexity of the process that gave birth to the Babylonian Talmud, it seems to make a singularly inappropriate candidate for the application of Neusner’s documentary theory (see earlier), which presupposed a unified editorial policy. Neusner seems to be reverting to a traditionalist religious view of a quasi-personified Talmud, or at least to the simplistic nineteenth-century attempts to identify a particular “redactor.” 68. See S. Friedman, “A Critical Study of Yevamot X with a Methodological Introduction,” in H. Z. Dimitrovsky, ed., Texts and Studies: Analecta Judaica, vol. 1 (1977), pp. 275–441. 69. Case Citation, p. 125. 70. Even if we were to assume that the Talmud’s redactors had before them the same independent compendia of baraita, talmudic debates, or midrashic homilies that have come down to us in the extant collections of halakhic midrash, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud, or classical aggadic midrash, it is hard to pinpoint essential differences between what is contained in those sources and the material that was accepted for inclusion in the Babylonian Talmud. The elimination of certain tractates from the final scope of the Talmud does not seem to have been a direct reflection of the quality of those tractates’ contents so much as it was a pragmatic way of dealing with the paucity of usable material—a situation that presumably resulted in turn from those tractates’ exclusion from the academic curriculum of the later amoraim. See Strack and Stemberger, pp. 209–10. 71. Formulations of this sort are employed frequently by J. Neusner in order to characterize what he sees as the inevitable consequences that follow from rejection of his “documentary” approach to Rabbinic literature. See earlier. 72. The typically laconic formulations in which the amoraim transmitted their teachings, which may have been forced upon them by the requirements of memorization, must have impelled them to pay meticulous attention to what should be included and what excluded from the material to be handed down to future generations. 73. Neusner’s singling out of the theological element as constituting the main purpose underlying the Talmud’s composition flies in the face of its obvious concern for the mechanics and theory of religious law. 74. Admittedly, some of the “acceptable” connective links are so ingeniously contrived as to raise doubts about whether any unit could not have been provided with a link. In two of the examples here, it was sufficient to establish a valid association with one item in a series in order to justify the inclusion of the complete series. 75. The Rabbinic work that conforms best to Western notions of systematic organization, the Mishnah, contains precisely the same kinds of digressions that I have described, in which a sequence of topically unrelated sources are inserted into a tractate because one of the items in the list is relevant to the context (e.g., Megillah 1:4–11). See H fi . Albeck, Mevo hamishnah [Introduction to the Mishnah] (Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 88–99. 76. The “at least” qualification alludes to instances in which redacted pericopes were utilized subsequently by even later redactors and introduced into newer contexts. Such instances are not uncommon. 77. As is Neusner; see earlier.

104 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 78. The most complete of these is Shamma Friedman’s in “A Critical Study.” 79. See S. H. Steinberg, ed., Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Literature (London, 1953), 1:23–24. 80. One striking ancient parallel to the talmudic esthetic of anthologizing is a work that in other respects belongs to a polarly different universe. I am referring to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose author has strung together a representative sample of the Greek and Latin mythological heritage by means of an elaborately contrived sequence of associative links. It is granted that Ovid’s work, carefully crafted by a single author, is not in itself an anthology. Nevertheless, there are some striking literary similarities in the way the individual units relate to one another and to their respective totalities. Some of the classic controversies of Ovid criticism offer uncanny and instructive parallels to questions raised in talmudic literary scholarship. To cite just a few of the features that enhance our appreciation of the Talmud’s literary form, I might refer to: difficulties that confront scholars in their attempts to find thematic consistency in Ovid’s selection of legends (see Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses [Chapel Hill, 1988], p. 11; all the following page references are to Solodow), and the poem’s general impression of “shapelessness” (13); lengthy digressions based on formal similarities frequently are often interposed between units that logically belong together (14); like the Talmud’s redactors, Ovid consistently eschews the presentation of separate units in favor of formal literary transitions (15), no matter how artificial those transitions sometimes appear (26); while the juxtapositions of some legends can be justified on grounds of thematic similarities (16), these similarities (including the metamorphoses themselves) can sometimes be merely incidental or peripheral to the main purpose of the unit (28); like the Babylonian Talmud, the Metamorphoses strives for comprehensiveness in its historical range, breadth of subject matter, and its variety of literary genres (17–18), and its author frequently collates sources belonging to different genres (24–25); in both collections, the resolve that was invested in the fashioning of literary transitions between the units was felt to be as important as the content of the units. Indeed, to stretch the comparison only a little bit further, we might justly submit that the relationship between the Talmud and a conventional anthology is equivalent to the one that exists between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Bullfinch’s Mythology. 81. In this respect, it bears some resemblance to the maqamas or picaresque novels of later generations, allowing always for the essential differences between single-author and multi-author works. To a more limited degree, this is true of a medieval midrashic “anthology” like Rabbi David Adani’s Midrash hagadol, which so often exasperates modern scholars with the liberties it takes in its presentation of the ancient sources (see Strack and Stemberger, pp. 386–87). 82. The delimitation of the “whole” is open to varying interpretations. Scholarship has been focused largely on the individual sugya, though other units can reasonably be used, such as a chapter, tractate, or the entire Talmud. At this stage of scholarship, it would seem that the more ambitious the scope, the less likelihood there is of reaching conclusions that are both well-founded and meaningfully specific. 83. Sections are enclosed in square brackets when there exists an ambiguity about their status as “talmudic sources.” 84. The formula davar telei bidla telei is found in tannaitic midrashic texts. See Sifre´ Numbers 91 (p. 91); Deuteronomy 312 (p. 353) and 333 (p. 383). 85. Rashi insists that the “corrected version” of Samuel’s tradition on 2a (“Rather, if it was stated, thus was it stated”) is being presented as the words of Rav Joseph himself. There are several considerations that recommend this view, including the facts that Rava


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appears to be responding to it, and that the emended tradition is formulated entirely in Hebrew, after the manner of authentic amoraic traditions (cf. Du¨nner (H fi iddushei): “The style of the emended dictum follows that of a baraita”). Neither of these factors constitutes irrefutable proof, and Du¨nner has noted that the ruling that appears to be assumed by Rava is, at any rate, challenged by later amoraim. The textual evidence seems to suggest that it is the redactors who are citing the emended version of Rav Joseph’s tradition, since the older texts, as attested by the medievals, read “Rather, if it was stated, thus was it stated: Says Rav Joseph: Says Rav Judah: Says Samuel” (see the evidence collected in Hershler’s edition, p. 2, n. 13). Most of the manuscripts have incorporated the emendation of Tosafot—often in a garbled form—and therefore cannot be relied upon as proof for the original reading here. However, the i itamar formula is a stereotyped one, and we should not attach too much weight to it. A similar ambiguity attaches to the fact that the Talmud has Rava refer explicitly to Rav Joseph’s emended version when he states either “And with regard to divorce it is not so” (2b), or “it is so” (3a). Here, too, it is conceivable that Rava’s original statement did not allude so explicitly to that tradition. The central item of new content that was added in the “revised” version of Samuel’s dictum, the statement about how “the Rabbis were concerned for the welfare of the daughters of Israel,” is being cited verbatim from the Tosefta Ketubot 1:1 (The Tosefta, ed. Saul Lieberman [New York; 1967], Nashim, Ketuboth, p. 56) as found on folio 3b, a fact that would also account for its Hebrew formulation. It is thus not entirely unreasonable to view the revision as the “anonymous Talmud’s” typical creative rearrangement of existing materials. This possibility is strengthened by the questionable logic of the objection, and by the possibility that the literary structure of the passage might have been copied from a pericope elsewhere in the Talmud, as I will soon discuss. We should also note that the tradition about Rav Joseph suffering from a memory loss, though cited as a biographical “fact” by Albeck, Introduction, p. 293; Halivni, Meqorot umsorot—Seder nashim [Sources and Traditions—on Seder Nashim] (Tel Aviv, 1968), p. 131; and others, is an invention of Rashi, based on a number of instances when Rav Joseph’s traditions were challenged by Abaye (e.g., Eruvin 66b, 73a, 75b, 89b; Pesahfi im 13a). 86. It does explain why Sunday is not considered a legitimate day for weddings. 87. What is the rule when waiting for Wednesday prevents the groom from complying with the twelve-month deadline? The artificiality of Rav Joseph’s objection was aptly noted by the Tosafot ad loc. 88. Such a reconstruction was proposed by Halivni, though his objections against the present form of the pericope are somewhat different. He notes that Bava Batra 134 has a similar structure, but “in Shabbat it is smoother.” Apparently, he is alluding to the fact that in Shabbat, there is a clearer delineation between “what was taught” (i.e., in a baraita) and “what was not taught” (i.e., is found only in an amoraic dictum). At any rate, the question is not entirely clear. 89. See earlier. The current version of the pericope in which Rav Ahfi a appears alludes explicitly to the emended version of Rav Joseph’s tradition, particularly to the fact that the delay mentioned there was in order to comply with a Rabbinic enactment. However, the passage could make sense without that reference. 90. There does not seem to be a consistent redactional policy for such cases. The Talmud sometimes leaves duplicated pericopes in the same tractate, and it is not obvious why it chose not to do so in the present instance. 91. The principle “there is [no] plea of force majeur in connection with divorce,” worded in Hebrew, has the earmarks of an allusion to a tannaitic or amoraic dictum. It is

106 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism found in Gittin 30a and 34a, but in both those passages it is part of an anonymous comment attached to Samuel’s ruling in the case (later in the passage here) of the husband who was prevented from keeping his thirty-day deadline. Rashi to Gittin 30a surmises plausibly that the Talmud there is actually referring to the Ketubot passage here and its two opposing versions of Rava’s comment. 92. The Tosefta, ed. Saul Lieberman (Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1973), Nashim, Gittin, 267. See his discussion in Tsefta Ki-shutah (New York, 1973), part VIII, 881. 93. Gittin 72b, 76b; Avodah Zarah 37a; cf. Gittin 7:3 and parallels. 94. The passage, its historical dimensions and its implications vis-a`-vis the text of M. Avodah Zarah have been discussed at great length in the course of modern rabbinic scholarship, from the time of S. J. Rapaport. Some recent studies (containing references to earlier works) include Lieberman, Tosefta kifshutah, loc. cit; David Rosenthal, Mishnah avodah zarah—Mahadurah biqqortit [Mishnah Aboda Zara—A Critical Edition] (Diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 166–74; Z. A. Steinfeld, “Gentile Products That May or May Not Be Eaten,” Sinai 86 (1980): 83–84. The Babylonian and Palestinian sources (TP Gittin 7:3 [48d]) agree in ascribing the enactment to Rabbi Judah Nesiah, the grandson of the Mishnah’s redactor. 95. Rabbi Yose´’s position is stated in Mishnah Bava Batra 8:7 in connection with a father’s ability to will his property to his son while retaining the rights of usufruct. However, the explanation of Rabbi Yose´’s view on the grounds that the date implies retroactivity is supplied by Tosefta Ketubot 8:4 (ed. Lieberman, The Tosefta, Ketuboth, p. 85; Tosefta kifshutah, p. 319). The reason is also cited in TP Gittin 7:3 (48d). Its primary location in the Babylonian Talmud is in Bava Batra 136a, as is noted by Rashi here, and from there it came to be cited in several pericopes that deal with posthumous fulfillment of conditions. 96. Its primary location in B. is Gittin 30a, where it is included in a sequence of cases. Mishnah 3:6 there deals with an agent for delivery of a get who finds himself unable to deliver the document, and the case brought immediately before this one in that talmudic passage also involves the questions of agency and unavoidable delay in meeting a stipulated deadline. The current case appears to have been attached to the previous one by virtue of the fact that it also deals with delays, even though it has no tangible connection to the issues of interrupted agency that are dealt with in the local mishnah. As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Case Citation in the Babylonian Talmud, esp. pp. 90–125, 215–16; and see later here), this situation is entirely consistent with the manner in which cases were generally incorporated into the Talmud, indicating that they were originally assembled into simple collections and afterward attached to existing pericopes at a relatively advanced stage in their redaction. The case is adduced by Rava in Gittin 34a. 97. David Halivni, Mekorot Umasorot: Be’urim Batalmud (Tel-Aviv, 1968), vol. 1, p. 530 note 2, aptly summarizes the question: “[The text] is found six times in the Talmud . . . and it is unlikely that Rav Ashi would have failed to reply to Ravina’s question in all those instances. Rather it is the Gemara that copied the question and answer from its original location to the other places. Where did it originate? It would appear that it was in Yevamot 110a.” Halivni goes on to observe that Ravina’s argument does not constitute a strong objection if directed against the principle, “All who betroth do so subject to the approval of the Rabbis,” and hence it probably did not originate in any of the passages where it is appended to that principle. See also Shamma Friedman, “A Critical Study,” pp. 356–57, and the extensive literature assembled in nn. 57–58 there. Friedman notes that in Yevamot 90b the conversation is evidently a later addition to a pericope that originated with a dispute between Rabbah and Rav H fi isda. The discussion there deals with the validity of the divorce, not the betrothal, as is stated in Ravina and Rav Ashi’s comments. In Yevamot 110a, by


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contrast, Ravina and Rav Ashi are responding directly to a case (of the hava ovada type) involving students of Rav, to which Rav Pappa had already commented. In Gittin 33a, Rav Ashi and Ravina are directly interpreting a baraita (the same one that was cited as a prooftext in Yevamot 90b); however, there too, the issue at hand is the annulment of the divorce, not of the betrothal.

6 david stern

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash

o feature of midrash has drawn more attention from modern readers than its

Nproclivity for multiple interpretation. The claim that biblical verses can be read in more than one way seems to be a virtual axiom underlying ancient Rabbinic exegesis, encoded in the oft-quoted Talmudic dictum, mikra ehad yotsei lekamah te’amim, “one verse may have several meanings” (just as, the same passage continues, “no two verses hold the same meaning”).1 Even if the precise meaning of this statement has not always been absolutely clear, its applicability seems to have been inscribed in nearly all surviving midrashic collections insofar as they regularly record multiple interpretations. Indeed, no editorial feature of midrashic literature seems to be more consistent than the use of davar aher, “another opinion,” as a superscription for still another interpretation. This habit of collecting multiple interpretations may be called the inherently anthological element in midrash. The anthological element can be located on virtually every plane of midrashic discourse—on the hermeneutical level (in polysemy, as an exegetical axiom, as was just noted); on the micro-level of the various rhetorical-literary forms in which midrashic traditions are actually recorded (and that constitute virtual mini-anthologies of interpretations, as we shall see); and on the macro-level of the various documents in which all these separate midrashic traditions have been preserved. On each of these separate levels, midrash appears to have been not only an effort of interpretation but a project of organizing and preserving the multiple interpretive traditions of the past. I am hardly the first to point this out. Scholars in the past have extensively discussed the genres of the various midrashic collections and their identities as literary documents. So, too, there has been extensive investigation of polysemous, multiple interpretation in midrash and its hermeneutical significance, particularly in the last several decades. The anthological character of the midrashic literaryrhetorical forms has also been studied, though less extensively. As yet, however, there has been no attempt to discuss these separate dimensions of midrashic anthologization in connection with each other, let alone assess their combined sig108

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 109

nificance. This is the task I wish to undertake in this essay—not only so as to understand the general phenomenon better but also in order to speculate upon its function, that is, the purpose such anthology making may have served in Rabbinic culture. Why, indeed, was the anthology, as it seems, the Rabbis’ literary genre of choice? To answer this question, it is necessary first to survey the anthological “question” on each of the separate planes I have identified. If only because the anthological element can be seen most clearly when it manifests itself on the largest scale, we shall begin with the documentary plane and then proceed to the literary-rhetorical and, finally, to the hermeneutical.

Anthological Documents: The Case of the Literary Homily At first glance, there is no reason to suppose that the various classical midrashic collections are anything but anthologies. This is not to say that all midrashic collections are identical, or that they are only anthologies. Scholars have traditionally distinguished between two types of midrashic collections: the exegetical and the homiletical.2 The former is organized basically according to the biblical text itself; the midrashic comments are recorded simply by the order of the verses upon which they comment, verse after verse, with no other discernible logic to their selection. In contrast, the homiletical collection is divided into so-called chapters (parashiyot); rather than interpret an entire section of the Torah, each chapter devotes its comments solely to the first or the first several verses in the section, and its comments often seem to be motivated as much by topical and thematic concerns as as by the verses themselves. As we shall see, attempts have also been made to attribute to the homiletical midrashim an even deeper literary unity and coherence. Even so, there is no prima facie evidence to suggest that the basic dynamic behind these works’ editing was ever more than anthological—that is, more than an attempt on the editors’ parts to collect exegetical traditions in recognizable literary units that the editor preserved more or less in their original form and without significant intervention (conceding the fact, to be sure, that in most cases we have no way of knowing what the original form was). In this respect, the midrashic collections are not in fact different from other Rabbinic works, nearly all of which are multilayered works, preserving (and often reworking) past traditions and, at least on the surface, not acknowledging their editors’ intervention. To be sure, not all contemporary scholars would agree with this characterization of Rabbinic texts. The greatest challenge to the “anthological” approach to midrash (as well as to other works of Rabbinic literature) has come from Jacob Neusner, who has argued that each separate work produced by the Rabbis should be seen as a document in its own right with an inner integrity and a coherent point of view all its own. Even if the document was compiled from previously existing traditions, Neusner claims that the author responsible for the document assembled his work with a plan and with an intelligible purpose so as to create a “composition.”3 The only alternative, Neusner writes, is to view the Rabbinic work as “a scrap book,” a “random and essentially promiscuous” literary expression.4 There are many difficulties with Neusner’s documentary hypothesis, some of


which have been explored by other scholars.5 For our present concerns, the main weakness of his argument is in his contention that a text must be either “a composition” or a “scrapbook.” This is a false opposition. There is, in fact, no reason to dichotomize literary works so extremely. Even if it is not a monograph—that is, an original work consciously and deliberately created by a single author—an anthology of diverse works need not necessarily be, and usually isn’t, a “random,” let alone a “promiscuous” text, a mere scrapbook of this and that. Indeed, the opposition between “composition” and “scrapbook” is especially inappropriate in the case of Rabbinic documents. In the first place, structure or organization in any anthology can take place on at least two separate levels—either on the macrolevel of the collection-document as a whole, or on the macro-level of its constitutive literary-rhetorical forms (to which we shall turn shortly)—and it is particularly in the latter that structure is to be located in the case of Rabbinic texts.6 Moreover, even the rudimentary organization of an exegetical midrash—in which interpretive opinions are listed sequentially by their lemmata or base verses—is, after all, still a form of organization, and not to be dismissed as meaningless. And finally, the very anthological form of the midrashic collection, with its proclivity for preserving multiple interpretations, may sometimes disguise the presence of an editorial hand that has consistently excluded an unnamed interpretive approach— an approach, in other words, that could not, for ideological or political reasons, be preserved. Such, for example, may have been the case with the cosmogonic interpretations on the first chapters of Genesis as preserved in Bereishit Rabbah, and so, too, certain Rabbinic exegeses of the Song of Songs as preserved in Shir Hashirim Rabbah. Both these works, despite the variety of exegeses they preserve, may have excluded certain esoteric interpretations that their Rabbinic editors found objectionable or impossible.7 Virtually every Rabbinic text, including the various midrashic collections, is in some fashion sui generis, and their anthological character takes on a somewhat different expression in each case. Consider, for example, two early tannaitic collections which are usually considered under the rubric of exegetical midrash. The Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael is a collection of interpretations on Exodus 12:1–23:19— that is, from the first commandment regarding Passover through the end of the laws given on Mt. Sinai—with an addendum, as it were, on nine verses about the Sabbath (Exod. 31:12–17 and 35:1–3). Yet while the collection is an “exegetical” midrash inasmuch as its interpretations are listed by the sequence of verses, the book as a whole is not in fact a mere running commentary on Exodus. Organized into nine tractates (massekhtaot), the Mekhilta is, as J. Z. Lauterbach pointed out a long time ago, “a collection of tractates dealing with certain events recorded or topics treated in the book of Exodus.”8 It is not merely a commentary or collection of interpretations on verses. In contrast, Sifra, the tannaitic commentary on Leviticus, originally followed the sections in the Torah literally word for word, as is already made clear in the reference in Shir Hashirim Rabbah 6:8: “ ‘There are sixty wives and eighty concubines’ (Song of Songs 6:8)—‘Sixty wives’ refers to the sixty tractates (massekhtaot) in the Mishnah (literally, halakhot), ‘eighty conclubines’ to the eighty sections (parashiyot) in Sifra (literally, torah kohanim).”9 As Shlomo Naeh has shown,


these original eighty parashiyot correspond to the eighty sections (also known as parashiyot) in the book of Leviticus, thereby making Sifra the first truly complete exegetical midrash.10 While Mekhilta and Sifra are, then, both “anthologies,” and even though both are usually described as “exegetical” midrashim—insofar as their main procedure seems to be simply to list interpretations by the verses upon which they comment—it is clear from their larger macro-organization and the titles of their different divisions that their editors also created and organized them for different purposes: in one case, to treat selected topics and sections of a book; in the other, to follow a scriptural book through its entirety. Whether or not the latter was a commentary in our sense of the term—that is, an ancillary text meant to be read and studied alongside the primary core-text—is a separate question to which I’ll return.11 Most scholarly debate about the literary identity of midrashic collections has revolved, however, not around the exegetical but the homiletical collections, specifically the two amoraic works, Vayikra (Leviticus) Rabbah (henceforth VR) and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (henceforth PRK). As I have already noted, these midrashim differ from the exegetical midrashim in several factors: 1. They are organized in “chapters” (parashiyot). 2. These chapters share a common shape—at their beginning, the chapters open with at least one example and usually a group of passages in the literary-rhetorical form of the petihta or proem (to which I shall return). These multiple petihtaot are then followed by a series of midrashic interpretations that are sometimes linked to the chapter’s opening verse or two and sometimes to a topic raised by the opening verse; and this series of interpretations typically culminates in a “happy end,” the simana denehemta, literally “a token [or sign] of consolation.” This conventional conclusion sometimes explicitly evokes the redemption of Israel in the time-to-come but it may also consist solely of a kind of blessing or a tying together of previous motifs in the chapter in such a way as to effect a satisfying and optimistic point of closure.12 3. In interpreting the Torah section (which may or may not have corresponded to the sections of the Torah that were read in synagogue in one of the Palestinian triennial cycles), the homiletical midrashim generally limit their comments to the first verse in the section (and sometimes only to a phrase or two in that verse), or at most to the first several verses in the Torah section—never, in other words, to the entire reading (as does an exegetical midrash). 4. Finally, in the homiletical collections, this opening verse (or group of verses) is often interpreted in a singularly figurative, nonliteral fashion, and almost always, in a way that, initially, seems to have little to do with its context in the larger Torah reading. These distinctive features of the homiletical midrash have been a staple of modern midrash scholarship virtually since its beginning, but their significance continues to be a matter of scholarly debate.13 In two articles first published in 1971, the Israeli scholar Joseph Heinemann proposed a more radical explanation


for the homiletical midrash’s singular features.14 According to Heinemann, the homiletical midrash represented a new literary genre in classical Hebrew literature, one that he called the “literary homily.” The chapters in VR (or PRK) are not mere anthologies of midrashic traditions, indeed not even exegesis in its traditional sense; rather they constitute attempts by the anonymous editor to take “separate and often heterogeneous parts” of past tradition—the many disparate biblical interpretations and extrabiblical legends on specific verses and passages that had originally been orally transmitted and that probably reached the editor in that form—and to meld them together into a new “organic unity,” namely, the literary homily, which is essentially a thematic composition. The organization of the literary homily in each chapter “is dictated by the inner logic of the theme and the need to attain coherence and integration.” Even so, Heinemann acknowledged, the anonymous editor’s most striking editorial habit was his tendency to emphasize “contradictory or conflicting viewpoints” of the same theme or idea and thereby to expose “the complexity of Torah.”15 The difficulty with Heinemann’s argument lies in his notion of the “organic unity” of the chapters in VR. This difficulty is partly due to the problems inherent in the notion of organic unity itself—an idea that was more fashionable in Heinemann’s time than it is today, some thirty years later—and partly because the socalled literary homilies in VR are not usually as unified as they should be, a fact that Heinemann himself admitted.16 In truth, there is no necessary reason to consider the separate chapters in VR to be unified entities in any sense even if they all tend to share a common organizational structure of petihtaot (usually multiple examples, in a very few cases a single petihta) followed by a group of separate exegetical traditions culminating in a simana denehemta. It is equally possible to consider each chapter as simply having two halves—one of petihtaot, the other of separate exegetical traditions leading to a conventional peroration. As I will argue in greater detail later, the petihtaot may have served as source material for a preacher who needed models to use in order to compose and preach his own petihta in synagogue; the second half of the chapter may have furnished material for a different type of sermon or for a teacher who needed to prepare a lesson for students. The two halves of each chapter, in other words, did not necessarily have anything to do with each other. The question of unity aside, however, it nonetheless seems to me that Heinemann was correct in his basic intuition. There is something different about VR and PRK, and what is different has to do with a certain shared feature, even a kind of “coherence.” Rather than view this coherence as thematic, however, I would propose that it is exegetical—that is, each chapter uses a more or less common approach to the verse (or verses) that serve as the explicit subject of its interpretations. The typical—one might even say universal—feature of the homiletical midrashim is that the interpretations in each chapter not only focus almost exclusively on the first or the first few verses in the Torah passage but also almost deliberately ignore the remainder of the verses in the passage and their contents. For example, VR 1, the first chapter in the midrash, has as its ostensible subject the first chapter of Leviticus, a lengthy treatment of the laws of the burnt offering. The midrash, however, limits all its interpretations in the chapter to the first phrase


in Leviticus 1:1, vayikra el moshe, “And He called to Moses,” and ignores all the rest of Leviticus 1, hardly even alluding to the subject of sacrifices.17 So, too, VR 4—whose ostensible subject is the reading beginning with Leviticus 4:1, a series of laws about sacrifices incurred “when a person unwittingly incurs guilt,” nefesh ki teheta (Lev. 4:2)—limits virtually all its interpretations to the word nefesh, which it reads not as “person” but as “soul” (which is the primary Rabbinic understanding of the word’s meaning), and uses the phrase nefesh ki teheta as an occasion to explore the relationship between the soul and sin.18 Or in VR 20, the chapter entirely ignores the reading’s subject, the scapegoat offering, and instead devotes its entirety to a treatment of Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aaron, whose deaths are alluded to in the opening phrase of the first verse in the reading. According to Heinemann, these chapters used Scripture merely as a pretext, a peg upon which to hang, as it were, their thematic essays about, for example, the uniqueness of Moses (in VR1) or the nature of the soul (in VR 4). In Heinemann’s view, in other words, there is nothing authentically exegetical about these chapters. Their editor wanted to put together thematic “essays,” not biblical interpretations, and he used “midrash” merely as a pretext. In contrast, I propose that these chapters are exegetical compositions and that their exegetical content can be identified on at least two levels. On the most obvious level, each chapter presents a series of interpretations that follow a common interpretive approach to the chapter’s prooftext(s). Beyond these exegeses, however, the chapter as a whole may also suggest an implied interpretation of the remainder of the Torah reading, or at least some kind of response to that reading’s significance. In a detailed study I have published on VR 1, I have argued that the book of Leviticus posed a special problem for a Rabbi who wished to preach on the book in the fourth or fifth century c.e., some 300 years after the destruction of the Temple and nearly as many centuries after the last hope to rebuild the Temple (in the time of Julian) had collapsed.19 The problem was, simply: What to do with this book of the Bible? The vast majority of laws in Leviticus (especially in its first half) deal with the Temple cult, and these sections had little if any practical import or relevance for an audience in a fourth- or fifth-century synagogue. How could a preacher make these readings from the Torah meaningful, let alone interesting? As I have proposed, the solution that the Rabbis found—as reflected in the exegeses found in VR—was to shift the burden of meaning away from the cultic substance of the chapters in Leviticus and to locate it instead in some other aspect of the scriptural passage. For example, VR 1, which deals exclusively with Leviticus 1:1 and ignores the remainder of the chapter (namely, the substance of what God tells Moses, the laws of the burnt offering), uses its interpretations—and in particular its multiple exegeses of vayikra el moshe, “And God called to Moses”—to reveal the type of revelation wherein God speaks to Moses (rather than its contents); elsewhere I have called that type of revelation “the language of havivut,” of “intimacy,” and through it, I have proposed, VR shifts the burden of the Torah’s meaning from its content to its style. In VR 4, the midrash uses the first verse in its reading to discuss “how a nefesh, a soul, might sin” (nefesh ki teheta); the result is not so much an essay on the soul as an exploration of the reason why a person is obligated to bring the sin offerings whose details the rest of the Torah chapter


goes on to delineate. In VR 16, the chapter is devoted to the section beginning with Leviticus 14:2 ff., the laws of the metzorah, the so-called “leper”; this section details the procedures through which a person stricken with tzara’at (leprosy) ritually purifies himself through the cult. The midrash, however, deals with none of these ritual procedures. Instead, it exploits an already well-established aetiological interpretation that reads the word metzorah as an elision of motzi shem rah, namely, the slanderer or gossip, and thus rereads the verse, zot tihyeh torat hametzorah” (literally, “this is the law of the metzorah”) to mean in effect “this is how one avoids tzara’at,” namely, by avoiding the sin of slander and gossip, whose punishment is the skin disease. What all this means, in short, is that VR (and its sister midrash, PRK) remain exegetical compositions, but the singular features of the exegetical approach pursued in each chapter—the habit of focusing on the opening verse(s) at the expense of the rest of the readings, the unusually “spiritualized” or “quasi-allegorical” readings of those verses, the implied responses to the contents of the remainder of the weekly Torah readings—all reflect the historical dilemmas and practical problems facing a Rabbi in the third or fourth or fifth century. Now by claiming that these chapters adopt a common or shared exegetical approach to their prooftexts, I do not mean to say that the exegeses they present are all identical or even that they necessarily agree with each other. Quite the opposite; as Heinemann noted, the various traditions preserved in each chapter not infrequently contradict each other. What is “shared” or “common” among the different exegeses recorded in each chapter is not substantive agreement on the meaning of a verse but a shared impulse to place the exegetical “weight” or “burden” of meaning upon one element in the Torah lection rather than upon another, and thereby to “read” the larger Torah reading of which that verse is a part in its light. For example, in VR 1, as I have already noted, the chapter deals largely with the opening phrase, vayikra el moshe, but it reads that phrase variously as “He [God] spoke only to Moses,” “He invited Moses,” “He named Moses,” “He held a teˆte-a`-teˆte with Moses,” “He screamed at Moses,” and “He spoke intimately with Moses.” So too, in VR 4:5, in one of the most famous cruxes in all midrashic literature, two contradictory views of the nefesh’s culpability and responsibility for a person’s sinning are put forth: in one, the body and the soul share culpability and are judged together; in the other, the soul is held more culpable precisely on account of its heavenly origins.20 For the chapter’s editor, the substantive contradiction between the two traditions was not an issue, because he was trying to put together not a unified thematic essay on the soul but rather an anthology of available traditions and interpretations that dealt with the soul and its character—in respect to sinning, and in relation to God, to the human body, and to the corporate body of the people Israel. The anthological impulse served the purpose of inspiring the editor to collect traditions and exegeses that could support an interpretation of the Torah reading in line with this exegetical and homiletical approach.21 In short, the kind of documentary organization found in the homiletical midrashim, VR and PRK, is not so different from the organization of an “exegetical” collection like Bereishit Rabbah. Both are primarily anthologies of earlier interpretations. Indeed, if the original chapter divisions in Bereishit Rabbah accorded


with the weekly Torah readings, as Joseph Heinemann has argued, and if the original chapters in Bereishit Rabbah all began with petihtaot, as do the chapters in VR and PRK, then these various amoraic collections were in fact even more similar in structure than has been previously supposed.22 The major difference in midrashic collections would be not the distinction between the exegetical and homiletical midrashim but that between those with petihtaot at their chapter beginnings and those without petihtaot—namely, the difference between the tannaitic and the amoraic collections. Exactly what the presence of the petihtaot in the amoraic collections may teach us is a question to which I will return. Before doing so, however, let us turn to the petihta itself as the paradigmatic anthological literary-rhetorical form in midrash.

Anthological Literary-Rhetorical Forms: The Example of the Petihta The distinctive literary-rhetorical forms of midrash are its most striking and identifiable feature—what sets midrash off from the many other different types of ancient Jewish biblical exegesis like Targum and the Re-Written Bible. The midrashic forms not only record individual interpretive opinions, they also collect and organize separate traditions and opinions into larger, more inclusive structures that tend to make their own points in addition to those of the specific exegeses they convey. In the tannaitic collections, the most prominent of these forms are the several different types of exegetical lists and enumerations. In the amoraic collections, the most typical form is the petihta or proem. The exegetical enumeration (and list) has been studied with exemplary clarity by W. Sibley Towner.23 In this essay I will limit my discussion to the petihta. In an influential and still debated article that appeared in 1971, Joseph Heinemann first proposed that the petihta owed its unusual shape to its Sitz im Leben as a mini-sermon that was delivered immediately before the Torah reading.24 Unlike most midrashic literary forms, which essentially follow upon the verse or scriptural phrase that they interpret, the petihta typically ends with the verse that is its real subject, the so-called lectionary verse (which is usually the first or close to the first verse of a section of the Torah, which may or may not have been [depending on the scholar] the beginning of the weekly Torah lection in the Palestinian synagogue).25 The classical petihta begins, however, with another verse, the so-called “remote” verse (or petihta verse), so called because it is usually taken from an unrelated, “remote” location elsewhere in Scripture (most frequently from the Writings, sometimes from one of the books of the Prophets, least frequently from the Pentateuch). It is also remote in the sense of having little or no connection to the lectionary verse, at least not an obvious connection. From this “remote” verse, the preacher evolves a chain of interpretations, often involving the quotation and interpretation of still other verses along with additional rhetorical forms (like parables and enumerations), building in the process an exegetical bridge that eventually culminates in the lectionary verse. At this conclusion, the lectionary verse takes on a new meaning or sense. Heinemann himself seems to have believed that the petihtaot preserved in


the existing collections were actual sermons that had once been delivered by preachers in synagogues. This possibility now seems much less certain.26 It is equally if not more likely that the petihtaot in the collections were literary creations of the editors of the collections. Further, it is possible that they were preserved in the collection not only to record compositions that had once been delivered but to provide would-be preachers or teachers with models of petihtaot that they could then use to “work” up their own sermons. For our immediate purposes, however, what is most important to note is not only that the petihta had the clear and identifiable outer form or shell that Heinemann identified—the conventional beginning and end—but that its inner structure, its contents, namely, the substance of the exegetical bridge between the petihta and lectionary verses, also possessed its own structural conventions and rules of composition. These conventions and rules are so obvious (once they are recognized) that they must have been familiar to every preacher. In an as yet uncompleted study in which I have been engaged for the past several years, I have sought to analyze the inner structure of the petihta in order to identify and describe those compositional rules and conventions. In an appendix to this essay, I briefly describe the study and some of its provisional conclusions. For our present concern with the topic of anthology, however, two examples of typical petihtaot will suffice to make my point about the petihta’s anthological character. The first example is a petihta from VR 20:1, whose lectionary verse is Leviticus 14:1. I have laid out the translated text in outline form so as to give the reader a sense of its highly organized structure and components. All quotations from Scripture are in boldface, and all formulae and deliberately repeated phrases are italicized. Rabbi Shimeon bar Abaye recited a petihta [that began]: “For the same is in store for all: one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; [for the good, and for the pure, and for the impure; for him who sacrifices and for him who does not sacrifice; for the good man and for the sinner; for him who swears and for him who fears oaths].” (Eccles. 9:2) “The righteous”—this is Noah, “Noah was a righteous man” (Gen. 6:9). Said R. Yohanan, the son of R. Eliezer the son of R. Yosi Hagelili: When Noah left the ark, a snake bit him and a lion gave him a fracture, and he was no longer fit to offer sacrifices, so Shem his son offered sacrifices in his stead. “And for the wicked”—this is Pharaoh Nekho. When he wished to sit on the throne of Solomon, he did not know [how to use] its mechanical contrivance, and a snake bit him and a lion gave him a fracture. This one died limping, and this one died limping. Is it not “one fate for the righteous and for the wicked”? “For the good”—this is Moses, as it is said, “And when she saw that he was good” (Exod. 2:2). R. Meir said: He was born circumcised. “For the pure”—this is Aaron, for he was busy with purifying Israel, as it is said, “In peace and in right-

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 117 eousness he walked with Me, and turned many away from sin” (Malachi 2:6). “And for the impure”—these are the spies. These [Moses and Aaron] spoke in praise of the land of Israel, and these spoke in disparagement of the land of Israel. These did not enter the land of Israel, and these did not enter the land of Israel. Is it not “one fate for the good and for the pure and for the impure”? “For him who sacrifices”—this is Josiah, “And Josiah donated to the people small cattle—lambs and goats” (II Chron. 35:7). “And for him who does not sacrifice”—this is Ahab, who did away with sacrifices on the altar, for this is what is written, “And Ahab killed sheep and oxen for sacrifices for him [Yehoshafat] in abundance” (II Chron. 18:2)—he killed for sacrifices to him [Yehoshafat] and not for sacrifices [to God]. This one died through arrows, and this one died through arrows. Is it not “one fate for him who sacrifices and for him who does not sacrifice”? “For the good one as for the sinner”—the good one is David, “So they sent and brought him, and he was ruddy-cheeked, bright-eyed, and a good one to look at (tov roi)” (I Sam. 16:12). Said R. Yitzhak: Good at seeing the law (halakhah).27 Everyone who looked at him recalled his learning. “As for the sinner,”—this is Nebuchadnezzar, “Redeem your sins through charity” (Dan. 4:24). This one built the Temple and reigned for forty years, and this one destroyed the Temple and reigned for forty years. Is it not “one fate”? “For him who swears”—this is Zedekiah, “He also rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar, who made him take an oath by God” (II Chron. 36:13). “And for him who fears oaths”—this is Samson, “Samson said to them, Swear to me that you will not attack me” (Judges 15:12).28 This one died by having his eyes picked out, and this one died by having his eyes put out. Is it not “one fate” for all of them? Another interpretation for “One fate for the righteous and for the wicked”— “For the righteous”—this is Aaron, about whom it is written, “In peace and in righteousness he walked with Me” (Malachi 2:6). “And for the wicked”—this is the followers of Korah, about whom it is written, “Move away from the tents of those wicked men” (Num. 16:26). These went in to offer sacrifices out of dissension, and they came out incinerated, and these went in to offer sacrifices without dissension and came out incinerated. This is what is written—“And after the deaths of the two sons of Aaron” (Lev. 14:1).


As the reader will observe, the petihta parses its petihta verse, Ecclesiastes 9: 2, into separate phrases, and then, following the initial phrase in the verse, it identifies each of the pairs of types of persons named in each successive phrase who share the same fate as referring to specific figures from the Bible who Scripture teaches us did in fact share the same fate. Thus, we are told, Noah and Pharaoh Nekho both suffered the same end—both died limping after having been bitten by a snake and having suffered a fracture at the hands of a lion—even though one, Noah, was righteous while the other, Pharaoh Nekho, was wicked. The same strategy is repeated for each of the five following pairs: Moses and Aaron, on the one hand, and the spies, on the other; Josiah and Ahab; David and Nebuchadnezzar; Zedekiah and Samson; and finally, in a second interpretation of the first phrase in the verse’s sequence, Aaron and Korah. The petihta’s return to the first phrase appears to be a technique of closure, but there does not appear to be any other logic underlying the sequence of the biblical figures treated. Each of them appears to have been chosen solely for his appropriateness as an example of the type named in the verse. The petihta’s author clearly did not invent every midrash in the petihta. A good number of the paired figures and the midrashim attached to them—Noah and Pharaoh Nekho, and Moses and Aaron, for example—had independent existences long before this petihta.29 The petihta, in other words, seems to be an anthology of various traditions about pairs of biblical figures who famously suffered the same fate despite the fact that one was wicked (and therefore deserved his fate) while the other was righteous (and did not). In terms of its overall message, the petihta can be read in one of two ways: either as an even more radical expression of cynicism than the original Ecclesiastes verse, or as a repeated demonstration of the fact that a person’s righteousness or wickedness cannot be judged by his (or her) fate. Each reading, in turn, casts the deaths of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, in a very different light. According to the second alternative, their deaths cannot be read as proof of their wickedness (since the righteous and the wicked die the same deaths); according to the first possibility, their righteousness or wickedness had no effect on the fate they suffered. Whichever of these interpretations one wishes to choose, however, the reader will also notice that this anthology of examples is very carefully organized, with each unit in the petihta following a nearly identical, patterned, and symmetrical structure. Each interpretation of each biblical type begins in the same way (“ ‘the biblical type’ is a given ‘biblical figure’ ”); nearly every identification is then followed by a citation of a biblical prooftext; and after the figures in each pair are identified, their identical fates are then spelled out in symmetrical statements which are followed by the identical rhetorical question, “Is it not ‘one fate’ ” for each of the figures in the pair? The phrase “one fate” is, needless to say, a quotation from the opening petihta verse, mikreh ehad. For all the petihta’s cynicism, and despite its implicit questioning of any providential justice in the universe or to human existence (for the righteous and the wickedness share the same fate), the highly organized structure of the petihta gives the impression of a strictly ordered world in which everything has its proper place and articulation.


The next example offers an even more impressive illustration of how a petihta can collect a large series of different exegeses in a highly organized and symmetrical structure of discourse that takes on a meaning that is significantly larger than the sum of its parts. The petihta appears in Bereishit Rabbah 8:1 as a comment on Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image. . . .” Rabbi Yohanan recited a petihta (patah) [that began] “Before and behind (ahor vekedem) You created me (tsaretani30); You lay upon me Your palm” (Ps. 139:5). (1) Said R. Yohanan: If man proves himself worthy, he enjoys two worlds, as it is said, “Before and behind You created me”; And if he does not, he will have to stand in judgement, as it is said, “You lay upon me Your palm.” (2) Said R. Jeremiah ben Leazar: At the time the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man (adam harishon), He created him an androgyne, as it is said, “Male and female He created them [ . . . and called them Man] (Gen.5:2). (3) Said R. Samuel bar Nahman: At the time the Holy One, blessed be He, created the first man (adam harishon), He created him two-countenanced (diprosophon), and sawed him in half, and made a back on this side and a back on that side. They challenged him (meteivin leih): But it is written: “And He took one of his ribs (mitzalotav) [ . . . and fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman]” (Gen. 2:21–22). He answered: [Yes!] God took [her] from [Adam’s] side, just as you say, “and for the other side (uletzeleh) of the Tabernacle” (Exod. 26:20). (4) R. Tanhuma said in the name of R. Benayah and R. Berechiah said in the name of R. Leazar: An unformed mass (golem) He created him, and he was spread out from one end of the world to the other end—“My unformed limbs (golmi) Your eyes saw” (Ps. 139:16). (5) R. Joshua said in the name of R. Nehemiah and R. Judah b. Simon said in the name of R. Leazar: Filling the entire world He created him. From “east to west,” from where? From, as it is said, “Before and behind You created me.”31 From “north to south,” from where? From, as it is said, “[ever since God created man on earth] from one end of heaven to the other” (Deut.4:32). And from where [do we know] that He created him to fill even the

120 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism space of the universe? This is what Scripture teaches, “You lay upon me Your palm”—just as you say, “Keep your fist away from me” (Job 13:21). (6) R. Leazar said: [He created him] last (ahor) on the last day of creation and first (vekedem) on the last day of creation. This is the view of R. Leazar, for R. Leazar said: “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creature (nefesh hayah)” (Gen. 1:24)—[the word nefesh means] the spirit [i.e., the soul] of the first man.32 (7) R. Shimeon ben Lakish said: [He created him] last (ahor) on the last day of creation and first (vekedem) on the first day of creation. This is the view of R. Shimeon ben Lakish, for R. Shimeon ben Lakish said, “And the spirit of God (ruah elohim) was hovering” (Gen. 1: 2)—this is the soul (ruho) of the first man, just as you say, “The spirit (ruho) of the Lord shall alight upon him” (Isa. 11:2)33 (8) Said R. Nahman: [He created him] last (ahor) of all the creatures and [He punished him] first of all those to be punished [as in Gen. 7:23, “All existence on earth was blotted out—man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky. . . .”] Said R. Samuel b. Tanhum: So too man’s praising [God] comes only at the end (beahronah). This is what it says—“Praise the Lord from the heavens”(Ps. 148:1), and then the entire series [of heavenly creations are listed] until [the series concludes with] “He established an order that shall never change,” (Ps. 148: 6); and after that [comes] “Praise the Lord, O you who are on the earth” (Ps. 148: 7), and only after [naming every earthly creature does it come to] “all kings and peoples of the earth” (Ps. 48:11). Said R. Simlai: Just as man’s praising [of God] came only after animals and wild beasts and fowl, so too man’s creation came after animals and wild beasts and fowl. At the beginning [of the fifth day, it says], “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Gen. 1:20) and after all [the creatures were created—] “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1: 26).

Whereas the previous petihta from VR had taken a single verse, broken it up into its constituent phrases, and interpreted each phrase sequentially according to a single logic, this petihta offers some eight different interpretations for a single verse, “Before and behind You created me and You lay upon me the palm of Your hand” (or at the least for the first half of the verse). As I have tried to indicate in the outline form of the translation (and the line spacing), these eight interpretations


are in fact divided into three pairs of interpretations (nos. 2 and 3; nos. 4 and 5; nos. 6 and 7), with single interpretations (nos. 1 and 8) bracketing them. Further, each of the middle three pairs of interpretation are, in fact, doublets—that is, the second interpretation in each pair is a variant upon the first. Thus 2 and 3 both offer versions of an Ur-Adam, who is either androgynous or two-sided (with each side possessing a different gender); 4 and 5 offer different versions of an Ur-Adam who is literally a microcosmos (filling the entire universe); and 6 and 7 offer different chronologies for the creation of the soul and body of the Ur-Adam. Taken together, these six interpretations offer a virtual encyclopedia of nearly every conceivable view that existed in the ancient world concerning the creation of man, the original human.34 In turn, the first and last interpretations in the petihta, numbers 1 and 8, do not offer contrasting views so much of how the primordial Adam was created— the facts of androgony, as it were—as of the purpose for which man was created (along with corresponding understandings of man’s place in the order of creation, a place that the different traditions in the petihta understand as related to man’s deeds such as his praising of God). This difference also affects the purpose underlying study. The three pairs of interpretation treat their scriptural prooftext— Genesis 1:26 and its surrounding verses—as a subject worthy of study for what it can teach us about the “facts” of cosmogony. In contrast, the theological approach contained in the first and last interpretations offers a very different rationale for why a Rabbi should study the opening chapters of Genesis—not to know how the world was created but to understand the purpose for which the universe and man exist. Both the cosmogonic and the teleological (or theological) approaches to the reading of the opening chapters of Genesis are reflected in many other interpretations preserved in Bereishit Rabbah.35 Indeed, as seen from within the context of the entire section, this petihta is not only an anthology of Rabbinic views on the creation of man specifically, but also a kind of microcosm of the entire Rabbinic approach to the subject of cosmogony. At the same time, the intrinsically anthological character of this petihta must also be appreciated in conjunction with the highly organized and symmetrical character of the petihta’s language and structure—even more striking in this petihta than in the previous one from VR. As in the translation of the latter, I have italicized all symmetries in this petihta. In the VR petihta the symmetries were constant throughout the composition. In this petihta in Bereishit Rabbah, in contrast, the powerful symmetries lie within each pair of exegeses (namely, between nos. 2 and 3, 4 and 5, and 6 and 7) in which the two halves (or by-forms, since they essentially state the same idea, slightly differently) repeatedly duplicate each other’s language. The sole exception to this rule is that, in each of the three pairs, the second interpretation of the two (namely, 3, 5, and 7) is always longer and has an “extra” interpretation or tradition appended to it. In its entirety, then, this petihta is extraordinarily highly organized and symmetrical; indeed, it is one of the most organized and symmetrical petihtaot in all midrashic literature. To be sure, it is not entirely clear precisely what purpose all this symmetry and stereotyping in the petihta actually served. Was symmetry primarily an esthetic


criterion, or was it merely a device for organizing petihtaot in a kind of outline form? As I have already suggested, these petihtaot may have been meant to serve as models for preachers—that is, as models to be used and worked up by a preacher however he wished so as to create his own petihta. If this were the case, however, we might well ask whether a preacher was meant to use all eight interpretations in his sermon, or whether the full panoply was more like a menu in a restaurant from which the preacher was intended to pick and choose? Was it understood, perhaps, that he would use only four or five interpretations in a passage but not all of them in a single sermon? Or was the petihta a “perfect” work in its entirety that was intended to remain intact and whole? We do not know the answers to these questions, but we can say with certainty that the petihta as a literary-rhetorical form is not very different from other literaryrhetorical forms of midrash in using highly stereotyped, even formulaic language and highly organized structures of discourse. One sees this in the “controversyform,” so common in tannaitic midrashim, where the opinions of two Rabbis whose interpretations diametrically disagree with each other nonetheless mirror each other’s language. So, too, one finds comparably stereotyped and symmetrical language in the enumeration form and in other types of exegetical lists, particularly in what Towner has called their “regularized” forms. Equivalent stereotyping is also found in the mashal’s highly formulaic narrative themes and diction; and even in the exegetical narrative, the sippur hadarshani, though to a somewhat lesser extent (if only because the sippur hadarshani is itself more amorphous and difficult to categorize generically).36 Indeed, such a tendency toward highly stereotyped, structured discourse seems to be typical of nearly all Rabbinic literature, from the Mishnah through the Bavli. Even so, the petihta uniquely combines the seemingly unregulated freedom of anthological collection with the high degree of organization characteristic of symmetrical discourse. When one analyzes a petihta like VR 20:1 or Bereishit Rabbah 8:1, it is difficult to explain why certain opinions found their way into the petihta while others did not. Did the author of the petihta deliberately exclude any current views of the creation of man? Or was there a reason why he included some interpretations in the petihta and left others out? We simply do not know. In the case of the biblical figures in pairs cited in VR 20:1, it is not difficult to imagine other figures taking the place of some of those used in the petihta; in some cases the pairs may even seem unlikely despite their inclusion in the petihta.37 Again, what is the logic determining the choice of examples? Both these questions touch upon the hermeneutics of anthologization. Yet in contrast to these indeterminate realities, the highly organized and symmetrical nature of the petihta’s discourse—the language of its exegesis—lends a kind of structure and order to the literary form that its hermeneutics do not provide. In this sense, the petihta’s discourse, its language, may be said to be the source of its stability as a literary form. Perhaps, indeed, the very stability of its language guarantees and grounds the petihta’s hermeneutical freedom, its capacity for remaining so unregulated on the interpretive plane. It is to this last dimension of the anthological habit—the hermeneutical plane—that we now turn.


The Hermeneutics of Polysemy and the Making of Anthologies The first impression that most midrashic collections give is not dissimilar to that given by the petihta—namely, that its contents are fairly unregulated; that to a greater or lesser extent the editor chose to preserve nearly every possible interpretation that came down to him from past tradition; and that the selection, if indeed the anonymous editor did make a selection from earlier tradition, was done without any easily discernible rhyme or reason. Even when a collection records criticism of a specific exegesis, it also tends to preserve the exegesis being criticized—a propensity that, if nothing else, makes it difficult to ascertain what was left out, let alone censored.38 We know, however, that this impression is only partially true. As I’ve already noted, it seems likely that in a few cases, as in the cosmogonic sections of Bereishit Rabbah and possibly in parts of Shir Hashirim Rabbah, the Rabbinic collections excluded certain esoteric traditions of interpretation that scholars today can reconstruct from non-Rabbinic sources.39 Even so, these indications of editorial intervention and selection only highlight the overall propensity of the collections and their editors for preserving multiple interpretations, and only make that propensity all the more puzzling. Where did this editorial habit come from? Probably the most frequently cited rationale for why the editors of Rabbinic literature preserved multiple interpretations in midrash—why, in other words, these compositions are anthologies—is that they were simply putting into practice an ideological belief about the nature of Scripture, namely, the hermeneutics of polysemy. This axiomatic belief is documented in several well-known Rabbinic statements such as the talmudic dictum in reference to Jeremiah 23:29 (“Behold, My word is like fire—declares the Lord—and like a hammer that shatters rock”), “Just as this hammer produces many sparks [when it strikes the rock], so a single verse has several meanings.”40 So, too, the mishnaic/Rabbinic tendency to record conflicting and even contradictory interpretations is often treated as the direct reflection of a statement such as “These and these [i.e., the opinions of both the Houses of Hillel and of Shammai] are the words of the living God.”41 Similarly, multiple interpretations in midrash are justified through the oft repeated claim that the Torah has “seventy aspects” or “faces” (panim).42 The anthological character of the midrashic collections is simply a reflection or product of all these axiomatic beliefs. Over the past twenty years, however, our understanding of those beliefs and of the documentary practice they supposedly reflect has changed considerably. In the first place, it is now commonly recognized that these various ideological statements appear mainly in relatively “late” sources like the Babylonian Talmud, and there they seem to be the outcome of editorial tendencies already crystallized in much earlier Rabbinic documents. The “polysemous utopia” seemingly envisioned in Rabbinic texts like B. Hagigah 3a-b—where “the disciples of the wise” sit “in assemblies and study the Torah, some pronouncing unclean, others pronouncing clean, some prohibiting and others permitting, some declaring unfit and others declaring fit,” all of them agreeing to disagree—is in fact an editorial artifact, a


fantasy created by the editors and redactors of the final Rabbinic documents. In historical actuality, there seems to be as much evidence if not more for Rabbinic factionalism and sometimes even violent discord as there are testimonies for pacific disputes.43 Yet if the various midrashic collections were not mere reflections of a Rabbinic ideology of the polysemy of Torah, then why indeed did the Rabbis choose to use the anthology as their primary literary form? We may begin to answer this question by saying that the Rabbis’ anthological habit seems to have a very ancient pedigree that can be traced back to earlier Israelite literature and its sacred “compromisetexts.” In the Pentateuch, for example, separate documentary sources are effortlessly combined into a single composition as though their different agenda and ideologies were compatible (which they eventually were made out to be). A number of narratives, like the creation of woman and the kidnapping of Joseph, are preserved in multiple versions. So, too, are many laws. Similarly, in the New Testament (another ancient text with a partly Palestinian pedigree), the four Gospels, each with a different Christology, stand side by side.44 Yet even the invocation of these literary precedents highlights the difference between them. Where the biblical precedents are literary compositions, the Rabbinic documents are clear-cut anthologies of past traditions. Why did the Rabbis so prefer the anthological genre over nearly every other literary type? And why for midrash in particular? To answer this question adequately, it would be helpful to know what function a midrashic anthology could have served. Was it meant to be used as a commentary, that is, as a text to be actually read and studied along with Scripture by a student? Or was it, as I have already suggested, a source book for professionals, that is, a manual for teachers or preachers for whom the collection was not a document to be read in its own right as a full-fledged literary composition but rather a repository of material to be consulted and extracted and turned into a lesson or sermon? Are the texts that the collections preserve transcripts or reports of previously delivered sermons? Or are they model texts possibly derived in part from pieces of actual sermon material but largely composed by an editor? Alas, we have almost no evidence for the literary history of these collections. Comparable evidence from other ancient literatures or from other genres of anthologies is also scarce or less than enlightening. We know, for example, that Origen’s sermons appear to have been written down by stenographers as he preached them ex tempore, but the difference between Origen’s polished and wellcrafted sermons and the fragmentary, highly elliptical, and truly stenographic character of the midrashic collections is so great that the relevance of the one to the other is virtually negligible.45 We have little knowledge of the literary history of other ancient Christian sermon-texts, and even fewer attempts to make a comparative study of the frameworks or formats of Jewish and Christian exegesis—namely, their shape as documents. In the single study that has directly broached the topic, Marc Hirshman has sought to compare the midrash on Ecclesiastes, Koheleth Rabbah, with contemporary Greek commentators on the book.46 Hirshman identifies four different types of compositions among the Christian fathers: the commentary (Olympia-


dorus), the homily (Gregory), the school lecture (Didymus), and the catena (or Greek seira, namely, “expositions of earlier exegetes on the respective biblical passages [which] are strung together without any personal opinion [of the editor or author] being offered”). Hirshman’s example for an author of a catena is Procopius of Gaza (died c. 538), who was the first author to compile extensive catena commentaries. While the catena might seem to be the form closest to that of the midrashic anthologies—both types string together earlier traditions of exegesis without offering preferential judgments or comments—Hirshman argues that the midrash is far more inclusive than Procopius’ catenae. In contrast to all the Christian genres, Hirshman argues that Koheleth Rabbah served its students primarily as an “encyclopaedia” and used the scriptural verses (of Ecclesiastes) as a system of rubrics to provide topical headings for various subjects and topics in the Rabbinic curriculum. This use of Scripture as a pedagogical tool was analogous, Hirshman argues, to the Roman educational practice of teaching specialized subjects, like mathematics and music, “incidentally in the literature lesson as the subject arose in the course of the ennaratio.”47 Koheleth Rabbah, it should be added, is a relatively late compilation, probably edited in the sixth or seventh century c.e. By this time, the Rabbis were very likely in control of the educational system in Palestine and in need of “textbooks,” a fact that makes Hirshman’s proposal plausible. Hirshman’s encyclopedia is another type of “functional” genre that might have served, with the preacher’s source book, as a type of “practical” anthology.48 Even so, Hirshman’s recourse to an educational context as the Sitz im Leben for the midrashic collection recalls one of the oldest and most frequently discussed questions in the history of midrash scholarship: the question as to whether certain works or types of material derive from the academy or from the synagogue, the Beit Midrash or the Beit Knesset.49 According to the former view, midrash was primarily a product of the elite, of the Rabbis and their disciples; this theory is easily argued in the case of midrash halakhah but, according to adherents of this view, it is equally true of the aggadic material. In contrast, the view seeing the synagogue as the Sitz im Leben of midrash tends to emphasize its more populist, volkish, and folkloristic aspects, its appeal to a wide popular audience and its rootedness in oral, popular traditions. While this view is obviously more applicable to the aggadic material, it also argues for a more popular setting for some midrash halakhah as well. Recent scholarship on early Rabbinic history, however, has radically altered the terms within which this traditional conceptualization must be framed. Two separate though related developments in our knowledge of Jewish antiquity are relevant here; both are closely connected to what one recent historian has called the new and revisionist “minimalist” approach to Rabbinic history in contrast to the traditional “maximalist” approach with which previous generations of Jewish historians had depicted the development of Rabbinic Judaism.50 The difference between these two approaches might be summed up briefly as follows. According to the “maximalist” approach, the Rabbinic period is essentially a continuation of the Second Temple period, with the Rabbis inheriting the mantle of the Pharisees, seeking to maintain—despite the changes in national,


social, and economic life—the coherence of the nation and its unity in the hope of serving as the center for Jews throughout the world. In this view, the Rabbis were the religious leaders of the nation, and their laws and prescriptions essentially governed the behavior of Jews. The Rabbis’ preeminent religious and cultural position is reflected in their literature, and that literature can be read as a description of Jewish life with even the disagreements among the Rabbis pointing to deeper social and political conflicts among contemporary Jews.51 The minimalist view calls into question the very assumptions with which the maximalists begin their work of historiography. Instead, it views the history of Palestinian Jewry within the more general context of Roman imperial provincial rule in the Near East. Basing themselves on a narrower, more “suspicious” reading both of what the Rabbis say about themselves and of the available archaeological and material evidence, the minimalists argue that the Rabbis were a class of selfappointed religious experts who, at least in the first two or three centuries after the destruction of the Temple, exerted little power or influence beyond their own circles. Further, these circles themselves were very small. Indeed, according to the estimate of one scholar (who himself was not in fact a minimalist), the number of Rabbinic sages living in Palestine over the 150-year period between 225 and 375 c.e. numbered no more than 367, with an average of 50 to 70 sages active at any one time.52 Admittedly, there was a significant rise in the power of the Rabbinic class in the early third century, during the patriarchate of Rabbi Judah the Prince, when the Rabbis began to establish a foothold in the urban centers of Palestine. As an identifiable class, however, the Rabbis did not have recognized legal authority until the fourth century. Further, at least in the view of some minimalists, the Rabbis did not really succeed in establishing themselves as significant forces in the religious institutions of Palestine Jewry until the sixth century. In the case of the synagogue, for example, it was not until the third century at the earliest that the Rabbis even began to play a significant role in its activities.53 For our present concerns with midrash and the history of its “literature”— that is, the writing down of its traditions and their preservation in anthologies— this new historiography of Rabbinic Judaism has several important implications. In the first place, it suggests that the question as to whether the academy or the synagogue was the site of origin for the Rabbis’ literary production is in a sense misframed. Instead of asking where midrash originated, we would do better to inquire for what audience and to whom this activity could have been addressed. If the minimalist view is even only partially correct, it would appear that, until the mid-third century, the impact and reach of the Rabbinic sages beyond their own small number of teachers and students were so minimal that it is impossible to conceive that what remains in the literature came from anywhere other than the Rabbis’ own tiny circles; so far as we know, the sages had hardly any involvement in synagogues. Indeed, given the fact that education in the circles of the early Rabbis was essentially a matter of master–disciple relationships, even the designation of the term “academy” for their higher educational stratum seems too grandiose.54 If all this is correct, the origins of the material in the tannaitic collections almost certainly lay in these tiny circles and probably not in any more popular


sphere. On the other hand, there can be little question that the formation of these earliest collections as documents was part of the larger spurt of literary production that began with and followed upon R. Judah’s patriarchate, including the “publication” of the Mishnah and, later, of the Tosefta. In whatever way the Mishnah was “published”—whether it was in a memorized oral mode or in a written form— this early codification of Rabbinic law was certainly connected in some way to the increased prestige and role of the patriarchal office and of the Rabbinic class as active participants in Jewish legal discourse in Palestine. One can safely assume that the compilation of the tannaitic midrash anthologies must also have derived from this larger literary and social matrix.55 Along parallel but different lines, the composition and publication of the amoraic “homiletical” anthologies should be viewed within the context of the increased involvement of the Rabbis in synagogue life in Palestine. From the third century on—that is, from the beginning of the amoraic period—many sources attest to the growing presence of sages in the synagogue. This fact is significant because, as I have already remarked, the synagogue, unlike the academy, was not initially under the Rabbis’ control or within their sphere of authority.56 In the third century, however, this state of affairs began to change. Certain Rabbis, like R. Yohanan in Sepphoris and R. Abbahu in Caesarea, became famous as preachers; in Jerome’s oft quoted statement, even gentiles would say to each other, “Come, let us listen to this or that Rabbi who expounds the divine law with such marvelous eloquence.”57 We know too that there were itinerant preachers who traveled from town to town and who were required to come up with sermons on the spot.58 The synagogue was also used by the Rabbis as a site for the education of the young, and it is possible that some of the material in the present collections (especially the non-petihta sections of the amoraic midrashim) could have served as source material for Rabbi-teachers.59 It is immaterial whether the petihtaot that have been preserved in the surviving midrashic collections were once actually delivered in a synagogue, or whether they were the independent literary creations of an editor; the practical difference between the alternatives is historically trivial (since the first possibility would be meaningful only if we could identify the date and place in which the sermon was originally preached). Heinemann’s Sitz im Leben for the petihta as a mini-sermon delivered before the Torah reading in the synagogue still seems the best explanation for the literary-rhetorical form’s unusual shape, and it is this essentially material question (namely, the origin of its shape) that is our basic concern. Is it merely coincidental that the “sudden” rise of the petihta as the dominant literaryrhetorical form in the amoraic collections correlates to the increased role amoraim appear to have taken in Palestinian synagogues in the late third and fourth centuries? Taken together, however circumstantially, these separate facts would seem to indicate that the amoraic anthologies were indeed closely tied to the activity of synagogue preaching. This is true not only of the clear-cut “homiletical” midrashim like VR and PRK, but also of the “exegetical” midrash Bereishit Rabbah (whose organization and chapter divisions, as Joseph Heinemann has shown, originally corresponded to the weekly Torah readings in the triennial Palestinian cycle, and whose “chapters” were marked, as in VR and PRK, with multiple petihtaot,


thereby making Bereishit Rabbah much more similar to VR and PRK than has previously been supposed).60 While our evidence suggests that preaching and teaching were done orally, without the aid of written texts, it is not hard to imagine the need that individual sages would have felt for preachers’ and teachers’ source books, for collections from which they could draw raw material for sermons and lessons. Such source books probably began as private notebooks kept by individual Rabbis and must have slowly grown into the collections that we possess today. Because these books were never more than private notebooks, the strictures against writing down “Oral Torah” were not applied to them. In any case, we know that actual books existed in use in Rabbinic culture—Sifra, for example.61 A famous passage in B. Temura 14b describes the third-century sages R. Yohanan and R. Shimeon ben Lakish studying a sifra deaggadeta, a book of aggadah with scriptural interpretations in it, on a Sabbath afternoon, and there are several other references to such books (though they are not always complimentary in tone).62 To the best of my knowledge, there is unfortunately no explicit reference to preachers’ or teachers’ source books in Rabbinic literature, but we do know of the existence of such books in the Middle Ages in the form of sermon collections and florilegia.63 In fact, however, the Rabbis did not need to confess to the existence of such books, for they were in essence the private tools of their trade. No one other than preachers read these books, no one read them in place of sermons, and what most people heard and doubtless related to each other were reports of spoken sermons delivered in synagogues. So why mention the source books that were no more than private notebooks in any case? That the midrashic collections were originally source books for professionals, anthologies to be used by preachers and teachers, and not texts to be read or studied, probably best explains their origins as documents and their spare, laconic, almost stenographic literary form. The highly stereotyped, symmetrical, and organized discourse of so many midrashic literary-rhetorical forms—the petihta, the mashal, the regularized enumeration—all suggest an “outline form” rather than an actually delivered sermon, while the telegraphed nature of so many midrashic passages suggests that these were also not literary compositions meant as “finished” texts. The most accurate description for the larger works containing such passages is that of a trade manual compiled for professionals in the field. To repeat: these books were not composed to be read in any ordinary sense of the term. At some point, however—precisely when, we do not know—people did begin to read and study these books. Our earliest evidence for this change in how these books were perceived and appreciated (and eventually used) comes not in the form of documentary evidence to the change but in the rewriting of their contents to make them look less anthological and fragmented and more coherent and continuous as exegetical narratives in their own right. This change first appears in the “late” midrashim of the Tanhuma school, which, as scholars have shown, consciously revise, and thereby “rewrite,” earlier midrashic traditions, smoothing out their rough edges, eliminating the most frequent gaps and inconsistencies in their atomistic interpretations, and seeking to find a more continuous interpretive approach that can span the separate exegeses of an entire section or episode. Whether or not the editors/composers of the Tanhuma collections actually read


Bereishit Rabbah (for example) in more or less its present form, they seem to have been familiar with the text in one stage of its formation, and they “read” that text rather than merely “used” it as a source book for sermons.64 At some later point, students probably began to read the various midrashic collections as true commentaries, that is, as supplementary texts to be read alongside the primary text, Scriptures. Eventually the midrashic tradition was preserved for popular Jewish culture by becoming subsumed in a genuine commentary, the first complete Jewish commentary on the Bible, that of Rashi. By this point, however, the anthology had yielded its role as the primary literary medium for the preservation and recording of biblical exegesis to the commentary proper, and late antiquity in turn had yielded to the Middle Ages.

Appendix: On the Composition of the Petihta As was noted earlier,65 the late Joseph Heinemann proposed a form-critical explanation for the petihta, or midrashic proem, and its unusual shape.66 In the body of this chapter I summarized Heinemann’s proposal and his putative Sitz im Leben for the form’s original setting, both of which seem to me convincing. Heinemann’s proposal, however, concentrated solely upon the literary-rhetorical form’s “shell,” its beginning and end. In an as yet uncompleted study in which I have been engaged now for several years, I have been studying the inner contents of the petihta, the “exegetical bridge” by means of which the preacher connects the opening petihta verse to the concluding lectionary verse. The primary focus of the study is the types of harizah used in this exegetical bridge, harizah being the technical term for the rules of exegesis according to which the preacher connects the opening and closing verses.67 The study is based on analyses of approximately 400 petihtaot preserved in the classical amoraic collections of Bereishit Rabbah, Vayikra Rabbah, and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Two assumptions underlie the study: first, it is possible to categorize all petihtaot according to inner structure and their types of harizah; and second, these structures and types of harizah constituted compositional conventions that were familiar to all preachers. The following are the various types of petihtaot as based on their structures and methods of harizah. All petihtaot can be categorized as either simple or complex. The Complex Petihta: The complex petihta uses an identifiable midrashic literaryrhetorical form other than harizah as the primary bridge between the opening and closing verses. That other literary form might be a parable (mashal), an anecdote or exemplum (maaseh), an exegetical enumeration, or some other prominent literary form in midrash. For example, in the following petihta on Genesis 1:6 (Bereishit Rabbah 4:1), the anonymous author uses a simple “custom of the world” parable. It is written, “He sets the rafters of his lofts in the waters” (Ps. 104:3). It is the custom of the world that a king-of-flesh-and-blood builds a palace and makes the roof out of stones and wood and dirt. But the Holy One, blessed be He, made the roof for His world out of water! as it is said, “He sets the rafters (hamekareh) of his loft in the waters”—“And God said, Let there be an expanse (raki’a) in the midst of the water” (Gen. 1:6). The word raki’a in Genesis 1:6 is interpreted as “roof” through a pun on the word hamekareh in Psalms 104:3, but the connection between the two verses is made via the parable.

130 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism The Simple Petihta: The simple petihta makes its connection solely through exegesis, that is, harizah. There are three different modes of harizah and hence three different types of simple petihtaot. Type I: In this type, the opening petihta verse is “atomized,” or parsed into its smaller phrases and segments, and each unit is then interpreted separately according to a single thematic or interpretive logic. VR 20:1, translated earlier in the article, is a typical example of this type; Ecclesiates 9:2 is atomized into its separate phrases, and then each phrase is interpreted as referring to a different pair of wicked and righteous biblical figures. The following petihta from Bereishit Rabbah 3:3, on Genesis 1:4, is a much briefer example of the type: R. Shimeon ben Yohai recited a petihta (patah): “Joy to a man is a ready response, and a timely word is how good!” (Prov. 15: 23). “Joy to a man”—this is the Holy One, blessed be He: “The Lord is a man of war” (Exod. 15:3). “is a ready response”—“And God said, Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3). “and a timely word is how good”—“And God saw that the light was good” (Gen. 1:4). This petihta is virtually pure exegesis, indeed almost stenographic in its brevity. The only nonscriptural insertion is the identification of the word “man” in Proverbs 15:23 as referring to God, a deliberately shocking exegesis which is then confirmed through the citation of Exodus 15:3. Type II: In this type, the exegetical bridge is made not by dividing the opening petittha verse up into smaller units but by interpreting the entire verse (or section of the verse) three or more times. Bereishit Rabbah 8:1, translated earlier, is a typical example of this type. The opening verse, and especially the opening phrase of that verse, “Before and behind You created me; You lay upon me Your palm” (Psalms 139:5), is interpreted some eight times. In many cases, this type of petihta also uses the petirah form, identifying the verse as “speaking about” or “being applied to” a series of different Biblical figures. For a typical example, see VR 1:4, where Psalms 89:2 is “applied to” Abraham, David, and Moses. Type III: As in Type II, the entire verse is interpreted but in this type, there are always only two interpretations, and the second interpretation always contrasts deliberately with the first interpretation. The following example, from Bereishit Rabbah 60:1, is a petihta for Genesis. 24:12. It is written: “Who among you reveres the Lord, heeds the voice of his servant; is the one who walks in darkness, and has no light; let him trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon his God” (Isa. 50:10). “Who among you reveres the Lord”—this is Abraham. “heeds the voice of his servant”—[heeds the word of the Holy One, Blessed be He, to His servant]. “is the one who walks in darkness”—from Mesopotamia and its environs. “and has no light”—And who did light up [the path] for him? The Holy One, blessed be He, lit up for him every place where he went. “let him trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon his God”—“And You found his heart true to You” (Neh. 9:8). “Who among you reveres the Lord”—this is Eliezer. “heeds the voice of his servant”—who was the servant of Abraham. “is the one who walks in darkness”—at the time that he went to bring back Rebecca.

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 131 “and has no light”—And who did light up [the path] for him? The Holy One, blessed be He, lit it up for him with shooting stars and lightning. “let him trust in the name of the Lord and rely upon his God”—“And he said, ‘O Lord, God of my master Abraham, etc.” (Gen. 24:12). The petihta interprets the entire verse twice, once in relation to Abraham, the other in relation to Abraham’s servant, Eliezer. Inasmuch as one is the master and the other his servant, the two biblical figures may be said to be opposites, and in a comparable sense the two interpretations are also opposites, or two sides of a single coin. In its biblical context, the subject of the petihta, its lectionary verse, is spoken by Eliezer, who recites the verse as a prayer to God in which he invokes God as the God of his master Abraham. The petihta’s audience would probably have assumed once they heard the preacher quote Isaiah 50:10 that he would apply the verse to Eliezer. Contrary to their expectations, though, he first applies it to Abraham, who, we learn almost immediately, is God’s servant. Rhetorically, the effect of this counterinterpretation, as it were, is to make the second, more predictable interpretation (in reference to Eliezer) less predictable. For now we know that if Abraham is Eliezer’s master, then God is Abraham’s master. When Abraham’s servant, Eliezer, then addresses God as the God of his master Abraham, he is only placing himself in a natural hierarchy, appealing to the master of his master. We now see both Eliezer and Abraham in a new light, and we understand why Eliezer makes a point of invoking his master’s name so as to remind God that not only is Abraham his—Eliezer’s—master; he is also God’s servant. As the reader will note, the two halves of this petihta are also strikingly symmetrical, with the same phrases and constructions repeated in symmetrical positions in the two halves of the petihta. This is the same phenomenon we saw in VR 20:1 and Bereishit Rabbah 8: 1, and it should now be clear that the different modes of harizah are not only different techniques of exegesis but also different frameworks in which a preacher was able to organize a petihta and its micro-exegeses in symmetrical patterns. In this sense, one may understand how these conventions and the rule of symmetry actually facilitated the composition of petihtaot. For once a preacher knew the rules of composition, and once he had chosen his opening petihta verse and the mode of harizah that he would use (which clearly was dictated in part by the verse he had chosen for his petihta verse, since some verses are more naturally appropriate to one mode than to others), the task before him—to construct an exegetical bridge to the lectionary verse—was clear. There are several additional compositional rules that underlie the use of these different types of conventions. First, different techniques of harizah are often employed in subordinate sections in the same petihta. For example, a Type II petihta, which interprets its petihta verse multiple times, will often use the atomization technique of Type I (parsing the verse up into its component phrases and then interpreting each one separately but according to a single consecutive logic) as a subordinated mode of exegesis in each of its individual sections. So, too, Type I petihtaot sometimes use either Type II or Type III techniques of multiple applications of a single phrase or word in each of their individual segments. Second, one of the individual exegeses in the petihta will often beget a “loop” or digressive interpretation. These loops often reenact in miniature the overall exegetical structure of the larger petihta. Generally, these “loops” also come near the beginning of the petihta, although in at least one document (PRK) they regularly come closer to its end. Third, deviations from symmetry commonly come at the end of the petihta and are used for purposes of closure. In addition to being a compositional and organizational tool, then, symmetry may also be an esthetic criterion of this highly architectonic form.68 Obviously, there are varying degrees of symmetry, and some petihtaot are more symmetrical than others. It is a rare petihta, however, that exhibits no clear signs of symmetry, just as there is almost no petihta

132 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism that is not constructed along the model of one of the types I have described. Which is to say: If there is a1, there will be a2. In its use of symmetry and in its adherence to the compositional types, the petihta thus receives its shape and its stability as an anthological form.

Notes I wish to thank Rachel Anisfeld, Jacob Elbaum, Marc Hirshman, Tammy Jacobowitz, Tamar Kadari, and Burt Visotzky for reading and commenting upon earlier versions of this essay. 1. Sanhedrin 34a; cf. Shabbat 88b, and my chapter on “Midrash and Hermeneutics” in Midrash and Theory (Evanston, 1996), esp. pp. 17ff. 2. This distinction was already made by L. Zunz in Die Gottesdientlichen Vortrage der Juden Historisch Entwickelt (2nd ed. 1892), translated to Hebrew as Haderashot Biyisrael (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 79; and restated by Chanoch Albeck in his introduction to J. TheodorCh. Albeck, Bereschit Rabba (Berlin, 1912–36; repr. with corrections, Jerusalem, 1965), vol. 3, part I, p. 1; and M. Margulies, Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah (Jerusalem, 1953–54), part V, pp. ix–x. The exegetical midrashim are usually considered to include all the tannaitic (aka halakhic) midrashim and the amoraic collections Bereishit (Genesis) Rabbah and Eikhah (Lamentations) Rabbah. The classical homiletical midrashim are Vayikra (Leviticus) Rabbah and Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. The postclassical Tanhuma collections (Tanhuma itself, Shemot Rabbah II, Bamidbar (Numbers) Rabbah, and Devarim (Deuteronomy) Rabbah) combine features of both earlier types. 3. Neusner has worked out his “documentary hypothesis” in a slew of works, as is his habit; for a clear and summary statement of his position, see Comparative Midrash:The Plan and Program of Genesis and Leviticus Rabbah, Brown Judaic Series (Atlanta, 1986), 1–19. The references in the last sentence to “producers,” “authors,” and “editors” is mine; Neusner tends to avoid the problem of naming the human agents responsible for the production of the document by personifying the works themselves (as though they were self-created). 4. Neusner, Comparative Midrash, 15. 5. See the essays in Shaye J. S. Cohen, ed., The Synoptic Problem in Rabbinic Literature (Providence, 2000), esp. R. Goldenberg, “Is ‘The Talmud’ a Document?” pp. 3–10, and Hans Jurgen Becker, “Texts and History: The Dynamic Relationship between Talmud Yerushalmi and Genesis Rabbah,” pp. 145–58. 6. See Goldenberg, “Is ‘The Talmud,’ ” 7–8, who speaks directly about the “anterior” documents that lie “behind,” such as Mishnah or the Bavli, and can no longer be recovered as independent documents; his argument certainly includes the component literary forms in such texts. 7. On Bereishit Rabbah, see Philip Alexander, “Pre-Emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabba’s Reading of the Story of Creation,” in JJS 43 (1992):230–45, and on the Song of Songs, my forthcoming article, “Ancient Jewish Exegesis of the Song of Songs and the Problem of Comparative Exegesis,” in Jewish Biblical Interpretation in a Comparative Context, ed. Natalie Dohrmann and David Stern (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 8. J. Z. Lauterbach, “The Arrangement and the Division of the Mekilta,” HUCA 1 (1924):433. Compare Judah Goldin’s comments in The Song at the Sea (New Haven, Conn., 1971), pp. 3–12, but note, too, the presence of the songlike passages in which the midrash

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 133 re-enacts Israel’s song to God with its own song, and the clear allusion at the Shirta’s very conclusion to its beginning (see Goldin’s notes ad loc., p. 248). 9. Shir Hashirim Rabbah, ed. S. Dunsky (Jerusalem, 1980), p. 146 10. See Shlomo Naeh, “The Structure and Division of Torah Kohanim (B): Parashot, Perakim, Halakhot,” Tarbiz 69 (1999):72–76; and “The Structure and Division of Torah Kohanim (A):Megillot” Tarbiz 66 (1996):485–86. Naeh argues that there were two methods of organizing halakhic midrashic texts in the ancient world: one, according to the order of Scripture and its divisions (essentially sequentially, and into parashiyot); the other, hierarchically, corresponding to the way the texts were studied. The Sifra was originally organized according to the first system; early on, however, the second system was superimposed upon the first, thus creating a double organization of parashiyot and of perakim. As Naeh has shown in the first part of his study, Sifra was first written down (probably in the Babylonian Rabbinic period) in nine scrolls whose contents were determined neither by the parashiyot or perakim but by simple considerations of length. 11. I have deliberately omitted from my discussion the question as to whether there existed different schools of exegesis among the early tannaim (namely, the School of Rabbi Akiva and that of R. Ishmael), and whether these schools were responsible for the editing and redaction of different collections; on the history of scholarship on these schools, see Jay M. Harris, How Do We Know This?: Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism (Albany, N.Y., 1995), and H. L. Strack and G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis, 1996), pp. 247–51. Significantly, whatever terminological differences may exist between collections from the supposed different “schools,” none of the parallel collections have any significant organizational or structural differences. All are exegetical and both tend to follow the same passages. 12. For this definition of the simana denehemta, see Margulies, Midrash Wayyikra Rabbah (Jerusalem, 1953–54), part V, p. xii. The nature of the peroration is often misunderstood, partly because of its title, as necessarily requiring an explicit reference to the final redemption. This is not the case. 13. Most of the features of the homiletical collection were already identified by J. Theodor, “Zur Composition der agadischen Homilien,” MGWJ 28 (1879):271–78, 337–50, 408–18, 455–62; MGWJ 29 (1880):10–23; they are reiterated and expanded by Albeck, “Midrash Vayyiqra Rabba,” (Hebrew) Louis Ginzberg Festschrift (New York, 1945), pp. 25–43. After completing this article, I was fortunate to receive an extremely important new book by Burton L. Visotzy, Golden Bells and Pomegranates (Tuebingen, 2003), the first booklength study to be written about Vayikra Rabbah and a very significant advance in our understanding of both VR and the homiletical midrash. Visotzky develops some of the same ideas that I pursue in this article, albeit in different directions. Wherever possible at this late stage in writing, I will refer to Visotzky’s suggestions; at the outset I should also say that some of my contentions may require re-thinking in light of Visotzky’s arguments. 14. Joseph Heinemann, “The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba” (Hebrew), Hasifrut 8 (1969–71):809–34; “Profile of a Midrash: The Art of Composition in Leviticus Rabba,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (1971):141–50. The latter is essentially an abbreviated version of the earlier Hebrew article. 15. Heinemann, “Profile of a Midrash,” 146; 150. 16. See, for example, the end of the “Art of Composition” (in Hasifrut) where Heinemann goes through the chapters in VR and assesses the relative unity of each. On organic unity in the midrashic collections see also N. J. Cohen, “Scripture and Editing in the Homiletic Midrashim,” AJS Review 6 (1981):1–20. The most trenchant criticism of Heinemann is in Jacob Neusner’s “Bibliographical Essay, Joseph Heinemann on Leviticus Rabbah,” in Neusner, Judaism and Scripture: The Evidence of Leviticus Rabbah (Chicago, 1986):

134 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism 130–36. Ironically, though not really surprisingly, given his documentary approach, Neusner himself adopts a view of VR’s unity that in certain respects argues for an even stronger coherence—a “logos of both intellect and aesthetics,” “a sustained syllogism” (7)—than did Heinemann. According to Neusner, VR is the first Rabbinic document to be “organized solely around large-scale theological themes” (10). 17. On this homily, see my chapter in Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996), pp. 55–71; the chapter is a revised version of an article that first appeared as “Midrash and the Language of Exegesis,” in Midrash and Literature, ed. by G. Hartman and S. Budick (New Haven, Conn., 1986), pp. 105–24. The reader should note that over the years my views have changed considerably about the “unity” of the chapters in the homiletical midrashim. In the article as it first appeared in Midrash and Literature, I still accepted Heinemann’s basic contention that there was some kind of unity even if not “organic” to the chapters. In the revised version of the article in Midrah and Theory, I tried to back off from that contention. In the present essay, I dispute the claim entirely although I do argue for a common exegetical approach that informs many if not all the exegeses in the chapter. 18. See my article, “Vayikra Rabbah and My Life in Midrash,” Prooftexts 21 (2001):23–38. 19. See the articles cited in nn. 16 and 17. 20. On this contradiction in particular, see my article cited in n. 17. 21. One could cite virtually any other chapter in either VR or PRK as a similar example of this anthological impulse. Just to give one additional example: VR 20 (⫽ PRK 26) deals with the Torah reading beginning with Leviticus 16:1, a verse that introduces the account of the famous scapegoat ritual. This chapter also appears in Pesikta deRav Kahana as the “sermon” for Yom Kippur, which is hardly surprising since the scapegoat ritual was performed in the Temple on Yom Kippur and because Leviticus 16:1ff. was the Torah reading for Yom Kippur. (According to J. Heinemann, “Chapters in Vayikra Rabbah Whose Originality Is Disputed,” Tarbiz 37 [1968]:339–54, the chapter originated in PRK and was later copied over to VR.) In any case, the chapter makes no allusion to the scapegoat ritual but concentrates entirely on the opening verse of the reading, “The Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who drew close to the presence of the Lord . . . ,” and specifically on the phrase “after the death of the two sons of Aaron.” This phrase alludes, of course, to the terrifying story told several chapters earlier in Leviticus 10:1–3 about how, at the conclusion of the joyous eight-day ceremony dedicating the sanctuary, Aaron’s two sons Nadav and Avihu offered up a “strange fire” on the altar and were immediately consumed by a divine fire. In what is one of the most astounding compositions in Rabbinic literature, the chapter collects what is in effect an anthology of differing interpretations and traditions about the deaths of Nadav and Avihu including various views as to the sins they commited that “justified” their deaths as punishment; a highly cynical view that uses their deaths as “proof” of the claim that the the righteous and the wicked suffer the same fate; and traditions that argue that their deaths took place solely to ensure the atonement of others (implicitly equating them and their deaths to the fate of martyrs). Needless to say, the chapter as a whole makes no effort to reconcile these different, often contradictory views. What “unifies” them is the fact that they all serve the common function of seeing Nadav and Avihu as implicit surrogates for the “scapegoat” whose ritual could no longer be performed in the Temple; their deaths, in other words, become the focal point of the anxiety over life and death that pervades the Yom Kippur liturgy. On this chapter, and on Rabbinic traditions about Nadav and Avihu, see Avigdor Shinan, “The Sins of Nadav and Avihu in Rabbinic Aggadah,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz 48 (1979): 201–14.

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 135 22. J. Heinemann, “Structure and Organization [Division] in Midrash Bereishit Rabbah,” Bar-Ilan 9 (1972):279–89. 23. W. Sibley Towner, Rabbinic “Enumeration of Scriptural Examples” (Leiden, 1973). 24. Joseph Heinemann, “The Proem in Aggadic Midrashim: A Form-Critical Study,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 22 (1971):100–122. 25. Heinemann assumed that the parashiyot in VR and PRK correlated with the Torah readings as the Torah was read in one or the other triennial cycles as practiced in Palestinian synagogues, although he also argued that the division was not uniform and had many variants. This latter view has been called into question by some more recent studies; see, for example, Shlomo Naeh, “Orders of Reading the Torah in Eretz Yisrael: A New Inquiry” (Hebrew) Tarbiz 67 (1998):167–87. 26. See Richard S. Sarason, “The Petihtaot in Leviticus Rabbah: ‘Oral Homilies’ or Redactional Constructions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982):557–67. 27. See Margulies’s note ad loc., p. 443; the text is probably slightly defective. In Koheleth R., R. Yitzhak adds: The word tov means “Torah.” 28. Margulies (ad loc.), p. 444, explains that Samson, by making the Philistines swear, proved that he himself feared the power of oaths. 29. On this, see Margulies’s notes ad loc.; and Avigdor Shinan, “Letorat Hapetihta,” Mehkerei Yerushalayim Besifrut Ivrit 1 (1981):133–43. 30. The word tsaretani literally means “hedged” or “fenced me in.” The midrash here is based upon a “misreading” of the word through the “minor” addition of the tiny letter yod to its beginning so as to make it read yetsaretani, “you created me.” 31. The Rabbis take kedem as “east” and ahor as its opposite. 32. In other words, man’s spirit was created at the beginning of the sixth day, and his body at the end of that day. 33. Here, again, they take the word ruah as referring to the messiah’s soul to prove that the same word in Genesis 1:2 referred not to God’s own spirit but to the spirit of the messiah, namely, his soul which had already been created. 34. A serious study of Rabbinic androgony and cosmogony is an urgent desideratum; for the present, see E. E. Urbach’s chapter on creation in HaZaL; Gary A. Anderson, The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville, 2001); and G.M.G. Teugels, “The Creation of the Human in Rabbinic Interpretation,” in G. P. Luttikhuizen, ed., The Creation of Man and Woman (Leiden, 2000), pp. 107–27. Louis Ginzberg’s footnotes to his retelling of the Creation story in Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1925), vol. 5:88–89, remain to this day a valuable bibliography of cross-references to both Rabbinic views and their parallels in other ancient traditions, both ancient Near Eastern and classical. The best-known part of the petihta, and the sole part that is usually cited, is no. 3, in particular the exchange between Samuel b. Nahman and his anonymous interlocutors over the question as to whether the word tsela means “rib” or “side,” and its bearing upon the difference (or agreement) between the two Creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. For a recent attempt to see the exchange as support of the claim that the Rabbis did not necessarily privilege the “rib story” and its implied misogyny, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley, Cal., 1993), pp. 42–46. In fact, if the passage is viewed within the context of other ancient cosmogonic theories, the passage may hold a somewhat different, and more surprising meaning. As is often noted, the “androgyne” theory of man’s creation has an intriguing parallel in Aristophanes’ famous speech on the origins of love in Plato’s Symposium (189d, 190d); in addition, Ginzberg cites a number of other parallels in ancient literature (most of which, I must confess, I have not been able to locate). One does not have to assume that the Rabbis knew the Aristophanes’ story (or Plato’s Symposium) firsthand to suppose that they were familiar in one way or another with the “myth,” and indeed,

136 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism may have known it as one regnant “scientific” explanation for how the two genders came into existence. Given this possibility, the debate between R. Samuel b. Nahman and his interlocutors may have to be understood as being over the question, in effect: Which version of the creation of woman is less implausible—the rib story or the androgyne myth? Significantly, Samuel b. Nahman opts not for the biblical rib story (which, it is clear from the exchange, is the dominant interpretation for the word tsela ) but for the latter—probably because it was widely known in the ancient world generally and was therefore a more plausible “scientific” explanation. 35. See, for the present, Philip Alexander, “Pre-Emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabba’s Reading of the Story of Creation,” in JJS 43 (1992): 230–45; cf. as well Robert Hayward, “Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer and Targum Pseudo-Jonathan,” JJS 42 (1991). 36. On the exegetical enumeration, see Towner, Rabbinic “Enumeration of Scriptural Examples”; on the mashal, see David Stern, Parables in Midrash: Exegesis and Narrative in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 24–45; on the exegetical narrative, Ophra Meir, Hasippur Hadarshani Bivreishit Rabbah (Tel Aviv, 1987). 37. See Shinan, “Letorah Hapetihta” (n. 29 of this essay). 38. See, for example, the interpretation of R. Meir in Bereishit Rabbah 36:1 about God’s behavior during the flood, to which the Rabbis respond, “Enough, Meir!” Or the similar exchange between Meir and the Rabbis in VR 5:1. Or the exchange between R. Yosi ben Dormaskit and R. Judah in Sifre Deuteronomy, ed. L. Finkelstein (New York, 1969), p. 7. Or the famous exchange in B. Sanhedrin 67b between Akiva and Eliezer ben Azariah on the giant frog in Exodus 8:2. 39. See the references in n. 7. 40. B. Sanhedrin 34a; cf. B. Shabbat 88b. For the midrash behind this interpretation, see my rejoinder, “Literary Criticism or Literary Homilies? Susan Handelman and the Contemporary Study of Midrash,” Prooftexts 5 (1985):102–3, n. 1. 41. B. Eruvin 13b. 42. Bamidbar Rabbah 13:15; cf. Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer o Midrah Shloshim u-Shtayim Middot, ed. H. G. Enelow, p. 45. On the phrase, see Jacob Elbaum, Lehavin Divrei Hakhamim (Jerusalem, 2000), p. 93, n. 78, and the bibliography Elbaum cites there. 43. On the question of midrashic polysemy and its relation to modern critical notions of indeterminacy as well as to ancient historical contexts, see my article “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (1988):132–62; reprinted and somewhat revised in David Stern, Midrash and Theory: Ancient Jewish Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996), pp. 15–39. See also Catherine Hezser, “Social Fragmentation, Plurality of Opinion, and Nonobservance of Halakhah: Rabbis and Community in Late Roman Palestine,” in Jewish Studies Quarterly 1 (1993–94): 234–51, who makes much the same point I do, though using very different evidence; I cannot help but note, however, that her references to my article and her summary thereof on p. 249, n. 65, grotesquely misrepresent what I say in the article. More recently, Daniel Boyarin in an article to be published in a volume on the Yerushalmi and Greco-Roman culture, to be edited by Peter Schaefer, and in Boyarin’s own forthcoming book, argues persuasively that the various ideological statements in the passages I cite in the text (and that are typically cited as proof of the Rabbinic ideology of polysemy) are all late Babylonian texts and reflect an ideology that first emerges in the Bavli as part of a Rabbinic ideology of orthodoxy and heresy. I wish to thank Boyarin for allowing me to read his manuscript. 44. Midrash and Theory, 33; for Ancient Near Eastern and other biblical parallels, see Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia, 1985), and especially Tigay’s article on Deuteronomy and Anthology in the Bible in this volume. 45. For Origen’s use of stenographers, see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History VI, xxxvi,

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 137 trans. J.E.L. Oulton (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), vol. 2, pp. 89–91. On Origen and the redaction of other early Christian sermons, see the helpful introduction by Mary B. Cunningham and Pauline Allen to their edited book, Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden, 1998), pp. 1–20, and 11–12 in particular. See also Hughes Oliphant Old, The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, vol. 1: The Biblical Period (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1998), pp. 312–13. 46. Marc Hirshman, “The Greek Fathers and the Aggada on Ecclesiastes: Formats of Exegesis in Late Antiquity,” HUCA 59 (1988):137–65; cf. Emilien Lamirande, “Etude bibliographique sur les Peres de l’Eglise et l’Aggadot,” Vigiliae Christianae 21 (1967): 1– 11. 47. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1970), p. 371, cited and quoted in Hirshman, “Greek Fathers,” 164. On the use of the Bible as a rubric for education, see the references in my article “On Canonization in Rabbinic Judaism” in M. Finkelberg and G. Stroumsa, Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (Leiden, 2003), pp. 227–52, esp. 237–40. 48. For another example of such a “functional genre,” see Visotzky in Golden Bells and Pomegranates, pp. 23–40, who invokes the Hellenistic genre of the “miscellany” as a possible precedent for VR. The literary models he invokes are those of Aelian’s Historical Miscellany as well as the sketch drawn by Lucian in his satire, “How to Write History.” Visotzky also makes the very interesting suggestion that the terms petihta and gufa (for the two parts of the chapters in VR) may be paralleled by Lucian’s terms “proem” and “body” for the two parts of the historical collection/miscellany he describes. 49. See, for example, Zunz, Haderashot Biyisrael, pp. 163–75; Saul Lieberman, Greek in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1965) p. 161; Jonah Fraenkel, Darkhe Aggadah Vemidrash (Jerusalem, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 16–44; Marc Hirshman, “The Preacher and His Public in ThirdCentury Palestine,” JJS 42 (1991):108–14. 50. I borrow these terms specifically from Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 b.c.e. to 640 c.e. (Princeton, N.J.: 2001); see esp. 2–14 and throughout the book. The other “minimalist” historians who have had an impact on my thinking in regard to the question I discuss are Shaye Cohen, in his many articles and books; Lee I. Levine, The Rabbinic Class of Roman Palestine in Late Antiquity (Jerusalem, 1985) and articles cited in other footnotes; and Catherine Hezser, The Social Structure of the Rabbinic Movement in Roman Palestine (Tuebingen, 1997). By “maximalist” historians, I refer specifically to the major historians of the last century, including Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (Jerusalem, 1980); Michael Avi-Yonah, The Jews of Palestine (New York, 1976), Shmuel Safrai, in his many articles; not to mention still earlier figures like Graetz, Zeitlin, Finkelstein, Halevi, and Weiss. Needless to say, the historical sketch I offer in the next paragraph is radically simplified and truncated. 51. Schwartz, Imperialism, p. 6. 52. Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud, Babli and Yerushalmi (Tel Aviv, 1969), pp. 669–81; cited in Levine, The Rabbinic Class, pp. 66–67. In contrast, as Levine notes, other maximalist scholars like Hyman and Safrai estimated the number of sages in Palestine as being between 2,000 and 3,400. 53. Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, Conn., 2000), pp. 460–61. See also Levine’s essay, “The Sages and the Synagogue in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of the Galilee,” in Lee I. Levine, The Galilee in Late Antiquity (New York, 1992), pp. 201–22. Schwartz’s view is even more radical: he does not see Rabbinic involvement in the synagogue documented as truly significant until the rise of piyyut in the sixth century (pp. 263–74). 54. On Rabbinic master–disciple circles, see Shaye J. D.Cohen, “Patriarchs and Scho-

138 Ancient Israel and Classical Judaism larchs,” PAAJR 48 (1981):57–85; Martin Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 b.c.e.–400 c.e. (New York, 2001). 55. The idea of the oral publication of the Mishnah was first broached by Saul Lieberman in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York, 1950), pp. 83–99. See now, however, Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tuebingen, 2001), pp. 427–28, who strongly contests Lieberman’s theory. 56. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 469–70. For a general introduction to Rabbinic preaching in the talmudic period, see Joseph Heinemann’s introduction to his collection, Derashot Betsibur Bitekufat Hatalmud (Jerusalem, 1982), pp. 7–28. 57. Jerome, In Ezek. 33:33, quoted in Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, p. 462; on the Rabbis in the synagogue, see Levine, pp. 458–63. 58. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 549–51. For an itinerant preacher, see VR 3: 6 for one example. 59. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue, pp. 462–63. 60. For Bereishit Rabbah, see J. Heinemann, “Structure and Organization [Division] in Midrash Bereishit Rabbah,” Bar-Ilan 9 (1972):279–89. The literature on PRK is relatively sparse but two important, as yet unpublished studies deserve to be mentioned. Elsie Stern is currently completing a monograph based on her University of Chicago dissertation in which she studies the chapters in PRK devoted to the Sabbaths before and after Tisha B’av (the telata depur’anita’ and the shiv’ata denehemta), and Jacob Elbaum, in an article to be published in a festschrift for Jonah Fraenkel, has studied the chapter in PRK devoted to Shabbat Shuvah (the Sabbath before Yom Kippur). In both cases, the chapters, which are devoted primarily to exegeses of haftarot from the Prophets, are clearly not determined by the Torah lectionary; in fact, these chapters in PRK are our earliest evidence for the dedication of these special Sabbaths in the first place. So far as we know, the latter may even be the “products” of the midrash (and its editors) rather than a reflection of an existing liturgical practice. As Elbaum notes, several manuscripts preserve the eleven chapters for the eleven special Sabbaths as a separate collection called Midrash Aftarot. 61. See Shlomo Naeh’s articles on Sifra (cited earlier in n. 10). 62. See as well the story in B. Berakhot 23a–b about R. Yohanan; in B. Sanhedrin 57b, the Babylonian Amora is mentioned as seeing a halakhah in a sifra de’aggadeta. For other references to Palestinian Rabbis, see Strack and Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, p. 34. 63. The classic text on medieval sermon aids (primarily of the thirteenth century) remains Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979), esp. pp. 3–92. See as well Siegfried Wenzel, “Sermon Collections and Their Taxonomy,” in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. S. G. Nichols and S. Wenzel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996), pp. 7–22. 64. On these tendencies in Tanhuma and other “late” Rabbinic midrashic texts, see Jacob Elbaum, “From Sermon to Story: The Transformation of the Akedah,” Prooftexts 6 (1986): 97–116; “Between Redaction and Rewriting—On the Nature of the Later Midrashic Literature” (Hebrew), Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Section 3 (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62. See as well Elbaum’s article on the Yalkutim in this volume. 65. See n.23. 66. This appendix summarizes a lecture I delivered on “Composition and Meaning in the Petihta” at the Twelfth World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem in August 1997. 67. The term harizah, literally “stringing together,” is borrowed from the famous story in Song of Songs Rabbah 1:52 (ed. Dunsky, p. 42), which describes flames descending from

Anthology and Polysemy in Classical Midrash 139 heaven as Ben Azzai sits and studies (doreish), whereupon Akiva accuses Ben Azzai of studying the esoteric “works of creation” and Ben Azzai denies it, saying he was only sitting and “stringing together” (horeiz) words of Torah. 68. There is a clear parallel here to the esthetics of piyyut; on the topic, see pro temp, Ezra Fleischer, Shirat Hakodesh Ha’ivrit Biyemei Habeinayim (Jerusalem, 1975) pp. 62–63. I hope to explore this parallel in the future.


ii

THE MIDDLE AGES


7 joseph tabory

The Prayerbook (Siddur) as an Anthology of Judaism

he prayerbook, or siddur, is certainly one of the most popular books among

TJews. If a member of the people of the book owns only one Jewish book, it is most likely to be a siddur rather than a Bible. The siddur is perhaps the most 1

explicit example of an anthology in Judaism and may arguably be considered not just an anthology of prayers but an anthology of Judaism—for the Jewish prayerbook is a veritable museum of the Jewish people. It contains passages from almost all periods of Jewish history, from the Bible to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel, and mementos from many of the lands in which Jews lived. In addition to its importance as a book of prayer, it may also serve as an anthology of Jewish literature, as it contains representatives from almost all branches of this literature. In addition to the prayers themselves and the extensive poetic selections that serve as prayer, one can find in the prayerbook passages from the Bible, tannaitic and amoraic literature, selections from mystical and devotional literature, philosophical statements such as the creed that begins “I Believe,” together with historical literature such as Megillat antiochus. One might say that if one were required to choose one Jewish book to take to the proverbial desert island, it would be hard to find a better choice than the prayerbook, an anthology of all of Jewish life and literature. However, in this discussion of the siddur we must be aware that there is no standard edition of the siddur nor can there be one. When we refer to the siddur, we refer not to a single book but to a genre of anthologies, whether printed or in manuscript, that contain collections of Jewish prayers and other matter. Some of these books try to be comprehensive, while others are avowedly selective. Thus we find siddurim that include Kol bo or Otsar in their titles, implying that they are meant to be comprehensive collections, and we also find siddurim (or mahfi zorim) that include only select prayers for special occasions: prayerbooks for the Sabbath; prayerbooks for holidays; prayerbooks that include only the weekday evening services; prayerbooks for the table, which include blessings before and after the meal, sometimes together with selections of poetry for singing at the 143

144 The Middle Ages

Sabbath meals; and prayerbooks with other selections.2 To understand the history of this genre and of its contents, it would be well to begin with an understanding of the anthological principles behind these creations. It would seem that most anthologies can be ascribed to one of two motivations: either what one might call a collective principle or what one might call a selective principle. The former is present when one tries to collect scattered material to create a corpus, frequently because the individual items are short and may easily be disregarded and lost. This was apparently the motivation for creating the early anthology of Greek epigrams and, hitting closer to home, the motivation attributed by the Rabbis to those who collected the Twelve Prophets into one book of Latter Prophets. This was apparently the motivation of Judah David Eisenstein, who may well be described as “the master of anthologies.”3 The selective principle is evident when one is faced with a vast corpus of material and it is thought that one cannot master it all. The anthologist believes that it is his task to select from this unwieldy corpus representative material in order to put a manageable composition before the reader. He may often select what he considers its most important items and present his selection as an anthology meant to give the reader a taste for this type of literature and an introduction to the corpus without it being necessary to study or read it all. However, there are other selective principles, such as the desire to prepare a work for a suitable occasion—for example, a prayerbook for the holidays. The corpus from which the anthologist selects his material is not always a unified body. He may have to select his material from a wide range of sources to create his anthology, such as was done by the compilers of the classic midrashic anthologies Yalkut shimoni and the Midrash hagadol.4 Thus the selective anthologist may also be faced with problems of collection. After collecting and selecting their material, both types of anthologists are faced with a common problem: how to arrange the collected material. It is worth noting that Meleager, the earliest Western anthologist, did not use the term “anthology”5 but called his composition Garland, thus expanding the metaphor of collecting flowers into creating a garland by intertwining the flowers into a pleasing whole composition.6 However, the organizing principle of Meleager is not clear: a scholiast thought that his collection was arranged alphabetically by the first line of each poem, but modern scholars think that his collection was grouped by author and subject.7 These ideas must be kept in mind as we examine the anthological aspects of Jewish liturgy. This discussion of the siddur must begin with the geonic period, since the siddur as a book was unknown before that time.8 What is generally considered the first book of prayers, the so-called Order of the Hundred Blessings of R. Natronai Gaon,9 is not even a book of prayers in the strictest sense. This work was composed as a responsum to a community that requested a list of the hundred blessings that one is required to recite every day. This list is, of course, an anthology of blessings following the collective principle, an attempt to create a corpus of the hundred blessings,10 but R. Natronai did not find it necessary to include the full text of all these blessings. The gaon arranged the blessings according to the order of the day, beginning with the morning. This point is of great significance for the understanding of Jewish prayer, as it is well known that the calendrical day of the Jewish

The Prayerbook as Anthology of Judaism 145

calendar begins in the evening. In Rabbinic tradition, only in the Temple worship was the day considered as beginning in the morning, and the organization of R. Natronai’s anthology of blessings shows that he considered the “day” of blessings to be concurrent with the “day” of the Temple. This pattern has been followed by almost all prayerbooks.11 The oldest extant book that contains the full text of the prayers is known to us as the Seder [of] R. Amram Gaon.12 This work was also composed as an anthology of prayers in response to a request from a Jewish community in Spain.13 The ages have not treated this work well. Not only is the original work, as issued by R. Amram Gaon, lost in the shadows of history, even the nature of the original request is not absolutely clear. In R. Amram’s preamble to his response, he reports that they requested “the order of prayers and blessings for the whole year.” But the Passover Haggadah included in the work begins, “and the order of Passover that you asked about,” implying that this was a separate request and R. Amram combined the answers to several requests in one work, much as R. Sherira Gaon did in his work about the history of tradition. The work that is known today as Seder R. Amram Gaon may be described as a collection of anthologies. It consists of what be may considered two separate works: a compendium of the prayers themselves and a compendium of laws and responsa that regulate the way people are supposed to pray. Each of these compendiums may be considered an anthology. I have already pointed out that the texts of prayers may consist of an answer to several questions, and the collection of prayers, probably the first of its kind in Jewish history, intends to present a comprehensive corpus of this literary genre. The compendium of laws and responsa clearly betrays its anthological nature by the inclusion of what seem to be complete responsa of various gaonim, in addition to those of R. Amram. Some of the material included in this work is clearly post-R. Amram, and thus we may wonder whether this description would be true of the original work. Nevertheless, the work that has survived under this name may be called a collection of anthologies or perhaps even an anthology of anthologies.14 Although there is great doubt whether the siddur of R. Amram is the actual work that was sent by R. Amram to Spain, there is no real reason to doubt that the general format of the work, including both prayers and the laws of prayer, was the format of the original work. This format appears also in the siddur of Rav Saadia Gaon, in works such as Mahfi zor vitry (although this work does not contain a complete version of the prayers), and it has served as a general model for later versions and editions of the prayerbook. The inclusion of a halakhic work on the siddur, interspersed with the prayers as part of the siddur, has become such a common feature of the siddur that almost no siddur is published today without the inclusion of minimal instructions about the performance of the prayers. The halakhic instructions, even when compiled specifically to be included in the prayers and among them, have been considered separate works with their own power for promoting the distribution of the siddur.15 One of the earliest compositions of this type was compiled in Italy in the twelfth century and was considered such an important work that it was “deanthologized,” that is, it was extracted from the siddur and distributed as a separate work, known as the Tanya.16 Among the anthologies of halakhic instructions included in the siddur, I

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should mention the Maagelei tsedeq of Benjamin ben Meir Halevi, first published in Salonika in 1548–49 and frequently afterward.17 This work is a potpourri of instructions, comments on and explanations of the text, and edifying material meant to impress the reader with the importance of praying properly. Its successor, Hadrat qodesh, compiled by Isaac ben Yaakov Yozbel Halevi, was first published in Venice in 1599–1600. Its anthological nature is a source of pride for the compiler. He writes in his introduction that the first part of his commentary, until the blessing beginning Barukh sheamar, is based on the Maagelei tsedeq; the continuation of the commentary for the weekday prayers is taken from the commentary of R. Hirtz Trevitsh, printed in Tu¨bingen in 1560; the commentary on the Yozrot was that of Moses ben Yosef Bezalel Katz; and Halevi included material from many other commentators. He also added an anthology of laws, customs, and ethics, part of which was printed in the beginning of the book and part as an appendix. The sources for this were Rabeinu Yonah, Maharil, R. Joseph Karo, R. Moshe Isserlis, R. Isaac of Tyrnau, R. Abraham Klausner, and his own teacher, R. Avigdor Zwiedel. One of the more popular works created for the siddur was the Derekh hahfi ayyim of Rabbi Jacob Lorbeerbaum (c. 1760–1832), first published with the siddur in 1828. This work was considered so important that, thirty or forty years later, it was also de-anthologized and published as a separate work.18 Modern siddurim are often accompanied by other anthologies of halakhic works, such as that of the Mishnah Berura. The independent nature of these halakhic commentaries to the siddur is also demonstrated by their migration from edition to edition. Publishers of prayerbooks wished to include the traditional commentaries even though the particular commentary was written for a different text from the one about to be published. Thus, there was sometimes inconsistency between the text and the commentary, the commentary actually explaining a text that was different from the printed version.19 The classical siddur Otsar hatefillot—published in Vilna by Rom—with its great commentaries, was issued in two editions, one according to the Ashkenazic tradition and one according to the Hasidic tradition, with the necessary changes introduced into the commentary. Siddurim were occasionally published not so much for the siddur itself but rather for the work that was attached to the end of the siddur. I might mention in this context the Meqor haberakhot of Zeev Yavetz and the Yesodei yeshurun of Gedalya Felder. A work on the sources of the prayerbook, called Meqor hatefillot, by H. Friedman, was published in two editions, one with the text of the siddur and one without it. The prayerbook turned into an omnibus anthology and was the one indispensable book in the Jewish library, even more basic to the Jew than the Bible. It thus became a repository for other works that were thought to be indispensable for a Jew. Important additions to the daily prayerbook were blessings that were to be said before eating and after meals, blessings recited at various occasions during the day, and the blessings recited at various religious rituals, primarily those connected with the life cycle. Although many of these blessings were included in the list of the 100 blessings of Rav Natronai, they were not always thought to be an


integral part of the siddur. Nevertheless, publishers, in an attempt to make the siddur a more complete prayerbook, included many of these blessings in the siddur. There were two main traditions about where to include these blessings. The Ashkenazi siddur often included such a compendium after the morning prayer, in accordance with the order of the Tur.20 This arrangement followed the order of the daily activity, because one ate after the morning prayer. But the siddur went further than the Tur, because of its more limited options. The Tur was able to relegate blessings and rituals connected with the life cycle to other books, but the editors of the siddur did not have such an option, and they included these blessings here. In a different approach, many Sephardic siddurim included the blessings connected with food as a supplement to the Grace after Meals, which itself appeared after the Friday evening ceremony. The rationale for this is not quite clear, and it gives the impression that the only time during the week that a formal meal, requiring Grace, was eaten was on the Sabbath. The blessings for the life cycle appeared in the Sephardic siddur as a separate work, Sefer toldot adam, which contained the blessings for circumcision, redemption of the first born, and so on, and a summary of the laws applicable to these occasions. This work was usually attached to the end of the prayers, either after the prayers for Purim21 or at the end of the volume.22 Other books of prayer were combined with the siddur. The Passover Haggadah, which is a microcosm of the anthological aspects of the siddur,23 has been incorporated into many siddurim.24 Perhaps the most noteworthy example of a complete book attached to the siddur is the addition of the book of Psalms, which has been printed at the end of the siddur in many editions. Chabad Hasidism has gone even further and now publishes, together with the siddur and the attached book of Psalms, its bible, the Tanya. This anthology is known as H fi TT, an abbreviation for these additions: Humash, Tehillim, Tanya.25 Some of the items added to the prayerbook were thought to be necessary complements to specific prayers. Thus, calendars were added to the prayerbook in order for one to know when the new month was to be blessed and when the conjunction of the moon and the sun occurred.26 In a similar vein, modern prayerbooks often include calendars with the times of sunrise and sunset in order for one to know the proper time for prayer. Another important supplement to the siddur was the inclusion of the passages from the Bible read during the week. The earliest edition known to me that included this was Amsterdam 1677, but today it is almost impossible to publish a siddur without this addition. The case in point was the first edition of the Rinat Yisrael siddur, which was originally published without it. The publishers were forced to include this feature in subsequent editions, and they did so by photographing the reading from Roedelheim editions.27 Finally, I close this section with a description of a siddur that best exemplifies the idea of the anthological prayerbook intended as a sort of vade mecum for the Jew: the siddur called Minhfi at yerushalayim—Kol bo hashalem, published by Rabbi Dworkes in Jerusalem in 1983. Here the anthological concept has created an omnibus book. In addition to the prayers and an extensive anthology of the laws applicable to them, the volume contains selected laws about the Sabbath,

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including a map of Jerusalem so that one can know where it is permissible to carry things on the Sabbath; the laws of mourning (about twenty-five pages!); timetables for sunrise, sunset, and other times of halakhic importance during the day, with separate tables for London and New York; the laws of mezuzah (fortyfive pages, including numerous diagrams); a seven-year calendar; and much more.28 Although the trends in the history of the prayerbook that have been portrayed until now consist totally of accretions to the prayerbook, I should point out that prayerbooks have also omitted material. This is consistent with the selective principle of anthology. This is most obvious in those prayerbooks that have been created for special occasions, which obviously omit all prayers that are not relevant to the occasion. However, prayerbooks also omit prayers that have fallen into disuse. The best-known example is much of the poetry that has commonly been used in the synagogal ritual and that no longer appears in siddurim and mahfi zorim. Some of the earlier forms of prayer have been replaced by forms that were considered more acceptable. For example, the poetic introduction to Barukh sheamar in the Sephardic tradition was replaced by the parallel passage in the Ashkenazic tradition. One can trace the history of this replacement in early printed siddurim, which printed both traditions side by side, until later editions omitted the early text completely. We may consider this an extension of the metaphor of flower collecting in the sense that some of the flowers in the collection wither and die and may be replaced by fresher flowers.29 The anthological tendencies found in the siddur may be considered expansions of anthological tendencies found in the very creation of Jewish prayer. But there is a significant difference between this type of anthology, which may be unique in anthological literature, and the types of anthologies discussed previously. Here we find new creations, which are considered distinct units, although they were composed anthologically, that is, by selecting existing units rather than attempting to create a new unit ab ovo. A number of prayers recited on various liturgical occasions are nothing but anthologies of sentences from the Bible. We may count among these the first chapter of the pesuqei dezimra, which appears in print as if it were a separate chapter but is actually an anthology of biblical verses,30 and the collection of biblical passages that serves as the extended tahfi anun for Mondays and Thursdays.31 The last blessing of the evening Shema, according to the Ashkenazi tradition, is a collection of biblical sentences that has become known as the “blessing of the pesuqim.”32 There are a number of other such collections, such as the seventy-two biblical verses that are meant to represent the seventy-two-letter name of God, but most of these other collections cannot be documented as early creations. On the other hand, we may consider what is probably the earliest stratum of obligatory prayer, the reading of Shema, as an anthology of chapters from the Bible. The anthological principle governing the selection of the first two chapters of Shema is clear: the primary passages that were chosen are the chapters that include the commandment to discuss the words of Torah when lying down and when rising up (Deut. 6:9, 11:19).33 This, of course, is the same principle that decreed that those passages should be included in the mezuzah, for they also contain the commandment for writing the words of Torah on the door-


posts of the home.34 In addition, this principle also prescribed that the phylacteries should contain the four passages in which the Torah mentions the obligation to tie the words of Torah to one’s hand and between one’s eyes.35 The reason that the third passage of Shema, the section whose main subject is the fringes required on garments, was included in the Shema is not clear. The only thing that we can say about it is that at the time of the tannaim, it was not considered an integral part of the Shema: it was included in the reading only in the morning and not in the evening (Berakhot 2:1). It would thus seem possible that its recital was originally connected with putting on the tallit, which was done in the morning. We can thus understand the true significance of the inclusion of the Ten Commandments as part of the daily Torah reading.36 This was clearly meant to be an indication of the centrality of the Ten Commandments in the Torah tradition, and it supplied very real ammunition for those heretics who wished to reject the rest of the Torah.37 An anthology of the complete Bible, including the Prophets and the Writings, is the basis of the special blessings of the Amidah for Rosh Hashanah.38 The Mishnah prescribes that one should recite in each blessing ten verses (from the Bible) that relate to the subject of that blessing (Rosh Hashanah 4:6).39 The Mishnah mentions only verses from the Bible and from the Prophets, but the Tosefta states specifically that verses from the Writings are also to be included in this anthology.40 Discoveries in the Geniza show that this was also the pattern for the Amidah of the holiday,41 thus implying that the very basis of the Amidah for holidays was an anthology of biblical verses. A further ancient anthology of passages from the Bible is the Kedushah. Isaiah reported that the Seraphs, the fiery servants of God, praised Him with “Holy, Holy, Holy! The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!” (Isa. 6:2), whereas Ezekiel reported that His angelic servants declared, “Blessed is the presence of the Lord, in His place” (Ezek. 3:12). Although Rabbinic tradition presented different ways of reconciling the apparent contradiction between the two reports,42 the mystical understanding of these visions—that the two groups of angels were two parts of a heavenly choir that was singing praises to God, and that a third group of God’s servants, the people of Israel, was a third participant in this choir—was the image that was accepted into the prayerbook.43 The biblical verse recited by the people of Israel was a verse that referred to the kingdom of God. However, not all versions of the Kedushah used the same verse. The standard Kedushah of the Amidah used Psalms 146:10 while the qedushah desidra used a verse taken from the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15:18), and this same verse appears in the blessing after the Shema, apparently to complete the angelic Kedushah found in the first blessing of the Shema. Understanding the Kedushah as an anthology may shed some light on the problem of the expanded Kedushah, used today only in the Musaf prayer,44 which includes the Shema. Since it was possible to utilize various biblical passages for the expression of God’s kingdom by the people of Israel, the recital of the Shema should certainly be acceptable—and even desirable since it was the key statement of the acceptance of His kingdom. Therefore, it is possible that the Shema was originally an alternative statement of His kingdom in the Kedushah, but in accordance with the tendency to adopt all alternatives as necessary parts of

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the tradition, it was included with the passage from Psalms as an expression of the kingdom of God.45 The creation of the Kedushah illustrates an important aspect of Jewish anthological thought. The collective principle of anthology seems to be more important in Jewish prayer than the selective principle. In other words, Jewish prayer tended to create a complete anthology, omitting nothing.46 This principle was stated clearly in the Babylonian Talmud by R. Pappa, who said, “Therefore we shall say them both,” and it extended even to cases in which the choices were mutually contradictory.47 The principle was even applied to cases in which the choices were more than just two. Rav Hamnuna declared, “Let us say them all” (BT Berakhot 11a). We now turn to another type of anthological prayer: prayers that are anthologies of blessings. We may count among these the most basic prayer of Judaism, the Amidah. Although a Rabbinic tradition claimed that the Amidah had been instituted by the members of the Great Assembly, the Rabbis admitted that this earlier tradition had been forgotten and the creation of an Amidah of eighteen blessings was an act of Shimon Hapaquli,48 under the direction of Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh, shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. Scholarly opinion is divided today about the nature of this creation. Joseph Heinemann has argued that Shimon Hapaquli was essentially an anthologist—he collected groups of blessings that had been in common use toward the end of the Second Temple period and created from them a new collection. Recently Ezra Fleischer mounted a monumental attack on this theory and claimed that the Amidah of eighteen blessings was a new creation ab ovo.49 However, Fleischer admitted that there were collections of blessings prior to the work of Shimon Hapaquli and that Shimon utilized these collections in creating the Amidah. Thus Shimon Hapaquli remains an anthologist, although there is also a consensus that his anthological work consisted not only of collecting the earlier works but also of editing and improving them according to his conceptions. In this, Jewish tradition followed his pattern, continuously reworking ancient tradition. The collection of these blessings was much more than an anthology because the requirement that they be said while standing, emphasizing the direct contact between God and the person who was praying, gave the total unit an importance and significance that these blessings did not have in earlier times.50 In addition, the number of blessings in the anthology, eighteen, quickly became a ritual number. This is evidenced by the fact that when it became necessary to add another blessing, shortly after the enactment of the eighteen blessings, the Palestinian tradition deemed it necessary to combine two other blessings into one, in order to retain the sum of eighteen blessings.51 The three blessings associated with the reading of the Shema may also be considered an anthology. It is true that the second and third blessings, Ahava, which directly preceded the Shema, and Emet veyatsiv or Emet veemunah, which immediately followed it,52 were apparently always connected with the Shema. Ahava served as thanksgiving to God for granting the Torah before reading the chapters from the Torah that were part of the Shema, while Emet veyatsiv or Emet veemunah served as a declaration affirming the Shema. However, the final blessing is actually a composite one, including—in addition to the general affirmation of


the Shema—a blessing thanking God for the redemption from Egypt. Although later theology considered this blessing a parallel to the third chapter of Shema, consideration of the evening Shema shows that this is not historically correct. The addition of this blessing to the evening Shema was a point of discussion after the destruction of the Temple, and we know that at that time the third chapter of Shema was not recited during the evening. More significant in this context is the first blessing, known as the blessing of the lights, which was a praise of God said at the change of day, morning and evening, and which originally had nothing to do with Shema. This is demonstrated by the fact that the priests of the Temple, who prayed before the first light, apparently omitted this blessing.53 Nevertheless, the whole became more than the sum of its parts. This collection was considered a unified entity, called Yotser after the beginning of the first blessing, as evidenced in the tannaitic halakhah limiting talk between the various blessings (Berakhot 2:1). A third type of anthology found in the liturgy is an anthology of passages selected for learning, and this type follows the selective principle. The earliest such selection is found in the passages selected for reading after the morning Torah blessings. Although the Talmud required one to recite a blessing before studying the Torah, the blessings included in the prayerbook were not a daily requirement in talmudic times. According to the Talmud, the blessing Ahavat olam or Ahavah rabbah,54 recited before the reading of the Shema, was considered the blessing for Torah study. Only one who studied Torah before reciting the Shema was required to make a separate blessing for Torah study. This ruling continued until the later gaonic period. Maimonides maintained the ruling that the morning blessings for studying Torah were required only for those who got up to study before reading the Shema (Prayer 7:11). Nevertheless, a popular custom developed of studying selected passages before prayer in order to be able to recite these blessings. However, the Talmud had discussed whether one was required to recite these blessings before reading from the Oral Law, the Mishnah, and midrash/Talmud,55 or perhaps the blessing was required only before reading passages from the Bible. Naturally, the custom developed of reciting selected passages from all these branches of Jewish learning, thus creating an anthology of Jewish learning. Two variant traditions developed. The first one, mentioned already in the socalled Seder Rav Natronai Gaon and generally adopted in the Sephardi siddurim, selected passages that related to the Temple sacrifices. The passage from the Torah was Numbers 28:1–8, which prescribed the daily sacrifice; the passage from the Mishnah was the fifth chapter of tractate Zevahim, which gave general instructions for all the Temple sacrifices; and the midrashic/talmudic passage selected was the introduction to the Sifra, the midrash to the book of Leviticus, whose main subject is sacrifices. The second tradition was found in French sources and was generally adopted among Ashkenazim. According to this tradition, the biblical passage was the priestly blessing, while the passage from the Mishnah was the first mishnah of the tractate Peah. The midrashic/talmudic passage was the continuation of the mishnah of Peah, which had been expanded and conflated on the basis of the talmudic discussion of this mishnah in BT Shabbat 127a–b. The principle behind this an-

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thology of passages was apparently to collect passages that dealt with the importance of Torah study. Both these traditions tried to create representative anthologies, in which selected passages stood for the whole. The all-inclusive anthological principle eventually determined that both anthologies would be used by all traditions. A later anthology of this type, which was meant to be an addition to the liturgy at the end of the morning prayer, was the Seder maarakhah of Rabbi Elijah the Elder. This order was fashioned after the manner of the maamadot that were held in the Second Temple. They included—in addition to the passages from the Torah, from the Prophets, and from the Writings that were part of the Second Temple liturgy—passages from the Mishnah and Talmud. Although this Seder was apparently never wide-spread, parts of it have been incorporated into the morning order of service in almost all communities.56 A later anthology, also meant to be recited and studied after the morning prayer, was the H fi oq leyisrael. The original anthology, compiled by R. Yitshfi ak Baruch and first printed in Egypt in 1740, included passages from the Torah, Prophets, Writings, Mishnah, Gemara, and Zohar, to be studied, recited, or read for every day of the year. This anthology was expanded by Rabbi H. Y. D. Azulai (HIDA), who added selected passages from ethical works and halakhot, called Yosef lehfi oq. This anthology became standard fare for many, no doubt because of the influence of the Hida.57 However, it was usually published as an appendix to the Bible and never became part of the prayerbook. A similar type of anthology was the tiqqunim, orders of study for special nights of the year—the last night of Passover and the night of Shavuot. The order of study followed the same principle of collecting passages that were thought relevant to the particular day, from almost all branches of Jewish literature. Later editions of the tiqqun for Shavuot, under the influence of the mystics, changed this pattern. They selected the opening and closing sentences of the books of the Bible and the books of Oral Law, as if to say that the whole Torah had been studied on the night of Shavuot, the night preceding the reenactment of the Sinaitic reception of the Torah. What is clear is that the anthological principle is a basic force in the creation of prayer, if not the basic force. It is very likely that this force is inherent in a religion and culture that continuously faces the challenge of adapting traditional life to changing circumstances. Entirely new creations are considered a break in tradition, while new creations that are essentially anthologies of older material serve as a valid method of renewal within tradition. This is well illustrated in the attempts to create a liturgy for Yom haatsmaut. The early institutors of the ritual took bits and pieces from the liturgy of the holidays to create a new liturgy. Although their opponents considered this ritual a parody, its authors were really following the traditional methods for creating liturgy. It was an expansion of this methodology that made the siddur not merely a book of prayer for organized prayer services but an anthology that would cover every religious occasion in life and its pertinent halakhot. Thus we may consider the literary genre of the siddur as a true anthology of Jewish life.

The Prayerbook as Anthology of Judaism 153 Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):115–32. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. This essay was written while I was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I wish to thank the Institute and its director, Dr. David Shulman, for their kindness and hospitality. I wish to thank my colleagues at the Institute, Dr. Esther G. Chazon and Dr. Stefan Reif, who carefully read a draft of this paper and gave me a lot of helpful criticism, advice, and suggestions. Special thanks are extended to David Stern for his advice and help in revising earlier versions of this essay. 1. An estimate of this can be derived from the index of Isaiah Vinograd, Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book, part 1 (Jerusalem, 1995). The index of editions of biblical books occupies five pages (pp. 329–33) while the index of editions of prayerbooks is over thirteen pages (pp. 343–56). It is difficult to discuss definitive statistics, since we do not know the number of copies printed in each edition, but these facts do contribute to creating an impression. See also my introduction to the facsimile edition of the Siddur of Hanau 1628 [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan), 1994, pp. 5–7. 2. The sociological significance of these various prayerbooks is greater than their significance for the history of prayer. Thus, the evening prayerbooks show that the persons who are praying are frequently not in their normal home bases at the time of these prayers, but they do succeed in gathering together a quorum for prayer. The collections of Sabbath prayers show the existence of communities in which the number of congregants on Sabbath is much greater than the number of daily congregants, and thus it was considered advisable to prepare a siddur for the Sabbath. Sociologists may also learn from the existence of these siddurim that the synagogue is expected to supply the congregants with siddurim rather than expecting them to bring their personal siddurim to the synagogue. It is interesting to note that some of the prayerbooks that contain only table blessings, often published for use at wedding meals, contain both Sephardic and Ashkenazic versions, implying the frequency of intermarriage with a measure of tolerance and recognition of the legitimacy of both versions. 3. For a list of some of his anthologies, see A. M. Haberman, “Eisenstein, Judah David,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1972), vol. 6, pp. 552–53. 4. A better example of the use of a broad range of sources is the anthology of aggadic literature by Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews. However, this cannot be used as an example in our context because Ginzberg was trying to create a comprehensive anthology rather than a selective work. It is interesting to note that his work served as the basis for a selective anthology, the one-volume Legends of the Bible. 5. The term “anthology” came into use only in the Byzantine period, several hundred years later. See Gilbert Highet, “Anthology,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard (Oxford, 1970), p. 67. Macrobius—one of those classical authors who used the literary form of the symposium for their anthologies—in the beginning of his Saturnalia compared his work to that of a bee, which collects pollen from many flowers but produces honey that is far superior to a mere collection of pollen. 6. Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology, from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993), p. 5. 7. Highet, “Anthology,” p. 67. 8. It may well be that there were no other Jewish books in existence, besides the Bible, until that period. Nevertheless, people may have had written notes of various traditions that were not considered “books.” For a survey of the remains of written prayers before the

154 The Middle Ages gaonic period, see Stefan C. Reif, “Codicological Aspects of Jewish Liturgical History,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, no. 3 (1993):119. 9. The best edition of this responsum is in Teshuvot rav natronai bar hilai gaon, ed. Robert Brody (Jerusalem, 5754), pp. 106–7. 10. The later Rabbis who created lists of the hundred blessings in accordance with their local customs thought that the number was typological. Although we might think that 100 was the minimal number of blessings that one was to recite during the day, these Rabbis were careful to point out why certain blessings were not to be numbered among the 100, and the total number was an exact one, at least on ordinary weekdays. 11. The major exception to this order is the siddur of Rav Saadia Gaon. Although Rav Saadia also begins with the morning prayer, his arrangement is based on logical grounds rather than practical considerations. I may just mention that the morning blessings, with which most siddurim begin, appear in his siddur after the daily prayer, since they are not strictly “prayer,” but rather incidental blessings. A number of prayerbooks follow the practical, chronological order, but they do not begin with the morning prayers. The most notable examples of this are the prayerbooks for Sabbath and holidays, which open with the evening prayer that begins the holy day, and later kabbalistic siddurim, which include the tiqqun hfi atsot, which was said at midnight but appears in the siddur before the morning prayers. However, this latter example is not really an exception, since the kabbalists thought of arising from one’s sleep for tiqqun hfi atsot, and thus the midnight prayer was really the beginning of the liturgical day. This followed a pattern also found in the Temple, in which, on the Day of Atonement, the day’s work began at midnight to facilitate the successful completion of the appointed tasks before sundown of the next day. 12. The most important scholarly edition of this work is that of Daniel Goldschmidt (Jerusalem, 1971). Another edition of the first part was published by David Hedega¨rd, Seder R. Amram Gaon (Lund, 1951). See the review by Goldschmidt, Kiryat sefer 29 (1953–54): 71–75. The section on Sabbath prayers was published by Tryggve Kronholm (Lund, 1974). See the review by Stefan Reif, JSS 23 (Spring 1978):119–22. None of these editions can be considered critical editions in the sense of an attempt to restore the original work sent by Rav Amram to Spain, and it is doubtful whether this can be done. 13. We are not sure whether this siddur was sent to Christian Spain, perhaps to Barcelona (see S. Assaf, Tequfat hageonim vesifrutah [Jerusalem, 1956], p. 180), or to Muslim Spain (Gerson D. Cohen, The Book of Tradition [Sefer haqabbalah] [Philadelphia, 1967], p. 53). 14. Most of this paragraph is based on Robert Brody, “The Enigma of Seder Rav Amram” [Hebrew] in Knesset Ezra: Literature and Life in the Synagogue: Studies Presented to Ezra Fleischer, ed. S. Elizur et al. (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 21–34. 15. Manuscript prayerbooks often have complete halakhic works inscribed in the margins. A manuscript of the prayerbook found in Hattstatt, apparently written in the sixteenth century, had the Sefer mitsvot qatan of R. Isaac of Corbeil in the margin, together with several minhagim books. See Moses Ginsburger, “Ein Siddurhandschrift in Hattstatt,” Magazin fu¨r die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 19 (1892):110–32. 16. See Israel Zvi Feintuch, “Tanya rabbati” [Hebrew], in Versions and Traditions in the Talmud (Ramat Gan, 1985), pp. 65–76. 17. See M. Benayahu, “The Complete Mahzor for the Whole Year According to the Minhag of the Ashkenazim and the Siddur of the Ashkenazim Savionetta 1567” [Hebrew], in Hebrew Printing at Cremona: Its History and Bibliography (Jerusalem, 1971), pp. 141–78. This commentary was considered halakhically important and was often referred to by R. Abraham Gombiner in his commentary to the Shulhfi an arukh, entitled “Magen avraham.”

The Prayerbook as Anthology of Judaism 155 18. Ephraim Kupfer, “Lorbeerbaum, Jacob ben Jacob Moses,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1972, vol. 11, pp. 492–93. This work was published separately (with notes by R. Abraham Lovat) and called Netiv hahfi ayyim (Vilna, 1887; repr. Brooklyn, N.Y., 1990). The purpose of the notes was to mark all the places where the traditional instructions of Rabbi Lorbeerbaum were in conflict with the decision of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. 19. Aaron Mirsky, “Variants between the Commentary and the Text in Siddurim” [Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 54 (1979):195–200. 20. The Shulhfi an arukh, of course, also followed the order of the Tur. For the precedents for this order, see Chaim Tchernowitz, Toledoth haposkim, vol. 2 (New York, 1947), pp. 199–203. 21. See the siddur printed in Florence, 1736. 22. Amsterdam, 1765. 23. The Haggadah also contains passages from a broad range of literature: Bible, Talmud, Rabbinic literature, liturgical poetry, and folk literature. Historically, these passages range from biblical times to modern selections, reflecting modern historical events and contemporary views. 24. The Passover Haggadah was included already in the siddurim of Rav Amram and Rav Saadia. Many of the later siddurim have not incorporated the complete text of the Haggadah but only the part that was traditionally said on the Sabbath before Passover. 25. A catchier acronym would be TTTT, which could stand for Tefillah, Torah, Tehillim, Tanya. However, the acronym chosen was apparently based on Genesis 35:5. 26. The earliest evidence for this known to me is the calendar for the years from 1511 to 1528 found at the end of the Rothschild Miscellany. The dates of this calendar are of particular interest, since it has been assumed that the Miscellany was commissioned about 1470. Although a great part of the Miscellany consists of liturgical works, the Miscellany is not considered a prayerbook. In a true prayerbook of that period, the Rothschild Mahzor—a manuscript written according to the Italian rite in 1492, six years after the first printing of this rite—we find rules for the calculation of the calendar, Christian as well as Jewish. See M. Schmelzer, The Rothschild Mahzor (New York, 1983), p. 27. 27. A siddur published for Oriental communities, Shaarei tsiyyon hashalem (Jerusalem, 1990), also used the Roedelheim edition for the Torah reading. 28. There is a resemblance in this collection to the Rothschild Miscellany, although the Miscellany is not considered a siddur—even though it contains a complete siddur— and Minhfi at yerushalayim is explicitly a siddur. 29. One of the extreme examples of the creation of an open-ended anthology is the publication of a loose-leaf siddur, meant to enable the community to add new readings but also permitting the assigning of earlier selections to the wastebasket. See Allen S. Maller, “Prayer Book and Self-Revelation to God in Judaism,” Journal of Dharma 9:3 (1984):216– 29. David Stern informs me that there is another siddur, entitled P’nei or, which was published in loose-leaf form, not to enable a continuous process of selection but simply to enable rearrangement of the material in accordance with the wishes of the participants. 30. Anthologies of biblical passages for liturgical purposes are found already in Qumran. See M. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Psalms Scroll (11 Q Ps a),” Textus 5 (1966):22–33. It is possible that the biblical book of Chronicles itself contains anthologies of passages in Psalms for liturgical purposes. See Moshe Weinfeld, “Traces of Qedushat yotser and Pesuqei dezimra in the Qumran Literature” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 45 (1976):24. 31. According to a legend transmitted by R. Abraham ben Nathan of Lunel, the expanded tehfi inah is in itself an anthology of anthologies. It is a collection of tehfi inot written by three different individuals. See Sefer hamanhig (Jerusalem, 1978), p. 102, and the literature in the note to line 88.

156 The Middle Ages 32. For the history of this blessing, see N. Wieder, “The Blessing of the Pesuqim” [Hebrew], Sinai 76 (1975):126–33. 33. This reason was mentioned in the Sifrei (Deut. 34, pp. 60–61) and by Palestinian amoraim (PT Berakhot 1:3 3c). However, at a very early date these passages were considered as reflecting basic Jewish principles: the recognition of the kingdom of God and the acceptance of the Torah (Berakhot 2:2). The unit took on a significance of which the whole was greater than the parts. See Israel Knohl, “A Parasha Concerned with Accepting the Kingdom of Heaven” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 53 (1984):11–31; Reuven Kimelman, “The Shema and Its Rhetoric: The Case for the Shema Being More than Creation, Revelation, and Redemption,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1992):111–56. Cf. E. E. Urbach, “The Place of the Ten Commandments in Ritual and Prayer” [Hebrew], in The Ten Commandments as Reflected in Tradition and Literature Throughout the Ages, ed. Ben-Zion Segal (Jerusalem, 1985), pp. 129–30; Yitshak D. Gilat, Studies in the Development of the Halakha [Hebrew] (Ramat Gan, 1992), pp. 285–86. 34. Urbach, “The Place of the Ten Commandments,” p. 130. This is also followed by the Samaritans, who, however, inscribe these passages on the doorpost itself rather than on a piece of parchment attached to the doorpost. 35. It has been suggested that the early phylacteries contained the four biblical passages that constituted the early Shema: the Ten Commandments and the three surviving passages. According to this theory, the Ten Commandments and the passage that dealt with the fringes were eliminated and replaced with the passages referring to the commandment about the phylacteries. See A. M. Haberman, “The Phylacteries in Antiquity” [Hebrew], Erets Yisrael 3 (1954):174–75. 36. We have no way of knowing whether the Ten Commandments were originally part of the daily Torah reading, whether they were added to the passages of Shema, or whether they were, by themselves, the original reading to which the passages of Shema were later added (cf. E. E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs [Hebrew] [Jerusalem, 1969], pp. 15–16). It should be noted that the Ten Commandments were never part of the evening reading, but this may mean that the evening recital was instituted after the elimination of the Ten Commandments from this ritual. The fact that the unit was known as “Shema,” even though the Shema itself was actually the second passage—being preceded by the Ten Commandments—is not significant, since the earlier sources often use the term “reading” rather than “Shema” (Cf. Gilat, “Studies,” pp. 285–86; Reuven Hammer, “What Did They Bless? A Study of Mishnah Tamid 5.1,” JQR 81 [1991]:310). 37. See Geza Vermes, “The Decalogue and the Minim,” in In Memoriam Paul Kahle, ed. Matthew Black and Georg Fohrer, Beiheft zur ZAW 103 (Berlin, 1968), pp. 232–40; repr. in G. Vermes, Post-Biblical Studies (Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity) (Leiden, 1975), pp. 169–77; Urbach, “The Place of the Ten Commandments,” pp. 130–40. 38. See J. Tabory, “On the Place of the Malkhuyos Blessing in the New Year Prayer” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 48 (1979):8–11. 39. See Eliezer Eliner, “Die Auswahl und Anordnung der Pesukim von ‘Malchiot’ in der Synagoge,” Ju¨dische Schule Zu¨rich: Festschrift (Jerusalem, 1980), pp. 53–55. 40. For a further discussion of this point, see J. Tabory, Jewish Festivals in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 19962), p. 234. 41. See I. Elbogen, “Die Tefilla fu¨r die Festtage,” MGWJ 55 (1911):426–46, 586–99; 58 (1914): 323–25. 42. Another tradition, found in Seder eliyahu rabbah (chap. 6, ed. Friedmann, p. 34) and preserved in some editions of Vayiqra rabbah (2:8, ed. Margoliot, p. 47), claims that the angels of Isaiah praised God during the day whereas the angels of Ezekiel praised Him during the night. The Babylonian Talmud claims that there was really only one vision,

The Prayerbook as Anthology of Judaism 157 which was reported differently by the two prophets because of their own subjective differences (H fi agigah 13b). 43. This is not meant to say that there was a disagreement between the mystics and the Rabbis. See Lawrence A. Hoffman, “Censoring In and Censoring Out: A Function of Liturgical Language,” in Ancient Synagogues: The State of Research, ed. J. Gutmann (Chico, Cal., 1981), pp. 19–37. For the precedents of the idea of a heavenly choir, see M. Weinfeld, “The Heavenly Praise in Unison,” in Meqor Hajjim: Festschrift fu¨r Georg Molin zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, ed. Irmtraut Seybold (Graz, 1983), pp. 427–37. 44. This was the standard form of the Kedushah used by the Palestinian Jews in the Byzantine period. 45. It is worth pointing out that, according to Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri, the blessing of Malkhuyot on Rosh Hashanah should be added to the Kedushah. Cf. Joseph Heinemann, “Kedushah and ‘Malkhut’ in the Reading of Shema and in the Kedushah of the Amidah,” in Studies in Jewish Liturgy (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 12–21. Heinemann considers the expanded Kedushah a macrocosm of the entire Shema reading, including its blessings. 46. See J. J. Petuchowski, “Some Laws of Jewish Liturgical Development,” Judaism 34 (1985):312–26. 47. The passages in which this statement appears are collected and analyzed by Y. Efrati, “The Advantage of the Integrative System for the Study of the Talmud” [Hebrew], Bisdei hfi emed 20 (1976):74–82, 174–79, 242–49, 288–92, 366–71. 48. There is some doubt about the meaning of the term “Paquli”: some think it is a designation of his occupation—that of a flax worker—and others think it is derived from the name of his home. 49. E. Fleischer, “On the Beginnings of Obligatory Jewish Prayer” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 59 (1990):397–441. Cf. Stefan Reif, “On the Earliest Development of Jewish Prayer” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 60 (1991):677–81; Fleischer, Tarbiz 60:683–88; M. Z. Fuks, “Response to Two Revolutionaries” [Hebrew], Sinai 114 (1994):164–70. 50. See Uri Ehrlich, “Modes of Prayer and Their Significance in the Time of the Mishnah and the Talmud” [Hebrew] (Diss., Hebrew University, 1993). 51. The Babylonian tradition did not have a problem with this, and the Amidah of this tradition, in use today, has nineteen blessings although it is frequently referred to as the Eighteen Blessings. For a comparison of the Palestinian versions of the Amidah with those of the Babylonians, as found in the Geniza, see Yehezkel Luger, “The Weekday Amidah Based on the Geniza” [Hebrew] (Ph.D. diss., Bar Ilan University, 1992). Some scholars are of the opinion that the early Amidah consisted of seventeen blessings and that it was only after adding the blessing against the minnim that the number reached eighteen. According to this theory, it was the Babylonians who changed the original number by dividing the blessing that referred to Jerusalem and the house of David into two separate elements. However, the fact that this blessing in the Palestinian tradition is the only one with a double ending would seem to imply that this is really a combination of two earlier blessings. 52. I do not claim that the actual text is ancient. See Stefan Reif, “Liturgical Difficulties and Geniza Manuscripts,” in Studies in Judaism and Islam Presented to S. D. Goitein (Jerusalem, 1981), pp. 99–122. 53. Mishnah Tamid 5:1. The Mishnah actually states that the priest recited only one blessing before the Shema, without specifying which blessing was said. Statements found in both Talmuds report that the blessing recited was Ahavah and the blessing of the lights was omitted. However, the Babylonian Talmud gives a conflicting opinion according to which it was the second blessing that was omitted. Hammer (“What Did They Bless?” n. 36, pp. 313–23) suggests that the whole talmudic discussion is an anachronism: the blessing

158 The Middle Ages recited before the reading of the Shema in the Temple was entirely different from the blessings before the Shema of the later tradition. 54. See I. Ta-Shma, “Ahavat Olam and Ahavah Rabbah—Two Versions of the Blessing Preceding the Shema” [Hebrew], in Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift, ed. Moshe Ahrend et al. (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 601–11. 55. “Talmud,” in this context, did not refer, of course, to the redacted compilations of commentaries on the Mishnah and related subjects known to us today as Talmud. What is meant here is more the method of study by which earlier sources were analyzed. For a discussion of the various branches of study, see Abraham Rosenthal, “Torah sheal peh vetorah misinai—halakhah umaaseh,” in Mehfi qerei Talmud: Talmudic Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Eliezer Shimshon Rosenthal, vol. 2, ed. Moshe Bar-Asher and David Rosenthal (Jerusalem, 1993), p. 463, n. 48. See also David Weiss Halivni, Midrash, Mishna and Gemara (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). 56. For the history of this order, see I. Ta-Shma, “Meqorah umqomah shel tefillat aleinu leshabeahfi besiddur hatefillah: Seder hamaamadot ushelat siyyum hatefillah,” in Sefer zikkaron leefrayim talmag’ (Haifa, 1993), pp. 85–93. 57. See M. Benayahu, Rabbi H fi ayyim Yosef David Azulai [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1959), pp. 148–49.

8 jacob elbaum

Yalqut Shim oni and the Medieval Midrashic Anthology

alqut—literally, a collection—is the common name in the Middle Ages for an

Yanthology of midrash, or rabbinic scriptural interpretation. The term yalqut, taken from the title of one such collection, yalqut shim

oni (which scholars through the ages have often simply called Yalqut), would indeed seem to be an appropriate name for these works. They are, after all, collections of midrashic tradition as it was preserved in the various collections made during the so-called classical or canonical period of midrash during the Byzantine period in the land of Israel. At first glance, these works also appear absolutely different in character from the classical canon of midrash. The singular literary genres of “authentic” midrash from the classical period, which had retained some vitality even in the collections edited at a relatively late date, no longer appear in their pure form in the yalqutim but are adulterated by disparate elements. So, too, in the yalqutim, the crystalline literary editing and original formulation of classical midrash give way to mere technical arrangement, which seems to have involved nothing more than a hackneyed conglomeration of passages from various sources. The sketch in the preceding paragraph, which more or less encapsulates the standard scholarly view, is based upon certain assumptions and beliefs that need to be reexamined. The first of these is the belief that the appearance of the yalqutim coincided with the close of the original period of midrashic creativity. This classical period culminated in the redaction of Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah, among other works, between 400 and 500 c.e. By then, so the argument goes, midrashic creativity had run its course and exhausted its powers of originality; where it continued to be composed, it did so by force of inertia until the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century, after which it steadily deteriorated through the geonic period. There may also have been a pervasive sense among those persons involved with midrash that, just as the Mishnah had been succeeded by the Talmud, and just as the Talmud had been “closed” and completed, so too midrashic tradition had reached closure and there no longer existed free license to add new midrashic material, even what 159

160 The Middle Ages

circulated but had not already been set down in writing. Stagnation inevitably leads to regression. Some scholars would argue that this was evident even in the later anthologists’ mode of presentation of the ancient sages’ sayings, in which everything was apparently perceived as equivalent and passages were lumped together without regard for their sources’ varying levels of diction or their characteristic terminology. Old and new were mixed indiscriminately. The anthologists’ only touchstone, according to this view, was the detection of some link between an utterance of the sages and the biblical text, the sole purpose here being to associate the sages’ comments with the biblical texts, often verse by verse, as comprehensively as possible. This linear history of midrashic literature is difficult to accept for many reasons. First, it is based upon certain uninspected assumptions about the nature and life span of aggadic midrash, and, no less so, about anthological literature in general. Without trying to present a comprehensive history of midrash in general, one might nonetheless question whether even the “classical” midrashim like Genesis Rabbah were intentionally edited with a program and plan rather than being mere collections artificially linking opinion to opinion according to the text of the book of Genesis. Perhaps the only thing that truly separates a work like Genesis Rabbah from the later yalqutim is that the former’s sources are mostly anonymous (and as a result, its contents may appear more original), while the sources of the yalqutim are usually known and sometimes explicitly acknowledged by their editors (and therefore, in the view of certain modern midrash scholars, they are of no importance beyond being “witnesses to textual variants”). Let me add that my comments on Genesis Rabbah were made solely for the sake of argument; I personally believe there was some kind of plan to its editing. Yet the possibility I broached surely applies to at least some of the midrashim collected under the title Midrash Rabbah. This famous collection of midrashim is itself in its entirety an “anthology” or “yalqut of midrashim,” whose editing is largely inconsistent.1 As we know, some of its constituent midrashim (and in some cases the separate parts of the same “midrash”) were composed even later than some of the yalqutim. Indeed, some parts of Midrash Rabbah from some of its most important sections were drawn from the yalqutim. Another difficulty in demarcating strict boundaries between midrashic literature and the later medieval anthologies can be seen in M. D. Herr’s attempt to periodize the history of midrashic literature in his entry “midrash” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Herr lists, among the midrashic works of the “Late Period” (1000–1200 c.e.), the work of R. Tobias ben R. Eliezer (eleventh century), Leqahfi tov (even though Herr himself calls it an anthology), as well as the “midrashim” based on the composition of R. Moses Hadarshan (who lived and worked in the same century). As the “Period of the Yalqutim (anthologies),” Herr designates only the era that followed (1200–1550). Within this category, he first mentions Yalqut shim oni, then Midrash hagadol (both of the thirteenth century), Yalqut makhiri (at the earliest, according to the view of some scholars, the second half of the thirteenth century), Ein ya aqov, and Haggadot hatalmud (in that order, though it should be reversed, because R. Jacob ibn H fi abib, whose Ein ya aqov was printed in Constantinople in 5276/1516, the year of his death, was himself fa-


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miliar with Haggadot hatalmud, which had been printed in Constantinople in 5271/1511). The difficulty here is obvious. How did Herr distinguish between earlier and later personages—between R. Tobias or R. Moses Hadarshan and their successors? Indeed, it should be stated that medieval scholars generally call R. Moses Hadarshan’s composition a “midrash,” and those who came after him sometimes mistook his words to be those of the classical sages. The same held true, it seems, for his homiletical interpretations, which were his own innovations (according to our best knowledge of midrashic literature).2 There are, moreover, collections gleaned from his work that everyone termed midrash—possibly because they were ignorant of their sources. These include Midrash aggadah and Numbers Rabbah (the first sections of which, Bemidbar and Naso, were based on material from “R. Moses’ midrash”)3 and finally, Genesis rabbati, also called Genesis Rabbah or Bereshit rabbah magna in Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. The same applies to Leqahfi tov; it was considered by many to be a stock midrash.4 There is, of course, a certain justification to Herr’s attempt to periodize in light of his fundamental assumption that Yalqut shim oni, the work of R. Simeon Hadarshan (“Our Rabbi, Simeon, Foremost of the Preachers, may his memory be a blessing, from the holy community, Frankfurt,” as inscribed on the title page of the anthology’s second printing, Venice 5326/1566) was the most important of the yalqutim and should therefore be given the distinction of opening the era of the yalqutim.5 One consequence of this distinction, however, is that it ignores such earlier works in the genre as those mentioned before, as well as Pitron torah, which may be dated to the ninth century (also absent from Herr’s listing).6 Moreover, by grouping Yalqut shim oni with the others, Herr blurs its singularity. No other anthology, before or after, attempted to present a similar kind of summa of midrashic tradition: that is, no other work ever attempted to quote the sages’ commentaries on all the books of the Bible solely by following the order of the original verses. Another ostensible point of distinction often made between a “midrash” and an “anthology” or yalqut is that while the midrashic collections tend to be anonymous, the editors of the yalqutim tend to specify their names. The obvious drawback to this claim is that unambiguous attribution says nothing about the nature of the materials in the work. Taking credit for producing or editing a book is largely a matter of cultural convention, and this convention was simply not normative in any way in ancient Jewish literature. The decision whether to identify one’s authorship or role depends on the author’s own perception of the link between his writings and his sources. But the marks of the anonymous authors of Pirqei derabbi eli ezer or Seder eliyahu on their respective works are no less prominent than those of the compilers of Leqahfi tov, Yalqut makhiri, and Yalqut shim oni on their works. Attention must be paid to developments within midrashic literature itself. The methods that a midrashic editor used to determine the shape of his work changed with time. For better or for worse, the redactors of the later midrashim changed and revised the words of their predecessors; it was no slip on my part that I called the compilers of Pirqei derabbi eli ezer and Seder eliyahu “authors.” These two compositions are different from other midrashim. As Meir Ish Shalom (Friedmann) famously wrote in describing the uniqueness of Seder eli-

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yahu, “All the Rabbahs and the Pesiqtot and the Tanhfi umot are nothing but yalqutim [arranged] according to either the order of the writings or the commentaries to the portions,” but Seder eliyahu, he added, “has an author . . . who does not merely cobble [texts] together [emphasis added]; rather, he wrote his composition in a distinctive style and order; his writings are not just pearls strung on a thread but links in a continuous chain.”7 Were the editor of Midrash Proverbs known, his work would undoubtedly be labeled a yalqut or anthology. The manner in which sources are mined in this work, the omission of the names of the sages, the addition of bits of old aggadah in new combinations and of explanations for ancient statements—all these familiar criteria would easily lead scholars to categorize the work as an anthology. Characteristically (and rightly, it seems), Ish Shalom would have associated it with Seder eliyahu. As regards terminology, it is also the case that even the most distinguished modern scholars have indiscriminately used the terms “midrash” and “anthology.” In his famous article “The Legends of the Jews—East and West,” L. Ginzberg, surely one of the preeminent authorities in this century on Rabbinic aggadah and midrash, considered both the aforementioned Pirqei derabbi eliezer and H fi ibbur yafeh mehayeshuah (the work of R. Nissim of Qairawan, d. 1062) as Rabbinical anthologies. Their common denominator was that both were influenced by Muslim literature—the latter linguistically, the former in its organization and structure; he describes Pirqei derabbi eliezer as “a grouping written according to the pattern of Arab anthologies based on tales from the sacred writings.”8 Ginzberg’s association of the term “midrash” with the genre of anthology has deep roots. Nearly all medieval scholars also used the term “midrash” to denote what we would call an “anthology.” The term yalqut, once adopted to designate the anthological literature of the midrash, was reserved for, at most, two such compositions: Yalqut shimoni9 and Yalqut hamakhiri (both of which were composed, as was noted earlier, at approximately the same time, although there is no sign that the anthologist of Yalqut hamakhiri ever saw its predecessor).10 Furthermore, Yemenite Jewish literature is well known to have been replete with what we call anthologies (of which Herr cites only Midrash hagadol, which is admittedly the most important of them all). Almost without exception, though, these works are called by the term “midrash,” and it appears that they were regarded as such.11 Midrash hagadol was described by its author, R. David Ha’adani, without a trace of self-consciousness, as “the midrash of the five books of the Torah,” and there existed other such compositions, including Midrash hahfi efets of R. Zechariah the Physician (whose writing ended in the year 1427) and Midrash habeur of R. Said ben David Dhamari (written in 1441). Indeed, R. Nethanel ben Isaiah, author of the Yemenite yalqut Maor haafelah (composed in 1328–29),12 generally refers to it as a “collection” (majmua ) or “composition,” but those who follow him call it a “homiletical interpretation” (derash) or “midrash.” In either case, it seems that these Yemenite works were never called by the term yalqut. Abraham Joseph Wertheimer, in choosing to title the fifteenth-century work that he published from a manuscript Yalqut midreshei teiman (Jerusalem, 5748/1988), evidently did not share the view of the works’ own compilers!


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I have gone into these terminological minutiae not only to clarify the terminological facts but also because they can help us understand how the anthologists saw their work not only as similar to but as a continuation of the classical midrashic compilations. That is to say, they did not view their works as belated or secondtier compilations, of lesser stature than the classical midrashim, nor was this estimation shared by the earliest readers of the yalqutim either in Central Europe or elsewhere. For these readers, the term “midrash” (as the name of a composition or collection of homiletical interpretations on a biblical book) simply denoted a collection of homiletical interpretations, and nothing more. The term carried no value judgment, nor did it characterize how its materials were used; the term “midrash” was, in any case, a consciously rehabilitated term, and it is doubtful if it was used in this sense before the Middle Ages.13 This being the case, it is hardly surprising that many works that we would probably not choose to include under the rubric of midrash, such as Midrash aseret hadibberot, were called “midrashim.” Indeed, the contributor who wrote the entry on this particular “midrash” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Joseph Dan, speculates on why it was called by this term.14 Modern sensibilities distinguish it from “midrash” per se, but terminological usage has simply changed. At one time, it was sufficient for a work to be loosely based on the verses of the Ten Commandments for it to be called a “midrash,” and we could speculate further about several other “smaller midrashim” in light of their content and form. The scholar who wishes to find striking differences between Midrash yonah and the compilation of homiletic interpretations on the book of Jonah in Yalqut shimoni will not have an easy task. From my preceding remarks, it might appear that there is no distinction between “midrashim” and yalqutim, particularly because I have shown how the two terms are often used as synonyms. Nevertheless, it is possible to differentiate between them. Just as some types should not be separated, so, too, others should not be joined. Let me briefly set out some features that tend to distinguish the yalqutim from the classical works of midrash. First, the anthologies show a tendency to collect together ancient midrashic materials, regardless of their sources or different genres. Some anthologists (like R. Jacob Sikili in his Talmud torah, by his own attestation) quoted their sources verbatim; others chose to abridge and rework the original material. Second, in some anthologies there is a clear desire to blend halakhic and aggadic sayings; in others, to set forth midrashic traditions, and next to them, a commentary. Indeed, modern scholars have often used this last practice as a way of distinguishing between a midrash and an anthology, so that a work that contains a blend of homiletical interpretations and biblical commentary (particular peshat or plain-sense exegesis) is called an “anthology.”15 Third, another type of work that is often called an “anthology” is one with an ethical, moralizing orientation. To this group belong, for example, the two works called Menorat hamaor (one by R. Israel alNakawa and the other by R. Isaac Aboab), as well as R. Jacob Ibn H fi abib’s Ein yaaqov. At first glance, the latter seems to be merely a collection of talmudic aggadot, presented in their original sequence, alongside of which is the compiler’s commentary (that is, the commentary of the “author”). The moralistic purpose of

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Ein yaaqov can be ascertained from the author’s introductions and the indices he appended to it (the latter were omitted from the accepted printings, thereby occluding this central purpose of the compilation).16 These three distinguishing features of the yalqutim, as opposed to those of midrash—the mixing of aggadah and halakhah, the blending of homiletical interpretation and commentary, and the making of collections with an ethical purpose—are not, however, necessary conditions for the genre. The proof of this fact is Yalqut shimoni itself, the one work that serves as a representative model for the medieval anthology. Yalqut shimoni lacks all three of the previous features. Thus, while it quotes halakhic traditions, especially where the biblical context is halakhic, its intent is assuredly not to intermingle words of Scripture with halakhah and aggadah throughout. The latter sort of commentary, which is to be found in Leqahfi tov and other works, is not present in Yalqut shimoni, and any reader can easily see that Yalqut shimoni does not discuss ethical issues except insofar as they appear in the ancient midrashim. The primary model for the compiler of Yalqut shimoni was unquestionably Genesis Rabbah. Precisely this sheer heterogeneity confounds attempts to bundle all the anthologies neatly together. What they have in common is an attempt to excerpt the ancient texts in a new and changed way. These changes need not lie within the quoted texts themselves; they can manifest themselves in their arrangement and in the juxtaposition of homiletical interpretations from various sources. This is true of Yalqut shimoni, although abridgments were made there too, especially in the narrative sections.17 Such is also the case with Midrash hagadol, except that its compiler chose to expand rather than abridge his sources. In some anthologies, the modifications are more extensive and include linguistic substitutions (especially when it comes to difficult technical, foreign, or even Aramaic expressions); omissions of the names of the original authors; text abridgments; and paraphrasing. Some anthologists felt free to add commentary to the words of the midrashim, as well as numerological and acrostical material either from extramidrashic sources or of their own devising.18 Indeed, even those who were careful to transmit the words of the sages in their original form did not refrain from contemporizing the material. R. Simeon Hadarshan quotes Rashi (et al.) in Yalqut shimoni, and in Midrash hagadol, R. David Ha’adani adds the sayings of the geonim as well as excerpts from the halakhic texts of R. Yitshfi ak Alfasi and Maimonides. Having shown where the midrashim and the anthologies share features and differ from each other, we come now to the question of why these anthologies were compiled in the first place. The reasons must be manifold, since the anthologies did not emerge from a single academy, nor were they the products of a single cultural center or period. I will merely mention some possibilities. (1) Some compilers apparently responded to a felt lack of available books, either because such books were too expensive or because they were scarce; obviously, I am speaking of the period before the invention of the printing press. Thus, compilers aspired to amass, in one all-inclusive collection, a kind of encyclopedia of traditions that they considered most worthy of preservation and study and that previously had been scattered among many books. (2) The anthologies may also testify to a desire to restore midrash to its former glory and to return it to its rightful place


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alongside the literature of biblical commentary. The latter literature had developed as a genre of its own and thereby distanced the general populace from the classical tradition of midrash. (3) In connection with this last point, there may have been a polemical motivation as well. There are reasons to suggest that the return to the midrash via the anthological literature (especially what followed the sequence of biblical verses) may have stemmed from the fact that the genre of biblical commentary had distanced itself from this kind of presentation as the result of doctrinal controversy, as with the Karaites. The previously mentioned Leqahfi tov is an example of this case. (4) Another impetus to the writing of anthologies was surely their capacity for serving as sources for sermons—that is, basic material that could be used for public homilies, whose delivery was a popular occupation. This is apparently the reason for the great number of Yemenite anthologies in comparison with the number of similar compositions elsewhere in the Diaspora. (5) Finally, the Middle Ages witnessed a large-scale tendency toward anthologization in general. This was the case in the sphere of halakhah, and the practice of collecting aggadah can be seen as a kind of response to the latter. An examination of the previously cited introduction to Ein yaaqov shows that R. Jacob ibn H fi abib tried to model his work on the compositions of R. Isaac Alfasi and R. Asher ben Yehfi iel.19 Indeed, there is no doubt that the principal motivation for the creation of the anthologies was the ancient desire and habit of collecting traditions. It was not just the urge to collect, however, that created these works but a desire to make a new (or at least complete) connection between Rabbinic tradition and Scripture. This is what appears to have motivated R. Simeon Hadarshan, the compiler of Yalqut shimoni (insofar as we know anything about his motives). R. Makhir b. R. Abba Mari explicitly attests to this very intention in his introduction to Yalqut hamakhiri to Psalms: The main purpose of my plans and my goal was to benefit others like myself, so that even the learned might find occasional satisfaction in it, for the midrashim and aggadot are scattered and dispersed all over. Most are not to be found in their right place, and since they are occupied in their diligent study of the laws of what is prohibited and what is permitted, students will not find quickly the midrashim they seek after for the verses as they need them. May this book be for them a means to reach the trove of their thoughts and intentions.20

Remarks similar to these, as well as testimony to the far-reaching objective of the act of compilation, are also found in the anthology Talmud torah (1366), whose title and goals are explained by its author, R. Jacob Sikili: And since I included in this book all halakhic and aggadic traditions and statements that were expounded and cited in all the midrashim and the two Talmuds and the Sifrei and the Sifrah,21 I called this work Talmud torah. This title is appropriate and correct, for it instructs man in the knowledge to understand and teach, and on its basis the principles of the mitzvot and their halakhot, in their general rules and particulars, as well as their reasons and details, will all be clarified. The reader will have no further need of the words of other commentators, be they little or great, because the study of Torah [Talmud torah] is greater than them all.22

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The work was entitled Talmud torah (rather than Yalqut talmud torah, as it was occasionally referred to by scholars) not only because “the study of Torah is greater than them all,” but also because it is a kind of Mishneh torah in the field of exegesis, meant to obviate the need for the words of further exegetes. Indeed, some compilers of anthologies were not content solely to collect homiletical interpretations but included biblical exegeses as well, undoubtedly in order to make their works all-inclusive, as described before. These expansive anthologies have been called by different scholars midreshei habeurim or midreshei haperushim (in both cases, “the midrashim of exegeses”), to distinguish them from midreshei hayalqutim (“midrashim of the anthologies”).23 To this group belong Leqahfi tov, which Zunz described as “half commentary and half aggadah,” as well as Midrash aggadah and the “midrashim” of the thirteenth-century sage R. Samuel ben Nissim of Sanut, including the anthology that Buber titled Midrash genesis zuta but R. Samuel himself called Midrash genesis. The statements of R. Makhir and R. Jacob Sikili, and Zunz’s brief description of Leqahfi tov raise two central issues that must be considered in the study of medieval midrashic anthologies. 1. Anthologies are rarely treated as works in their own right, principally because the production of an anthology is, on the face of it, a mere technical feat— the gathering, organizing, and ordering of extant material, and these acts are usually not considered sufficiently creative or even important enough to warrant recognition. So, too, the work of a “learned man who collects [sources] from everywhere”—in the words of the fifteenth-century Yemenite sage H fi oter ben Solomon (Dhamari Mansur Suleiman), compiler of Ner hasekhalim (or Or hasekhalim)— does not usually command respect because “collecting [sources] from everywhere” may at best attest to naivete´, and at worst to an inability to discriminate between what is valuable and what is not.24 Nevertheless, it is important to delve into the inner construction of each anthology, if only on the chance that such investigation will reveal an ideological core or stance that makes the anthology more than merely a vehicle by which a speaker from the past is made to address the present. If such is the case, the anthological production is not mere technical work, in which there is “naught to distinguish, praise, or marvel at, since even schoolchildren can do it, and no one in the land cannot,” to quote the words of the anthologist of Yalqut hamakhiri in the introduction cited earlier. This is not necessarily a complicated matter. We can, it seems to me, fairly easily reveal the principles guiding an anthologist as he shapes his anthology in both its overall and specific dimensions. Despite the general absence of explanatory prefaces to anthologies, it is not difficult through study and analysis to ascertain the underlying principles by which the anthologist mined the corpus of his sources. If I have spoken little about these principles with respect to the anthologies I have discussed, it is because past scholarship, when it has paid any attention to these works, has almost exclusively concentrated upon the question of “sources,” and then only in order to work backward from the anthologies to learn more about their sources in the classical midrashim and their variants. To be sure, the contribution of anthologies in general to the identification of lost works has been of great significance. But what is usually found in anthologies


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serves only to confirm what is already known. If a version of a text preserved in an anthology differs from the known versions, it is not necessarily a reflection of another textual tradition; the changes may have been the work of the anthologist himself. In contrast, inquiry into the texts themselves, as they emerge from their presence in the anthologies, may be a subject of greater importance. This is what gives the anthologies a value beyond mere copyists’ handiwork and justifies distinguishing between the different anthologies as works in their own right. To illustrate this last point, let me comment briefly on one small matter relating to Yalqut shimoni. In general, arguments from silence or absence lead only to conjectures. Nevertheless, it is surely significant that the anthologist of Yalqut shimoni overlooked and omitted all references to works of ancient esoteric literature like the Heikhalot and the merkabah tradition, even though he was undoubtedly familiar with them. Except for an allusion to a midrash from the Alphabet of Rabbi Akiva, there is not a single mention of this extensive literature in his entire wide-ranging anthology. This obviously reflects the fact that even though all anthologies are compilatory texts, not all acts of compilation are to be measured by the same standard. Every compilation is accompanied by processes of selection, classification, and appraisal, and each of these processes is distinct; taken together, they are also distinct from the craft practiced by the scribe-copyist. All this should be a commonplace in the study of anthological literature; yet only rarely do scholars address such questions as: Did the compiler, in sequencing his texts, follow the order of importance of the midrashim from which he culled them?25 Or did he present them in an order corresponding to the degree of eminence of the speaker (if the speaker was, for example, a tanna or an amora—that is, according to the anthologist’s hierarchical perception of the sages involved)? Or did he use an order based on the proximity of the homiletical interpretation to what the compiler presumed was its “simple meaning”? Perhaps he ordered the texts according to some external principle (such as length or brevity)? Or did he try to construct a conceptual problem that he saw raised in the biblical text, or according to other such matters? Even more difficult to pursue is the detailed analysis of what was omitted from the anthologies, and why—whether its cause was a response to heretics or to detractors from within the community or outside it, or to other entirely different causes. It is worth investigating, for example, whether the widespread tendency in the Yemenite midrashim to divert their contents in the direction of philosophical topics has parallels in the non-Yemenite anthologies. Are there grounds for comparison between such anthologies and midrash Maor haafela, in which the author’s goal of doctrinal guidance is plainly evident (following Maimonides, he involves himself in philosophical discussions)? Here we must take into account J. Tubi’s trenchant claim26 that, except for Midrash Hagadol and Midrash Lamentations (whose precise character has not yet been clarified), the works that fall under the rubric of “Yemenite midrashim” are essentially books of commentaries and that, “in the linguistic tradition of Yemenite Jewry, the word ‘midrash’ is used in the sense of a commentary on Scripture, the Pentateuch in particular.”27 Moreover, according to Tubi, two factors remove these Yemenite works from the domain of “midrashic literature”: first, their language, which is mostly Arabo-Judaic (although sayings of the sages are quoted in Hebrew,

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as was the widespread custom in Arabo-Judaic philosophical literature); second, their content, with its strong link to the allegorical philosophical commentary tradition.28 These criteria undoubtedly demand further clarification.29 In any case, a rigorous examination of different anthologies along such lines would, in my opinion, lead to extremely interesting conclusions about their methods. They would not seem quite so blurred and undefined as they do at present. 2. The anthologists’ utilization of aggadic and midrashic literature raises the question of how “closed” this literature was, in their view. This question is a complex one and should by no means be examined exclusively along this axis. The work of copyists and printers should also be studied. Nonetheless, the work of the compilers suggests that, in their view, aggadah and midrash were in the category of a “possible interpretation” that did not rule out other opinions, and thus they did not hesitate to add their own, and others’. The Yemenite anthologists whom I mentioned occasionally put Maimonides’ words into midrashic formulations, which then became part of their “midrash.” Nor was this “midrashizing” restricted to the writings of Maimonides; the same was done to exegetical and homiletical passages, which were easily added (in these and in the anthologies in general) to the sayings of the midrashim. Joining them to the original midrashic utterances made them all into a kind of midrash.30 All these examples suggest that, in the views of the anthologists, midrash remained a vital tradition; this suggestion is further confirmed by the flexible use by later authors (not just Yemenites) of the term “midrash,” a matter I have already discussed extensively. On the other hand, it is possible that the very blending of old and new paved the way for the reduced stature of midrash, a view that emerges from the remarks of some authorities. Such is the upshot, for example, of R. Abraham Ibn Ezra’s criticism of Leqahfi tov in the foreword to his Perush hakatsar of the Torah, in which he disapproves of the exegetical methods of midrash.31 So, too, in the introduction to his commentary to Lamentations, he offers the generalization that “of the midrashim . . . some are as fine as silk, others as coarse as sacks.” Paradoxically, while the anthologies relate to midrashic tradition as though to an “open” text, the anthologies themselves are “closed” insofar as they bear their authors’ signatures. Furthermore, some authorities actually “close” midrashic tradition with these works. This, as I mentioned earlier, was apparently the intention of R. Jacob Sikili in his Talmud torah, and even if it was not the intention of the anthologist of Yalqut shimoni, from a practical and functional perspective that work effected the “closing” of midrash. The fact is that, after it became widespread (in the wake of its printing), Yalqut shimoni came to be, in the hands of many, the primary medium through which midrashim were cited. I refer not only to those midrashim that were lost, their contents known to us solely through their citation in this anthology. For many later authors who refer to midrashic sayings, we do not know whether they saw the actual midrashim themselves or whether they consigned to paper a reconstruction based on what they saw in the notations of the anthologist of the Yalqut. This question arises particularly when the later citations merely transmit the contents of the midrashic sayings, not its language verbatim.32 Yet the anthologies did not succeed in fully “closing” midrashic tradition. Nor,


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for that matter, did the rise of printing, for the printers themselves often added to the midrashim as they saw fit. This is a phenomenon known from the Mantua edition of Midrash Tanhfi uma (5323/1563) and the additions to it by R. Ezra of Fano to the earlier Constantinople printing (5282/1522), among them both tanhfi umaic and nontanhfi umaic sections. The same phenomenon occurred with other midrashim, such as Midrash Psalms, whose contents on Psalm 119 ff. are not original; likewise, every commentary cited therein on Psalms 112–37 was copied from Yalqut shimoni. Even in the case of Genesis Rabbah, the printers mingled diverse elements in it, interweaving sections from the Tanhfi uma and from other sources. All this goes to show that the later authorities who served as printers and proofreaders in the Hebrew printing houses did not regard the midrashim they worked with as closed texts.33 Here is yet another manifestation of the same paradox I discussed above: the very act of printing gave final shape to certain works, and occasionally without inner justification. The aforementioned Mantua edition of Midrash tanhfi uma determined the shape of the midrash; the numerous later editions all followed it. Such was the case as well with Seder eliyahu; its later printers followed the exemplar not of the Venice 5358/1598 edition, but of R. Samuel Heida’s Prague 5436/1676 edition, which was, according to its printer, fixed with the aid of the providential spirit that descended upon him. Indeed, having shown how open midrash remained even at this late date, we may ask again how completely even the editors of the classical midrash collections viewed their work as completed and sealed acts. Once again, it is obvious that a simplistic comparison will not be sufficient, but there is reason to speculate that many of the early editors did not regard what passed through their hands as closed works to which no one was allowed to add or subtract material. A fine example of this view is provided by the various recensions of the Tanhfi uma, among them those included in the Midrash Rabbah, but this is a separate discussion. I can bring this discussion full circle with a few final comments on the transition from midrash to yalqut and on what seems to be the decline of the latter genre. As I remarked at the beginning of this essay, if one reads the existing scholarship, one receives the impression of a sharp, clear transition between midrashic creativity and the period of the anthologies. This picture is mistaken because it derives from some less than cautious transferences of characteristics unique to classical midrash to all midrashic literature. The result is the habit of trying to fit all midrashic literature into the procrustean bed that sharply divides the entire tradition into “exegetical” and “homiletical” midrash when, in fact, this distinction applies only to the contrast between Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah or Pesiqta derav kahana. These types of organization, when they are found mixed together in the anthologies, are construed as characteristic of the broken forms by which the anthological genre is defined. Even experts lose sight of the fact that this kind of mixture was already present in midrashic literature after its classical period (which concluded no later than the seventh century). So, too, the use of the “adaptation of ancient midrashic materials” as a criterion for defining anthologies. Here again, scholars overlook the fact that such adaptations had been made for a long time and that they clearly characterized the Tanhfi uma tradition, inter alia.34 And so, too, other supposedly clear defining characteristics that scholars

170 The Middle Ages

offer to define the anthological genre actually abound in midrashic literature from the so-called interim period of aggadic creativity (from 640 until the end of the tenth century).35 Still, it is not unreasonable to try to define a beginning for the anthological period. Even if we cannot offer a firm determination, and the genre’s initial channels of diffusion remain unclear, it is not too much to suppose an Eastern connection. Some evidence for this may come from the work Pitron torah (which should perhaps be seen as the oldest extant anthology) and from Leqahfi tov, which originated in Byzantium. Viewing from this perspective, it may also be possible for us to question anew the accepted Western orientation of the works of R. Moses Hadarshan. In mentioning these three compositions, my intention is not to suggest that the literature of the anthologies directly evolved in a chain from these works. Any attempt at this stage to present a “genealogical tree” for this literature would be contrived. Nonetheless, it can be stated unequivocally that, from the time the anthologies emerged, the genre lived an intensive life for hundreds of years— indeed, until the coming of print. At that point, the genre began to diminish, apparently because midrashim now became readily available and the need for the anthology vanished. Yemen, however, again followed its own path. There, the creation of the midrashim continued energetically until at least the seventeenth century.36 It is perhaps more accurate to speak not of the decline of the genre but of its conversion and integration into a more encompassing genre, namely, aggadic commentary in works like Ein yaaqov, including the booklet appended to it on the aggadot of the Palestinian Talmud, already mentioned here several times; Zikhron torat moshe of R. Moses ben Joseph Figo (Constantinople, 5313–14/1543–44); R. Jacob Luzzatto’s Kaftor vaferahfi (Basel, 5741/1581); and R. Samuel Jaffe Ashkenazi’s Yefe mareh (Venice, 5350/1590).37 In this context, it is also worth asking whether such non-Hebraic compositions as Tsenah urenah or Meam loez belong to the anthological genre; these works are not customarily mentioned by scholars working in the field.38 On the other hand, even if we wish to delimit the anthological genre rather than broaden it by adding works of aggadic commentary and compilations in translation, it should be remembered that creativity in this sphere reemerges at specific cultural junctures, and that is certainly not happenstance. Take, for example, the case of Yalqut reuveni of R. Reuven Hacohen, first printed during the author’s lifetime in Prague in 5420/1660, which united the worlds of kabbalah and midrash. Certain well-defined reasons can be adduced for the revival of the genre in the modern period when many new anthologies were composed: I. B. Levner’s Kol aggadot yisrael, M. J. Berdyczewski’s Mimekor yisrael, H fi . N. Bialik’s and Y. H fi. Rawnitzki’s Sefer haaggadah, E. E. Halevy’s Yalqut haaggadah, and L. Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, as well as R. Baruch Halevi Epstein’s Torah temimah and R. M. M. Kasher’s Torah shelemah and Yalqut sinai. These works (and still others) can shed light on their predecessors; it is not too much to suppose that like literary phenomena are nurtured by like causes. In conclusion, as difficult as it may be to locate the precise beginning of the midrashic-aggadic anthological tradition, it is no less difficult to determine its


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conclusion, especially if we include in the genre its capacity to assume multiform and renovated guises. Nevertheless, if indeed the midrashic anthology was meant primarily to be a literary medium in the manuscript age for the transmission of classical texts of aggadic literature when they were rare, scattered, and not widely available, it is also the case that the anthologizing of these texts was a positive response both to a felt personal need (as in the gathering of the ancient Megillot hasetarim) and to the compilers’ desire to impart to the masses the essence of rabbinic aggadic tradition, which they regarded as something that could lead people “to recognize He who spoke and the world came into being.” The labor of anthological collection did not end once “iron pen and lead” were set into motion—that is, with the introduction of the printing press—when the words of the sages became readily available to all in their own form. Still, time marches on. Nothing remains static. Things past are viewed through the lens of the present, and they inevitably alter their image. New developments are forced into existence by the vicissitudes of historical circumstances, spiritual interests, the languages serving the author and his audience, and other such factors. Literature, after all, evolves from within as well as in response to its environment.

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):133–51. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. On the work of joining sections, done in Spain in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until the completion of the text, Devarim rabbah shel benei sefarad [Deuteronomy Rabbah of the sons of Spain], i.e., the Lieberman edition of Deuteronomy Rabbah, see M. B. Lerner’s important article “New Light on the Spanish Recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah [1]: The Evolution of Ed. Lieberman” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (Studies in the Aggadic Midrashim in Memory of Zvi Meir Rabinowitz, Tel Aviv, 1996): 107–45. This phenomenon of “building” midrash, like that of creating what I have termed an “anthology of midrashim” (a good example of which is Midrash hfi akhamim; see H. Albeck, Mavo umaftehfi ot livreshit rabbah [Introduction and indices to Genesis Rabbah] [Jerusalem, 1965], p. 115), merits its own discussion. I will not enter into it, although in theory and in practice, lines of similarity can be found between their modus operandi and those of the compilers of the yalqutim, as well as in the manner of treating the homiletic interpretations that constitute the works. 2. Rashi, however, called the composition yesod, which he uses to mean “book.” Unlike many of his day and later, Rashi distinguished clearly between midrash and what was not midrash. 3. On the acceptance of Numbers Rabbah, see H. Mack, “Numbers Rabbah: Its Date, Location, and Circulation” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (supra, n. 1):91–105. 4. Abraham ben Azriel acknowledges Leqahfi tov by name in his Arugat habosem, but he also refers to it simply as a “midrash.” Moreover, he attributes statements to the Mekhiltah and to Genesis Rabbah that do not originate there but in Leqahfi tov. See E. E. Urbach, Arugat habosem, 4 vols. (Jerusalem, 1963), 4:175; see also S. Buber’s introduction to Midrash leqahfi tov (Vilna, 1880), pp. 58–59. Furthermore, Leqahfi tov’s title in its first printed edition (Venice, 5306/1546), Pesiqta zutarta, contributed to its mistaken reputation as a stock midrash (R. Azariah del Rossi even thought the yalqut was based on an earlier

172 The Middle Ages midrash to which R. Tobias merely added; see Meor einayim, “Imrei binah,” chap. 19. What concerns us is the widespread phenomenon of offering citations via the yalqutim while attributing words to their sources (see later notes). For more on the method of quoting midrash in Arugat habosem, see Urbach, Arugat habosem, pp. 168–69. 5. It was first printed in Salonika in two parts: on the Prophets and Hagiographa in 5281/1521; on the Pentateuch in 5286–87/1526–27. 6. See E. E. Urbach, Sefer pitron torah (Jerusalem, 1978), introduction and esp. pp. 28– 33. 7. Seder eliyahu (Vienna, 5664), introduction, p. 102. 8. L. Ginzberg, Al halakhah veaggadah [On halakhah and aggadah] (Tel Aviv, 1960), pp. 261–62; and cf. Ish Shalom’s remarks on Pirqei derabbi eliezer, Seder eliyahu, ff. 9. This title may not even have been the original one. In the colophon to the oldest manuscript of Yalqut shimoni (Oxford: Bodleian, 2637), written in 1308, the copyist, Kalonymus ben R. Jacob, calls the composition “a book . . . [whose author] is R. Simeon Hadarshan of blessed memory.” In any case, the transitional stages in the meaning of the term yalqut, from its biblical sense as “a shepherd’s sack” (I Sam. 17:40; see Targum Jonathan, Rashi’s and Radak’s commentaries to the verse) to its medieval usage as a collection into which excerpts from many books are gathered, remains to be clarified; see further, n. 13. 10. On this and on the difference between them with regard to their use of sources, see S. Buber, introduction to the Makhiri to Psalms (Berdichev, 1900), pp. 12–13. 11. For further discussion, see n. 27. For a fuller list of Yemenite midrashim and biblical anthologies, see M. B. Lerner, “The Case as It Is and as It Should Be in the Publication of the Midrash Hagadol” [Hebrew], Peamim 10 (1982):110; cf. M. M. Kasher, Torah sheleimah 1 (Jerusalem, 1969), pp. 10ff., who includes among anthologies both Rashi’s commentary to the Torah and R. H fi ezekiah ben Manoahfi ’s commentary on the Pentateuch, H fi izzequni. For the most recent survey of “Yemenite midrashim,” see Y. Ratzaby, Toratan shelivnei teiman [Yemenite Jewish Literature: Authors and Their Writings] (Kiryat Ono, 1995), pp. 102–15. 12. Some consider it the first Yemenite “midrash.” They date Midrash hagadol to the fourteenth century; see Ratzaby, Toratan, p. 102. 13. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, in his dictionary under the entry “midrash,” notes one ancient appearance of this meaning in Avot derabbi natan, version A, chap. 18 (Schechter 67), but this seems to be a misreading of the source. In any case, M. Margolies (Leviticus Rabbah, introduction, p. xxvi, nn. 78–79; and p. xxvii, n. 47) notes that the term “midrash” as a title for midrashim is a late usage that replaces the earlier term “haggadah” or “aggadah.” Either way, we must look up the dictionary meanings of terms used in the world of midrashim, anthologies, and similar works. These terms includes perush and perushim (singular and plural forms for “commentary”), which often serve to denote collections of commentaries but also works sometimes called yalqutim; see, for example, the terms used by the author of Sekhel tov to describe his work; “foundation” (yesod); “booklet” (kunteres); “compilations” (liqutim); “book” (sefer); and, of course, midrash, which also serves as an appellative for the sayings of commentators, and not only in traditional Yemenite usage (see n. 27 here). The scribe of R. Shemaiah Hashoshani’s commentary called it “the midrash founded by Rabbi Shemaiah”; see also R. I. Aboab, Menorat hamaor (Mosad Harav Kook edition), p. 21. To the best of my knowledge, the terms “notebooks” (mahfi barot) and “collections” (asuppot) did not serve to designate midrashic anthologies in the Middle Ages (the book Haasuppot of R. Eliyahu bar Isaac of Carcassone, a student of R. Eliezer of Worms, is a book of halakhah). Indeed, Sephardi authors spoke of “masters of collections” (baalei asuppot) and Rabbi Abraham ben Ezra, in his remarks on Ecclesiastes 12:11, defined them as those who


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“gather from many books and compose notebooks.” To characterize the genre of anthological literature accurately, we must also consider its relationship to the literature of the maftehfi ot (“indices”) to Rabbinic aggadah, homiletic interpretations, and so on, as well as its links to the literature of the commentaries to aggadah, which themselves were based on compilations. See my concluding remarks. 14. On this work (also known as Haggadah shel shavuot), see E. Yassif, Sippur haam ha ivri [The Hebrew folktale] (Jerusalem, 1994), chap. 5, passim. Yassif correctly included, as part of the discussion, the H fi ibbur yafeh mehayeshuah and Sefer hamaasim. 15. See Buber’s vacillations regarding R. Menahem ben R. Solomon’s Sekhel tov (Italy, 1139) until he decides to call it a “midrash”; Sekhel tov to Genesis and Exodus (Berlin, 1900), pp. xiv–xvi. 16. In this regard, Ein yaaqov differs from the work Haggadot hatalmud, which he rejected (and which has often been overlooked by scholars who have surveyed the field of anthologies). Still, the two works share an aspect, which also sets them apart from other anthologies: they require a defined corpus from which to begin, and they then try to extract from it what they called aggadah. The parameters they used are themselves a matter for further research. See, for example, the statements of R. Samuel Jaffe Ashkenazi (Yefeh toar [Venice, 5350/1590], introduction, 2b), who complained against the collection of aggadot from the Palestinian Talmud in Ein yaaqov that its author “did not record one in a thousand . . . and what is more, there are errors of deletion and insertion, because he did not have at hand the book of the Palestinian [Talmud], but only one misleading booklet, as he wrote in his introduction.” 17. The anthologist of Yalqut shimoni often abridges material, even when he quotes talmudic discussions and cuts to the conclusions. This entire matter can now be discussed in light of the books of Dov Hyman, Meqorot yalqut shimoni to Prophets and Hagiographa (Jerusalem, 1965) and to Pentateuch (Jerusalem, 1974); cf. Yalqut shimoni to the Pentateuch, ed. D. Hyman and I. Shiloni (Jerusalem, 1973–92). 18. See, for example, Buber’s remarks on R. Tobias b. R. Eliezer, Leqahfi tov, introduction, pp. 28, 31. 19. On the tendency to eclecticism in the realm of biblical commentary, see S. Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Commentaries in Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in M. Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination (New York, 1993), pp. 98–130. It is possible to use the literature of biblical commentary to illuminate that of the midrashic anthologies, and vice versa. On a similar tendency, as manifested in a collection of folk narratives/exempla, see Yassif, Sippur haam haivri. 20. S. Buber edition (Berdichev, 1900), p. 3. The introduction is restated in similar language in Yalqut hamakhiri to the Twelve Minor Prophets and to Isaiah. 21. R. Jacob notes that he culled his material from 234 works, and he lists them. 22. S. A. Poznansky, “The Yalqut Talmud Torah of R. Jacob b. R. H fi ananel Siqili” [Hebrew], Hatsofeh meerets hagar 3:1 (5673/1913):5. The writing of the work was completed, it seems, in Damascus. 23. See E. Horowitz’s critique of D. Hyman’s “The Sources of the Yalqut Shimeoni” [Hebrew], Hadarom 24 (1967):216–20. If we accept this definition, we may include in this category the anthology of R. Judah Lirma, Tsintsenet haman, discovered by M. Kahana in the Firkovich collection in Leningrad (“Midrash Preserved in the Leningrad and Moscow Libraries” [Hebrew], Asufot 6 [1992]; see ibid., pp. 62–67). Among other things, Kahana quoted lengthy excerpts from the introduction to Tsintsenet haman, and there is cause to compare them with the introductions of Hamakhiri and R. Jacob Sikili, portions of which have been cited here. R. Judah Lirma writes, inter alia, of his intention to quote the sayings

174 The Middle Ages of sages whose “books are not to be found, [and with whom] most people are not familiar, for they are dispersed at the ends of the earth.” 24. See S. Lieberman, Midreshei teiman [Yemenite midrashim], 2d. ed. (Jerusalem, 1992), p. 39; and see ibid., pp. 18–22, his remarks on this midrash. 25. On this matter, see R. Jacob Sikili: Poznansky (supra, n. 22), p. 6; and on the preference shown by the compiler of Midrash hagadol for Genesis Rabbah as the basic text for Midrash hagadol to Genesis, see J. Tubi, Hamidrash hagadol—meqorotav umivnehu [The sources and construction of the midrash hagadol] (Doctoral Diss., The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1994), p. 287ff. 26. See Midrash hahfi efets, M. Havatselet edition (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 489–91. 27. Ibid., p. 489. Tubi notes in his remarks that the redactor of Midrash hahfi efets called (inter alia) the commentaries of Rashi and H fi izzequni, “Rashi’s midrash” and “H fi izzequni’s midrash”; see my citation of Rabbi Kasher in n. 11. 28. Ibid., p. 490. 29. For example, the position of Yalqut midreshei teiman, constructed along the lines of Midrash hagadol (a rough generalization), and written in Hebrew, must be clarified in Tubi’s system. On midrash and commentary in the Yemenite midrashim, see Lieberman, Midreshei teiman, pp. 6, 10. 30. The compiler of Sekhel tov cites the Sheiltot under the heading, “so said our Rabbis”; see Buber, introduction, p. xxx. Perhaps this is connected to the phenomenon that the term H fi aZaL (hfi akhameinu zikhronam livrakhah, “our Sages of blessed memory”) and others like it were not used exclusively in the Middle Ages to refer to the sages of the Talmud and midrash. 31. Compare his remarks in the introduction to the long commentary in Derekh hashelishit with his remarks in Derekh harevi it to the short commentary. See my book, Lehavin divrei hfi akhamim: mivhfi ar divrei mavo laaggadah velamidrash mishel hfi akhamei yemei habeinayim (Jerusalem, 2000). 32. See, for example, M. Ish Shalom (Seder eliyahu, introduction, pp. 87–88), on quotations from Seder eliyahu as it appeared in Reshit hfi okhmah of R. Elijah de Vidas by way of the Yalqut. Many certainly regarded the Yalqut as highly as did S. Y. Agnon, who wrote: “First and foremost is the book Yalqut shim’oni [Simeon’s compilation], by Rabbi Shim’on the Greatest of the expounders. All who seek to know the Torah, its interpretations, its allusions, its elaborations, and its secrets will find this book edifying” (Present at Sinai, trans. M. Swirsky [Philadelphia, 1994], p. 9). Indeed, the quoting of midrashic sayings by way of the anthologies was prevalent enough a practice as early as ancient times; see M. B. Lerner, “Concerning the Source of a Quotation in the Epistle of R. Solomon b. Judah and Studies in Midrash shir hashirim” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 52 (1983):581–90. 33. The great diversity of manuscripts assuredly had an impact here. There were copyists who shortened and added as they wished, as is obvious from the manuscripts to any midrash. I will mention as a generic example the Paris manuscript (Arles, 1291) of the rabbah midrashim (which include Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and five portions of Numbers Rabbah). The printers of Midrash Rabbah in Constantinople (5272/ 1512), apparently on their own initiative, appended to Leviticus Rabbah three sections from Seder eliyahu, chap. 6, at the end of its portions A, B, and C. See also M. Kahana, “Genesis Rabbah MS Vatican 60 and Its Parallels” [Hebrew], Teudah 11 (supra, n. 1):17– 60. 34. See, for example, Lieberman in the introduction to his edition of Deuteronomy Rabbah, and my article “From Sermon to Story: The Transformation of the Akedah,” Prooftexts 6 (1986):97–116. 35. For now, see my article “Between Redaction and Rewriting—On the Nature of


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the Later Midrashic Literature” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, section 3 (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62. 36. Among them Midrash hfi emdat hayamim, attributed to R. Shalem Shabazzi of the seventeenth century. The work was first printed in Jerusalem in the year 5645/1885 by the traveler R. Jacob Sappir. On this, see Lieberman, Midreshei teiman, pp. 32–39; Ratzaby, Toratan, p. 53. 37. See on this supra, n. 13, and my remarks there on the matter of “indices” to aggadah. 38. On the question of the linguistic criterion, see earlier, near n. 29.

9 eli yassif

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages

he history of the Hebrew story in the Middle Ages corresponds, to a great

Textent, to that of the literary anthology. In turn, the evolution of the Hebrew tale in the Middle Ages is linked to what was arguably the most important cultural 1

phenomenon of the early Jewish Middle Ages, namely, the “separation of disciplines.” Talmudic literature, central to the literary activity of the preceding period—and, to a great extent, of the Middle Ages as well—is an all-encompassing creation. This one composition incorporates most of the period’s cultural components: scriptural commentary and medicine, law and astronomy, linguistics and historiography, prayer and liturgical poetry, botany and agronomy, all in the course of a single, unbroken, and largely undifferentiated discussion. By the height of the geonic period (eighth and ninth centuries), a tendency had evolved to create special works on law and Hebrew grammar, Jewish philosophy and hermeneutics, liturgical poetry, and Jewish history.2 This important cultural phenomenon was undoubtedly connected to the parallel development in Arab culture of the first centuries of Islam. Arab scholars in Iraq and Persia, the lands in which the phenomenon first manifested itself in Jewish culture, distinguished between separate branches of knowledge, defined the various subjects, and devised special works in the different branches.3 The question of who influenced whom is of no consequence here. Jewish culture may have borrowed the norms of the ruling culture, or perhaps Jewish culture’s internal needs led to the creation of new modes of expression, which influenced Muslim culture. Like any complex cultural phenomenon, it was undoubtedly the result of a number of interlocking factors, and only the particular confluence of an encompassing cultural atmosphere with the specific needs of the Jewish world of that time can explain its appearance. Hebrew literature’s first literary anthologies were the product of that time and phenomenon. Although the collections of medieval Hebrew tales, with a few exceptions, were anonymously composed, scholarship has proven that two of the earliest—Midrash aseret hadibberot (Midrash on the Ten Commandments) and The Alphabet of Ben Sira—date from the eighth and ninth centuries and origi176

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages 177

nated in the cultural expanse of Iraq-Persia. The prominent characteristic of these anthologies, in keeping with the separation of disciplines, is that they contain stories alone. This is not an insignificant matter: at a time when the Talmud and the midrash constituted the exclusive literary model, such an esthetic decision (to contain only narrative material) was culturally and socially audacious. Indeed, the independence that the Hebrew tale strived for in the Middle Ages was not realized quickly. Until later in the Middle Ages (the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries), production of midrashic anthologies such as Yalqut shimoni, Midrash hagadol, Yalqut hamakhiri, and Yalqut reuveni continued, zealously preserving the literary frameworks of the past.4 These traditional midrashic anthologies did not carry forward the endeavor to create new literary frameworks, which would establish new contexts for the period’s Hebrew literary creativity. This task fell to the two collections of tales aforementioned, the Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Midrash aseret hadibberot epitomizes the transitional stage. It preserves the classic pattern of the midrash: biblical verse, its homiletic interpretation, an exemplary tale, and a “circular” conclusion with the opening words of the midrash and the verse. Yet all of these are formal features, a kind of midrashic veneer over a collection of folktales. Although the tales are offered ostensibly to exemplify the scriptural commandments, the homiletic portion of Midrash aseret hadibberot is minimized. It has already been noted that the connection between the opening commandment and the tales that follow is often tenuous and forced, making it seem as though the editor-author sought to justify the multitude of tales by tacking them on to biblical verses.5 His artistic efforts focused more on the development of the tales than on emphasizing their exemplary features, a significant departure from the way stories are employed in Rabbinic literature. Moreover, while all the composition’s homiletic passages connecting the commandments to the tales originated in Rabbinic literature, most of the tales themselves, in the various formulae of Midrash aseret hadibberot, are fresh, appearing here for the first time in Hebrew literature. This suggests that the anthologist sought new and original narrative material while relying on haphazard, uninspired selections from Rabbinic literature for the homiletical-didactic portion. His dual loyalty is therein exposed: on the one hand, he cannot divorce himself from the literary norms of the preceding period; on the other, he wants to give expression to new literary trends that focus on the tale itself instead of on its homiletic context. The composition’s formal-midrashic framework made possible its acceptance by the period’s Jewish culture. Its form, however, more closely resembles that of the framework grouping (see later) than classic midrash, giving it the latitude for a wider variety of tales and the development of their plots than anything that had been accepted earlier in the period. This clashing of orientations, so prominent in Midrash aseret hadibberot, is muted by the time of The Alphabet of Ben Sira. Unlike the earlier compiler, who maintained the traditional midrashic forms even when he filled them with basically new contents, the authorial hand behind the Alphabet’s composition has given up even this formal allegiance. This author selected the literary pattern of the framework tale—Ben Sira as an infant of five is called to Nebuchadnezzar’s

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court, where he answers the ruler’s questions and riddles in story form—in order to bind together the fundamentally new narrative material. This being the case, Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Alphabet of Ben Sira can be viewed as two sequential stages in the development of the Hebrew anthology of the Middle Ages. The first still feels duty-bound to preserve the normative midrashic pattern, although the material it presents to the Hebrew reader is fundamentally new. The second is more daring and revolutionary—as is its narrative content—and forgoes completely the literary norms prevalent in the earlier Hebrew literature. It presents the narrative material as part of a new literary pattern, apparently intended for an audience of readers other than Torah scholars and study-hall devotees. The transition described here, from the anthology with a midrashic construction to one with a framework construction, is not the end stage of development for anthologies in the Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages. Another anthological construction was a collection of tales without any formal editorial framework. Examples include: the collection of tales from the early thirteenth century preserved in an Oxford manuscript; the cycle of Yemenite folktales, also, it seems, dating from the thirteenth century, published by Gaster; and the collections dating from the late Middle Ages, such as the collections of tales in the Jerusalem Mss., and the various editions of the Mayse-bukh, in Hebrew and Yiddish.6 Almost paradoxically, it is precisely those amorphous anthologies of tales, with no editorial hand or narrative framework to bind them together, which indicate a more developed literary phase. In these anthologies, the cultural objective of “separation of disciplines” has already been completely achieved: each story is independent, free of any ideational, exegetical, or literary ties to the other tales in the anthology, collected together solely on the basis of their narrative character. In other words, in these anthologies the literary text is not beholden for its existence to any external factor, such as an idea or context, and it exists only on the strength of its own merits. This is the great difference between story cycles in Rabbinic literature and narrative anthologies of the Middle Ages: The former were created in order to reinforce a position or illustrate the legal or ideological issues into whose context they are woven, and the ties between the cycles’ tales are ideational, exegetic, or associative.7 In contrast, the narrative anthologies of the Middle Ages demonstrate near total independence: they appear as distinct compositions, and their constituent narrative texts are gathered without ideational or other intent. Each text can stand alone; the justification for its existence and narrative development is unquestionably literary. It seems to me that this is an important cultural development toward educating the audience of readers of literary works that the reading of literature is self-justifying; it need not rely on other motives such as education, ethics, or religious precepts. Alongside the framework anthologies and those containing independent tales, the Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages developed another type—the chronological anthology. To this category belong such works as the Chronicles of Moses, Midrash vayissau (The wars of Jacob’s sons), The Scroll of Ahimaaz, Shevet yehudah, Shalshelet haqabbalah, and Divrei yosef. These anthologies are generally constructed from a collection of independent texts, the great majority of which


belong to the genre of historical legend, culled from various written and oral sources and arranged by editors in chronological order, as historical documentation of an individual hero (Moses, Jacob), a family (Ahimaaz), a community (Shevet yehudah, Divrei yosef), or the history of Jewish tradition (Shalshelet haqabbalah). The generic division mentioned here, between the framework anthology and the chronological one, interestingly coincides with the geographical divide between east and west. That is to say, most of the framework anthologies, especially those dating from the start of the period, were the product of the eastern Jewish communities—Babylonia, Persia, north Africa—whereas the chronological anthologies came out of Europe. Although by the close of the Middle Ages the eastern communities had also produced chronological compositions (such as Divrei yosef), whereas independent story groupings, such as those of the Oxford manuscript and the Mayse-bukh, had been compiled in Europe, for the most part the generic models were distributed along geographical-cultural lines. This distribution may indicate outside influence on the creation of the anthology in Jewish literature: one salient formal characteristic of narrative traditions among eastern peoples is its inclusion in a framework. The Arabian Nights, The Tales of Sendebar, and Kalila wa-dimnah were vastly influential examples of eastern, frameworkbound anthologies.8 European literature of the early Middle Ages was, conversely, characterized by rich and developed historiographical writing, beginning with the historiography of families, tribes, regions, and kingdoms, and on to world histories.9 There seems to be further evidence of this phenomenon in that Jews living under Islamic rule were familiar with such compositions as The Tales of Sendebar and Kalila wa-dimnah, which had been translated into Hebrew. The Book of Josippon and the Romance of Alexander the Great appeared in Europe in Hebrew and thus became part of Jewish culture of the time. A historiographical composition, according to its definition, cannot be considered an anthology. It is ordered chronologically and uses all existing documentation and evidence to present as complete a historical picture as possible of the period or event it treats. On the face of it, nothing is more antithetical to this definition than the anthology, whose editor collects texts, usually literary ones, according to his own preexisting taste and ideology, as representative examples of broader cultural elements. In the Middle Ages, however, the perception of historical writing and the attitude to literary sources were fundamentally different from these principles, which are derived from modern perceptions.10 Indeed, the most important, encompassing, and paradigmatic anthological work to come out of the Jewish culture of the period belongs to this category. This is the chronological anthology of Eleazar ben-Asher Halevi, Sefer hazikhronot (SZ, The Book of Memory) from the first half of the fourteenth century, consisting of some 400 manuscript pages, in the Bodleian Library, and as yet unpublished in its entirety.11 A detailed analysis of SZ’s composition and construction may more clearly define the concept of anthology as perceived by medieval Jewish culture, the principles guiding the collection, selection, and editing of its components, and the ideational and social basis underlying such a literary endeavor.

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We can begin by describing the composition and its author. An unpretentious Jew by the name of Eleazar ben-Asher Halevi, who professes to be neither rabbi nor scholar, writes a will in the early fourteenth century. In it he bequeaths to his children a single item, admonishing them neither to sell it nor to let it out of the family’s hands, but to safeguard it as something precious and irreplaceable. The legacy is a single volume in which he invested all his energies and wealth, copying it out with his own hand, which he calls Sefer hazikhronot. Accounting to his children for the content of this priceless property, Eleazar Halevi says: “For I have seen many scrolls of the external books [sfarim hahfi itsonim], dispersed and scattered about . . . I have set them down in writing for admirers of parables and poetical style [melitsa] . . . though I know that most men will not approve; in their hearts they will question how I could have invested so much time and effort in such a book, on what seems to them mere parables.”12 Toward the end of the will, he apologizes again: “though I knew those that follow me will accuse me and mock me in saying: what an ignoramus, to write a book and put so much effort into a book of parables like these . . . to compose a book of parables like this.” Eleazar uses two generic terms here: “external books” and “parables.” It is not difficult to ascertain his intent in using the first term. By “dispersed and scattered about,” he meant unknown books, or works not studied in Jewish educational institutions. His reference is apparently to the noncanonical works of the period’s Jewish literature. Moreover, since this composition includes the largest collection of apocryphal texts translated into Hebrew, he may have been referring to them when he said, “external,” which was also the talmudic sages’ term for them.13 The technical term appearing over and over in the course of the will is mashal (parable). In biblical Hebrew, this concept had various meanings, beginning with proverb and rhetorical language and ending with a complex tale. The term had the same variety of meanings in the Rabbinic period and on into the Middle Ages.14 The Latin parallel is fabula, which for medieval culture denoted all types of tales—from comic stories by way of animal tales to historical stories and exempla.15 Eleazar Halevi uses the term in this sense, giving us an indication of the literary homogeneity he perceived in the plentiful material he gathered for his composition. He labels all the varieties of literary types as “parable” and in so doing apparently distinguishes the narrative texts from the canonical texts such as legal rulings, responsa, liturgical poetry, and so on. As Salo W. Baron put it, SZ is composed of “tracts loosely connected with one another,”16 as the work includes a wide range of literary types, subjects, and narrative patterns that differ enormously from one another. What Baron stated negatively, I construe as positive: Sefer hazikhronot is the greatest, most encompassing, and diverse literary anthology of the Jewish Middle Ages that we know of. It embraces nearly all the period’s known literary types: midrashic story, historical tale, local legends, hagiography, novellas, women’s stories, parables, comic tales, martyrological narratives, miraculous rescue of a community, tales of war and heroism, journey tales, and foundation legends. Yet Eleazar also states in his will, “I wrote them in a book . . . [they] will see, comprehend, and know the truth of some of the acts committed beneath the sky, and some of the trials and tribulations to find our fathers in their exile . . . lest


their descendants forget. Therefore I named the book The Book of Memory . . . as I have collected in this book, The Book of Memory, all that has happened and all that has been done from the creation of the world until today.”17 Eleazar’s chosen title for his book is very significant, echoing as it does the verse from the Scroll of Esther (6:1): “On that night the king could not sleep, so he commanded the book of memory of the chronicles to be brought; and they were read before the king.” In other words, the conceptual identification of the term “book of memory” with “chronicles”—the Hebrew equivalent of the word “history”—indicates, from another perspective, the character and function of the composition. Indeed, as Eleazar Halevi said, Sefer hazikhronot opens with the creation of the world, covers the prominent events in Jewish history such as the Exodus, the period of the judges, the Second Temple, the Destruction and Exile, the gezerot tatnav (that is, the massacres of 1096), and concludes with the End of Days and the coming of the Messiah. From this perspective, the work is constructed according to a purely chronological principle, establishing an encompassing historical picture of the world and the Jewish people. What follows from this description is that Sefer hazikhronot carries an internal, essential contradiction between its character as a literary anthology and its construction and orientation as a historical work. Literary texts have a narrativeentertainment orientation or are, in R. Eleazar’s words, “for admirers of parables and poetical style . . . who have no other pursuit.” He also asks, “for who would spend money on scribes for such a book?” and uses words such as “leisure” and “broad-spiritedness” to describe the disposition suited to its reading. In other words, before us is a self-proclaimed example of recreational reading in Hebrew literature of the Middle Ages.18 Yet Eleazar Halevi defines the composition as a historical book with a didactic function: “So that they will ponder, see, comprehend, and know the truth of some of the acts committed beneath the sky, and some of the trials and tribulations to find our fathers in their exile . . . lest their descendants forget.” In other words, intrinsic to the author-editor’s perception and orientation is that same duality we discerned regarding the nature of the texts included in Sefer hazikhronot and their overall construction. The duality of literary nature and historical orientation in SZ becomes very clear when examined against the background of the time and place in which it was compiled. In the 100 years between 1250 and 1350, a genre of historical writing known as “universal history” developed, mostly in Germany and the surrounding area. This genre included such titles as Weltchronik, Chronikon mundi, Historia univeralis, Summa istoriarum, Memoriale historiarum,19 all of which echo the title Sefer hazikhronot (“Book of Memory,” or “Chronicles”). Students of the genre in Christian culture have defined it as a history of the world from its creation until the author’s time, and sometimes on to the end of time and the Second Coming. For example, Aron Gurevich writes: The Middle Ages saw the efflorescence of the Encyclopaedias, the Summae, the Specula. All of these exhibit that same obsession with comprehensiveness which we find in medieval universal histories, which claim to tell the story of mankind from Adam to the moment of their writing—or even beyond that to the end of the world and the Day of Judgment.20

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It indeed seems that no other Jewish work of the period so precisely corresponds to these notions of European historiography: there is a single universal history and, as Jacques Le Goff has noted, “that history has a beginning and an end.”21 So, too, Eleazar Halevi bracketed his chronicle between these two temporal moments—the beginning and end of history—basing himself on authoritative Jewish documents like the midrash, which “documented” the process of the Creation and the visionary books that describe in detail the End of Days and the time of the Messiah. It may be possible to find more than a circumstantial connection between this genre of European historiography and Sefer hazikhronot. One of the longest and strangest tales to appear in SZ concerns Virgil the Necromancer. Eleazar Halevi inserts this tale among those of Titus and his punishment for desecrating the Temple. It is an erotic-magic novella about the sorcerer’s attempt to seduce the wife of a Roman nobleman, and how he punishes her for rejecting him by humiliating her before all the denizens of Rome.22 The tale is told here with detail and polish, and it bears consideration that this was perhaps a translation from one of the European languages. The first complete known version of the story appears in the book of Jansen Enikel of Vienna, Weltchroniken, in the year 1280, one of the first and most popular universal histories.23 This link between SZ’s inclusion of so alien a tale, and the European work preceding it by not too many years (a work that was one of the foundations of the historiographical genre, written in Eleazar Halevi’s language—medieval German—and whose version of the tale is similar) is not necessarily an accident. It may indicate that Eleazar Halevi’s historiographical conception, as well as the literary techniques he employs, were influenced directly by a similar work of European literature. Earlier chronicles and annals, or various sorts of literary works, were the primary raw materials from which the European universal histories were composed. In other words, the duality of SZ was not atypical for the culture of the time and place. Eleazar Halevi was not alone in recognizing the possibility of employing literary texts in historical writing, provided they bore the “authority” of time (that is, they came first, and as such, were reliable) or of personality (having been written by, or about, a credible individual); this was a common notion underpinning the period’s historical writing. As Gurevich writes, quotations and borrowings, set phrases and cliche´s, were a natural way of expressing oneself in an age when authority was everything and originality nothing. . . . As a rule, the historian saw himself as continuing the work of his predecessors; since, strictly speaking, there is only one universal history which cannot be rewritten anew: it can only be continued.24

Eleazar Halevi’s statements, quoted earlier, do signify that he viewed all the materials he collected for his work as just such historical “authorities,” as sources for understanding the history of the world and of the Jews. For him, even an erotic novella such as that concerning Virgil the Necromancer had positive historical value. The same orientation is manifested in the literary act itself: alongside such explicitly historical texts as Josippon and the Hebrew Chronicles of the Crusaders


there appear the mythological tales of Romulus and Remus, Apollonian rites, the wit and wisdom of the Jerusalemites, and more of the like. The text’s authority derives not from its nature, but from its source. It then stands to reason that had R. Eleazar penned an original historical text, based on the testimony of his own eyes and ears, he would have accorded it less importance than an entertaining novella like Virgil the Necromancer, which he had found in an authoritative historical work. In other words, in Sefer hazikhronot, as in other universal histories, the sum outweighs its parts in importance: each of the dozens of texts included here is known from previous sources, some with the most dubious documentary credibility, and so in and of themselves devoid of historical value. But any one of them inserted into an encompassing chronological conception, Jewish and universal, and thereby assimilated into it from a literary perspective, becomes a component in the overall historical journey. This issue puts the act of editing at the center of historical-literary writing: Eleazar did not write any of the compositions himself, but he is the individual primarily responsible for its overall composition. And as the work’s historical meaning and cultural role are, as aforementioned, the products of the sum, not its parts, questions pertaining to the work’s editorial conception, the selection of the components, and the manner of their treatment become key literary and historical questions. Interestingly enough, R. Eleazar sees his literary role in a similar light: For I have seen many scrolls of the external books, dispersed and scattered about . . . I have set them down in writing for admirers of parables and poetical style . . . I said [I would] faithfully collect and join them in one book . . . as I have collected in this book, The Book of Memory, all that has happened and all that has been done from the creation of the world until today as is written in this book and which I found and wrote and assembled into one tent to become one book . . . and much have I troubled and toiled to couple each item to its neighbor and position it as a pearl into the mounting and as clasps into the loops.25

In other words, Eleazar regards the brunt of literary endeavor to be the gathering of scattered, unfamiliar works, and their “coupling,” as he put it, into a single textual entity. The allusion is to the building of the Tabernacle as described in Exodus 26:11: “and put the clasps into the loops, and couple the tent together, that it may be one” (we must not forget that Eleazar was, after all, a Levite!). By alluding to this verse and by using its language, Eleazar raised his literary endeavor to a virtually sacred level. Contesting Eleazar Halevi’s principal claim of unity and coupling is the criticism of those modern historians who have discussed Sefer hazikhronot. They fault Halevi for using “tracts loosely connected with one another” (Baron), and though they describe SZ as “a rich anthology of texts of historical character,” they also note that its author “did not succeed in integrating them into a unified work.”26 First, it should be emphasized that most modern historians, if they even mention SZ (and most do not),27 do so perfunctorily, and moreover they rely on Gaster’s translation into English, which is fragmented and imprecise, and do not bother to look at Eleazar Halevi’s own manuscript. Before deprecating Eleazar Halevi on the basis of our anachronistic notions of “tracts loosely connected with one an-

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other,” and what constitutes a “unified work,” we should identify what Eleazar himself meant when he spoke of “clasps and loops” to couple together separate books, as a pearl is set into its mounting. Beside its “technical” literary value, this question has, more important, a cognitive aspect: how did people of the Middle Ages perceive the links between historical events, and how did they grasp the structure of chronological continuity within Jewish history and in the broader context of general history? The first and most prominent characteristic of the work of editing chronologically is the sequencing—the editor’s ordering of texts. The placement of texts from different periods and sources alongside or within others is particularly significant in a historical chronicle, the basis of whose organization is the passage of time. In midrash, too, verses are taken from various books of the Bible, belonging to different periods, and even more so in the midrashic compilations of the Middle Ages, which cull texts from earlier and later sources and place them alongside each other without distinction. But the organizing principle of the midrash is the link to biblical verses and their interpretation, and as such, they do not require any “clasps and loops” to couple them together under one tent. Let me illustrate the placement of separate works in a single chronological sequence with SZ’s first chapter—“The Creation.”28 It opens with sections copied from Pirqei derabbi eliezer, describing the creation of the world according to the order of the days of the week, until the point where Adam is created and his children born. Here ends the midrashic excerpt; the text continues with material extracted from Sefer yezirat havalad (The creation of the child). This work concludes with a description of death and the ensuing decomposition of the body, and from here Eleazar proceeds directly to copy Masekhet hfi ibbut haqever (Treatise on suffering in the grave), describing, as its title implies, the agonies of the corpse in its grave, and concluding with the types of people that “Gehenna devours.” Eleazar now advances to the work Seder gehinnom, which describes the travels of Joshua ben Levi in Paradise and Gehenna. This concluded, Eleazar writes, “Let us return to the matter of the first man” and retells Adam’s fathering of children by Lilith and Eve, from an unknown source. Since he was dealing with the progeny of the first man, Eleazar copies Midrash shamhazzai veazael, two sons of God who married human women and stayed in this world. From here he progresses to excerpts from the Second Temple period’s Biblical Antiquities, attributed to Philo,29 and apparently translated from Latin to Hebrew in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, one of SZ’s main sources. He continues copying, generation by generation, until he reaches Abraham, where Maaseh avraham, a relatively short midrash from the Middle Ages, is rendered in full. From here, the chronology moves on to Jacob and his offspring via another medieval work—Midrash vayissa or Milhamot benei yaakov—which details the wars of Jacob and his sons against the Canaanites after Dina’s incident in Shekhem, in the style of medieval tales of knights. After this comes The Testament of Naftali, a translated and reworked medieval version of The Testaments of the Patriarchs from the Second Temple period. Eleazar Halevi’s choice of The Testament of Naftali over all the other testaments in the book is typical: only this one boasts tales of battle and bravery, similar to those recounted in Midrash vayissa. In other words, the “clasps and


loops” coupling the texts are not only chronological-associative, but generic as well: tales of war and courage. The Testament of Naftali concludes with two dreams linked to Joseph, which portray him in an especially negative light, as prideful and arrogant toward his brothers. Immediately afterward comes the tale of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, offering a detailed picture of his exemplary modesty and righteousness. Here, too, it seems on the face of it that the placement of this story immediately after The Testament of Naftali is a combination of “tracts loosely connected with one another,” as Baron put it. However, insight into Eleazar’s motives can explain this editorial decision: since the earlier passage concluded with a negative image of “Joseph the Righteous Man,” Eleazar feels duty-bound to give equal weight to a normatively correct perspective of the tzaddik to his readers. He therefore inserts the story of Potiphar’s wife here, so that Joseph’s image is not tarnished by a final, unfavorable portrayal in the chronicle. Eleazar Halevi’s editorial effort was indeed comparable to the artisan’s setting of a pearl in its mounting. Culling dozens of works from various sources and periods and linking them together with chronological, associative, generic, and ideational “loops and clasps” required considerable skill and craftsmanship. At any rate, that is how he, as a fourteenth-century man, perceived the editorial craft. Though the modern reader may view SZ as a collection of “tracts loosely connected with one another,” we cannot accuse Eleazar Halevi of ignorance of editorial practice for, as we shall see, this is precisely what he considered to be his chief skill. Therein lay the medieval perception of the treatment of literary and historical documents, and it is up to us to seek out and apprehend the underlying logic. One of the most amorphous chapters from an anthological, editorial perspective is the one concerning the departure into exile. If we wish to understand the underlying logic, this is precisely the kind of material we must examine. After recounting the destruction of the Temple as per Josippon, SZ presents Josephus’s testimony on Jesus.30 Following this, he tells three tales involving Titus: the departure of captive Jewish sages in a ship bound for Europe, their sale into slavery, the establishment of communities in southern Italy and France, and the prayer Vehu rahfi um, written to commemorate the event. Afterward comes the legend of Titus and the gnat, and finally the erotic novella mentioned earlier of Virgil the Necromancer, which also takes place, in Eleazar’s opinion, in the days of Titus. After this come legends of the fall of Bethar, Zechariah’s blood, and the sins of the Jerusalemites. Baron’s and Shulvas’s accusations of loosely connected tracts and lack of fusion are more on target in this chapter than anywhere else. Yet this very disorder, so glaring to the modern reader, may yield a better understanding of the editorial conception of SZ. Eleazar Halevi ends the previous chapter with the largest extract from any work to appear in SZ, that from The Book of Josippon. It crescendos to the harrowing and tragic destruction of the Temple and the loss of national political existence—a circumstance expected to continue until the messianic age. From this crossroads extends the new era in the life of the Jewish people: departure into exile and life amid the Christian peoples (Eleazar’s reference group). Josephus’s testimony on Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum, signals the inception of a com-

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plicated relationship between Jews and Christians, the hard kernel of the European Diaspora. Here, then, is the reason for what seems, on the face of it, to be unnecessary backtracking to the preceding period of the Great Revolt and the destruction of the Temple. No disruption of chronological order, this is rather a logical and correct insertion in the eyes of a denizen of the Middle Ages. Immediately afterward comes the legend of Vehu rahfi um, describing the dispersal of the Jewish sages among the European communities and the establishment of Torah centers. This segment belongs to the same chronological sequence, to the same “seam” joining the Destruction to the founding of an established, culturally developed European Diaspora, home to Eleazar and his readers.31 Of course, from his medieval vantage point Eleazar had to acknowledge not only the suffering of his brethren, but also the punishment of those who caused it. Two of the tales concerning Titus—the legend of the gnat (Titus’s personal punishment for causing the Destruction), and the story of the sorcerer in Rome who caused harsh civil wars and devastation (the collective punishment)—belong to the perception of past punishments as a harbinger of what would befall the nations in the End of Days. The last texts of this chapter, concerning Zechariah’s blood and the sins of the Jerusalemites, describe events that preceded the Destruction. Eleazar Halevi seems to have had two reasons for “coupling” these episodes nonchronologically. First, he found these legends in other sources, in midrash, and was averse to inserting them earlier and breaking the flow of the story from Josippon. Second, and perhaps more important, midrashic legends of the Destruction focus less on historical events than on their ethical causes. It is as if Eleazar were saying to his readers: the terrible events of which you read just now were not happenstance but the direct consequence of these serious transgressions. In other words, these texts, seemingly out of order, were deliberately placed to make a point: their goal is to give meaning to the horrific destruction and make of it a historical lesson for future generations. One of the longest and most impressive chapters in SZ is the one Eleazar Halevi calls the “Book of Massacres.” Most of it consists of extensive extracts from two works, Eliezer ben Nathan’s Chronicles of the First Crusade, and Sefer zekhirah (Book of Reminiscence) of R. Ephraim of Bonn.32 Between these two, Eleazar sandwiches the story of Amnon of Mainz, whom he sees as belonging to the same martyrological circle of the Crusades. But especially interesting is the fact that the entire chapter opens with Asarah harugei malkhut (The ten martyrs), which, chronologically speaking, belongs to a much earlier chapter.33 Eleazar’s decision to include this piece in the “Book of Massacres” instead of in the section covering the Rabbinic period, as would be chronologically indicated, shows that the subject and ideas took priority over chronology as an organizing principle. Thus the martyrs of the 1096 massacres are presented as the successors of the Ten Martyrs. Some of the characters in the Chronicles discuss this very continuity, but SZ gives the argument (that the Ten Martyrs were forerunners of the martyrs of the Crusades) a formal literary framework by putting them in the same chapter. No less interesting is what immediately follows the “Book of Massacres.” SZ’s last chapter is devoted to the End of Days and the messianic age. As has been


mentioned, this is typical for universal histories, which choose to end in the foreseen future (i.e., the return of the Messiah) as a fitting conclusion to the history that the work as a whole treated. Thus, actual historical survey in SZ stops at the close of the twelfth century, that is, more than 100 years before Eleazar Halevi’s time. Why here? Why didn’t Eleazar bring it up to date as did, for example, Jansen Enikel in his world history, cited earlier, which included documents and testimony relating to Vienna’s contemporary history? There can be several answers. One is that Eleazar could not find any works on more current events. Another possible explanation is that he did not consider any of the more contemporary events to approach the Destruction or the Crusades in power—thus they were not worthy of documentation to be “a remembrance for coming generations,” and he stopped. And there may be yet a deeper reason. The principal works included in the last chapter on the End of Days are the Book of Zerubbabel and Otot haqets (Signs of the End of Days). The description of the wars of Armilus and Gog and Magog, said to bring great suffering and devastation upon the kingdoms of the nations in preparation for the messianic age, is central to both works. Countless gentile dead, the ruin of the mighty kingdoms, blood in every place and shape will characterize the age. One quotation from Otot haqets will suffice: “[This is] the third sign: the Almighty sends dew of blood and it will seem to the nations [of the world] like water and they will drink of it and die.” It can be stated that on a deeper, perhaps unconscious level, the wars of the End of Days are the ultimate punishment for the “Book of Massacres” perpetrated by the nations against the Jewish people: the non-Jewish blood to flow like water in the End of Days avenges the rivers of Jewish blood that SZ recounted in such detail only in the stories of the massacres. Perhaps here lies further evidence of Israel Yuval’s argument of a connection between the descriptions of blood, tortures, and mass suicides during the Crusades and the anticipation of divine vengeance against the gentile nations.34 Until this point, we have focused on chronological sequence as the main technique of forming the “loops and clasps” that join the anthology’s dozens of separate works into “one tent.” Another salient technique is deconstruction, namely, the dismantling of entire compositions and their reassembly in a new sequence. This was the rule, for example, for the broad example we looked at earlier concerning the creation of the world. The basic text is Pirqei derabbi eliezer, but SZ excerpts it selectively and intersperses among its disconnected parts small works such as Sefer yezirat havalad, H fi ibbut haqever, Seder gan eden, Seder gehinnom (Paradise and hell), and Biblical Antiquities. Thus, the original midrashic construction of Pirqei derabbi eliezer is transformed into a chronicle, based no longer on verses and midrash, but on the historical story of the creation of the world and human life. In any case, Eleazar Halevi (and likewise, perhaps, Jerahmeel, upon which much of SZ is based) did not feel much of an obligation to preserve the entirety of the work he copied, and he made masterful use of it according to the needs of the chronological anthology and his own perception of its forward movement. SZ’s primary source is undeniably the Book of Josippon. To retell the Creation tale and the dispersion of Noah’s sons after the Flood, Eleazar copies from the beginning of Josippon.35 Once Josippon moves on to cover topics not relevant to

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his chronological perception, however, R. Eleazar states: “[U]ntil this point, the words of Josippon, and what is written afterward, beginning with ‘And it came to pass when God scattered’ I will write [in the section] concerning Esau and the Edomite kings.”36 He then moves to accounts of other genealogies that he found in other sources, and continues his saga of the Jewish people—Abraham, the tribal wars, Joseph’s deeds. At this point, after inserting various passages from many other works, he says, “here too it seems right to me to go back to the Book of Josippon, to the place where I left off, in the generations of the sons of Noah, as the Josippon began to tell of Adam, Shet, and Enosh and explained the names of the families descended from Yefet and the borders of their lands, to Kittim and Dodanim as I wrote above in the generations of the descendants of Noah. And this is what he wrote afterward and, since it belongs here, I wrote it here.”37 And here he copies Josippon’s tales of the abduction of the Sabine women, the myth of Tzefo ben Eliphaz, the foundation myths of Rome and its first rulers. The reason for the deconstruction of Josippon and the pasting of its parts next to other works is, in Eleazar’s words, that the parts “belong here,” that is, since he believed all these events pertaining to the history of the nations took place during the 400 years of Egyptian servitude, he slips them in between the stories of Joseph and the Exodus. Indeed, when he encounters events that divert him from what he perceives as the proper course of things, he says: “Until here, the language of the Josippon. And afterward the Josippon wrote [of] the kingdoms of Darius and Cyrus and the Book of the Maccabees and the kingdoms of the Second Temple until the Destruction. And I will write of this in its proper place with God’s help, all as is found written in the Book of Josippon until their conclusion,”38 and he continues with the story of the Exodus. SZ is studded with such editorial remarks, which illuminate Eleazar’s clear awareness of his editorial undertaking, and the priority he gives a particular chronological perception over loyalty to the ancient works available to him. Perhaps more than anything else they reveal his historiographical perception, which regards sources as documents composed of independent units, which he could separate and rearrange according to another historical and editorial conception. In other words, Eleazar was not guilty of belittling the editorial craft or of connecting “tracts loosely . . . with one another” out of neglect. Instead, the opposite is true; he regarded the available sources as eclectic and, as such, felt free to cut and paste them with the aid of those “loops and clasps”—the main tools in the realization of his historical perception. Another literary phenomenon, similar to the last two in that it is likely to leave an impression of slipshod and disorderly editing, is repetition. Eleazar Halevi retells a number of tales in the course of his story: the legend of Raban Johanan ben Zakkai’s escape from Jerusalem is recounted in an extract copied from Midrash Lamentations Rabbah (12, 3), and again later in the excerpt taken from Seder olam raba;39 the tale of the Septuagint is told in the context of Second Temple stories, and then again in a Rabbinic framework,40 to list some examples. These repetitions lend themselves to a simple technical explanation: they stem from the copying of compositions containing different versions of the same tale, consequently, tales Eleazar already told are recopied. The anthological nature of the work can hardly prevent such phenomena as repetition and doubling. Still, when


these repetitions occur with respect to encompassing texts that claim a central portion of SZ, and when the various versions have different and contradictory orientations, mere technical explanations do not suffice. The story of the Destruction is the first instance of this phenomenon. It can be said without hesitation that this is SZ’s central story: it stands at the crossroads of Jewish history, as does the Incarnation for Christian history. It splits the historical horizon of SZ into “before” and “after”: all history of the past took place prior to that point, whereas the events of the present—the Diaspora, the establishment of centers of Torah scholarship, the wanderings and persecutions—came “after,” the direct result of that devastation. Indeed, the two primary bodies of texts relating to the Destruction, which are the longest unbroken excerpts in the work, are from the Book of Josippon and Midrash Lamentations Rabbah,41 and both recount the same episode. Differences between the Josippon/Josephus version of the tale of the Destruction and that of Midrash Lamentations Rabbah exist on almost all possible levels: the historical story versus midrash; an eyewitness to the event who penned his impressions some years afterward as opposed to legends crystallized over hundreds of years following; the professional historian with military training and experience in contrast to sages of the study hall; a Hellenistic author writing in Greek for a Roman audience juxtaposed with the compilers of the midrash, writing mostly in Aramaic for broad sectors of the Jewish people. And, of course, we cannot dismiss the dissimilar orientations of the two narratives of the Destruction: whereas the former tells a historical tale with apologetic tendencies, Lamentations Rabbah seeks to tell an ethical tale with didactic intent. The Josippon version describes the zealots’ internecine struggles and their battles with the Romans, the political forces active in that arena, the disposition of forces and their logistical situation, the technical details of the conquest and the destruction. The chapter copied in SZ from Lamentations Rabbah begins with the legend of Zechariah’s blood, documenting the sins of the Jerusalemites, continues with a description of their wickedness and the wantonness of their daughters, and goes on to detail, by means of the appropriate verses, the punishments for these transgressions. Afterward the editor collects the martyrological tales from the midrash—among them the infants drowned at sea, the children of Zadok the Priest, the mother and her seven sons— to show how the reproof was carried through. Neither the passage from Lamentations Rabbah nor that from Josippon is quoted in the original order; they are thoroughly deconstructed. As a result, the conceptual pattern woven herein can be seen as the work of Eleazar Halevi, although its foundations originated in these two sources. Is it possible that Eleazar failed to sense the differences between the two texts? Even if he did, how could he overlook the fact that they both told the story of the same event, and that copying both in the chronology would be redundant? Answering these questions draws us to the status of the texts in Jewish culture. Eleazar Halevi declared in his will-cum-introduction his intention to gather in this work the scattered and dispersed external books, those that had not been graced with interest, that were defined as noncanonical literature. The Book of Josippon was still part of this category at the time. But what was Midrash Lamentations Rabbah, an inalienable, uncontested part of the Jewish canon, doing here? There

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is no escaping the supposition that Eleazar copied the story of the Destruction from the Book of Josippon, knowing of another narrative describing the event, one accepted by devout Jews. Offering only the noncanonical version of the story would have been tantamount to challenging the normative Jewish narrative and contesting its version of the course of events. Had Eleazar not included the passage from Lamentations Rabbah, he might have been accused of asserting, for instance, that the causes of the Destruction were political, social, and military, as Josephus maintained, and not theological as per the “official” Jewish version. Copying the passage from Lamentations Rabbah after the one from the Josippon was intended to communicate that he had not forsaken the traditional narrative in favor of those external books, rather that he had laid them side by side, as two different perspectives of a key event in Jewish history. Still more pronounced is the second example, which proves retroactively that the repetitions reflect a pluralistic perception (if I may use an anachronistic term for the sake of convenience) of the Jewish narrative, and not mere technical and haphazard copying. I refer to SZ’s concluding chapter, which deals with the End of Days and the messianic age. In the “Book of Massacres”—tales of the Crusades—Eleazar Halevi inserts a passage from chapter 12 of “Hilkhot melakhim” from Mishneh Torah, then he copies all of Ephraim of Bonn’s Sefer zekhirah and reaches the concluding chapter of SZ—the End of Days and the messianic age. Here he copies the famous works of the redemption—The Book of Zerubabbel, Otot haqets, Simanei hamashiahfi (Signs of the Messiah), H fi ishuvei haqets (Calculations of the End), and the descriptions of Gan eden vehagehinnom in the End of Days. In this case, the phenomenon can in no way be described as one of repetition or replication, because these two groups of texts simply cannot lie parallel. In Maimonides’ words, opening the passage: Let no one think that in the days of the Messiah any of the laws of nature will be set aside, or any innovation be introduced into creation. The world will follow its normal course. The word of Isaiah: “and the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid (11,6)” are to be understood figuratively. . . . No one should ever occupy himself with the legendary themes or spend much time on midrashic statements bearing on this and like subjects. He should not deem them of prime importance, since they lead neither to the fear of God nor to the love of Him.42

In other words, Maimonides’ statements cancel out all the works SZ copies here, and even forbid having anything to do with them: Eleazar Halevi quotes these statements before copying in full those works strictly proscribed by Maimonides. This leaves us in the dark as to the position of the compiler of SZ; it may have been restorative or apocalyptic, but for us it neither adds nor detracts: Eleazar offers both as part of the narrative of the Jewish end of history: it seems we have no sharper, more important debate, with regard to the Jewish present as well, than this question, and SZ chooses to present to the reader the clearest and most extreme manifestations of both sides. Here, too, he does not strive for harmonization but presents each approach individually, in its original expression, without intervention or emendation. Again, the critics might well conclude: “tracts loosely


connected with one another,” what does Maimonides’ codification of the laws pertaining to the Messiah have to do with the Book of Zerubabbel? The distinction of a superior anthology is its success in presenting the diverse, and especially contradictory manifestations of the subject, each faithful to its original form. This, likewise, is what sets apart a great universal history, which bars no options but presents, side by side and intermixed, the various outlooks on the past and future: the Jewish narrative alongside the general narrative; opposing scenarios for the development of history—restoration of the past or its utter destruction in favor of the establishment of another world. The historical chronicle thus makes impressive use of the literary text’s strength—which separates it fundamentally from historical documentary—complexity, and polyphonality. The Jewish history emerging from SZ follows not one but several tracks: not solely the books of Genesis and Judges, but a narrative from the book of Biblical Antiquities as well; the normative tale of the Destruction as shaped by the canonic midrash is joined by another narrative, different, provided by Josippon/Josephus; the rationalistic, prescriptive narrative of the greatest Rabbinic authority stands not alone but in the company of another, anti-authoritarian scenario of the end of Jewish history as depicted in the treatises on the redemption. I do not claim that Eleazar Halevi, unsophisticated as he was, demonstrated an inflammatory pluralistic stand at the height of the Middle Ages. To do so would be to attribute wholly anachronistic positions to a man whose frame of reference did not support such concepts. My argument is literary, not ideological (I mean by this pairing of terms to emphasize not their dichotomy, which is, of course, nonexistent, but the technical aspect of selection and editing of literary texts, as opposed to those external ideological considerations that led to the selection and interpretation of the texts). Eleazar Halevi viewed all the texts, the noncanonical ones in particular, as we saw in his will, as inalienable Jewish property, and he felt obliged to copy them down for future generations regardless of their content or expressed religious stances. He copied the commentaries on the redemption not because their ideological positions appealed to him, but because he felt it imperative that they be preserved for future generations. This unbiased approach to the texts, stemming from a quintessentially literary-technical perception, was responsible for the composite, pluralistic world picture of the historical narrative of SZ, even if the editor himself did not have this specific objective in mind. Here is medieval anthological creation at its most refined, representing the culmination of the innovative approaches to form and content initiated at the start of the Middle Ages with Midrash aseret hadibberot and The Alphabet of Ben Sira. SZ embodies the tendency toward historiographical creation in Ashkenazi culture, along with the influences of eastern collections of tales. Above all, it exhibits the complex artistry of selecting and editing texts, preserving for each its original form and independence, while striving to create an anthological composition with associative, generic, ideational, and historical links. The aim of examining “the anthological art” of the hand behind Sefer hazikhronot was not limited to understanding the construction of one anthological composition. I also tried to comprehend the medieval Jewish attitude toward the period’s literary canon, as well as the literary and ideological bonds between various works, those principal historical

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narratives that shaped the historical consciousness of the period’s Jewish society. Eleazar Halevi, a Jewish intellectual of the fourteenth century, made masterful use of various anthological techniques in his laudable struggle for expression, creativity, and originality. A glance forward may illuminate Eleazar Halevi’s historical anthology as a forerunner of the orientations of the great twentieth-century Jewish anthologies. It is as if the primary goals of the principal modern anthologies were first formed there: the sweeping perception, from the creation of the world until the end of days in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1909–28); the portrait of Jewish history via citation of Rabbinic sources in fragmented and deconstructive manner, as in the anthology of H fi . N. Bialik and Y. J. Ravnitzky, Sefer haaggadah (1908– 31); the use of noncanonical sources and the pluralism deriving from the expression of different versions of the same tale or event, as in M. J. Bin Gorion (Berdyczewski), Mimeqor yisrael (1939–45); and the historiographic anthology of B. Z. Dinur (Dinaburg), Yisrael bagolah (1959–72), which attempts to reconstruct Jewish history by means of citation of sources only, without the intervention or interpretation of a historian. In these respects, Sefer hazikhronot was the pioneer of anthological writing in Jewish literature, even if its goals and worldview were fundamentally different from those of twentieth-century Jewish anthologists.

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):153–175. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. J. Dan. Hasipur haivri bimei habenayim [The Hebrew Story in the Middle Ages] (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 1–32; E. Yassif, “Hebrew Prose in the East—Its Formation in the Middle Ages and Transition to Modern Times” [Hebrew], Peamim 26 (1986):53–70. 2. M. Steinschneider, Jewish Literature from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1857), pp. 59ff.; J. Dan, Torat hasod shel hfi asidut ashkenaz [The Esoteric Theology of Ashkenazi Hasidism] (Jerusalem, 1968), pp. 9–12; E. Fleischer, “A New Study of the Old Hebrew Fable Literature” [Hebrew], Biqoret ufarshanut 11–12 (1978):19–24. 3. Avner Giladi, Baghdad—A Window to Islamic Culture in the Middle Ages [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1981), pp. 53–54, esp. on the catalogic composition of Muhammad ibn Elnadim of the tenth century, who summarized these developments in the earlier Muslim sciences. 4. L. Zunz, Homily in Judaism and Its Historical Development [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1954), pp. 141–50, 176–92; Steinschneider, Jewish Literature, pp. 28–53; A. Jellinek ed., Beit hamidrash [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1967); J. Elbaum, “On the Character of Late Midrashic Literature” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, division C (Jerusalem, 1986), pp. 57–62. 5. D. Noy, “Jewish and International Tale Types in the Midrash of the Ten Commandments” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 353–55; J. Dan, The Hebrew Story, pp. 79–85; E. Yassif, “The Man Who Never Swore an Oath: From Jewish to Israeli Oikotype,” Fabula 27 (1987):216–36. For a partial English translation of these texts, see David Stern and Mark Jay Mirsky, eds., Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature (Philadelphia, 1980). 6. J. Dan, “The National Library Manuscript No. 8⬚3182” [Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 51

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages 193 (1976):492–93; S. Zfatman, “The Mayse-Bukh: An Old Yiddish Literary Genre” [Hebrew], Hasifrut 28 (1979):126–52; E. Yassif, “Sefer hamaasim” [Hebrew], Tarbiz 53 (1984):409–30. 7. E. Yassif, “The Cycle of Tales in Rabbinic Literature” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 12 (1990):103–46; Shulamit Valler, Nashim venashiyut besipurei hatalmud [Women and Womanhood in the Stories of the Babylonian Talmud] (Tel Aviv, 1993), pp. 16–23. 8. E. Yassif, “Pseudo Ben-Sira and the Medieval Tradition of the ‘Wisdom Questions,’ ” Fabula 23 (1983):48–63. 9. Scholarship on the subject is vast; recent studies include: B. Guenee, Histoire et Culture historique dans l’Occident me´die´val (Paris, 1980); D. Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1977); W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (a.d. 550–800) (Princeton, N.J., 1988); M. J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); J. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992). 10. L. Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); W. Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, Mass., 1973); G. Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 59–86; I. Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52; R. Chazan, “The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of Events,” History and Memory 6 (1994):5–34. 11. Bodleian manuscript Heb.d.11; A. Neubauer and A. Cowley, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1906), vol. 2, pp. 208–15. On the manuscript and the compositions included in it, see Neubauer, Medieval Hebrew Chroniclers (London, 1887), pp. xix–xxi; idem, “Jerahmeel Ben Shlomo,” Jewish Quarterly Review 11 (1899):364–86 (One major source of Sefer hazikhronot was an earlier compilation known as The Chronicles of Jerahmeel, composed by an eleventh- or twelfth-century Italian scholar and poet. The text itself was lost and is known only from the large quotations made from it in SZ. This is why some authors confused the two compositions.) The first part of the anthology was translated by Moses Gaster and published with an introduction and notes as The Chronicles of Jerahmeel (London, 1899). The second edition of Gaster’s translation (New York, 1971) has a preface by H. Schwarzbaum (pp. 1–124), which includes a full bibliography and sources; E. Yassif, “Theory and Practice in the Formation of Hebrew Narratives in the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], Kiryat sefer 62 (1988–89):887–906. 12. All references to this work will be to Bodleian Heb.d.11 or to my forthcoming critical edition—Sefer hazikhronot. This quotation is from p. 7a of the former. 13. See Numbers Rabbah 14:14; ibid., 15:18; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 12:13; Pesiqta Rabbati, chap. 3, and “Sefarim hitsonim ugenuzim” [Hebrew], Encyclopedia Biblica (Jerusalem, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 1104–5. 14. Compare: “Mashal” [Hebrew], Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 5, pp. 548–53; E. BenYehuda, “Mashal” [Hebrew], Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language (Tel Aviv, 1948), vol. 7, pp. 3386–89. On the development of the genre in Hebrew literature, see D. Stern, Parables in Midrash: Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 15. “[F]abula . . . appears to include everything that is ‘mere invention,’ ” E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), p. 452; J. Chance, ed., The Mythographic Art: Classical Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England (Gainesville, Fla., 1990). 16. S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York, 1958), vol. 6, pp. 195–97. 17. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 7a.

194 The Middle Ages 18. In European literature: G. Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); in Arabic literature: D. Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden, 1992), pp. 1 ff.; and in Hebrew literature: Yassif, “Theory and Practice.” 19. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1975), pp. 195–98; K. H. Krueger, Die Universal-chroniken ([Typologie des sources du moyen age Occidental, no. 16] Turnhout, 1985); E. Schulin, ed., Universalgeschichte (Cologne, 1974); A. Borst, Medieval Worlds: Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages, trans. E. Hansen (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 63–71. 20. A. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Campbell (London, 1985), p. 289. 21. J. Le Goff, Medieval Civilization 400–1500, trans. J. Barrow (Oxford, 1988), p. 166. 22. The story was published from this manuscript by D. Flusser, “Virgil the Necromancer in an Old Hebrew Story” [Hebrew], Memorial Book for Umberto Nahon, ed. R. Bonfil et al. (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 168–75. On the history of this unusual story in European literature, see D. Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages (New York, 1895), pp. 325–39; J. W. Spargo, Studies in Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, Mass, 1934), pp. 136–206. 23. Ph. Strauch, ed., Jansen Enikels Werke (Zurich, 1972), vol. 3, and his introduction to Enikel’s work and its influence on European historiography. The story about Virgil appears here on pp. 470–72, lines 24139–224. 24. Gurevich, Categories, p. 128. 25. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 7a. 26. M. Shulvas, “The Knowledge of History and Historical Literature in the Ashkenazi Culture of the Middle Ages” [Hebrew], H fi anoch Albeck Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem, 1963), p. 495. 27. For example: A. Grabois, Les Sources Hebraiques Medievales ([Typologie des sources du moyen age Occidental, no. 50] Turnhout, 1987), and Y. H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982). 28. My forthcoming edition: Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 1. 29. G. Kisch, ed., Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum (Notre Dame, 1949); M. R. James, trans., The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (London, 1917); L. Cohn, “Pseudo Philo und Jerahmeel,” Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstag Jacob Guttmans (Leipzig, 1915), pp. 173–85. 30. D. Flusser, ed., Sefer yosifon [The Josippon] (Jerusalem, 1978), pp. 439–42; idem, “Josephus’s Testimony on Jesus” [Hebrew], Jewish Sources in Early Christianity (Tel Aviv, 1979), pp. 72–80. 31. A. Neubauer, “The Early Settlement of the Jews in Southern Italy,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (1892):616–20; G. D. Cohen, “The Story of the Four Captives,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 29 (1960–61):75–94. 32. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 14. The Jewish chronicles of the persecutions were published by A. Neubauer and M. Stern, eds., Hebraïsche Berichte der Judenverfolgungen wa¨hrend der Kreuzzu¨ge (Berlin, 1892); A. M. Haberman, ed., Sefer gezeirot ashkenaz vetsarfat [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1971); S. Eidelberg, trans. and ed., The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusaders (Madison, 1977). 33. For the sources of this composition, see S. Krauss, “ Asara harugei malkhut” [Hebrew], Hashiloahfi 44 (1925):10–22, 106–17, 221–33, and the recent synoptical edition: G. Reeg, Die Geschichte von den zehn Martyren (Tu¨bingen, 1985). 34. I. J. Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations” [Hebrew], Zion 58 (1993):33–90. 35. Bodleian Heb.d.11, pp. 26a–26b; Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 4, sec. 3. 36. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 26b.

The Hebrew Narrative Anthology in the Middle Ages 195 37. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 35a. 38. Bodleian Heb.d.11, p. 36b. 39. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 12, sec. 3, and chap. 13, sec. 1. 40. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 9, sec. 4, and chap. 13, sec. 2. 41. Sefer hazikhronot, chap. 8, sec. 7–chap. 12. 42. For the full text and its interpretation, see Isadore Twersky, Halakhah vehagut: Qavei yesod bemishnato shel harambam [Law and Philosophy: Perspectives on Maimonides’ Teaching] (Tel Aviv, 1995), vol. 2, pp. 188–99. The English translation is from The Code of Maimonides: The Book of Judges (book 14), trans. A. M. Hershman (New Haven, Conn., 1949), pp. 240–41.

10 marc bregman

Midrash Rabbah and the Medieval Collector Mentality

idrash Rabbah is one of the most popular and best-known works of midrashic

Mliterature. This is particularly true in the English-speaking world, where the Soncino translation

1 —sometimes titled simply “The Midrash”2—may be found on the shelves of nearly every library that includes Jewish books. It is therefore surprising how little has been written about when, where, and why this important collection of midrashic works came together as a literary anthology, despite the extensive research that has been published on the history of Rabbinic literature.3 As currently printed and marketed, Midrash Rabbah seems to be a relatively homogeneous midrashic commentary on ten books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther (variously arranged in different editions). However, as we shall see, Midrash Rabbah is in fact an anthology of discrete and generically different midrashic compositions whose textual and intellectual history is far more complex than first meets the eye. Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch was first published in Constantinople in 1512. This was followed by the publication of Midrash to the Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther).4 These two compilations were first published together as a single work, titled Midrash Rabbah, in Venice in 1545. In this form, as a midrashic compilation to the Pentateuch and Five Scrolls, Midrash Rabbah has been reprinted and republished frequently until our own day.5 Since the seminal study of the history of midrashic literature by Zunz in the early nineteenth century,6 it has been well known (at least to critical scholarship) that the separate midrashic works that make up Midrash Rabbah were composed at different times and places and belong to a variety of distinct midrashic genres. Genesis Rabbah, Leviticus Rabbah, and Lamentations Rabbah belong to the classical aggadic midrashim that were compiled in Palestine from the late fourth until the early sixth centuries.7 The second part of Exodus Rabbah (chapters 15–52), the second part of Numbers Rabbah (chapters 15–23), and Deuteronomy Rabbah be-

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long to the Tanhuma-Yelamdenu midrashim, a distinct genre of midrashic literature that evolved in Palestine, Babylonia, and Europe over an even longer period of time—beginning, I believe, already in the fifth century.8 The first part of Exodus Rabbah was compiled apparently in the tenth century.9 The first part of Numbers Rabbah—a product of the school of Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan—was compiled apparently in the twelfth century in Provence.10 The separate histories of each of the Rabbah midrashim to the Five Scrolls is even more complex. Suffice it to say that these works were edited at different times from the beginning of the early sixth century until the twelfth or thirteenth century.11 The name “Midrash Rabbah” seems at first glance to mean something like “The Great Midrash,” which would certainly be appropriate for a midrashic work of this magnitude.12 However, historically it seems clear that the name “Rabbah” was first applied separately to Genesis Rabbah,13 gradually became attached to other individual Rabbah midrashim,14 and only at the end of this process was applied to the entire anthology of works we know as Midrash Rabbah. The evolution of this title reflects the way that Midrash Rabbah itself gradually evolved as an anthology composed of separate midrashic works. An examination of the manuscript evidence reveals that the various Rabbah midrashim and other midrashic works were joined together in a surprising variety of combinations.15 First, we should note the existence of another midrashic anthology, Midrash Hakhamim, which contains separate midrashic works on each of the five pentateuchal books: an abbreviated version of Genesis Rabbah, the Mekhilta to Exodus, the Sifra on Leviticus, and the Sifre to Numbers and Deuteronomy. Midrash Hakhamim survives in only one known manuscript, written on paper in a relatively late Sephardi script.16 The importance of this work for our discussion of the evolution of Midrash Rabbah is in the way Midrash Hakhamim represents an alternate compilation of separate midrashic works to the pentateuchal books, incorporating together the best-known aggadic midrash to Genesis and the best-known works of halakhic midrash to the remaining four books of the Pentateuch,17 which contain halakhah according to the Rabbis. By contrast, Midrash Rabbah stands out more clearly as a compilation specifically—and perhaps intentionally—of midrash aggadah. Further along the road to the emergence of Midrash Rabbah as we know it, we find in a British Library manuscript (Add. 27169/340) Genesis Rabbah in its entirety followed by Leviticus Rabbah in its entirety and nothing more. It is interesting to note that we find here together the two earliest separate works found in Midrash Rabbah. It is difficult to date this manuscript precisely, but it is written on parchment, and various additions in the body of the text suggest that it was copied from a manuscript that was written prior to the year 1000.18 A Paris manuscript (Bibliothe`que Nationale 149) contains Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah, together with the first five chapters of Numbers Rabbah and a small part of Esther Rabbah (3:4).19 It is interesting to note that we have here the earliest parts of Midrash Rabbah copied together with the latest part, the first chapters of Numbers Rabbah. This manuscript was written at the end of the thirteenth century. Significantly, the scribe refers to each individual work as a “rabbah”—for example, between the first two separate midrashic works, he writes

198 The Middle Ages

hbr tyXarb qyls followed by hbr arqyw lyxta (“End of Genesis Rabbah”/“I will begin Leviticus Rabbah”). When we look at the important manuscript fragments recovered from the Cairo Geniza, we find, for example, a relatively extensive text of seven leaves that contains material from Leviticus Rabbah (34:4–5) followed immediately (on the same page) by material from Deuteronomy Rabbah (the printed version) (5:5–6: 2).20 While it is clear that the author-editor of this text was excerpting material, it seems to me that he was doing so from a larger text that contained together at least these two Rabbah midrashim (or some closely related recension). In my work on the manuscript resources of the Tanhuma-Yelamdenu midrashim,21 I managed to reconstuct the remains of a single manuscript from eight Geniza fragments that preserve part of Leviticus Rabbah followed by TanhumaYelamdenu midrash to Numbers and Deuteronomy different from what has come down to us in Numbers Rabbah and Deuteronomy Rabbah or the two versions of the Tanhuma. We do, however, sometimes find parts of the Tanhuma copied together with parts of Midrash Rabbah. For example, a manuscript in the Angelica collection (Or. 61) in Rome, written in a fifteenth-century Italian script, contains the Tanhuma (printed version) to Genesis and Exodus, lacks any material to Leviticus, but continues with the first part of Numbers Rabbah (chapters 1–14), followed by Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version).22 In contrast to the preceding examples, Midrash Rabbah to the Torah stands out as the realization of several different anthological aspirations: (1) the desire to create a compilation of complete midrashic texts to the five books of Moses, which we find expressed in Midrash Hakhamim and its precursors; (2) the desire to create a compilation of exclusively aggadic midrash to the pentateuchal books expressed in the other examples. The tendency to collect Rabbah midrashim with other works together in one compilation is perhaps best illustrated by the monumental codex found in the De Rossi collection (1240) in Parma.23 This Ashkenazi manuscript, written in 1270, contains no fewer than thirteen separate works, including Pesiqta Rabbati, Tanhuma (Buber version), Song of Songs Rabbah, Midrash on Proverbs, Otiyot deRabbi Akivah, part of Lamentations Rabbah, and Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version).24 As we shall see, the distinction between the two versions of Deuteronomy Rabbah is an important factor in the final composition of Midrash Rabbah as we know it. We come very close to the Midrash Rabbah known to us from the printed edition in a group of manuscripts, each of which includes the Rabbah midrashim to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. However, in all of them, we find not the printed version of Deuteronomy Rabbah,25 but the Lieberman version.26 In the introduction to his edition,27 Lieberman demonstrated that this different recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah circulated primarily in Sephardi culture. Indeed, all the manuscripts of Midrash Rabbah that contain the Lieberman version of Deuteronomy Rabbah were written on paper in Spain or North Africa in the fifteenth century.28 These manuscripts form such a close-knit group as to suggest


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that the production of manuscripts of this version of Midrash Rabbah was localized in one or more places in the fifteenth-century Sephardi world. The first printers of Midrash Rabbah in Constantinople in the early sixteenth century adopted a similar format of Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch. However, it seems clear that they did not publish Midrash Rabbah on the basis of a single manuscript,29 but rather they took textual traditions from several manuscripts in compiling at least some of the different Rabbah midrashim.30 It is interesting to note that only in Midrash Rabbah to the book of Genesis they seem to have used a specifically Sephardi text-type.31 However, in the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers they seem to have used non-Sephardi text-types.32 And significantly, in the book of Deuteronomy, they went even further afield, by incorporating a different recension of the midrash to Deuteronomy.33 In so doing, they made this recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah the one we today refer to as “the printed version,” to distinguish it from the recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah published by Lieberman. In effect, Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch known to us from the printed editions (which contains the “printed version” of Deuteronomy Rabbah), seems to have achieved final form only when it was first printed in Constantinople in 1512.34 However, from citations, it is clear that a monumental anthology of Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch already existed centuries before. In thirteenth-century Spain, Nahfi manides (d. 1270) made use of all the Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch, which he seems to have had together in one discrete work that he referred to as Midrash Rabbah.35 Nahfi manides was a Sephardi, so it is not surprising that he had before him the Sephardi recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version). He cites this work as “Rabbah,”36 just as he cites from other Rabbah midrashim by the name “Rabbah.” From this we may deduce that a midrashic anthology to the Pentateuch known as Midrash Rabbah—similar to the fifteenth-century Sephardi manuscripts of Midrash Rabbah already described—was available by the second half of the thirteenth century in Spain.37 Why did such a monumental anthology of midrash aggadah to the Pentateuch come together in the medieval period, probably in Spain? To answer this question, we need to contextualize this “literary event” into its surrounding intellectual climate. A key component of literary culture in this period is what might be described as the “medieval collector mentality.” The medieval period as a whole was, it seems, marked by a kind of “anthological avidity.” In Christian culture, this is the period of the compilation of the great summae and other florilegia.38 In secular European culture, we have the compilation of vernacular anthologies, by such figures as Chre´tien de Troyes.39 In Islamic culture, we have beginning already in about the ninth century the compilation of classical collections of Hadith (legal traditions) and the Tafsir commentaries on the Quran.40 In secular culture, we have anthologies of Arabic poetry,41 and the compilation of great story collections, such as the so-called Thousand Tales, which eventually became the famous Thousand and One Nights.42 In medieval Jewish culture, we have the compilation of the yalqutim (verse-

200 The Middle Ages

by-verse collections of midrashic traditions)43 and the medieval compilatory commentaries.44 And we have many collections of narrative material: the so-called Exempla of the Rabbis edited by Gaster,45 the Gests of Alexander of Macedon, Mishlei sendebar, Mishlei shualim of Rabbi Berechiah ben Natronai Hanakdan, Sefer hashaashu im of Joseph ben Meir Zabara, the H fi ibbur yafeh mehayeshuah of Nissim ben Yaakov ibn Shahin,46 and the Sefer hazikhronot compiled by Eleazar ben-Asher Halevi.47 The medieval Jewish collector mentality may be further concretized in another way. In Mishnah Avot (4:1), we learn: ~da lkm dmwlh ?~kx whzya, “Who is wise? He who learns from every person.” However, a medieval variant has a significantly different description of the archetypal wise person: @samh ?~kx whzya ~wqm lkm, “Who is wise? He who collects from every place.”48 Literary collecting indeed seems to have been a medieval Jewish passion. However, for the purpose of this investigation, it is important to define as precisely as possible the kind of literary collecting that resulted in the compilation of Midrash Rabbah. This is so because nearly all midrashic and talmudic works can be considered “collections”—literary compilations of what were once independent oral and literary traditions, some anonymous and some cited in the names of rabbinic sages. Midrash Rabbah can be described as a medieval midrashic anthology most correctly if we define “anthology” in a somewhat more restrictive way than usual—as a “composition of compositions.” Each individual Rabbah midrash that makes up Midrash Rabbah is already in its own right a midrashic composition that has undergone its own discrete editorial evolution. The compiler of Midrash Rabbah created a kind of “metacomposition” of these separate midrashic compositions by bringing them together in one compilation, apparently without much other redactional intervention on his part. It is also important to recall that Midrash Rabbah is demonstratively a collection of midrash aggadah. In medieval Judaism, aggadah was commonly defined in a highly amorphous way, as everything not in the realm of halakhah.49 However, an earlier midrashic tradition describes aggadah in a more imaginative way: hdgal twqxwc ~ynp, “Aggadah has a laughing face.”50 The compilation of Midrash Rabbah in the medieval period served to give the amorphous and playfully enigmatic “face” of aggadah a far better defined physiognomy than it ever had before. If the emerging physiognomy of midrash aggadah was Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch, then its full form was the later compilation of the entire Midrash Rabbah, combining the Rabbah midrashim to the Five Books of the Torah and the Five Scrolls. The evolution of this format also has a history, going back at least to Midrash Leqahfi Tov, written by Toviah ben Eliezer, who lived in the Balkans at the end of the eleventh century. This work is an individually authored midrashic commentary, not only to the Pentateuch but also to the Five Scrolls.51 We see here that the idea of a midrashic composition on the Pentateuch and Five Scrolls had reached fruition as early as the eleventh century, despite the fact that a complete Midrash Rabbah to both the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls as we know it seems to have come together only in the mid-sixteenth century. It should be noted that this compositional format represents a work ideally suited to the needs of the


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synagogue, for it contains midrashic material on all the biblical books read aloud during the annual liturgical cycle; the Pentateuch on the Shabbatot and the Five Scrolls read on the various holidays—Song of Songs on Passover, Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha b’Av, Ecclesiastes on Sukkot (except for some Sephardi communities), and Esther on Purim. To complete this kind of midrashic compilation, we have another kind of liturgically organized midrashic anthology— the Pesiqta,52 which contains midrashic material to the Torah readings for the holidays and the haftarah readings for special Shabbatot.53 It may well be that the primary purpose for the composition of Midrash Rabbah was to serve the needs of rank-and-file Jews who read the halakhically assigned biblical lections in synagogue throughout the year. A midrashic anthology of this sort supplies, in effect, a kind of homiletical-exegetical companion volume to those parts of Scripture read in the synagogue. In conclusion, note that the compilation of Midrash Rabbah as an anthology of aggadic midrash to the most frequently read biblical books in Jewish culture does not seem to have created a “canon,” in the commonly accepted sense of the word as implying some kind of authoritative body of literature.54 It is important to note that medieval Jewish scholars do not seem to regard the individual Rabbah midrashim or Midrash Rabbah in its entirety as having any kind of special authority by virtue of its being in this collection of works. The reason for this perhaps surprising lack of “authoritative canonicity” would seem to be the essentially nonauthoritative and open-ended nature of midrash aggadah.55 It does, however, seem useful to apply to Midrash Rabbah the notion of an “accessible canon,”56 in the sense of a group of works that attain a kind of corporate identity by becoming readily accessible to a particular readership community. In light of its subsequent popularity, the compilation of Midrash Rabbah in the Middle Ages may be said to have created a particular midrashic readership community—a community we join in our day by becoming its readers. Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):63–16. Reprinted by permission from The Johns Hopkins University Press. Earlier drafts of this essay were presented at the workshop on the anthological imagination in Jewish literature, Tel Aviv University, June 7, 1995 (in Hebrew), at the first European Association for Jewish Studies Summer Colloquium on Medieval Jewish Bible Exegesis, Yarnton Manor, Oxford, July 15–19, 1996 (in English), and in the Jewish Studies Colloquium at UCLA, November 21, 1996. I am grateful to the participants at these presentations for their comments, and particularly to Professors David Stern, Albert van der Heide, M. B. Lerner, Yaakov Elman, David Ellenson, and especially Chaim Milikowsky for helping me to clarify a number of points. 1. Midrash Rabbah, translated into English under the editorship of H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London, 1939), in 10 volumes, has been reprinted several times and has recently become available on CD-ROM in a bilingual edition with English subject index, by arrangement with Davka Software of Chicago.

202 The Middle Ages 2. Barry Holtz, Back to the Sources: Reading the Classical Jewish Texts (New York, 1984), p. 178, bewails this fact: “Unfortunately for non-Hebrew readers, when the Soncino Press published its English translation of the best-known midrashic text, Midrash Rabbah, they called the set The Midrash.” 3. The best available handbook of rabbinic literature, Gu¨nter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. and ed. Markus Bockmuehl, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1996), mentions Midrash Rabbah only in passing in its highly informative entries on some of the individual Rabbah midrashim. The Encyclopaedia Judaica has no separate entry for Midrash Rabbah, though it does have entries for nearly every major and minor midrashic work, including the separate Rabbah midrashim. Significantly, modern introductions to Midrash Rabbah tend not to deal with this specific work as a compilation; rather, they tend to serve as platforms for the discussion of midrash in general. See the forward to the Soncino edition of Midrash Rabbah by I. Epstein, and the introductions to their respective editions of Midrash Rabbah by Halevy (Tel Aviv, 1956–63) and Mirkin (1957–67), and the introductions to Midrash rabbah hamevoar (Jerusalem, 1983–93). 4. It was widely accepted that the Pesaro edition of 1520 was the first edition of Midrash to the Five Scrolls. However, M. B. Lerner, “The First Edition of ‘Midrash to the Five Scrolls,’ ” in The A. M. Habermann Memorial Volume, ed. Zvi Malachi [Hebrew] (Lod, 1983), pp. 289–311, has demonstrated that the first edition is actually the one published from a manuscript (similar to MS Oxford 164) in Constantinople, apparently in 1514, and the Pesaro edition is in fact copied from it. The midrash on Lamentations in this compilation was referred to as Ekhah rabbati (apparently on the basis of the expression rabbati am in Lam. 1:1); see Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, p. 284. But the midrashic works to the Five Scrolls contained in this compilation were not referred to as “Rabbah,” individually or collectively, until the Venice edition, in which they were published together with Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch. Note that Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, p. 315, refers to these midrashic works on the Five Scrolls as “The So-Called Rabbot.” The first printings of Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch and Midrash to the Five Scrolls were part of a general program of publication of midrashic literature undertaken by Contantinople printers in the early part of the sixteenth century. See Abraham Yaari, Hadefus haivri bekushta (Jerusalem, 1967), p. 20; Lerner, pp. 294–95. 5. The numerous editions are listed in Bet Eked Sepharim Bibliographic Lexicon (n.d.) covering the years 1474–1950, pp. 560–61, entry 783, and in Bet Eked Sepharim Hehfi adash Bibliographical Lexicon New Series (Tsefat, 1976), covering the years 1950–75, p. 120, entries 1123–33. A recent vocalized edition, Midrash rabbah hamevoar (Jerusalem, 1983–93), received generally positive reviews in the Israeli religious press: see Hamodia, March 30, 1990, and January 11, 1991; Yated neeman, April 6, 1990. 6. Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstlichen Vortra¨ge der Juden historische entwickelt, first published by the author in 1832; supplemented by H fi anokh Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael (Jerusalem, 1954). At the end of his discussion of the earliest Rabbah midrashim (chap. 10, Haderashot, p. 80), Zunz notes that Midrash Rabbah is made up of separate works composed at different times. At the end of his discussion of the latest Rabbah midrash, Numbers Rabbah, part 1 (chap. 14, p. 127), he adds, “without a doubt” from the thirteenth century the various Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch began to be copied together in one volume. 7. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 276–91. 8. See Marc Bregman, “Stratigraphic Analysis of a Selected Pericope from the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim” [Hebrew], Proceedings of the Tenth Congress of Jewish Studies, Division C, vol. 1: Jewish Thought and Literature (Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 117–124; “Early Sources and Traditions in the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim” [Hebrew], Tar-


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biz 60 (1991): [Hebrew] 269–74; The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature—Studies in the Evolution of the Versions (Diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991) [Hebrew with English abstract]; The Sign of the Serpent and the Plague of Blood (Tu¨bingen, 1997); Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (New York, 1997), s.v. Tanhuma-Yelammedenu. Compare Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 303–7. 9. See Avigdor Shinan, Midrash Shemot Rabbah, Chapters I–XIV: A Critical Edition [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1984), introduction, pp. 19 ff. Shinan notes that the place of composition cannot be determined. See also Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 156–57, noting parallels to midrashic material from the school of Rabbi Moshe Hadarshan, which may suggest contact with early medieval European Jewish culture. 10. See Hannanel Mack, “Prolegomena and Example of an Edition of Midrash Bemidbar Rabbah Part I” [Hebrew] (Diss., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1991) [Hebrew]; Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 309–11; and Marc Bregman in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, s.v. Numbers Rabbah. 11. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 315–21. 12. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 80. 13. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, pp. 76–78; Albeck, introduction to the Theodor-Albeck ed. of Genesis Rabbah, 2d ed. (Jerusalem, 1965), vol. 3, pp. 93–94; Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 276–77. The name Bereshit Rabba (with a final alef, or Rabbah with a final hei) is already found in geonic literature. Another early name for this work, Midrash livreshit deRabbi Oshaya Rabba, with several variants, after the first sage mentioned in the work, may have been abbreviated to Bereshit Rabbah. Early scholars, including apparently Maimonides (Introduction to Mishneh Torah), believed that this Rabbi Hoshaya (or Oshaya) was the author or compiler of Genesis Rabbah. ZunzAlbeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 78, suggests that the word Rabbah was added to Bereshit to indicate that this work was “The Great Genesis,” a midrashic commentary far larger than the biblical book on which it is based. I. H. Weiss, Dor dor vedorshav (Vilna, 1871– 83), part 3, p. 253, suggests that Bereshit Rabbah was so named to distinguish it from an earlier and less extensive midrashic work to Genesis. J. Theodor, in MGWJ 38 (1984):518, suggests that Bereshit Rabbah originally applied only to the more extensive part of the work (chaps. 1–29). 14. See Albeck, introduction to the Theodor-Albeck ed. of Genesis Rabbah, p. 94. Albeck goes on there to develop the idea suggested by Zunz concerning the name Bereshit Rabbah (see the previous note) to suggest that all the Rabbah midrashim (Shemot Rabbah, etc.) were given the appellation Rabbah (“great, large”) to distinguish them from the smaller biblical books (Shemot, etc.) to which they served as expansive midrashic interpretations. A. A. Halevy, introduction to Genesis Rabbah in his edition of Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, p. 37, suggests that the appellation Rabbah distinguishes each of the Rabbah midrashim from smaller midrashic works (mostly now lost) referred to as zuta, plural zutot (“lesser, minor, small”) to the same biblical books; and that Midrash Rabbah is a collective name applied to the compilation of individual Rabbah midrashim. The division of works into Rabba and Zuta is already attested from talmudic times; Ketubot 106a mentions a Seder Eliyahu Rabba and a Seder Eliyahu Zuta. 15. The following examples are far from an exhaustive survey, which would be beyond the scope of this study. 16. See Albeck, introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 115. Chaim Milikowsky (personal communications, 1996) points out that “Midrash H fi akhamim, inasmuch as it does not follow its base text slavishly, shows that its compiler had a higher degree of self-consciousness as author and/or redactor than did the compiler who put all of the texts of Midrash Rabbah into one volume.”

204 The Middle Ages 17. M. B. Lerner, in Teuda 1 (1980):44 n. 28, has suggested that the combination of Genesis Rabbah and the halakhic midrashim was already known in geonic times, being reflected in Halakhot Gedolot (ed. Hildesheimer, pp. 633–34): yXrdm h[bdaw synhb trwt ~yrpws. In discussion, Prof. Lerner has mentioned that he thinks this combination may reflect a “geonic curriculum,” a kind of semiofficial syllabus of midrashic works especially authorized for study of each of the books of the Pentateuch. 18. See Albeck, introduction to Genesis Rabbah, pp. 108–10; Margulies, introduction to his ed. of Leviticus Rabbah, pp. xxxiv. 19. Albeck, p. 105; Margulies, p. xxxv; Hannanel Mack, “Prolegomena,” pp. 244–45. 20. Published by Meir Zvi Weiss, “Seridim mehagenizah,” Hatsofeh lehfi okhmat yisrael 13 (Budapest, 1929):105–19. According to Weiss, the text was in the Kaufmann collection in Budapest, but my attempts to receive a photographic copy have not so far been successful despite the generous assistance of the late Chief Rabbi Schreiber of Budapest. 21. Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Midrashim, p. 82 (on Oxford-Bodleian E.75 folios 7 and 8) and the other MSS referred to there. 22. Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 24–25. 23. See Stefan C. Reif, “Codicological Aspects of Jewish Liturgical History,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75:3 (Autumn 1993) [Artefact and Text: The Re-Creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, ed. Philip S. Alexander and Alexander Samely]:125: “The twelfth to the sixteenth centuries were the years in which the bound codex reached the apogeé of its elegance, usefulness and influence.” This technological evolution, which permitted the compilation of such a monumental codex as MS De Rossi 1240, may also have permitted the compilation of such monumental compilations as the codices of Midrash Rabbah discussed here later. 24. See N. J. Cohen, “The Manuscripts and Editions of the Midrash Pesikta Rabbati— A Prolegomenon to a Scientific Edition” (Diss., Hebrew Union College, 1977), pp. 1–19; Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 41. 25. Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) survives in one complete manuscript copy (MS Parma 1240) and five incomplete or fragmentary copies in addition to the printed editions. See Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 49–51. A critical edition of this version of Deuteronomy Rabbah was undertaken by Rabbi Chaim Luban but never completed; see Bregman, p. 284 n. 7. According to Lieberman, in the introduction to Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version), p. xiii, Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) is a recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah that circulated among Ashkenazi and French Jews. 26. Midrash Debarim Rabbah, ed. Saul Lieberman (first published in 1940, rev. 2d ed. 1965, rev. 3d ed. 1974, cited later). This version of Deuteronomy Rabbah is preserved in four relatively complete manuscript copies: MSS Oxford 147, Oxford 2335, Rome Angelica 61, and Munich 229.2. MS Epstein, as described by Schwarz (see n. 28) contained a nearly complete copy of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version). Other MSS (Sasson 920, Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977) each preserve two leaves of this work. A Geniza fragment (London British Library Or. 10.797 Gaster Collection) preserves the beginning of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) copied out as a separate work (recto is blank). See Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, pp. 51–54. Compare M. B. Lerner, “New Light on the Spanish Recension of Deuteronomy Rabba [1] The Evolution of Ed. Lieberman,” Teudah 11 (1996) (Meir Rabinowitz Memorial Volume):107–45. Parts of what eventually became known as Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) were published in the nineteenth century by S. Buber and A. Epstein; see Lieberman, p. v–vi. On the earlier publication of parts of this text from MS Munich 229 by N. Rabinowitz, see Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 52. It is important to note that the version of Deuteronomy Rabbah published by Lieberman preserves a different recension (i.e., an essen-


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tially different literary work, but of the same midrashic genre) of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrash to Deuteronomy only in some sections; see Lieberman, p. xi, n. 3. Other sections of Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) replicate the same recension found in Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version)—see Lieberman, p. 83, n. 9; p. 116, n. 2, and the text found in Tanhuma (printed version) to Deuteronomy, see Lieberman, p. 125, n. 4. At the conclusion of the introduction to his edition of Deuteronomy Rabbah, p. xxiii, Lieberman states that both versions of Deuteronomy Rabbah are among the “oldest recensions of Tanhuma” (i.e., Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrashim, see note 8 here). Buber’s claim that there was an alternate recension of a midrashic work to the whole of the book of Deuteronomy Rabbah is refuted by Lieberman, pp. viff. Compare Lerner, “New Light.” Because Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) contains alternate recension material that circulated in Sephardi culture, added to material from Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) and Tanhuma, it is far less uniform, as a literary work, than Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) (see n. 33 here). 27. Pp. xi–xxi. 28. Meir Benayahu, in Tarbiz 43 (1973–74):445, n. 136, remarked: “It seems that until now all the Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch have not been discovered together in one codex except in Sephardi manuscripts.” This general observation remains unchallenged in light of subsequent research. On MSS Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977 (Spitzer), Oxford 147, Oxford 2335, Sasson 920 (Sephardi fifteenth century), see Shinan, in the introduction to his edition of Exodus Rabbah, pp. 25–26. See also his brief descriptions of MSS New York (JTS) 1672* 5014, and Jerusalem National Library 8⬚ 554, which are incomplete but may originally have been MSS of Midrash Rabbah. A manuscript once owned by Avraham Epstein but now for the most part lost also seems to have originally included all of Midrash Rabbah to the Pentateuch; see A. Z. Schwarz, Die hebraïschen Handscriften in ¨ sterreich, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1931), pp. 11–13, no. 26. On the rediscovery of part of this manO uscript after World War II in Poland and its transfer to the Warsaw Jewish Historical Institute, see Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature, p. 49; compare Mack, “Prolegomena,” pp. 251–52. Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah, p. xxxvi, identifies the two fifteenth-century Sephardi MSS of Midrash Rabbah (Oxford 147, Oxford 2335) and MS Jerusalem 8⬚ 515, which apparently also at one time included Midrash Rabbah to the entire Pentateuch, as belonging to the same text-type. These three MSS are written on paper that even bears the same watermark; see Bregman, The TanhumaYelammedenu Literature, pp. 45–47. Milikowsky (see n. 16) has informed me that according to the noted paleographer Edna Angel, the two Oxford MSS 147 and 2335 and another fifteenth-century Sephardi MS of Midrash Rabbah (Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977) “were all written in the same workshop,” and that MS Oxford 147 and MS Jerusalem National Library 24⬚ 5977 “were written by the same scribe.” 29. On the general affinity between early Hebrew printing and manuscripts, see Malachi Beit-Arie´ in Essays and Studies in Librarianship Presented to Curt David Wormann (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 27–39. 30. This has been noted by editors of the individual Rabbah midrashim. See Albeck, in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 128; Shinan, in the introduction to his edition of Exodus Rabbah, p. 27; Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah, p. xxxvii. Compare Hannanel Mack, “The Reworking of a Midrash by Printers in Istanbul in 1512” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 52 (1992):37–45, and his “Prolegomena,” pp. 256–58, who argues that the Constantinople printers used only one manuscript of Numbers Rabbah, Milikowsky, in Alei sefer 12 (1986):40, states that printers of the 1517 Constantinople edition of Seder Olam also mixed textual traditions from various manuscripts. 31. Albeck, in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah p. 137, notes that the textual tradition

206 The Middle Ages of the printed edition is related to the two Sephardi manuscripts (a MS Oxford 147, and a MS Oxford 2335). 32. Shinan, in the introduction to his edition of Exodus Rabbah, p. 27, notes that one of the manuscripts used by the Constantinople printers of Midrash Rabbah was similar to MS Paris 187/15, which was copied in Italy in the beginning of the sixteenth century (see Shinan, p. 26). Margulies, in the introduction to his edition of Leviticus Rabbah, p. xxxvii, notes that the Constantinople edition of this Rabbah midrash is most similar to MS Paris 149, which was written in Arles in 1291 (see Margulies, p. xxxv). Mack, “Reworking,” p. 45, notes that the printed edition of Numbers Rabbah is similar to the older Provençal-Italian text-type rather than to the Sephardi one; see also his “Prolegomena,” p. 256. Though the Constantinople printers were of the Spanish exile, what they brought from Spain to Turkey seems to have been primarily the format of Midrash Rabbah as an anthology of Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch. However, the actual textual resources they used apparently came mostly not from Spain but from elsewhere, such as Italy and southern France, perhaps brought by Ashkenazi immigrants who came to Turkey in the mid-fifteenth century. This specific conclusion runs counter to the generalization made by Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky, “Structure, Organisation and Spiritual Life of the Sephardi Communities in the Ottoman Empire from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Sephardi Heritage, vol. 2, The Western Sephardim (Grendon, Northants, 1989), p. 330: “printing houses were set up immediately after the Spanish exile in Constantinople. . . . These printing houses printed much of the works on Torah by the Spanish sages of the Middle Ages, thus saving from total loss the many manuscripts that the Spanish exiles brought with them.” 33. Because we do not know what textual resources the Constantinople printers had at their disposal, it is not possible to determine with certainty if their incorporation of a different recension of the midrash to Deuteronomy resulted from an intentional editorial decision. But two considerations suggest that such speculation may be justified. As was noted by Albeck in his introduction to Genesis Rabbah, p. 128, the Constantinople printers of Midrash Rabbah seem to have made a careful study of the work they were editing. And as was noted by Norman Cohen, “Structure and Editing in the Homiletic Midrashim,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 6 (1981):6, Deuteronomy Rabbah (printed version) exhibits a fixed ordering of homiletical units, more like the earlier homiletical midrashim Leviticus Rabbah and Pesiqta deRav Kahana than the Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrashim. This stands in particular contrast to the lack of redactional uniformity found in Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version) (see n. 26 here). It may well be that the Constantinople printers exercised sound literary judgment in selecting the more structurally uniform recension of Deuteronomy Rabbah that they incorporated into Midrash Rabbah and in so doing functioned as careful and conscientious anthologizers. 34. The flexibility of the contents of what eventually evolved into Midrash Rabbah as we know it illustrates the “open book” typical of medieval Jewish literary culture. See Israel M. Ta-Shma, “The ‘Open’ Book in Medieval Hebrew Literature: The Problem of Authorized Editions,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75:3 (Autumn 1993) [Artefact and Text: The Re-Creation of Jewish Literature in Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, ed. Philip S. Alexander and Alexander Samely]:15–24. 35. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, p. 345, n. 123. Using the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project CD-ROM database of Rabbinic texts, I was able to locate ten passages in his Torah commentary where Nahfi manides cites from Exodus Rabbah and Numbers Rabbah as “Midrash Rabbah.” See, for example, his commentary to Exodus 7:3, where he cites Exodus Rabbah 5:6 as coming from Midrash Rabbah. Sporadic references to “Midrash Rabbah” (no more than one per author) in pre-sixteenth-century works, I regard as unreliable because 20


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these may be the result of later accretions to texts for which we generally have no critical editions. See, for example, Pseudo-Rashi to 1 Chronicles 27:33. 36. In his novellae to Baba Batra 100b, Nahfi manides cites from what he found abr ~yrbd hla tdghb, which we find in Deuteronomy Rabbah (Lieberman version), p. 32 (see n. 7 and Lieberman’s introduction, p. vii). 37. Marc Saperstein, Decoding the Rabbis: A Thirteenth-Century Commentary on the Aggadah (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), pp. 21–22, has suggested that in the thirteenth century in Provence, Rabbi Isaac ben Yedaiah wrote a commentary to the entire Midrash Rabbah on the Pentateuch. Unfortunately, what survives in manuscript is only part of his commentary to Leviticus Rabbah and the first part of Numbers Rabbah with cross-references to other parts of the work, such as Genesis Rabbah. As we have seen, the various Rabbah midrashim were sometimes copied together in collections not containing all the Rabbah midrashim to the five pentateuchal books. For this reason, what survives of this commentary does not provide sufficient evidence that Midrash Rabbah to the entire Pentateuch was available in thirteenth-century Provence as a complete midrashic anthology to the Pentateuch. Significantly, Rabbi David ben Samuel Kokhavi (Estella) (Provence, late thirteenth–early fourteenth century), in the introduction to his Sefer Habatim, lists all five Rabbah midrashim to the Pentateuch, but only as separate midrashic works: wnydyb acmnw . . . hbr tyXadb

hlaw hbr ygys rbrmb hbr arqyw hbr twmX hlaw hrwth yrps raXm ~yrxa ~yXrrm hbr ~yrbd; see Mack, “Prolegomena,” p. 212. Yedaiah Hapenini Bedersi, who lived in Provence at about the same time, wrote a philosophical commentary on yrpsw amwxntw hbr twXrdm; see Meir Benayahu, Tarbiz 42 (1972–73): 457. Because this commentary has never been published, it is difficult to determine whether Yedaiah had the Rabbah midrashim as separate works or as a discrete anthology. 38. See Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer (New York, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 317–20, s.v. “anthologies.” 39. See Sandra Hindman, Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chre´tien de Troyes (Chicago, 1994), pp. 3–4. See p. 1 for the suggestion that Chre´tien, who worked during the 1170s, may have been a converted Jew from the great French talmudic center in Troyes, which would account for his odd first name. My thanks to my colleague Prof. Susan Einbinder, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, for having called my attention to Hindman’s book. 40. See The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden, 1934), s.v. “Hadith,” “Tafsir.” See also Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. (New York, 1964), vol. 6, p. 165, for a comparison of Quranic exegesis to midrash, and particularly concerning Midrash Rabbah; see his n. 14. 41. See R. A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, 1956), index, p. 489, s.v. “Anthologies of Poetry.” 42. See Muhsin Mahdi, The Thousand and One Nights (Leiden, 1955), pp. 1–11; The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York, 1990), pp. xi–xiii. For evidence of Jewish familiarity in the twelfth century with Alf Laila wa-Laila, see S. D. Goitein in JAOS 78 (1958):301–2, and S. D. Goitein and Paula Sanders, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 6 cumulative indices (Berkeley, 1993), pp. 11, s.v. “Arabian Nights.” 43. See Jacob Elbaum’s essay on the yalqutim, chapter 8 in this volume. 44. See Sara Japhet, “The Nature and Distribution of Medieval Compilatory Commentaries in the Light of Rabbi Joseph Kara’s Commentary on the Book of Job,” in The Midrashic Imagination, ed. Michael Fishbane (Albany, N.Y., 1993), pp. 98–130; “Hizkuni’s Commentary on the Pentateuch—Its Genre and Purpose” [Hebrew], Rabbi Mordechai Breuer Festschrift: Collected Papers in Jewish Studies (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 91–111.

208 The Middle Ages 45. See Philip S. Alexander, “Gaster’s Exempla of the Rabbis: A Reappraisal,” in Rashi 1040–1990: Hommage a` Ephraim E. Urbach, ed. G. Sed-Rajna (Paris, 1993), pp. 793– 805. 46. See An Elegant Composition Concerning Relief after Adversity, ed. William Brinner (New Haven, Conn., 1977). 47. See the essay by Eli Yassif, Chapter 9 in this volume. For a survey and categorization of medieval aggadic collections, see Alexander, “Gaster’s Exempla of the Rabbis,” pp. 802–5, and particularly his comment (p. 803): “Aggadic collections are popular in character. They are meant for edification: they could be read in private on Shabbat, or quarried by the darshanim for sermon illustrations.” 48. Notes on a Hitherto Unknown Exegetical, Theological and Philosophical Commentary to the Pentateuch Composed by Aboo Manzur Al-Dhamari, ed. Alexander Kohut (New York, n.d.), p. 47. 49. See Joseph Heinemann, “The Nature of the Aggadah,” in Midrash and Literature, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick (New Haven, Conn., 1985), p. 42, citing Mevo hatalmud, ascribed to Shmuel Hanagid. Heinemann’s essay was originally published in his book Aggadah and Its Development [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1974), see p. 7. 50. See Pesiqta Rabbati, chap. 21, ed. Friedmann, 101a–b and parallels. 51. See Zunz-Albeck, Haderashot beyisrael, pp. 145–46; Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2d ed. (New York, 1964), vol. 6, pp. 173–75; Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 356–57. 52. See Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, pp. 291–96 on Pesiqta deRav Kahana, and pp. 296–302 on Pesiqta Rabbati. 53. On these special haftarot, see Lewis Barth, “ ‘The Three of Rebuke and the Seven of Consolation’ Sermons in Pesikta and de-Rav Kahana,” Journal of Jewish Studies 33 (1982): 503–15. 54. On canonization and authority, see Frank Kermode, “Institutional Control of Interpretation,” in The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 168– 84; see also Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago, 1984), and Lucia Re, “(De)constructing the Canon: The Agon of the Anthologies on the Scene of Modern Italian Poetry,” The Modern Language Review 87:3 (July 1992):585–602. On the formation of the biblical canon, see James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia, 1984), and Frank Kermode, “The Canon,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987). On the problematic issue of the canonization of Rabbinic literature, see Jacob Neusner, Canon and Connection (Lanham, Md., 1987). Compare the brief, but to my mind more helpful, comments by David Stern, “Sacred Text and Canon,” Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York, 1987), pp. 841–47, who emphasizes the complexity of the question of canon in nonhalakhic literature (pp. 845ff.). 55. See, for example, the statement “one may not invoke aggadah as support [for a certain view]”; see Judah Goldin, “Freedom and Restraint of the Haggadah,” in Studies in Midrash and Related Literature (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 252–68, and David Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn 1988), revised in his recent book Midrash and Theory: Ancient Exegesis and Contemporary Literary Studies (Evanston, Ill., 1996), “Midrash and Hermeneutics: Polysemy vs. Indeterminacy,” pp. 15–38. On the general nature of midrash aggadah, see Y. Heinemann, Darkhei haaggadah, 3d ed. (Jerusalem, 1974). 56. For this expression, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), pp. 215–16.

iii

THE MODERN PERIOD


11 zipora kagan

Homo Anthologicus Micha Joseph Berdyczewski and the Anthological Genre

“To be both source and progeny” Berdyczewski

o figure in modern Hebrew literature has been more closely identified with the anthological enterprise than Micha Joseph Berdyczewski, later known as N Bin-Gorion (1865–1921). In the course of his life, Berdyczewski, in addition to being a writer of fiction, a folklorist, essayist, critic, and scholar, compiled five multivolume anthologies and seems to have discovered in the anthological form a fitting embodiment of what he considered the nature of modern Jewish existence. Indeed, so central and fundamental a role did the compilation of anthologies play in his life that it would be no exaggeration to call Berdyczewski homo anthologicus. Micha Joseph Berdyczewski was born on July 27, 1865, in the village of Medzibezh in Podolia, a district in the Ukraine (Little Russia). Most of his childhood and youth were spent in Dubova, where his father served as the community’s rabbi. His mother died when he was eleven, and this traumatic experience shadowed Berdyczewski all his life, serving as the subject of several of his stories. In 1882, at the age of seventeen, the young iluy (prodigy) married a rich man’s daughter, but after he was discovered reading maskilic texts, his father-in-law forced him to divorce his wife (whom Berdyczewski had grown to love). The trauma of this episode was later given poignant esthetic expression in his story “Meever lanahar” (Across the River, 1899). In 1882 Berdyczewski entered the Volozhin yeshiva. In that same year, he published his first article, “Toldot yeshivat ets hfi ayyim.”1 In 1888 he married for a second time, only to be divorced within a year. In 1890 he visited Odessa, where he became acquainted with the most important Hebrew writers. At the end of the year, he left Poland, first for Germany, where he enrolled in Breslau University, and later for Switzerland, where in 1896 he received a doctorate in philosophy from Berne University for a dissertation entitled ¨ ber den Zusammenhand zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik (On the connection beU tween ethics and aesthetics).2 In 1902 he married Rachel Ramburg, who also be211

212 The Modern Period

came his main literary collaborator. They lived in Breslau until 1911, then moved to Berlin, where they lived for the next ten years. Berdyczewski died on November 18, 1921. Throughout these years, Berdyczewski devoted considerable energy to various anthological projects, most of them collections of aggadah. For him, the anthological activity was not only the mere assembling of a collection, but the making of a literary genre with both historical and philosophical dimensions that represents the unique structure of Jewish existence: “This work of mine is objective toladatic poetics,” he wrote on October 1, 1904, to A. L. Ben-Avigdor, to whom he sent the manuscript of H fi ayyei moshe (The Life of Moses), which itself belongs to the anthological genre. By toladatic—an adjectival form I have invented for the purposes of this article, derived from the Hebrew toladati, the term Berdyczewski himself used— Berdyczewski meant a historically dynamic rather than static memory, namely, the summation of all deeds, desires, feelings, and visions that had accumulated over generations in the life of the Jewish people, a nation that Berdyczewski called a toladatic folk. It is clear why literature without such a “toladatic mark” was disqualified from his purview, since “true and whole recognition of ourselves and the quality of ourselves deepens on the knowledge of our tolada” (Berdyczewski, 1914). Tolada is a major category and term in all aspects of Berdyczewski’s writing—from philosophy and literature, to criticism and scholarship.3 Between 1903 and 1905, Berdyczewski was occupied in preparing two anthologies: a compilation called Matam (Mishnah, Talmud, midrash) and a collection of Hasidic texts entitled Liqutei reshit hahfi asidut (Extracts from the Origins of Hasidism). The latter project was never completed, though parts of it survive in manuscript form in the Berdyczewski archive.4 In any case, Berdyczewski’s preoccupation with anthology making is evident in the entries he made during this period—especially from July to November 1905—in his private diary (Chroniq),5 which include many references and descriptions of anthological projects: “I have started a new plan: to arrange talmudic proverbs. Some of it I have already done, but I should also have collected disputations in talmudic literature and prayers” (July 22, 1905).6 Or, as he wrote on August 10, 1905: “I have collected masses of legends.”7 At that time, as Berdyczewski noted in his diary, he had begun to collect and arrange talmudic texts containing disputes with “idol worshipers, Christians, and sectarians mentioned in talmudic literature.”8 As in the Hasidic anthology mentioned earlier, only some parts of this work survive in manuscript. Whether or not they were completed, however, all these projects attest to the centrality of the anthology in all spheres of Berdyczewski’s work. His aggadic collections, in German as well as in Hebrew, include different types of anthologies, and they reflect his self-conception as both a philosopher of history and a narrator. In the first role, Berdyczewski approached the aggadic collections as a historian of culture, collecting different versions of stories and traditions, comparing their details, and assembling them in carefully designed arrangements. In the second role, that of writer, he treated each version of a particular story as an autonomous, unique work. In both roles, however, Berdyczewski collected his material from a

Homo Anthologicus 213

wide range of sources—from canonical and noncanonical texts, from those central to the tradition and from those marginal to it, and from both authoritative and unorthodox works. To understand the nature of these different types of anthologies, it will be helpful to review briefly Berdyczewski’s five large anthologies, three of which were composed in Hebrew, and two in German. I will treat the Hebrew and the German works separately and begin with the former.

H fi ayye moshe ish haelohim (The Life of Moses, the Man of God) Prepared in 1903–4, this work9 was Berdyczewski’s first anthology in the domain of biblical literature, and in it, his revolutionary cultural and poetic spirit are already conspicuous. Each section of H fi ayyei moshe is a mosaic composed of entire or partial verses from the Pentateuch and fashioned into a new composition. To connect the verse fragments, Berdyczewski had to delete words or make other kinds of linguistic modifications (e.g., inflect verbs, make pronouns possessive). His cultural daring is evident in the freedom with which he changed the biblical original and rearranged Scripture into a new order. As a scholar of the biblical era, Berdyczewski identified his project with contemporary critical approaches in biblical scholarship, which were also struggling to pose new questions about the authorship of the Bible and about the history of Israel in antiquity. In taking this approach, Berdyczewski relied primarily on the traditional commentaries in the Rabbinic and medieval literature to the Bible and Talmud, as he did in his biblical research Sinai ugrizim.10 Berdyczewski divided H fi ayyei moshe into seven books: (1) Sefer toladot (Book of History), a historical and geographical history of the Israelites from Abraham to Moses, from the time of Moses’ birth to the Exodus; (2) Sefer habrit (Book of the Covenant), which focused upon the covenant at Mount Sinai and the giving of the Ten Commandments, namely, the historical moment that consolidated the twelve tribes into a single nation through their common acceptance of monotheistic faith; (3) Sefer hamishkan vimei hamerivah (Book of the Sanctuary and the Days of Strife), an account of the problematic transition undergone by the “generation of the wilderness” from being a tribe of slaves to an independent people; (4) Sefer hamilhfi amot (Book of Wars), on the victorious wars waged by the newly constituted nation against its enemies, its conquest of territory for settlement, and the building of a society ruled by the laws of the Torah; (5) Sefer hamishpatim (Book of Judgments), consisting of laws governing individual and communal behavior according to the moral codes established by Moses, the emissary of the God of Israel (but in an order different from that in the biblical original); (6) Sefer devarim (Book of Words), on Moses’ last words and death; the transfer of the mantle of authority to Joshua, and the transition of Israel from its wilderness period to its normalization as a nation; and (7) Sefer yehoshua (Book of Joshua), which relates the story of the conquest of the land and the renewal of the covenant between God and His people on Mount Gerizim. Berdyczewski completed H fi ayyei moshe in 1904 and sent the manuscript to


Ben-Avigdor, his publisher, and to Bialik, who on October 19, 1904, responded with respect to what he recognized was a daring literary act, the creation of a new and revolutionary literary consciousness that was ahead of its time: It seems to me that your intention is worthy, but I greatly doubt that the time is ripe for it, or that you are the man capable of accomplishing this deed. Such things are done by generations, not by individuals. . . . In principle, I agree with this, but at the present time you will find no audience among the people, and the idea will appear premature, an object of derision and outrage. . . . Things like this must be done with caution, in a manner unsensed by the eye and heart of the people. . . . In truth, Ish haelohim is the creation of the folk. In any event, the people do everything and are made by themselves. Both are the words of the living God.11

Berdyczewski’s answer to Bialik (on November 3, 1904) can be taken as relating to all his anthological works: You can see the division of the submitted material into earlier and later [material], and the scope of every matter accords with both its scholarly and poetic arrangement. By scholarly, I wish to denote merely that each of my arrangements is constructed on critical as well as traditional criticism, namely, I have endeavored to find for every change and new order some authority among Talmud sages, and I permitted myself no move without being able to defend it from that source. By “poetic,” I mean my effort to provide a backbone to all the visions and statements through the type of the man Moses as the main subject for all sections. (H fi ayyei moshe, pp. 117–18)

Meotsar haaggadah and Tsefunot veaggadot Meotsar haaggadah,12 published by Ahisefer in Berlin in 1914, was the first of the two comprehensive anthologies of aggadah published by Berdyczewski. Meotsar haaggadah, on which Berdyczewski labored for close to a decade (1906–14), contains 533 legends. The other one, Tsefunot veaggadot,13 an expanded edition that appeared under a new title, contains 783 legends. Meotsar haaggadah is divided into two parts. The first, Minni qedem (From Antiquity), includes legends and tales of the lives of the ancient Hebrews from the creation of the world to the talmudic age; the second part, Aggadot am (Folktales), consists of legends and traditions from the lives of the Jews scattered throughout the Diaspora from the Middle Ages to modern times. The title page of Meotsar haaggadah articulates both Berdyczewski’s work method and the dual roles he saw for himself in creating these anthologies. It reads: “Collected and prepared [vehekhinan] by Bin-Gorion and made ready for the press by Micha Joseph Berdyczewski.” The fact that he used both his given name and his nom de plume suggests how differently he saw his two roles as editor and publisher; the word hekhin was understood already in the Bible as a creative act also involving study.14 Presumably, the choice of the term vehekhinan was tantamount to a declaration by its editor that Meotsar haaggadah was not simply an act of compilation but one of creativity as well.


The key to that creativity can be seen partly in the differences, in content as well as in language, between the aggadic texts as Berdyczewski recorded them in Mimeqor yisrael—verbatim, in their original language—and the rewritten form in which they appear in Meotsar haagadah and Tsefunot veaggadot. The latter work is a fusion of the original aggadic text, which bears the seal of folk literature as transmitted from generation to generation, and the personal, subjective creativity of an individual author’s voice: that is, a fusion of folk tradition and literature. Meotsar haaggadah and Tsefunot veaggadot reflect a toladatic memory that is not a static but a dynamic one, and that imparts an intricate and relevant meaning to the texts that is dictated by the “editor’s” position midway between past and present, between the original aggadah as created by tradition and the newly rewritten composition of the individual author. To grasp Berdyczewski’s conception of the “poetic construction” of Tsefunot veaggadot, which he regarded as his masterpiece,15 one need only read an example of the type of aggadah he presented in the anthology. Consider the legend of the tanna R. Eliezer Horkenos as he adapted it from its talmudic and midrashic sources: After years of trial and anguish, the tanna’s greatness is recognized by all, including his father. In most versions of the legend, the tale concludes with the hero winning his reward in Torah, greatness, and wealth. Thus, the version of Avot derabbi natan (version 1, chap. 6), in Bereshit Rabbah (chap. 42), and in Tanhfi uma (Buber’s edition, chap. 91); another version, preserved in Avot derabbi natan (version 2, chap. 13) and in Pirqei derabbi eliezer (chaps. 1–2), takes an extreme, idealistic approach wherein Eliezer ben Horkenos rejects the possessions offered to him by his father as a bribe to stop studying Torah. That is, he who chooses the kingdom of spirituality must turn his back on the kingdom of matter; there is no room here for compromise. Characteristically, this is the version Berdyczewski records in Tsefunot veaggadot. The first passage in this version—about the beginnings of R. Eliezer ben Horkenos—is not in the Talmud but in the midrashim, in contrast to the other passages describing the circumstances of the tanna’s death, which originate in the Talmud (Baba Metsia, 59b; Sanhedrin, 88a). Berdyczewski’s connecting sentences at the beginning and the end of the passages both expand upon and deepen the aggadic elements found in the sources; they build upon them a new-old literary reality woven around the figure of the Talmud scholar who has lived his life mainly in isolation—from his family, his friends, even his pupils. In a world dominated by the principle of ahfi arei rabim lehatot (going with the crowd), a figure like R. Eliezer was doomed to live a solitary life. “This sage was a lonely figure, separated from his colleagues all his life; and his wisdom was buried with him,” as Berdyczewski states at the conclusion of his version. The dispute between R. Eliezer and the sages is highlighted in all the talmudic and midrashic accounts, but the talmudic sources tend to stress the reconciliation between the tanna and his opponents, albeit only at the time of his death. In Tsefunot veaggadot, however, there is no room for compromise. The tanna’s life course was determined from the root of his soul: his was a principled and uncompromising stance, derived from the certainty of the rightness of his


halakhic decisions, and this stance brought him into conflict with the other sages throughout his life, even at the time of his death.16 The anthology Meotsar haaggadah (and Tsefunot veaggadot) represents a merger of two distinct cultural disciplines: folk tradition and true written literature. Into the warp of the folktales of all generations, Berdyczewski wove his own weft, the “children of my spirit,” as he called them, and in this way he created “new yet old” constructions, a narrative that presents the idea and the method of his entire oeuvre. In other words, the inclusion of young writers of modern times was a component of equal worth in the creative output of the generations to the place occupied by the age-old voices of tradition. Berdyczewski’s anthologies in German—Der Born Judas (The Spring of Judah) and Die Sagen der Juden (Legends of the Jews)—were, like all his literary works, acts of recovery and restoration, attempts to return the treasures of aggadah to the Jewish people. But with the German anthologies, Berdyczewski had another goal in mind as well: to restore to world literature itself the legends of Israel and the Jewish folktale. By compiling a classic collection of these legends and folktales, Berdyczewski wished to place the legends of Israel among the other great collections of folk legends that were considered to be the timeless assets of the nations of the world. A living Jewish culture, in Berdyczewski’s view, was one that held a complex dialogue with two distinct partners—with the roots of its own culture, on the one side, and with the cultural world in which it was situated, on the other. The legends in the two anthologies were translated by Rachel Bin-Gorion, Berdyczewski’s wife, who took great pains to remain faithful to the original text without embellishing or sermonizing over it. When it first appeared, the translation was received to great acclaim, with critics expressing enthusiastic approval and stressing the spiritual depth of the legends and tales that had been translated.17

Die Sagen der Juden zur Bibel This anthology18 consists of five volumes; three of them were published during Berdyczewski’s lifetime. All the volumes contain ancient myths and aggadot, midrashim, fables, tales, and stories, all linked to biblical stories. Berdyczewski collected the material from hundreds of sources, some of which were easily accessible and others highly arcane, from printed books and from manuscripts, and from every layer of Jewish literature, from Talmud and midrash to kabbalah. In setting forth material from earlier and later times, he was careful to point out the plethora of versions of a single story or text, a feature of the tradition that he considered a major factor in aggadic literature. In Die Sagen, Berdyczewski kept to his sources and did not alter the text other than to translate it into German.

Der Born Judas This anthology19 contains about a thousand fictional tales that were copied and printed over a millennium, from the early Middle Ages to the beginning of modern times. Berdyczewski sought out these stories from dozens, if not hundreds, of books


and collections, including banned and apocryphal sources. He compiled much of the material from ethical and religious treatises and books of customs, kabbalah, and natural science, and he gathered, copied, assembled, and arranged the material according to chronological, thematic, and, at times, poetic criteria. This collection, too, is distinguished by its artistic and scholarly editing: adherence to the version of the sources (in translation), the addition of references for every aggadah and story, with notes and an index at the collection’s end. In the introduction to Der Born Judas, Berdyczewski wrote: Besides myth, aggadot, and the teachings that are interspersed throughout Jewish literature and that determine the life and hopes of the people, a special sphere may be defined that encompasses legends and tales, fables, and stories. The goal of this initial book is to elaborate this field. To the many great and famous anthologies of Ma¨rchen and legend, to such works as The Wise Man and the Fool, A Thousand and One Nights, and the Gestum Romanorum, let us add a new collection that, though it has its own form, may complement the others. Spiritual matters, which were the daily bread and water of their times, outlive their era. In the folk literature and in the religious stories of the ancients, we are bequeathed a lavish heritage.

Mimeqor yisrael (From the Fount of Israel) The preparation of this work,20 Berdyczewski’s best-known anthology, occupied him for most of his life, even though it was published only after his death. The collection of the material underwent several stages, from the comprehensive selection of the stories in their original Hebrew in preparation for their appearance in German translation, to the compilation and arrangement of the material for publication in a book that was originally known as Sefer hamaasiyot (The Book of Tales). With Berdyczewski’s sudden death in 1921 at the age of fifty-six, however, the texts were left unpublished in an archive. Only in 1939 did Emmanuel BinGorion, Berdyczewski’s son, publish them as a collection, under the title Mimeqor yisrael. This anthology contains about a thousand tales and fictional stories as well as folktales, mostly from post-talmudic sources up until the period of Hasidism. In arranging the texts, Berdyczewski ordered them according to the motifs of the tales, as national, religious, folkloric, and so on, adhering as closely as possible to their chronological order. In the main, though, he tried to retain their folkloric character precisely because he saw the endeavor as an act of restoration. For this reason, too, he chose to present different versions of the same story (including rejected versions, such as those of the Samaritans, the Karaites, and so on), thereby giving scope to a multiplicity of voices—a feature of the tradition that, in his view, characterized Jewish culture throughout the generations. The collection, assembly, and editing of the material, along with its division into books, chapters, and sections, were all done according to criteria commonly applied to the making of anthologies like those of folktales and to the preservation of the vernacular character of the genre and its arrangement of material by subject and content. At the same time, the historical-philosophical and typically Berdy-


czewskian toladatic approach to the material is also evident in the way the anthology adheres to the course of Jewish creativity and, as far as possible, organizes its materials in keeping with it. Berdyczewski was more than a compiler-editor. Even in Mimeqor yisrael, in which he strove to keep its contents as faithful and exact a copy of the original as possible, his interventions are felt by the reader. Precisely because he was both a creative writer and a scholar, he was interested in presenting the legend or story as an event, as an autonomous and authentic human spectacle, without tendentious ideological meddling in its presentation. For this reason, he deleted the didactic sermonizing frames that were attached to the texts in their homiletic originals. The special value of the legend, Berdyczewski repeatedly stated, lay in itself, not in its didactic purpose. The event of the legend preceded its purpose and its moralizing function. The legend’s vision existed apart from the tendentious interpretations piled onto it through the generations, and it withstood those interpretations as well. Berdyczewski’s intention, as scholar and narrator, was to produce a free encounter between the reader and the toladatic literature without an editor’s intervention in the reader’s consciousness, and to allow the reader to construct the “old yet new” connections according to his education and mental powers. Dan Ben-Amos, who wrote a comprehensive introduction to the English edition of Mimeqor yisrael,21 similarly comments on the “light” involvement of the anthology’s editor, with his interventions limited to alterations to the text of a word or two, or sometimes more. But in his view, this does not diminish the importance of Mimeqor yisrael as a monumental presentation of the evolution of popular Jewish literature, and as a founding text for the scholarly study of the Jewish folktale and of Jewish folklore—an abiding testimony to the art of storytelling among Jews and to the literary achievement of Jewish storytellers through the ages. The stories and legends from both earlier and later periods, the medieval romances, the historical chronicles, and tales of mystical kabbalistic experiences all constitute a rich and colorful fabric that was in danger of perishing if not for the fact that they were preserved, in their proper historical perspective, in Mimeqor yisrael. Even from this brief review of his various anthologies, a certain trajectory in Berdyczewski’s work emerges. In his earlier works, he seems to have allowed himself greater freedom in rewriting his sources as he anthologized them. In his later works, he more strictly maintained the original text, though often in multiple versions. In either case, though, Berdyczewski rejected the common distinction maintained by his contemporaries between the traditional literature, including aggadah, and the new Hebrew writing. Early on, he published chapters of aggadah from Meotsar haaggadah in periodicals such as Hatequfah—a publication that aroused opposition precisely for this reason; in a letter to F. Lachover, the editor, Abraham Joseph Steibel, the publisher of Hatequfah, confessed that while he personally enjoyed the aggadot, he felt that they did not belong in Hatequfah: “If we wish young Hebrew readers to feel at ease in Hebrew literature, [the aggadot of Berdyczewski] do not belong in Hatequfah in the stories section.”22 Berdyczewski deliberately mingled literary and scholarly elements in his writing—ancient pas-


sages, modern fictions, and more scholarly commentaries, all for the purpose of presenting a vision of the continuous creativity of the Jewish people. The anthological genre, for Berdyczewski, was thus not a mere tool for collecting or storing aggadot and other tales from the past but an independent literary genre with its own literary and cultural value constructed by an editor who is both a writer and a philosopher of history and who consciously reconstructs the materials of the past into a new composition. “The sources alone will not suffice without a new light shining on them,” Berdyczewski wrote to Shemuel Abba Horodezki in 1904. In another letter to Horodezki, dated November 20, 1907, Berdyczewski formulated his credo as an anthologist with even greater clarity: “First we must pave the way to organizing the parts and details of the talmudic literature. Then we shall be able to inquire into the spirit. Again, we must do this not for them but for ourselves; the work is first of all literary and toladati and not religious.”23 Berdyczewski’s radical understanding of the anthological genre can be detailed in four areas relating to the genre: 1. Selection of material and organization: In collecting his sources, Berdyczewski boldly included apocryphal and so-called heretical or sectarian books (e.g., Samaritan and Karaite texts, as well as canonical works). In present-day terms, one might say that Berdyczewski altered toladatic discourse by expanding its range in the spirit of his main idea, shinui arakhin (change of values), in which he sets out his vision about “a new yet old” Jewish culture and Hebrew literature. 2. Fragments: Through the fragment, the anthology receives its unique form, hence also its meaning. By presenting different versions of its various traditions, each subject is “reproduced” with its own contradictions and its full variety, a key factor for Berdyczewski. 3. Heterogeneity: All Berdyczewski’s anthologies represent the many possibilities of Jewish existence through different models developed down the generations in the Jewish communities. The anthology structure is re-created by the editor-anthologist, who has collected and arranged the aggadot and tales from varied literary sources. The reorganization of the aggadot and tales through the anthological form, which is a process of conceptual and artistic transformation, makes the texts communicate across generations and encourages open dialogue among them. 4. The power of ordering: Not content simply with preserving traditions in multiple versions, Berdyczewski also organized the many fragments into systems, arranging them according to thematic, poetic, or chronological criteria. “Organization has many modes: we may use the theme as a measure, or the chronology of the tales, or the poetic way of writing; or we can use all of them, because the choice of one clear and decisive mode is almost impossible” (Berdyczewski, 1914 [see n. 12], part 2, pp. xiv–xv).24 In the introductions to his various anthologies, Berdyczewski admitted that sometimes the first principle took prece-


dence, at other times the second or the third. Analysis of the principles of arrangement and organization can therefore help uncover the coherent and complete meaning of the anthology as an integral literary structure. Berdyczewski’s anthologies reveal signs of the cultural revolution that was taking place across Hebrew literary culture during his time. His attitude toward anthologizing both paralleled and differed significantly from that of his contemporaries H. N. Bialik and S. Y. Agnon. Bialik and Y. H. Rawnitzki’s Sefer haaggadah (The Book of Aggadah), for example, claimed to present “essentially a large and complete literary anthology, containing in correct order the best and the choicest aggadot, all that is typical and characteristic of its important branches; this is all that the compilers wished to show here,” its editors wrote modestly in their introduction. Yet even though Bialik set great store upon the arrangement of Sefer haaggadah, which he called “the essence of the work,” he seems to have treated the enterprise mainly as a task, not as a creative act; only after completing the work did he recognize its unique value. Agnon, on the other hand, was more aware of the creative dimension of anthology making, but he and his followers seemed to have considered it secondary to his work as a fictionalist and novelist; thus, while Agnon published three anthologies (Yamim nora im [Days of Awe], 1938; Atem reitem [You Have Seen], 1959; Sifreihem shel tsadiqim [The Books of the Righteous], 1961) and worked on several more, his engagement in anthology making underwent many interruptions and periods of ambivalence.25 In contrast to Bialik and Agnon, Berdyczewski viewed the anthological genre as a central creative medium, a primary source of Jewish creativity through the ages—indeed, as the fundamental medium for understanding Jewish creativity in the present time. So central was the anthological genre to Berdyczewski’s own creativity that one might even argue that his anthological powers reached their greatest height not in one of his anthologies proper but in his novel Miriam. Or, to put this same claim in different terms: To understand this novel and its unusual structure and meaning, it is necessary to appreciate Berdyczewski’s anthological poetics. The novel Miriam, which Berdyczewski considered to be his cultural-artistic will, was completed in 1921, just two days before he died.26 Miriam, the protagonist, represents the Jewish young generation in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Like most of her generation, Miriam is in search of her identity, and at the same time she examines her relations with society. The influence of the anthology upon Miriam is most obviously evident in the novel’s fragmentary structure, its structure in vignettes. From the time the novel first appeared, this feature raised the eyebrows of Berdyczewski’s critics, many of whom singled it out as proof of the failure of the book: “Berdyczewski wishes to bestow a great novel upon us, but only a third of it written. The first part is a piece of rare writing. The second is a kind of volume of gleanings. You do not know the purpose of each chapter. The third part is both a continuation of the story and another volume of gleanings,” wrote Yaakov Rabinovitz.27 Even Yaakov


Fichmann, the author of a riveting and enlightening introduction to Kol sipurei berditshevski (The Complete Works of M. J. Berdyczewski), which included Miriam, wrote that “at times [the novel] seems like a string of novellas, each of which stands alone. . . . Only after some time does it become clear that [the novella] is a link in the narrative chain.” Even so, Fichmann concluded that Miriam “is not a structured work.”28 The view espoused by Rabinovitz, Fichmann, and others that Miriam was only “a string of novellas”—in other words, a mere compilation or anthology— was not completely unfounded. The novel’s structure is a singular mosaic of fragmentary events, deeds, myths, and tales. At a first reading, one is likely to feel that it is nothing more than a medley of episodal stories. There is no clear way to join the individual sections or to ascertain the overall meaning of the novel’s structure. Berdyczewski was well aware of the compilatory nature of Miriam and of the fact that this structure was alien to the normative models of the Hebrew (and European) novel of his day. Indeed, within the book, Berdyczewski seemed to allude to this difference by means of various “landmarks” strewn through the book—including such paratactic statements as: “And here are two more tales” (Miriam, part 2, p. 185), or “and I know something else that happened in those days with another man” (ibid.)—linking statements whose only purpose was to emphasize the fact that there was nothing more than an artificial link between the story and what preceded it. Further, in the course of each of the novel’s three parts, its author-narrator explicitly commented upon the book’s unusual structure and its meaning: Many years ago, I jotted down on a sheet of paper all the details of this affair, which had within it the making of a novel complete in all its parts. I envisaged everything, clearly observing the cycle of events and the interweaving of the incidents. (part 1, p. 31) Strange events and unprecedented happenings took place at this time, especially among the Jews of Honyrad. I shall relate them one by one, even though they are not relevant to my central story. (part 2, p. 180) I am engaged in the birth pangs of creating a memorial for the people of my generation, to give a pen-picture of life in the towns in which I was reared. . . . My mind thronged with different faces and events. (part 3, p. 259)29

Miriam is indeed composed of hundreds of vignettes—“chambers and rooms,” in the words of the author. An anthological assembling of numerous myths and aggadot, the novel reflects two contrasting yet complementary tendencies, what we might call, borrowing from Northrop Frye, the “episodic” and the “encyclopedic.”30 Episodic literature is produced by the individual writer; it emphasizes the separateness of his personality, his isolation. Encyclopedic literature, in contrast, presents its author as society’s spokesperson; it is a communal product, based on the principle of the entire corpus. In Berdyczewski’s anthologies, the encyclopedic tendency predominates. In Miriam, in contrast, the encyclopedic is counterbalanced by the episodic. That is to say, by collecting and assembling its constituent incidents, events, stories, and tales, the novel attempts the inward “reproduction” of life from the perspective either of an individual (the narrator)


or of multiple individuals (the characters). The dozens of myths and stories contained haphazardly in Miriam do not indicate a directionless writer who could not help but overfill a limited canvas, but rather a consciously artistic effort motivated by the writer’s intellectual drive to impose order on episodal chaos, to uncover hidden processes beneath the chaotic surface, all with the purpose of constructing a novel that would portray the life, customs, and beliefs of an entire community. The episodal structure of Miriam reflects both elements or contrasting tendencies as principles of life: the first militates toward isolation, the second toward the integration of the individual in a larger whole. The two forces—of the one and of the many—are in constant tension. The tendency toward isolation arises from the individual’s wish to be true to himself, to control his fate. On the other hand, the individual’s cultural background, his beliefs, and his habits can all be traced back to the many. The individual cannot acquire self-knowledge without recognizing the society from which he sprang and within which he lives. Even when the individual seems to exist in isolation, he is still connected to the larger community in some way. So, too, when a community appears to be wholly united and consolidated into a single communal entity, one need only look closely at it to find the odd, unassimilable, episodal narrative. This is true even in the case of Berdyczewski’s anthologies, where the proper fundamental unit is neither an episode nor a chapter. Each story or text exists within its context. Every tale belongs to a chapter, every chapter to a volume, and every volume to the central authority responsible for the work’s overall meaning. Within Miriam itself, the anthological dimension emerges in two realms, the philosophical-historical and the poetic. In the first, the novel serves as a medium for assembling multigenerational knowledge and traditional wisdom as preserved in such ancient literary forms as myth, legends, tales, and proverbs. In the second, the book’s poetic or narrative dimension, Berdyczewski was not content simply to transmit information by imitating his sources; rather, he sought to reinscribe the tales in a historical framework (namely, the modern period) and in a specific literary genre (the novel). It is “old yet new.” At a time when the traditional communal and religious frameworks were collapsing, Berdyczewski sought in his anthologies to present a Jewish anthology as preserved in the aggadic literature through the generations in its various forms. He thus offered the Jew a twofold encounter with Jewish culture—as both an emotional and an ideological experience with its two distinct axes: knowledge and wisdom. Researchers of Berdyczewski’s life have repeatedly tried to describe him by attaching to him various labels—of a folklorist or of an editor or novelist, for example. Although these labels are not in themselves incorrect, they cannot convey the multiple intellectual and artistic roles that Berdyczewski filled—as a narrator and storyteller, a literary critic and antiquarian, a theologian and a philosopher of history—often simultaneously, and that contributed to the construction of the anthological genre and to the anthological poetics in Miriam in particular. Traces of the anthological genre are visible in all Berdyczewski’s literary work: in his studies, essays, and stories. Consequently, the path to “new yet old” Hebrew literature passes through the anthologies. Indeed, as Berdyczewski increasingly found himself immersed in the


problematics of Jewish existence, so, too, did his work as an anthologist. In the multiple versions and perspectives regularly preserved and recorded in his anthologies, Berdyczewski revealed the creative forces that replenished the Jewish people and community in its capacity to contend with and adapt the many changes resulting from the change of regime, of place, and so on. For Berdyczewski, in short, the making of anthologies was a philosophicalhistorical and poetic activity, whose main goal was to do away with the artificial borders separating the new Hebrew literature from its traditional sources, or even classical anthologies from modernist novels. By placing anthologies of classical aggadah within the new-yet-old Hebrew literature, Berdyczewski’s plan was to broaden this literature and its horizons. The reservations of such writers as Brenner and Yaakov Rabinovitz about Berdyczewski’s prolonged immersion in the study of the past and in the preparation of anthologies—which, they argued, were mere distractions and the waste of an important Hebrew writer’s time and energy—need to be reappraised. Yet even more than serving the purpose of expanding Hebrew literature and its scope, and even more than working to reconnect segments of Hebrew literature that had been lost through the generations, the anthological genre was for Berdyczewski perhaps the authentic modern Jewish literary form, the literary genre most appropriate for capturing and communicating the nature of modern Jewish existence. Notes Prooftexts 19 (1999):41–57. Reprinted by permission of The John Hopkins University Press. I want to thank Prof. David Stern, who read this manuscript. His remarks and suggestions were very helpful. 1. “History of the Ets H fi ayyim Yeshiva,” Haasif 3 (1887):231–41. ¨ ber den Zusammenhand zwischen Ethik und Aesthetik (diss., 2. M. J. Berdyczewski, U 1896); intro. and Hebrew trans., Alexander Barzel (Tel Aviv, 1986). 3. About the term tolada in Berdyczewski, see Berdyczewski, “Al hatolada,” in Al em haderekh (Warsaw, 1899), pp. 47–49. See also Z. Kagan, “The Toladatic Novel,” in M. J. Berdyczewski, Miriam: Roman gamur [A completed novel] (Tel Aviv, 1997), pp. 25–31. 4. M. J. Berdyczewski archive (Ginzei mikha yosef), Holon, Israel. See Emmanuel BinGorion, Reshut Hayahfi id: The Life and Work of M. J. Berdyczewski in His Last Twenty Years (Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 201–5. See also Avner Holtzman, intro. to M. J. Berdyczewski, Mul har hamoriyah [In front of Mount Moriah], (Tel Aviv, 1995). 5. Chroniq: Entries in M. J. Berdyczewski, Pirqei yoman [diary] January–November 1905 [Hebrew translation from the German by Yitshfi ak Kafkafi], Berdyczewski archive, file Vav (Tel Aviv, 1995), pp. 27–89. 6. Ibid., p. 71. 7. Ibid., p. 72. 8. Ibid., pp. 85–86. 9. M. J. Bin-Gorion (Berdyczewski), H fi ayyei moshe [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1961). 10. Sinai ugrizim [Hebrew], ed. and pub. E. Bin-Gorion (Tel Aviv, 1962); 1st ed. in German (Berlin, 1925–26). 11. H. N. Bialik, Letters (Tel Aviv, 1938–39), 1: 174–76. 12. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Meotsar haaggadah, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1914).

224 The Modern Period 13. M. J. Berdyczewski, Tsefunot veaggadot [Hebrew], 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1924). 14. “It is he who made the earth by his power / who established [hekhin] the world by his wisdom” (Jer. 10:12); “He established it [hekhinah] and searched it out” (Job 28:28). 15. The great importance Berdyczewski attributed to Tsefunot veaggadot is attested in a letter to Brenner dated May 20, 1911: “This [work] is the greatest that I have written so far, certainly in quantity, perhaps also in quality.” This statement also explains the fact that it took the author two decades to prepare and write the book in its various editions. M. J. Berdyczewski to Y. H fi . Brenner, Letters [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv). 16. Z. Kagan, “Divergent Tendencies and Their Molding in the Aggadah,” Scripta Hieroselimitana 22 (1971):151–70. 17. See Emmanuel Bin-Gorion, Reshut Hayahfi id, pp. 77–81. 18. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Die Sagen der Juden, 5 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1913–27). 19. Berdyczewski, Der Born Judas, 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1916–23). 20. Berdyczewski, Mimeqor yisrael [Hebrew](Tel Aviv, 1939). 21. Dan Ben-Amos also distinguishes between the objective writing of the author of Mimeqor yisrael, who collected, edited, and published the aggadot, keeping exactly to the writing and language in the sources, and his subjective writing in Tsefunot veaggadot, into which the author poured his personality, his thoughts, and his feelings. See n. 10 here p. xx. 22. Cited from Steibel’s letters, in the archive of the Union of Hebrew Writers in Israel. Publication is by kind permission of the archive management. 23. Shemuel Abba Horodezki, Zikhronot [Memoirs] (Tel Aviv, 1937), pp. 184, 189. 24. David Stern, in his introduction to the English edition of Sefer haaggadah (see next note), relates to the connection of the editors with three basic obstacles they face: the fragmentary nature of the material; its excessive heterogeneity; and the language, entire points of which (including the Aramaic) are foreign to the modern reader. The criteria that enabled them to overcome these difficulties are, according to Stern, selective choice: the singling out of a certain version of the aggadah portions. To present the aggadah as classical literature, the editors joined together aggadah fragments that seemed to them different parts of a single literary creation, even if these fragments were taken from different sources and different locations, such as the Babylonian Talmud or the Jerusalem Talmud (in his critical essay Sefer haaggadah, 1913, Berdyczewski opposed the merger of aggadah fragments from different sources into a single one). 25. On Bialik’s and Rawnitzki’s attitudes toward anthology making, see Haim Be’er, Ahavatam gam sinatam [Their loves and their hates] (Tel Aviv, 1992), p. 207; and David Stern’s introduction to the English translation of Sefer haaggadah (New York, 1996). On Agnon’s anthologies, see Dan Laor, S. Y. Agnon: New Aspects (Jerusalem, 1995), pp. 125–53; and on his attitude toward anthology making, cf. Dov Sadan’s letter (quoted in Haim Be’er, “Hasafran hagadol shel hasivilizatsiah hayehudit” [The great librarian of the Jewish civilization], Haarets, May 13, 1995); “I long to see Bluma and her world, and you give me a collection, which even if it were perfection itself . . . would not compensate me for the loss of time and mind to what is not your essence or your greatness”; and Agnon’s 1924 letter to Zalman Schocken: “Indeed, this labor does remove me from my own world, and from my own independent writing” (ibid., p. 209). 26. Miriam was published in six editions, five in Hebrew and one in English. Four of them will be cited here. M. J. Berdyczewski (Bin-Gorion), Miriam: Roman mehfi ayyei shtei ayarot [A novel about life in two townships], Hatequfah, vols. 10–12 (Warsaw, 1921); Miriam, 3d ed. (Tel Aviv, 1971), intro. Dan Miron; Miriam, 5th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1983) (English trans. A. S. Super, intro. Z. Kagan; Miriam, 6th ed. (Tel Aviv, 1997), intro. and annotated Z. Kagan; see n. 3.

Homo Anthologicus 225 27. Y. Rabinovitz, “Miriam,” Hedim 1 (1922, no. 2):59. 28. Y. Fichmann, “Berdyczewski As Storyteller,” Kol sipurei berdyczewski (Tel Aviv, 1961), p. 27. 29. All quotations from Miriam are from the English ed.; see n. 26. 30. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957), pp. 315–26.

12 mark w. kiel

Sefer Haaggadah Creating a Classic Anthology

ebrew literature has been waiting for such a book.”1 So H fi ayyim Nahfi man

Bialik proudly announced that his and Yehoshua Hana Rawnitzki’s Sefer “H ha

aggadah was soon to appear. His claim to have answered the call of history was uncharacteristically immodest of him and, to be sure, he omitted his boast when, in 1908, he reprinted the article in which it appeared as the introduction to their classic anthology. In any case, it was not entirely accurate either. It clearly was, as Bialik said, “a great and plentiful literary anthology, which includes, in a suitable arrangement, all the characteristics and types, of all the important branches of the aggadah.”2 But Hebrew literature had, in fact, long been afraid of such a book. Wissenschaft, too, displayed a studious lack of interest in the subject as Bialik was now presenting it. The need for such an anthology of aggadah had manifested itself slowly and only recently. Once it appeared, however, Sefer haaggadah’s impact on Jewish literary culture for nearly a century to follow was extraordinary by any measure. As a result of Sefer haaggadah, similar works followed and academic interest in the subject grew, as did the number of dissertations. It also became a phenomenal best seller.3 It was the first and most successful effort to create a classic folk literature in Hebrew that could stand alongside the great European collections.4 It was not just the content of Sefer haaggadah that served a need and made it great. Two years earlier, Bernhard Kuttner’s Ju¨dische Sagen und Legenden fu¨r jung und alt: Gesammelt und wiedererza¨hlt gave a positive romantic view of the aggadah in German, but it was not as great, plentiful, or popular.5 Far beyond any work of its kind, including Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (which began to appear in 1909), or any of Micha Joseph Berdyczewski’s collections (the first of which appeared in 1913), Sefer haaggadah went through numerous editions in Hebrew, and appeared in Yiddish, Russian, and German translations, “an inheritance for all Jews everywhere.” Recently Schocken published a deluxe English edition, and that has been followed by a CD-ROM version.6 Indeed, its success suggests that Bialik may have been right, after all. Whether 226

Sefer Haaggadah 227

it was because of his national or poetic genius, Bialik was among the few who understood, as Berdyczewski said, that “for those of us who are concerned with the aggadah itself, and not [just] its usefulness,” what had come before was not enough to answer what was indeed, a long-denied and deep-seated need.7 Yet for all its success, Sefer haaggadah did not quite live up to its authors’, particularly Bialik’s, grander national designs. What Bialik was after was nothing less than an aggadic renaissance, a synthesis of literary theory and popular practice. He wanted the aggadah to become a living folklore of the Jews, an ideal combination of academic and artistic self-consciousness, and a popular and unselfconscious frame of reference that could give substance to the sense of being Jewish.8 Bialik, in other words, wanted aggadah to be precisely what Jewish scholars and writers had generally not wanted it to be—and feared its becoming. An interest in the aggadah as folklore presupposed a receptive Jewish romanticism. However, both intellectual trends in Jewish life that generated discussion of the aggadah—Wissenschaft and Haskalah—were fundamentally at odds with some of romanticism’s major trends. The Jewish enlightenment saw aggadah as a disreputable and corrupt legacy of popular susceptibility to superstition. Until the rise of Jewish nationalism, scholars had contented themselves with historicalphilological inquiry, while preachers and reformers as early as Hyman Hurwitz (1826) had used aggadah publicly to advance a morally edifying view of Judaism and the Rabbis.9 For Europeans, folklore was romanticism’s means of rescuing and rehabilitating the legacy spurned by the Enlightenment. For Jews, however, even where the impact of romanticism had begun to alter the negative image of aggadah, its transformation into a respectable literature hung precisely on the assumption that aggadah was not folklore. German Jewish scholarship elevated aggadah into an academic discipline that almost resembled the efforts of German scholars to find in their legends, sagas, and epics the living folk sources of their contemporary culture. By treating aggadah as an antiquarian pursuit that was ultimately directed toward establishing the human ethical spirit of ancient or Rabbinic Judaism, Wissenschaft des Judenthums carefully refrained from giving the aggadah the kind of contemporary political significance that Germanistik, German scholarship, attributed to Sagenkunde. Scholars such as Leopold Zunz, Nahman Krochmal, Shlomo Rapoport, and Zacharias Frankel had alluded to the existence of an aggadic folklore surreptitiously.10 It was a given of their enlightened faith, however, that they would not use the terms “folklore” or Volkskunde because these connoted romantic ideas of innate and unassimilable character. Acting in the service of Emancipation, what Wissenschaft could do, at best, was defend the aggadah as finely crafted Gottesdienstlichen Vortra¨ge, Rabbinic sermons.11 Cognizant of the prestige given to the German sermon, and duly noting the halakhic limitations of the aggadah, they respected the genre as a historically reliable tool for the moral development of the Jews and promoted it as an integral part of Jewish literature.12 Although an anomaly in its time, Sipurei yeshurun, by the Maskilic Rabbi Isaac Margolis, was a harbinger of change.13 Privately published in Berlin by the author in 1877, it was, like Yavetz’s work later, a predecessor of the Sefer


haaggadah in several respects. Margolis retold aggadot drawn from the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, the midrash, the Yalqutim and the Zohar, in a variety of clear and self-consciously biblical styles, depending on the nature of the topically arranged material. All the Aramaic passages were translated into Hebrew. On the German title page, the work was subtitled Charakter Bilder und Sagen, but the author did not describe the material as “folklore.” The aggadah was important because it was the morally edifying literature of the Rabbis. Unlike the scholarly intentions of some later research and compilations of aggadah, Margolis’s purpose was explicitly didactic. He claimed to have written his stories specifically to fill the void of a children’s literature in Hebrew, but Margolis also wanted to remove the so-called reproach of the Talmud by exhibiting for public scrutiny the high moral character of the Rabbis. From here, it was a short step, in tune with the times, to regarding folklore as the source of the sermon. It had to be preceded by a revolution in the way the folk was perceived, that is, no longer as a repository of ignorance and superstition but as a source of wisdom and authority. With the publication of Isaac Hirsch Weiss’s Dor dor vedorshav (beginning 1871), a more positive view of the aggadah reached beyond Wissenschaft circles to Maskilim and yeshiva bokhurs in Eastern Europe. Weiss, the “talmudic Darwin,” had demonstrated in his person the compatibility of orthodoxy and historicism.14 He had written his magnum opus in Hebrew rather than German not only because it suited the subject but because he wanted to reach an audience he admired as a vital source of Torah.15 Concerned primarily with the evolution of Jewish law from its pre-Torah, oral sources through the sixteenth century, Weiss also paid considerable attention to aggadah and midrash. Aggadah was subordinate to halakhah, but its historic role and abiding value were to amplify the meaning of the law as expounded by the Rabbis in public sermons and in private lectures.16 Weiss did not look at the interaction between the folk and Rabbinic culture and managed to avoid the delicate question of a Jewish folklore.17 In the place where Weiss saw the source of contemporary Torah life, however, a new cycle of discussion was spawned that would look at the folk differently. In a series of articles in Nahum Sokolow’s journal Haasif, Haim Oppenheim distilled Weiss’s work and the work of the Wissenschaft school to produce an erudite manifesto on the national significance of aggadah. He pleaded the case for seeing aggadah as both a source of legal wisdom and the medium by which the Rabbis shaped and preserved the character and faith of Judaism. Aggadah, therefore, embodied the soul of Judaism and its people’s spirit. Like his predecessors, however, Oppenheim continued to regard aggadot primarily as the literary creation of the Rabbis, a historically layered and textured literature, not a folk literature per se. Ignoring Weiss’s suggestive thesis of the oral tradition’s antiquity predating the written Torah, Oppenheim specifically dissociated aggadah from folklore by arguing that, whereas the Sagenkunde of the nations was preliterate, aggadah came into existence a thousand years after the Jews had their scripture. To the Jewish devotees of Hellas, he said that although the ancient Greek philosophers anach-

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ronistically interpreted their morally inferior folk literature to reveal their own values and wisdom, the Rabbis created aggadah to strengthen and popularize a long-established way of life.18 National pride notwithstanding, Oppenheim was unable to evoke the same sense of his texts’ contemporary relevance that German scholarship gave to its Sagenkunde by linking it to Volkskunde. It was the Maskil and editor of the defunct journal Hakarmel, Shmuel Yosef Fuenn of Vilna, who crossed the threshold to romantic nationalism and articulated the importance of the aggadah as a literature by the people and for the people. His “Essay on the Aggadah” was a modest contribution, but its impact, as evident in the works that followed, was considerable. Fuenn first summarized the opinion of Wissenschaft scholars and summoned the older authority of Azariah de Rossi, the Italian Renaissance scholar who first suggested that the aggadot are best understood as the products of their time.19 Rossi was more concerned, however, with the need to read the aggadot critically (in terms of the historical data they purported to reflect), rather than with the usefulness of aggadic texts as primary documents of cultural history.20 For this reason, Rossi was a hero to Wissenschaft scholars. Fuenn, on the other hand, developed Rossi’s ideas along romantic lines, arguing that the aggadah, though not always a reliable repository of historical truth, remained an unimpeachable source of higher truth. Citing Herder, Fuenn maintained that the aggadah was not properly understood merely as a source or component of a sermon. He justified aggadah not in terms of religious, ethical, or philosophical principles but rather in terms of current literary and esthetic categories. As “legends” of the Jewish people, the aggadah became a key to its collective consciousness, and a window into its soul.21 Zev Yavetz’s Ancient Fairy Tales (Sihot mini qedem) was everything Fuenn could have asked for in a national writer.22 Appearing in 1887 as a subscription premium for the Kneset yisrael yearbook, it presented twenty-one stories retold from the aggadah a` la Grimm, in modernized biblical Hebrew, and was an example of the Hebrew renewal he advocated. Yavetz resented Wissenschaft’s apologetic use of aggadah as proof to the outside world of the Jews’ humanity. He was proud to note that the stories reflected the unique moral character of Rabbinic Judaism and were thus very unlike the Grimm stories.23 But writing in Hebrew, he was certainly not concerned with making a good impression on the gentiles.24 Like the Grimm brothers, Yavetz intended his collection to instill national self-esteem. Yavetz was indignant with Jews who lacked the pride Europeans had in their folk traditions or the respect they had for their national mentors.25 Jewish Wissenschaft, Yavetz complained, remained the abode of antiquarians pursuing an irrelevant philology and writing in foreign languages.26 His tales were all set in Eretz Yisrael and bore all the familiar features of modern fairy tales: the stock of heroes and villains, the sentiments of love and longing, the aura of magic and myth, the eerie settings and bucolic landscapes, and the ideals of innocence and integrity. Yavetz adapted the proven techniques of the European genre, to promote interest in the aggadah among new and young readers and Jewish readers of European folktales. He even adopted some of the


fashions’ excesses, boasting of Jewish peasants and deprecating the Jewish bourgeoisie.27 Given his orthodoxy, Yavetz was remarkably rooted in a potentially pagan romanticism. He was impressed with European scholarship that demonstrated the benefit of folk studies in revealing the intuitive powers of native languages and reviving the folk consciousness.28 The aggadah, Yavetz insisted, had to be revived, just as the Nibelungenlied was in Germany. What made the aggadah particularly suitable for its contemporary recasting was the fact, as he saw it, that the aggadah rested on the foundations of those dimensions of awareness that were the distinguishing features of romantic poetry and could function as a Beer mayim hfi ayim, a Jewish “well of living waters.”29 At the same time and without any apparent sense of contradiction, Yavetz renounced outside influences on Jewish life as a threat to its eternal spirit, in the fashionable terms of chauvinistic European romanticism. His romanticism was both a strategy for national-religious awakening and an internalized esthetic for the appreciation of Jewish tradition. His discussion of the rise of romanticism as a reaction to the burdensome imposition of the classical heritage on the organic folk cultures of Europe informed Maskilim that they, in fact, lagged behind the nations that they were slavishly imitating. The influential Warsaw critic David Frischmann hailed Yavetz’s slim volume as a great national achievement. Here, he rejoiced, the reader can find a Jewish version of “Snow White” and other wonderful stories that “we had heard a thousand times.”30 In Yavetz’s Tales, Frischmann found “the dew of his youth” and the answer to his question, “Who will educate the new generation that it might know that it, too, had a childhood, that its people had a childhood?” Yavetz’s Tales, Frischmann said, “will teach the coming generation after the death of our old mothers, and they will plant in it the visions of their nation and of its fantasies, and it will make Jews out of these lads.”31 Admirers of Yavetz believed that his Tales and similar works they now expected to follow would inspire a love of folk and religion for a generation that was alienated from tradition, for children growing up without a strong sense of identity, and for the Maskilim, whose rationalism had skewed their image of the aggadah. Once again, the aggadah would serve its natural function as a consolation to the people in time of crisis. If naive belief sustained aggadah in the past, this time it would flourish through the creative imagination and a sense of art. These expectations were all unduly optimistic. Yavetz and Frischmann, like Fuenn and Sh. P. Rabinovitz, editor of the literary and scientific yearbook Kneset yisrael, believed that the new generation, however lost, could still read Hebrew, certainly Yavetz’s innovative and clear Hebrew (which appeared in a vocalized text)—but that was wishful thinking.32 Rabinovitz paid Yavetz the highest compliment by comparing his work to that of Zunz, who, a generation earlier, in Germany, had restored dignity to the legacy of aggadah.33 Zunz, however, wrote in German. Considering furthermore that there was, as yet, no secular or modern orthodox school system in place (the hfi eder metuqan was still in its infancy), Rabinovitz’s recommendation that the Tales serve as a model children’s textbook and resource for teachers was premature.34 The

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appreciative Hebrew audiences at the time were limited to the circles of romantic Zionists, religious and secular. If the Tales addressed a new generation, it was the one found in the yeshiva. In Volozhin, Yavetz’s appeal came from his religious romanticism, his modern Hebrew, and the mystique of his having settled in Palestine. The recognition of the uncanny in romantic thought provided an opening for a religious Zionism that viewed the return of the Jews to their homeland as a process linked to the mystical destiny of Israel. The programmatic context in which Yavetz placed his Tales also paved the way for a more thorough secularism. Because folklore restored respectability to a segment of Jewish tradition that had lost its authority for all but the most backward of traditional Jews, there seemed little risk, at first, in supporting the folkways on secular grounds. But folklore did not lead back to orthodoxy. Romantic interest in folklore was motivated by the desire to recapture tradition as the substance of a new secular identity, with folklore functioning as a surrogate for religion. Modern orthodox Jews may have continued to delight in the works of Jewish folklore as much as anyone; on no grounds could they tolerate secularism intruding into the heart of tradition as part of their ideology. In the romantic intentions of his iberdikhtung, his poetic revision, in the programmatic translation of the Aramaic aggadot, as well as in the didactic vocalization of the texts, Bialik discovered in Yavetz the model, if not inspiration, for his Sefer haaggadah, although he never acknowledged it.35 Yavetz became associated with a chauvinistic orthodoxy repugnant to Bialik and served as a warning to him about the risks of withdrawing into national work. Along with the inspiration of Yavetz, Bialik’s folkloristic work arose out of developments in Hebrew literature and poetry, whose relationship to aggadah and folklore grew more positive as the century drew to a close. Through the midnineteenth century, Hebrew literature of the Haskalah parodied and derided folk culture and the irrational excesses of the aggadah, along with the gullibility of those who believed in them, particularly the Hasidim. Yet even the most extreme opponents of folk culture showed an ambivalence toward their material in the sheer delight they seemed to take in describing it, whether in Hebrew literature or Yiddish.36 The inevitable impact on Yiddish and Hebrew literature of romanticism, and specifically of symbolism and primitivism in Polish and Russian literature, resulted in a reevaluation of demonology, legends, magic, and myth.37 In Hebrew through Bialik (who was first exposed to these trends in S. Frug’s poetry), as was the case in Yiddish through his mentor Peretz, aggadah became freely employed in the most personal and subjective terms for their powerful psychological metaphors and as symbols of the obscure line separating reality from fantasy.38 As a loyal disciple of Ahfi ad Haam, Bialik had suppressed these impulses for years, although, as his noncanonical works show, they sometimes surfaced even in Volozhin, at the very beginning of his career.39 In 1899, with the appearance of the shadowy reflective poem “Razei laila,” Bialik finally came to terms with these impulses and opened a path in Hebrew literature toward subjectivity and a radical individualism he himself was reluctant to follow.40 Dan Miron has argued


that for Bialik, even the modern person unwilling to surrender his foothold in reality could bridge this gap between mind and myth by means of the esthetic appeal to the imagination. Although in such magnificent poems as “Habrekha” (1904) and “Megilat haesh” (1905) he moved in that direction, Bialik chose to harness that new consciousness mainly in the service of the folk with a folksbukh.41 Bialik wanted a work that would be known to all, young and old, just as until recently the entire folk, so he believed, had been intimately familiar with hfi umash and Rashi.42 If to Bialik, hfi umash and Rashi were indeed together the common book of devotion, why, then, did he not take it, rather than aggadah, as the focus of his literary enterprise? Why, for that matter, did he turn away from what was for a short while his most important project, the preparation of a modern textbook of the Mishnah? Perhaps because neither project, as such, possessed romantic appeal or was up to the task at hand. National revival required a way out of the bourgeois compartmentalization of the spiritual and material, the private and public realms. Legend, myth, and folklore, in the romantic vision, embraced all of life’s dimensions just as they demanded an all-embracing acceptance, if they were to be appreciated. Legend, myth, and folklore thus subsumed and legitimized the genres of poetry, law, and Scripture. But they required, as Nietzsche pointed out, a certain concession of the imagination in order to be acceptable to the rational person.43 From the beginning of his poetic career until 1901, Bialik had softened, disguised, or eliminated altogether the contemporary folkloric-aggadic aspects of his poems. He did this in deference to the H fi ovevei tsiyon, whose collective tastes were presided over by Ahfi ad Haam. But when Saul Ginzburg and Pesahfi Marek’s collection of Yiddish folksongs (1901) appeared, Bialik saw that not all of Jewish polite society shared Ahfi ad Haam’s antipathy for folklore. Shortly after Bialik founded the Moriah publishing house in Odessa in 1905 (together with Rawnitzki, Simha Ben Tsion, and Elhanan Leib Levinski), he began planning a volume of aggadah for the growing modern Hebrew school system, the hfi eder metuqan. Moriah, a telling name, saw its purpose as providing children with secular textbook versions of classical Jewish literature.44 First, the editors thought of producing a work comparable to their already popular biblical books.45 But conceptualizng a book of aggadah presented its own peculiar problems. The literature of the aggadah was not the equivalent of a single book but a sea of dispersed texts, from which a judicious selection would have to be made in order to produce a true anthology. Otherwise, a single book of midrash aggadah would have to be chosen. In that case, however, it would not be the aggadic literature as a whole that would be represented, but only one specific text in revised form. Such a single book was also more in keeping with the form of their earlier projects, and far less complicated. Yet no single aggadic book, standing alone, was the equivalent of a biblical book. Plans were interrupted soon after they had begun when Bialik left for Warsaw to become literary editor of Hashiloahfi . Having been dispatched by Ahfi ad Haam, Bialik came armed to resist the Warsaw spirit that was dominated by the figure of Peretz. But the Paris of the East, in which he found himself for a little over a year

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(December 1903–February 1905), cast its spell on him.46 Jewish Warsaw’s leading literary antagonists, Peretz and Frischmann, had their differences over the purpose of a Hebrew renaissance. Nevertheless, they shared a profound interest in reviving “tales of old” as part of Jewish national life.47 Moreover, they helped convince Bialik that aggadah was folklore and that folklore was central to modern national culture.48 When Bialik returned to Odessa, the aggadah, which until then had not been uppermost in his mind (at best, he saw it as a project that would take up a small portion of his creative energies), became his all-consuming passion and his major literary preoccupation.49 With Yavetz, Frischmann, Peretz, and Berdyczewski, Bialik came to share a Nietzschean vision of aggadah as folklore and myth. Reinvigorated among the people as a mass phenomenon, and on new secular grounds, myth could once again give rise to a cohesive folk imagination. Sefer haaggadah emerged, between 1908 and 1911, as a three-volume anthology of edited and revised texts, with portions from the Aramaic translated uniformly into modern Hebrew. The result was an unprecedented scholarly feat of haute vulgarization.50 Bialik and Rawnitzki drew from a wide range of literary Rabbinic sources— among them, the Mekhilta, Sifri, Sifra, the Yalqutim, and the Palestinian Talmud. Most of the material was derived from the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli), because it was best known among the people and represented to Bialik the source of the most authentic element of persistent folklore. Judiciously derived selections from widely dispersed and inaccessible sources were pulled together and often quoted verbatim. Bialik felt that the image of the slovenly Eastern European Jew had attached itself to the aggadah and that, along with its inaccessibility, was to blame for the widespread disinterest in the subject, if not downright contempt for it, by modern Jews. “Contemporary man,” Bialik said, “needs order,” and it was the order of Sefer haaggadah that he regarded as the work’s essential task. Through order, Bialik wanted to render the aggadah whole—or, as he claimed to believe, restore its original orderliness.51 Rather than editors, Bialik referred to himself and Rawnitzki as mesadrim (orderers). The subjects were arranged chronologically and thematically. Beginning with the third edition, they included philological glosses and vocalized texts in order to foster correct pronunciation and proper understanding of the Hebrew.52 Bialik called the reader’s attention to the essential interconnectedness of the material, which was linked topically, logically, and causally in a narrative, from the Creation through the period of the Second Commonwealth.53 To put the texts in order, Bialik first had to put them through considerable revision on all levels. Each aggadah was itself a fragmentary piece of a larger epic whose remaining shards lay strewn over a vast and inaccessible literature, alongside relics of many other tales.54 Bialik claimed to have transcribed the texts faithfully from their diverse sources, without adding to or subtracting from them or changing their basic style, language, and substance.55 He also told artists and writers that they had more to learn from the unretouched aggadah, in its pure folk form, than the aggadah could


ever benefit from what they had to offer.56 But Bialik also admitted to having made all kinds of changes. Generally, however, he wanted to convince his audience that such changes were no more than minor emendations that were necessary to reveal the true character and esthetic quality of the story. In fact, the changes Bialik made in the aggadic texts were considerable and could certainly not escape the attention of his readers. The changes included: eliminating aggadot of inferior quality; deleting the pervasive narrative digressions; expurgating, in accordance with highbrow European tastes, some of the coarser and unedifying elements of the stories; and making what he characterized as minor linguistic changes.57 The aggadot that Bialik retained were chosen on the basis of their artistic merit, for the quality of the idea embodied in the tales, and for their popularity. Previous writers (Krochmal, for example) were not interested in the popularity of the aggadah at all. On the contrary, its popularity or folkloric quality often made it esthetically and intellectually suspect.58 The most important change Bialik made was one he vigorously defended until his final days. Openly and uninhibitedly, he eliminated the original literary (homiletical and exegetical) context in which the aggadot were used to illustrate, or ultimately be justified by, a scriptural prooftext, or asmakhta. Unencumbered by extraneous biblical quotations, the aggadah could free itself, Bialik believed, from its narrow association with the beit hamidrash and could appeal to the new generation, which rejected religious authority.59 Presuming, uncritically, that an audience was indicative of an alternative authority, Bialik presented the aggadah as a secular genre that could assume its rightful place in world literature without losing its national distinctiveness.60 Bialik fully recognized just how momentous a step this was. For him, however, it was the crucial change that had to be made in order “to rescue the aggadah” for the modern reader.61 To some extent, these changes were already present in the works of Margolis and Yavetz. But their works were not nearly as extensive as Bialik’s, nor were their aims the same. Certainly, Yavetz, whose hidden agenda was to lead modern Jews toward an orthodox Zionism, would not have wanted to create a secular version of the aggadah to take the place of the traditional texts. Bialik later tried to bring some coherence to the field by insisting on its right to be judged subjectively, on its own terms (which is to say, on Bialik’s terms). But primarily he understood his mission to be the presentation of the human, universal, ethical dimension of the aggadah, as a cohesive narrative composition, however fragmentary it may have been in the original. Like the Sagenliteratur (terminologically and conceptually the literal equivalent of aggadah), the Kinder und Hausma¨rchen, and similar others, the folktales of the Jews were intended to serve as the primary sources of a renewed folk inspiration rather than as the exclusive subject of scholarly discourse. The editors’ description of their material as aggadah, rather than the cognate Sagen, was itself a telling sign of their didactic intent to restore the tradition to its native vocabulary. For Bialik, the term “folklore” referred specifically to the material in his final volume, which covered folk medicine, divinations, incantations, the “evil eye,” folk sayings, and so on.62 These were the standard fare of documented Jewish

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folklore in Grunwald’s Mitteilungen, the Globus, the Urquell, and other contemporary folklore journals and magazines.63 At the same time, the editors of the Sefer haaggadah did not designate these distinct folkloristic genres apart from the rest of the work. Bialik and Rawnitzki clearly regarded all of the aggadah equally and indistinguishably qualified as the “folk literature of the Jews” and the “permanent lodging of the soul and spirit of the folk.”64 Bialik applied none of the folklorist’s rigor in identifying his material. His understanding of Jewish folklore did not significantly evolve beyond whatever vague notions he may have had of it when he wrote his first poems in Volozhin. Moreover, Bialik had little patience for the scholarly trappings of the field; his agenda was social, aimed at the creation of a national literature from which Jewish folkloristics could achieve parity with that of other ethnic groups. From the very beginning, folklore was, for Bialik, an essentially esthetic-literary category, a romantic intuition rather than a scholarly construct.65 Nor was Bialik at all interested in the actual folk origins of the Rabbinic, midrashically transmitted aggadot. Although he later expressed some interest in the Sitz im Leben of the midrashim, he never really developed more than a vague concept of the aggadah as folklore.66 At the time, he basically conceived of the aggadah as a collective body of folk literature. Interestingly, Bialik later pointed to the Bible as exemplifying and justifying his conception of the aggadah. He appealed to the Bible on secular grounds, as historical precedent, as the voice of the people captured in literature, not as religious authority.67 First, the Bible was itself a collection of books and texts selected and canonized by the Rabbis from a host of works. Even as a compendium of diverse styles, it nonetheless achieved in its canonic unity a common style that is readily identifiable as “biblical.” Second, precisely because the Bible was an edited literary composition in its parts and as a whole, its genius was not lost on the secular imagination. Finally, the Bible was a collective concept, which, in its Rabbinic reinterpretation, permeated the folk life of the people. The aggadah, Bialik would argue, had an existence apart from, and in some measure equal to, the Bible. Turned into a book, it could acquire the same stature. The esthetic presentation, or packaging, of the material would bring the material to new, younger audiences. At the same time, it might convince a generation that had rejected the irrationalism and chaos of aggadic texts that the aggadah was worth serious reconsideration, though sincere appreciation, in the end, would require an act of will.68 To be sure, the aggadah, like the Bible, and all folk creations were initially the work of individuals. Once they strove for expression, however, they entered the folkloric process. No matter how original the work, it was mediated by the richly figurative and allusive folk idiom.69 With this thought, Bialik left a door open to formalism. Through it, had history taken a very different course, scholars might have advanced aggadic studies along the lines of the formalist studies of the Bylini and other Russian folktales. In that case, it might not have mattered that Bialik himself eschewed any scientific


pretensions. His works were, in the best romantic spirit, unabashedly subjective, although, happily, his taste was nearly impeccable. For Bialik, the best of the aggadot (and it was only those that he chose) were certainly not the artificial products of the thirteen principles of rhetoric; true art was designed by intuition, not by formula.70 Bialik later changed his position on the midrash, distinguishing between the exegetically and homiletically derived aggadot and midrashim. Aggadot were adaptive and dynamic, beginning with an idea and then searching for a prooftext. The mediocre midrashim began, unimaginatively, with a verse and forced out helpless illustrations. The aggadah, however, was not just the preserve of the Rabbis, who themselves hailed from diverse elements of society, but also that of the lowly laborers, the carpenters and shoemakers. As a folk literature, it enshrined the words, expressions, images, and ideas of the common man, whose name, like that of Daniel the Tailor, it sometimes even remembered.71 Generally, however, its authors were the collective, anonymous Baalei haaggadah, just as the period in which it was created is known as the Tequfat haaggadah, concepts Bialik fully realized were more “folkist or literary” than scientific.72 The aggadah, he pleaded, was the poetry and belles-lettres of its time and had to be recognized as such.73 It is hardly conceivable that a pioneering work of such magnitude would escape any criticism, deserved or otherwise. Yet that was the case—apart, that is, from an occasional letter offering some minor correction of a text, or the comments of Berdyczewski, a letter Ahfi ad Haam sent to Bialik and Rawnitzki, and the private discussions Bialik had with Ben-Tsion Dinaburg (Dinur).74 Such was the admiration for Bialik and for Sefer haaggadah that a body of criticism did not appear until recently.75 When Sefer haaggadah first appeared, Berdyczewski, who was surely attuned to all its problems, found nothing harsher to say than that while the work was admittedly not “scientific,” Bialik should have included at least some historical analysis of the aggadot. He was also puzzled by Bialik’s preference for Babylonian sources over older sources.76 Ahfi ad Haam questioned the topical division of the texts: the position of some of the texts under their particular rubrics, their editing, and the usefulness of the volumes as a reference work. He also took issue with the translation into Hebrew of popular Aramaisms and the insufficiency and sometimes inaccuracy of the philological commentary. Curiously, though Ahfi ad Haam was a notorious prude, he wondered why Bialik left out some “adult material.” This was, of course, a very sound folkloristic criticism, but here it was strictly a difference in taste.77 Ahfi ad Haam liked Sefer haaggadah; he called it a “folk book, in the better sense of the word,” by which he meant a book for the folk, not by the folk.78 He even suggested that Bialik should have it translated into English.79 Only Dinaburg told Bialik, in so many words, that not all the material could rightly be considered folklore and that there was a need to distinguish between folk and literary sources, for a proper reconstruction of the ancient literature. For the Zionist movement, this was especially important, Dinaburg said, to demonstrate that there was a continuous tradition of Hebrew folklore that led from antiquity into the Middle Ages. He assured Bialik that young people were interested

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in this material. In fact, Bialik was already aware of the young Jewish men and women who attended Dinaburg’s lectures on the subject of labor and found his use of sources from Sefer haaggadah fascinating. Bialik respected Dinaburg’s talents as a scholar and valued his opinion. His response, recorded by Dinaburg from memory, was typically ambiguous in some respects, but uncharacteristically frank in others.80 Bialik repeatedly said that while the aggadah was an entirely unique literature, not subject to scientific distinctions, it had to be raised to the level of Greek drama, which transformed ancient folk rituals and tales into art. No one, save scholars, Bialik told Dinaburg, would presume to improve on these classics by dissecting them in order to reconstruct their original literary and folk contexts. The aggadah was not the work of artists; rather, it represented the exegetical and homiletical parables of the Rabbis, transformed, in content and form, into oral lore. This, he said, constituted its folklorization and was the reason for the extant aggadic variants. Bialik’s theory of variants was formulated impromptu, in response to the Hebrew critic Y. H. Taviov, an extreme opponent of Yiddish. To Bialik’s dismay, Taviov had harshly dismissed the songs in the Ginsburg and Marek collection, believing them to be recordings of defective texts rather than genuine folksongs. Rejecting this, Bialik insisted that variants were the developmental signposts of folklore, a process that was as true for the Yiddish folksongs as for the aggadah— only more complicated and more culturally inclusive.81 Later critics took Bialik to task for all aspects of his work, from the omission of proper citation of midrashic context for his extracts, to his book’s claim to selfsufficiency. Though Bialik did not mean to eliminate interest in pursuing the sources (certainly not on a scholarly level), scholars of the aggadah were bound to reject his imposition of modern tastes on its distinctive style, even if his purpose was to make the aggadah accessible to a popular audience.82 If, as Bialik argued, the aggadah was to be understood on its own terms, it had to be appreciated precisely in its own rhetorical framework. The critics also questioned—as had Berdyczewski and Ahfi ad Haam—the faithfulness of his texts to the letter and spirit of the sources. Far from synthesizing the aggadic fragments, Bialik was accused of fragmenting them even further.83 Bialik was certainly aware of what Wissenschaft would have preferred to see in a work of such scope.84 Given what Bialik claimed he hoped to do—restore the fragments to their epic whole—the scholarly criticism regarding his selection of variants was valid. Reconstruction of texts necessitated, in the first place, a critical use of sources. However, it was not just that by disclaiming any scholarly intentions, Bialik apologized in advance or hoped to forestall criticism, as E. E. Urbach suggested. We may take Bialik at his word when he said that his intentions were different from those of scholars; indeed, their aims were incompatible with his.85 Berdyczewski, of course, was no less romantic than Bialik, and perhaps was even more so. Berdyczewski, however, was a trained scholar, and he often required a more precise methodology in order to demonstrate convincingly the existence of subterranean traditions in Judaism. Bialik’s aims were more practical, programmatic, and pedagogic than theoretical or scholarly, and they derived from his own participation in the aggadic process, his actual work in shaping the aggadah.86


An important clue to Bialik’s literary imagination at work in the Sefer haaggadah may be found among the familiar tales of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22). One tale, on closer examination, stands out as strange and obscure.87 In this version of God’s putting Abraham to the test, unlike all the others, it was Satan who not merely attempted, but actually succeeded in foiling God’s plan. Satan kept Abraham from going through with his tragic jest. Bialik wove separate midrashic strands into a new whole that, as Joseph Heinemann discovered, did not exist in the sources.88 Bialik made no secret of tying midrashic fragments together into a larger epic that he imagined as their original form. It was quite another matter, however, to fashion a narrative so brazenly antithetical to the spirit of the sources. In Bialik’s Akedah, Satan saved Isaac and, in that moment, the Jewish people. When their destiny is left to God, the Jews must repeatedly suffer the shame and humiliation of the Akedah throughout their history. The traditional Akedah, which Bialik protests with his own version, is a metaphor for murder, both the kind perpetrated against men, women, and children, as in the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 (Bialik’s “City of Slaughter”), and the kind committed on a daily basis against the spirit of young Jewish men who wasted away their lives in the yeshiva.89 Bialik held the Jews responsible for both—because they relied on God to intervene for them when they were under the knife, as in Genesis, and because they squandered their children’s youth by making them aspire to the image of the matmid. In Bialik’s “ingenious mosaic,” as Heinemann called it, salvation comes not from God, the Master of the Eternal World, but from Satan, master of this world.90 Two years before the appearance of Sefer haaggadah, Bialik had upbraided Berdyczewski for tampering with hallowed, ancient texts. In their fragmented state, Bialik said, the aggadot were precious gems, consummate forms that were honed to their bare essentials by generations of Jews telling and retelling them. Like the Torah, the aggadah had to be left alone, “nothing added or subtracted.”91 But no sooner had Bialik embarked on his own epic quest for a Hebrew folk literature—one he would have to rely on himself to create—than he, too, found himself taking the time-honored literary prerogative of polishing folklore, whether for his Hebrew folksongs, children’s songs, or aggadot.92 Bialik’s complaint that Berdyczewski should not have altered the aggadah, on the grounds that such development of the sources was rightfully a process of time and nature, not the art or artifice of individuals, was, in fact, disingenuous. What really concerned him was that he thought Berdyczewski unsuited for the task. The Jewish Nietzschean set out to liberate the repressed pagan traditions of the free Jewish spirit, in an effort to redefine the canon of tradition. Bialik did not want to give up the God in whom he had lost faith. He wanted to achieve for the classic aggadic canon what Grimm and others had done for their classic tales: Bialik wanted to “restore the crown to its former glory,” as he was fond of saying, by giving the aggadah contemporary relevance and romantic appeal. Of course, what was Bialik’s subversive version of the Akedah if not Berdyczewskian? The lines distinguishing the two writers should not be blurred: this was not typical of Bialik’s style, but it does underscore the ambivalence that trailed

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and inhibited his work. Whereas Peretz freed himself of the religious tradition by excising it from its ethical core, Bialik thought that by secularizing it, the religious material could be salvaged. For Bialik, who lost his traditional faith, salvation lay not in the present, as it did for Berdyczewski, with his Nietzschean affirmations, but in the recalled and idealized vision of a clear commitment to tradition.93 Of course, this was a hopeless vision of an undisturbed secular piety in which Bialik did not himself believe, but for which he longed nonetheless. This is the due he gave Satan, master of this world. Bialik’s Akedah is fraught with the ambivalence of one who steps boldly, but unsurely, from the cloister into the wilderness and, once out, looks back in longing. Moriah had a host of meanings. It was a paradigm of martyrdom, the hekhal hatorah, the Temple of Jerusalem in exile, and the altar on which the life of the matmid was offered. In Bialik’s Akedah, Moriah was transformed into a frontier outpost of secularism and the will to live. At the same time, it remained a powerful symbol of rootedness and a competing memorial to what had been.94 From Moriah came the people’s book, Sefer haaggadah. Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):177–97. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. “Lekinusa shel haaggadah haivrit,” Hashiloahfi 10 (1908):23, 24. See also B. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot shel bialik,” Kneset 9 (1945):13. 2. H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Y. H fi . Rawnitzki, Sefer haaggadah, rev. ed. (Tel Aviv, 1930), 1:xi. 3. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 14. 4. Ernst Simon, Chajim Nachman Bialik: Eine Einfu¨hrung in sein Leben und sein Werk (Berlin, 1935), pp. 98–99; Yehoshua Gutman, “Bialik baal haagadah,” Kneset 10 (1947):65. 5. Frankfurt am Main, 1906. 6. H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Yehoshua H fi ana Rawnitzki, The Book of Legends: Sefer haaggadah, Legends from the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York, 1992). 7. Kol kitvei berdyczewski (Tel Aviv, 1960), p. 249. 8. When exactly did Bialik make the explicit connection between aggadah and folklore? The rubric Mishirei am first appeared in the 1908 edition of Bialik’s poems (F. Lahfi over, Bialik: H fi ayav vitsirotav [Tel Aviv, 1962], 3:620; herein, Lahfi over). Mi yodea ir lishtina, his first “folk song,” appeared in 1901 (ibid., 1:347–48). By the time he came to articulate his plan for Sefer haaggadah, he clearly regarded aggadah as the equivalent of folklore. Of course, all Bialik’s poems bear the imprint of aggadah and represent his cultural iberdikhtung of the past treasures of Jewish expression. See Mordecai Genn, “The Influence of Rabbinic Literature on the Poetry of Hayyim Nahman Bialik” (Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1978). 9. Hyman Hurwitz, Hebrew Tales: Selected and Translated from the Writings of the Ancient Hebrew Sages (London, 1826), and its German version, Sagen der Ebraër: Aus den alten ebraïschen Weisen (Settingen, Hainsfurth, 1828). 10. On Frankel, see Ismar Schorsch, “Zacharias Frankel and the European Origins of Conservative Judaism,” Judaism 30 (1981):348–49. See also the nationalistic appreciation of

240 The Modern Period Frankel, by Shaul Pinhas Rabinovitz, R. zekharyah frankel: H fi ayav zemano, sefarav uveit midrasho (Warsaw, 1898), pp. 59–70, 139–40. 11. Leopold Zunz, Die Gottesdienstlichen Vortra¨ge der Juden: Ein Beitrag zur Altertumskunde und biblischen Kritik, zur Literatur und Religionsgeschichte (Hildesheim, 1966), pp. 62, 64–65, 98, 104–6, 126, 133, 136, 138–39, 147–48, 153, 163, 179, 324–25, 327, 335, 341, 375, 469. Rapoport began his lengthy discussion of the essentially literary-homiletical aspects of the aggadah by identifying the material parenthetically, in German, as “Sagen, Erza¨hlungen, Legenden, o¨ffentliche Vortra¨ge.” His work, however, only suggests a folkloristic aspect of the aggadah (Salomo Jehuda L. Rapoport, Erekh Milin [Prague, 1852], 1:6–13). N. Krochmal, Rapoport’s mentor, specifically rejected those elements of the aggadah that fall under the category of folklore, as late, and vulgar accretions, to the edifying and noble work of the Rabbis (Kitvei rabi nahfi man krokhmal, ed. Simon Rawidowicz, 2d ed. [London, Waltham, 1961], pp. 251–66). See also Rawidowicz’s apt remarks, p. 145. Solomon Schechter thought folklore was nonsense; see “Nachman Krochmal and the Perplexities of the Time,” Studies in Judaism: A Selection (New York, 1974), p. 342. 12. See Alexander Altman, “Zur Fru¨hgeschichte der ju¨dischen Predigt in Deutschland: Leopold Zunz als Prediger,” Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute 6 (1961): 3–59; Alexander Altman, ed., “The New Style of Preaching in Nineteenth-Century German Jewry,” in Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 65–117. 13. Isaac Margolis, Erza¨hlungen Jeshurun’s: Charakter Bilder und Sagen (Berlin, 1877). 14. F. Lahfi over, Rishonim veahfi aronim (Tel Aviv, 1965), pp. 61–62; idem, Toledot hasifrut haivrit (Tel Aviv, 1966), 3: pt. 1, 48–51; Nahum Sokolow, “Harav R.I.H. Weiss, H.Y.V.,” Haasif 2 (1885):47–48. 15. J. Klausner, Yotsrim uvonim (Tel Aviv, 1925), 1:17, n. 1. 16. See Dor dor vedorshav (New York, Berlin, 1924), 1: chap. 22; 2: chap. 21, 3: chaps. 22–23, esp. pp. 252–53, 287, 294–95; see also Elazar Atlas’s contemporary review, “Even bohen,” Haasif 1 (1884): pt. 2, 234. 17. Isaac Hirsch Weiss, “Haraayon haleumi beyisrael,” Haasif 6 (1893):95–101; Encyclopaedia Judaica, 16:413–14. 18. Haim Oppenheim, “Biqoret midrash aggadah,” Haasif 5, 2 (1889):1–22, and 6, 2 (1893):87–103. On Oppenheim, see the autobiographical notes in N. Sokolow, ed., Sefer zikaron lesofrei yisrael hahfi ayim itanu kayom, (Warsaw, 1889), pp. 126–27, and Jewish Encyclopedia, 9:410. 19. On Rossi’s attitude to the aggadah in the context of his historiographical method, see Salo Baron, History and Jewish Historians (Philadelphia, 1964), pp. 196–97, 225, 237, 435; cf. Yosef H fi ayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Historians (Seattle, 1982), pp. 71–73; 127, n. 40. 20. See Michael A. Meyer, Ideas of Jewish History (New York, 1974), pp. 120–21. 21. Shmuel Yosef Fuenn, “Maamar al haaggadah,” Haasif 1 (1884): 94–105. 22. Yavetz translated Sihfi ot as Ma¨rchen. 23. Yavetz, pp. 12, 17; Peretz, Ale verk (New York, 1947), 7:129. 24. Yavetz, pp. 11–12. 25. Yavetz, p. 12; cf. Zunz, “Etwas u¨ber die rabbinische Literatur,” Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1875), pp. 23–24; Ismar Schorsch, “From Wolfenbu¨ttel to Wissenschaft: The Divergent Paths of Isaak Markus Jost and Leopold Zunz,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 22 (1977):125. On Yavetz’s admiration of Zunz, as well as of Krochmal and Rapoport, see his Sefer toledot yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1939), 14:18–22, 70. 26. Yavetz, p. 11. 27. Ibid., p. 12; idem, Toledot yisrael, 14:162; Lahfi over, Toledot, 3: pt. 1, 40–42. 28. Yavetz, pp. 3–7.

Sefer Haaggadah 241 29. Ibid., p. 8. 30. David Frischmann, Mivhfi ar ktavim (Tel Aviv, 1947), pp. 367, 369. 31. Ibid. 32. Shaul Stempfer, “Yediat qaro vekhatuv etsel yehudei mizrahfi eiropah batequfah hahfi adashah: Heqsher, meqorot, vehaskalot,” in Tradition and Change in Modern Jewish History: Essays Presented in Honor of Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem, 1987), pp. 459–83. 33. Preface to Sihfi ot mini qedem, p. x. 34. Ibid. 35. Bialik may also have been influenced by Yavetz’s Neginot mini qedem (Warsaw, 1892?), which retell some of the aggadot relating to the destruction of the Temples, as epic poems, a` la the ancient Greeks and Germans, but in the style and meter of ancient Hebrew poetry. Some of these are reprinted in Rabi zev yavetz (Jerusalem, 1943), pp. 33–41; see also A. Sh. Hershberg, “Letoledot yisrael ultoldot r. z. yavetz, z.l.” in Yavetz’s Toledot, 14:137– 38. 36. Dan Miron, “Folklore and Antifolklore in the Yiddish Fiction of the Haskalah,” in Studies in Jewish Folklore, ed. Frank Talmage (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 219–49. 37. Czeslaw Milosz, The History of Polish Literature (New York, 1969), pp. 322–79; James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1970), pp. 474–518. 38. Dan Miron, Boah, lailah:Hasifrut haivrit bein higayon le i-giyon bamifne hameah haesrim, iyunim bitsirot hfi . n. bialik ve-m. y. berditshevski (Tel Aviv, 1987), pp. 90–97, 157. 39. Moshe Ungerfeld, ed., Ktavim genuzim shel hfi ayim nahfi man bialik (Tel Aviv, 1970), passim; Dan Miron, ed., Bialik: Shirim (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 94–193. 40. Miron, Boah, lailah, pp. 110–24. 41. Harold Fisch, “Bialik and the Greater Romantic Lyric: A Comparative Study,” in Melanges Andre Neher, ed. E. Amalo Levy-Valensi et al. (Paris, 1975), pp. 227–36. 42. Lahfi over, 2:542; Iggerot hfi ayim nahfi man bialik, ed. F. Lahfi over (Tel Aviv, 1938), 1: 282–83. Sholom Aleichem’s semiliterate Tevye was a more realistic, although certainly a peculiarly brilliant, image of how much hfi umash and Rashi the common man really knew. 43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), pp. 136–37. 44. Lahfi over, 1:520–29. 45. Tsvi Sharfshtein, Toledot hahfi inukh beyisrael bedorot haahfi aronim (New York, 1945), 1:363ff; Elias Schulman, A History of Jewish Education in the Soviet Union (New York, 1971), p. 4; Iggerot bialik, 1:135, 140–42. 46. Y. H. Biletzki H fi . n. bialik veyiddish (Tel Aviv, 1970), pp. 24–29; Khone Shmeruk, Peretses yiesh vizye: Interpretatsye fun y. l. peretses bay nakht oyfn altn mark, un kritishe oysgabe fun der drame (New York, 1971), pp. 102–3, 114, 121, 124; Iggerot bialik, 1:264. 47. Lahfi over, 2:426–27; on Peretz and Frischmann’s stormy relationship, see Nakhman Mayzl, Perets un zayn dor shrayber (New York, 1951), pp. 298–301. 48. Lahfi over 2:446–48. Idem, Toledot hasifrut haivrit hahfi adashah (Tel Aviv, 1966), 3: pt. 1, 94; Menuhfi a Gilboa, Bein realizm leromantiqah: al darko shel david frishman (Tel Aviv, 1975), pp. 119, 153. 49. See Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav (Tel Aviv, 1937), 2:128–30. 50. Book 1 of the first volume apeared in 1908, printed out of the elegant publishing house of Joseph Fisher, in accordance with Bialik’s wishes that the appearance of Sefer haaggadah be worthy of its subject. Originally, two volumes were planned. In all, three volumes appeared, consisting of two books each. Both the second book of volume 1 (printed by Moriah with imported type) and two books of volume 2 came out in 1909. The third volume came out in Krakow in 1911. Bialik continued correcting and revising Sefer

242 The Modern Period haaggadah until just before his death in 1934. See Mordechai Ben Yehezkel, “Sefer Vayehi hayom,” in Bialik: Yetsirot lesugeha bir i habiqoret, ed. Gershon Shaked (Jerusalem, 1974), pp. 339–40; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav 2:130–31. 51. Sefer haaggadah, 1:ix; Rawnitzki, among others, appreciated Bialik’s work for its “architectural” order. “And Bialik’s luminous talent for spiritual architecture was revealed in this vocation, too, in all its greatness. He was unequalled in organizing a broad and complex program, or a great and beautifully ordered, spiritual tabernacle, with all its passageways, chambers, and inner chambers” (Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:132). The architectural motif was frequently used by Bialik as well. Sefer haaggadah, 1:viii–x; see also D. Sadan, Al sifruteinu (Jerusalem, 1951), p. 47. 52. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xiii; Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 16. 53. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xi. 54. See Berdyczewski’s generally laudatory review, “Divrei biqoret: sefer haaggadah,” in Kol kitvei berditshevski pp. 249, 251. 55. Sefer haaggadah, 1:x; Rawnitzki, 2:130. 56. Sefer haaggadah, 1:x. 57. Ibid., 1:10–13. 58. See Rawidowicz’s introduction in Kitvei rabi nahfi man krokhmal, p. 143. Bialik deferred to the authority of the sages for his esthetic distinction between “good and bad” aggadot; see Devarim shebeal-pe (Tel Aviv, 1935), pp. 44, 71–72. Bialik’s prodigious memory, at which Rawnitzki marveled, as well as his literary tastes, were also factors in determining which texts would appear, and in what form. It is inconceivable that the editors could agree on all the final material, but Rawnitzki confessed to disagreeing only sometimes with Bialik’s interpretations of the aggadah. His admiration for Bialik overrode all differences between them, and the result, if we take Rawnitzki at his word, was equally satisfying for both (Rawnitzki, 2:133). On Bialik’s criteria, see Devarim shebeal-pe, p. 62. On the Grimms’ revisions, see Maria Tartar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, 1987). 59. Bialik, Devarim shebeal-pe, pp. 62–63; idem, “Limud haaggadah beveit hasefer,” Kneset 10 (1947):13; Yehoshua Gutman, “Bialik baal haaggadah,” Kneset 10 (1947):70–71; Efraim E. Urbach, “Bialik veagadot hfi zl,” Molad 17 (1959):268; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2: 127. 60. Later, Bialik spoke of the aggadah acquiring a new kind of sanctity, “the sanctity of national creativity,” and “a different kind of sanctity, a secular sanctity” (Devarim shebealpe, p. 61; “Limud haaggadah,” pp. 13, 15). See also the critical remarks of this method by Yosef Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik baaggadah hatalmudit,” Molad 31 (1974), passim; A. A. Halevi, “Hakompozitsiya shel haaggada,” Kneset 10 (1947). 61. Bialik, “Limud haaggadah,” p. 13. 62. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xiii. 63. Ibid., p. xii. 64. This is also evident in the subtitle of the editors’ Yiddish translation of the Sefer haaggadah, Di yidishe agodes: Folkstimlekehe ertseylungen; see also Bialik’s essay of 1913, “Hasefer haivri,” in Kol kitvei bialik (Tel Aviv, 1962), p. 316; idem, “Limud haaggadah,” p. 21, passim; Gutman, “Bialik,” p. 64; Sefer haaggadah, 1:9. 65. On Bialik’s ostensibly indifferent attitude to folklore as anything other than an artistic source for his work, see Ben Yehezkel, “Sefer Vayehi,” p. 343. 66. Devarim shebeal-pe, p. 74. 67. Bialik, “Limud haaggadah,” pp. 13–14. 68. Nathan Rotenstreich, Tradition and Reality: The Impact of History on Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1972), pp. 98–99. 69. See Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 13; Lahfi over, 3:700. See Bialik’s “To the Aggada,”

Sefer Haaggadah 243 Selected Poems of Hayyim Nahman Bialik Translated from the Hebrew, trans. and ed. Israel Efros (New York, 1938), pp. 19–20. 70. Devarim shebeal-pe, pp. 43, 61. 71. Vayiqra rabbah, p. 32. 72. “Lekinusa haaggadah,” pp. 23–24. 73. “Limud haaggadah,” p. 16. 74. On such a letter from the shtetl, see Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:132–33. 75. These include Gutman, Halevi, Heinemann, and Urbach. See also Shmuel Verses, “Hasifrut haivrit beeinei bialik,” in his collection Biqoret habiqoret: haarakhot vegilguleihen (Tel Aviv, 1982), p. 108; and on early Bialik criticism, “Shelavim rishonim behfi eqer bialik: 1915–1948,” pp. 130–64. 76. Kol kitvei Berditshevski, p. 249. 77. Letter to Bialik and Rawnitzki (October 31, 1909), Iggerot ahfi ad haam (Jerusalem, Berlin, 1924), 4:106–9. 78. Letter to Rawnitzki (February 27, 1910), ibid., p. 125. 79. Letter to Rawnitzki (September 23, 1910), ibid., p. 150. 80. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” pp. 10–15. 81. Ibid. On Taviov, see Mendl Bobe, “Y. H. Taviov,” Heavar 16 (May 1969): 141–63. 82. Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 268. 83. Halevi, “Hakompositsiya,” p. 91. 84. Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 14. 85. Sefer haaggadah, 1:xi. 86. Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 268; Dinaburg, “Tokhniyot,” p. 13. 87. Sefer haaggadah, 1:54. Bialik and Rawnitzki, The Book of Legends, p. 41. 88. Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” pp. 89–91. 89. Selected Poems, pp. 114–28; Lahfi over, 2:424–39. 90. Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” p. 90. 91. Iggerot bialik, 1:274, no. 21; Urbach, “Bialik,” p. 267; Rawnitzki, Dor vesofrav, 2:130; Heinemann, “Al darko shel bialik,” p. 90. 92. Ziva Shamir, Hatsirtsur meshorer hagalut: Lehfi eker hayesod haamami beshirat hfi . n. bialik (Tel Aviv, 1986), pp. 18–21. 93. See Avraham Parnes’s “Hamatmid shel hfi . n. bialik, m. y. berditshevski lifnei shinuy arakhin,” in his Mibein lemaarakhot (Tel Aviv, 1951), pp. 9–34. 94. On Moriah and its connection to Bialik’s Zionist longings, as midrashically suggested in El hatsipor, which was written in Volozhin, see Lahfi over, 1:91, n. 20.

13 israel bartal

The Ingathering of Traditions Zionism’s Anthology Projects

Zionism and Culture he intellectuals who enlisted in the Zionist movement’s Kulturkampf hoped

to create a national culture for the Jewish society that was to grow on the soil T of Palestine. This culture, like other national cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was based on a tension-ridden conglomeration of elements of cultural heritage from the period prior to the advent of modern nationalism, and materials adopted from the European cultural repertoire, with Central and Eastern Europe taking particularly central positions. One of the most important elements in the creation of the new national culture was the reimaging of the past. The Zionist movement’s past was designed out of materials taken from the traditional cultural heritage; these, however, were rearranged in a manner that did not accord with traditional Jewish society’s image of the past. Matters that had been central to the traditional Jewish consciousness were moved to the margins, while others, which had been minor and marginal, moved to center stage. Thus, thinkers and writers within the Zionist movement focused on periods of national independence such as the Hasmonean period and showed considerably less interest in periods of cultural prosperity outside of Palestine. Past materials were given new meanings and were transposed from their old religious context to social, economic, and intellectual contexts determined by modern nationalism. The new national culture was created in direct association with the Central and Eastern European versions of romantic nationalism and was profoundly influenced—in a manner that has yet to be fully studied—by Eastern European political radicalism. The combination of nationalism and social radicalism left its mark on the manner in which materials from the past were used. It created dialectical thought patterns in which the desire for destruction and erasure coexisted with the demand for continuity and rehabilitation. Out of this dialectical duality, a new secular Jewish culture emerged and developed; it took root in the late nineteenth century and developed later in Palestine, Israel, and communities throughout the Diaspora. 244

The Ingathering of Traditions 245

How was this new national culture transmitted to its consumers in the growing Jewish yishuv in Palestine? The new society, after all, was not supposed to continue using Jewish text in the way they traditionally had, nor reading all the texts that had been in use in traditional Jewish society. At the same time, there was a fear of severing the relation to the old texts completely. It was hoped that the new readers would read the traditional texts in a new way and find in them what their ancestors had not found, thereby establishing a link between these texts and the ideas of modern Europe. The Hebrew educational system that developed in Palestine beginning in the late nineteenth century played a decisive role in this matter, as did Hebrew journalism, in which members of the nascent national intelligentsia actively took part. The written word—both the literary text and the journalistic article—was seen as a major medium for the propagation of culture. The Hebrew culture that emerged in Palestine consisted of many components taken from Jewish tradition and channeled into a secular-nationalistic context. From the Bible—serving now as a historical document—to the Holy Tongue that shifted to a daily vernacular, much of the cultural upheaval in Palestine took place in a written form. Within the realm of the written word, the present article will address itself to one particular tool of cultural dissemination that was put to extensive use during the formative period of Hebrew culture of Palestine: the anthology. The Zionist anthologies, be they collections of poetry, historical documents, or journals of pilgrims, will be studied here as yet another cultural weapon in the struggle for a new Palestine. These anthologies were conceived of as bridges between the traditional text and new texts. It was their task to fulfill the role played by the traditional text in old reading habits, and to institute a new—and often directly opposed—manner of reading within the continuum of generations of traditional Jewish texts. As a selection of edited texts arranged according to particular organizational principles, the anthology was a most fitting instrument for disseminating the values of the new culture. By its very composition as a continuum of texts, the anthology could express and indeed embody the historically continuous national existence to which Zionism laid claim. The anthology had the capacity to extend lines of connections backward and forward, drawing links among the interpretation of the past, political action in the present, and national expectations for the future. By its nature, the anthology authorized putting into practice in a small scale the selecting of materials from among the nearly infinite variety of traditional texts. Furthermore, a textual continuity could be established between traditional texts from the past and innovative texts of the modern era. Anthological editing also facilitated the ordering of the materials in a manner that seemed to fulfill the Zionist principles for organization of the past: certain periods could be skipped over; periods distant from each other in time could be brought close together; and new compounds might be created according to a common denominator attributed to the various elements by the anthology’s editor. The anthology was not, of course, a Zionist innovation. Literary anthologies had reflected literary tastes, political changes, and ideological trends in Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Collections of texts organized according to topic, historical period, or geographic region had already served other


national movements prior to the rise of Jewish nationalism. Various nationalist trends—not necessarily Zionist—published literary and historical anthologies that were based on organizational principles different from those that characterized the Zionist selections. For example, Yiddish literary collections began to appear in the early twentieth century, which established a link between Yiddish creativity in the late Middle Ages and the modern Yiddish literary revival. These anthologies were created by editors associated with the Yiddishist camp, who saw the Yiddish language and the culture associated with it as the backbone of Jewish nationalism. Like the Zionist anthologies, these anthologies reflected a fusion of national romanticism and social radicalism. They, too, were brimming with the dialectical tension between the call for the destruction of the old world and the desire to continue some of its characteristics.

The Project of Ingathering The anthologies edited and published by editors associated with the Zionist movement were inextricably linked to nationalist thought. This thought was expressed in the structure of the anthologies, in the principles by which the sources were selected and included in the various collections, and in the manner in which each source was presented. Moreover, the very creation of the anthology was consciously put forward as part of the project of national revival. The selection of the texts, their translation into Hebrew (a dead language that had been resurrected), their placement within the framework of the national narrative, and their reclamation by the people renewing itself and by the land being rebuilt—all this served simultaneously as a means by which to achieve national goals and as an end in itself. The anthological strategy was mounted as part of the project of “ingathering,” or kinnus, which had been envisioned by Ahfi ad Haam and H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik, the founders of cultural nationalism, and which was being realized in various quarters by Jewish intellectuals who devoted themselves to the preparation of sections of this enormous cultural enterprise. The ingathering of elements of the Jewish cultural heritage was to take place both in the realm of time—the materials of all historical periods, beginning with the distant past and through the present, would be linked together—and in the realm of space—cultural sources from all parts of the Jewish Diaspora would be transferred to Palestine. The project of kinnus was designed to preserve in the old-new homeland these national-cultural values that appeared destined to be forgotten in the reality of the modern world. The goal was to rehabilitate and reconstruct those elements of culture that had been ostensibly lost yet implicitly preserved in Jewish creativity throughout the generations. At the same time, the project assumed more interventionist prerogatives; it sought to reformulate what was deemed to be in need of improvement and to adapt it to the new values of the national movement. Only with such active gathering and reworking of the products of generations of Jewish cultural creativity could one hope to transform materials scattered throughout time and space into a Jewish national culture.1 As Bialik put it in a 1932 lecture to activists of the Jewish Labor party of Palestine in the settlement of Nahalal:

The Ingathering of Traditions 247 So long as this material is not gathered, not utilized, not used to fortify the nation, to preserve its unity, to increase its strength—it is not our cultural capital. Recouping the cultural capital—this is a matter for a great ingathering from the most ancient times up until the most modern period, from all tongues, from all generations; this is the matter of organizing this capital and reevaluating it with a new approach, with the means and tools and new knowledge we have acquired over time. All this material must once again be placed into a new crucible, in order to be molded anew. This is something that must take place here in Palestine.2

It is not an accident that these words were delivered before representatives of a Zionist group that envisioned the creation of a new society and a new culture, and in a place (Nahalal) that clearly represented the innovative nature of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine: a workers’ moshav (cooperative settlement) in the Jezreel Valley. Indeed, the anthologies edited in the spirit of the Zionist movement were a link in the project of national cultural ingathering. The enterprise of kinnus was aimed not only at preservation and restoration, but also, as was mentioned previously, at discovery, disclosure, and reconstruction. This meant revealing the meanings, concealed behind the visible, behind the plain sense of the text, bringing forgotten or suppressed writings to consciousness, and exposing facts, events, and deeds that the traditional Jewish reader had not known or had refused to know. Since the modern nationalist movement sought to provide a new reading of the past and reveal a different connection between people and land than had been conceived of by traditional society, the editors of these anthologies also addressed themselves to the task of creating new texts out of the old ones. They discovered subterranean streams that had been flowing in the dark throughout the 2,000 years of exile; they exposed vital manifestations of popular culture that had been repressed by elites lacking in national consciousness; and they discovered invisible threads connecting places and events in Eretz Yisrael in the past with places and events in the Diaspora at different times and in different places. Most of the Hebrew-language anthologies edited in the spirit of Zionist ideology and published in Palestine and Israel appeared between the 1920s and the 1960s. A literary and scholarly establishment already existed in the twenties, and it was a substantial factor in the cultural and political life of the new Jewish yishuv. The inspiration for the publication of anthologies came from the circles of an intellectual elite that identified explicitly with the Zionist worldview and took an active part in the formulation of a Hebrew national culture. The collections’ editors included the most distinguished figures in the Zionist intelligentsia of the time: writers such as Jacob Fichmann; political leaders such as Berl Katzenelson; teachers and intellectuals who were to be among the first professors of the Hebrew University, such as Ben-Zion Dinur (Dinaburg), Joseph Klausner, and Israel Heilprin. This distinguished group combined ideological fervor and political commitment with an extremely broad education and intimate familiarity with traditional Jewish texts. It included writers of history, editors of newspapers and journals, excellent translators, and experienced bibliographers. In their work of gathering, translating, editing, and interpreting, they were assisted by the experts and most


learned members of the small Jewish yishuv.3 The funding for the gathering of the anthologies, some of which were quite large, was provided by Zionist institutions such as the Jewish National Fund, the youth department of the Zionist Organization, Sollel Boneh (the labor union’s construction company), the culture department of the Kibbutz Hameuhfi ad (one of the kibbutz movements), and the Jewish Labor Organization of Palestine. Who were the intended readers of those volumes? According to the definition provided by the poet Jacob Fichmann, such anthologies as Sefer haarets, which he compiled, were edited in the manner of those folk collections of legends and prayers that for many generations had expressed the powerful feelings of love and longing for the Land of Israel. “It is not the nature of these books to provide a systematic teaching. Their colorful material, gathered from all corners of literature and poetry, is likely, more than any exhaustive scholarship, to awaken hearts and to draw them to the Land of Israel.”4 The collections of new texts, moreover, were intended for the entire Jewish population of the new yishuv, not for a small elite of intellectuals. The historical-geographical-literary anthology was designed to take the place of the kind of popular reading that had once been prevalent in many sectors of traditional Jewish society. The popularization of the modern critical scholarship was designed to take the place of midrash, legend, and liturgical poetry or to present the old material in a new light, in such a manner that it would be read by any and every Jew. In the following pages, I will survey some of the principal Zionist anthologies that were edited according to themes central to Zionist thinking. I will examine the relationship between ideology and knowledge and between the message and the genre used for its transmission.

The Changing Map of Palestine Sefer haarets—an anthology of writings about the land of Israel (1926), was arranged according to a geographic-historical principle. Its first section opens with God’s promise of the land to Abraham’s descendants in Genesis and with the Tel el-Amarna letters (the earliest extrabiblical mention of the Hebrews’ presence in the land of Canaan) and ends with David Ben-Gurion’s recollections of his first day in Palestine. It tells “the tale of the people exiled from its homeland.”5 The exilic period includes sections on the remnants of the Jewish community in Palestine in the Middle Ages, waves of immigration to Palestine, and various messianic movements. The editor, poet Jacob Fichmann, speaks of exposing the subterranean currents in which the connection between the people and its land found expression. The prayers, the epistles sent by immigrants back to the lands of the Diaspora, and the words of vision and prophecy spoken by messianic claimants were like seeds blowing in the wind, which preserved the connection to the distant land and eventually took root. “The love for the homeland never abandoned us. It was that love that turned the wanderings of thousands of years into a temporary sojourn, and the land that had been only told about into the one and only homeland.”6 The longing for the land of the fathers is the theme that unites the multitude of sources brought together by Fichmann and establishes historical continuity between kabbalists, Hasidim, Christian millenarians, and socialist atheists.


The second part of the book is organized geographically and includes historical sources and literary and poetic depictions of settlements and locales in Palestine: Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the Jezreel Valley, the Galilee, and Trans-Jordan. In the same way in which the traditional texts in the first section are historicized and linked to contemporary texts anchored in the immediate political milieu, so the holy geography of Palestine undergoes a radical transformation and becomes concrete political geography, i.e., Zionist geography. This process also involves the Judification of the map of Palestine and the obscuring of its ArabMuslim character. Rather than the existence of the Arab population in the land being erased, their presence is felt more acutely in texts garnered from Arab geographic literature as well as from the many descriptions of twentieth-century reality included in the collection. Nevertheless, this presence does not come together to form a complete geographical-historical picture in the same way that the Jewish presence does. The Arab presence is most often related to the country’s destruction and backward state. One significant innovation is the change in the priority given to the different geographic regions of the ancient homeland in accordance with what the Zionist settlers had reconstructed during the decade preceding the book’s appearance. The Jezreel Valley, an area of utterly marginal significance in traditional Jewish texts, is given a particularly central position. In the anthology, it is this region, which the new communal settlements had built up in the twenties, that becomes the pinnacle of the Zionist enterprise and innovation. This is an innovation that is related dialectically to the mystical element in the old texts. Take, for example, the words of Eliezer Steinman, then a young and rebellious Hebrew writer and later the editor of an anthology of Hasidic sources, upon visiting the new kibbutz Beit Alfa in the valley: “Beit Alfa, which serves as the absorption ground for the young and enthusiastic forces of Hashomer Hatsair during the Third Aliyah is, because of its vibrant nature and the manner of its expression, the fruit of Hasidic creation. . . . Do we not see here a continuous thread leading directly from the students of [Rabbi Shimon] Bar Yohfi ai, who see the world in its entirety engulfed in flames? Is this not a remnant of a burning ember from the periods of Hasidim and Kabbalists?”7

The New Jew In 1938, an anthology of the new prose of Palestine, accompanied by literary appraisals, was published in Jerusalem.8 The introductory essay to this collection was written by Joseph Klausner, professor of modern Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University and one of the most prolific writers of the Zionist intellectual elite. The anthology was designed, according to the introduction, “to provide the reader with a picture of the revival of Eretz Yisrael reflected in the new Palestinian literature. Although the roots of this new Hebrew literature are still embedded in the exilic past, the Palestinian element in it is growing ever stronger and more ubiquitous. All the customs of life that have been created by the nation now reawakening in its homeland, from the days of the Bilu to the present, a period of but fifty years, already found expression in the prose of Palestine. . . . The pur-


pose of this collection is to provide a survey, of these, and only of these, works.”9 Indeed, as the distance from the earliest days of Zionist settlement increased, so the yishuv element in the anthologies grew increasingly dominant. The yishuv was presented by the editors as an almost self-evident fulfillment of a vision to which all the threads, currents, and historical contexts of pre-Zionist texts led. The anthology’s selections followed the transition from exilic mores to the new ways of living in the Land. Moreover, the explanatory notes that accompanied the texts clearly distinguished between works written by an author outside of Palestine and those created by him once he arrived. This was held to be a crucial distinction, because in Palestine the author absorbed into his being “the singularity, the uniqueness of this little-big land.”10 It appears that the collection’s editors, fervent Zionists who had recently emigrated to Palestine, were still filled with sincere awe at the sight of the growing new society in the ancient-modern land, a society so radically different from the one with which they had been familiar in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the texts they chose to include in their Mivhfi ar hasippur haerets yisraeli emphasize the sharp distinction between the new human product of the national movement and the old-world Jew. In his story “Adam shalem” (A Complete Person), for example, Shlomo Zemach describes the son of a rural Eastern European ritual-slaughterer who goes out enthusiastically to the harvest because “here [in Palestine] we are destined to become whole and healthy, here we are unwittingly children of the field, whole in spirit, like a blade upon which one may say a blessing.”11 An even more characteristic example is the visit paid by the character of Menahem Mendl to a young kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley in which his son and daughter-in-law are members. Menahem Mendl is Sholem Aleichem’s familiar hero, the ultimate luftmentsh whose misadventures revolve around the fluctuations of the stock market. He was brought back to life after Sholem Aleichem’s death in the Hebrew prose by his son-in-law, Dov Berkowitch. Unlike the socioeconomic world to which Menahem Mendl is accustomed, the valley is new, young, fresh, and in bloom; the kibbutz, unsurprisingly, is the antithesis of the shtetls of Poland and Russia. “Here nothing is known of barter and trade, middlemen and fraud, profit and price manipulation.”12 However, the young pioneers are presented as successors to “our fathers and grandfathers, who had the strength of lions, to arise with dawn to worship the creator.”13 In his introduction to the anthology, Klausner defines the cultural rebirth embodied in the yishuv as a “renewal of what was superior in the old, and its connecting to what is good in the new.”14 For him, the “old” was the distant past, the era of the ancient kings, the prophets, and the Hasmoneans. This past served as the basis for the renewal expressed in the anthology’s literary selection, and not “the Middle Ages, a period of darkness and distress that stretches from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Enlightenment, with but a few intervals of light and rights.”15 Indeed, Klausner says, the new writers have returned to the landscape of ancient Palestine, whose smells and views differ so much from those in the lands of exile. They have, furthermore, returned to the flora and fauna of the land of their fathers, associated with the glory of the distant past: “The anemones [kalaniyot], red like


large drops of congealed blood—the blood of the Maccabees, the Zealots, and Bar Kochba’s soldiers, spilled in sanctification of His name and of freedom.”16 The Palestinian man is also utterly different from the person he was in exile. Klausner elaborates extensively on the change that has occurred in some of the stereotypical traits of the Jew: “Before us is a new Jew, a man-Jew. The typical Jewish cowardice has been terminated, the pallid color above the cheeks is gone, and the delicate palms of the hands are no longer. Excessive spirituality has passed from the world along with fear of dogs, of policemen, of the Gentile. The back has become straight and the bent-over body has grown erect.”17 However, Klausner laments that the old is hardly represented at all in the new Hebrew literature. In nearly every story in the collection, he writes, “Judaism does not exist—either as a religion or as a unique culture or as a national worldview. Aside from the land and the language, there is nothing in here [eyn kan klum].”18 The first literary anthology of Palestinian prose, then, expresses the separation from the past, a separation caused not by an abandonment of the old texts but rather by a rereading of them in a new way. The connection with the distant past is with a past invented by the new Hebrews and connected by them to the geography and natural landscape of Palestine. This is not a fictional past, but one based upon a radical selection of particular portions of the old texts: courage, physical prowess, political independence.

From Masada to the Haganah Physical prowess and political independence were in the center of the Zionist discourse, hence, the major place of the two concepts of shemirah (defense, or guarding) and avodah (labor). Inherited, as is well known, by the modern Jewish nationalist movement from the world of the Jewish enlightenment, these two terms represented an array of demands for changes in traditional Jewish society. The use of weapons and the study of warfare were seen as an uplifting of the Diaspora Jew. Working the land and physical activity in general were seen as the cure for the fatal disease suffered by the nonproductive Jew. This idealization of the active heroic life played a decisive role in the new reading of traditional texts and in the selection of modern texts attached to them in the Zionist anthology. Gevurah (heroism) was the term used to describe Jewish physical courage, which had characterized Jewish people in the distant past, when they had resided on their own land, and which was lacking in them when they went into exile. The bravery of the ancient Jewish warrior, whose last manifestations could be seen in Palestine in the days of the rebellions against the Romans, was renewed in the image of the Zionist settlers in the late nineteenth century. Judah Maccabee, Shimon Bar Giora, and Shimon Bar Kochba were linked through secret subterranean currents to the defenders of Petah Tikva and the fighters of the Haganah during the Arab revolt of 1936–39. The conspicuous void between ancient and modern times was filled in various ways. Berl Katzenelson, a leading politician and an influential intellectual in the Zionist Labor movement, made this attempt in his introduction to Sefer hagevurah:19

252 The Modern Period The giant figures of Rabbi Akiba and Bar Kochba . . . represent the two channels of Jewish heroism after the destruction; the heroism of the sanctified spirit and the heroism of the rejected arm [i.e., warfare]. At times the two channels flowed together, and at times they flowed apart. . . . In essence, there is no difference between the fate of the rebels in Galilee, the fate of the defenders of Tulchin [the Cossack massacres in 1648], those who stood before Muhammad, those who fortified themselves against the crusaders, and those who rebelled throughout the Roman Empire, surrendering their lives for their faith.20

In the case of Jewish heroism, as we have seen elsewhere, the anthology was designed to restore forgotten or repressed historical instances to the reviving national consciousness. The power of Jewish forgetfulness, Katzenelson opined, is enormous: “A great deal of forgetfulness, to be sure, is caused by forceful conversions, by burnings at the stake, by the fear of despots, and by the fate of the vanquished. And what was able to survive the long arm of censorship from the outside was lost because of internal censorship. Has a single line reached us from the literature written by the Zealots [the Jewish extremists of the Second Temple period]? Expressions of Jewish heroism that did not end in victory were sentenced to erasure.”21 This, wrote Katzenelson, “is the fate of the vanquished!” And with Zionist enthusiasm, Katzenelson adds that the modern movement of national liberation has also liberated the imprisoned text and uncovered the truth behind the words. With the appearance of Zionism, the narrative changed: the fighters of Masada were liberated from Josephus’s Greek text and returned to the Hebrew text read by young Jewish fighters, members of the Haganah; Rabbi Akiva and Bar Kochba were liberated from the talmudic text and recognized anew as true rebels. After the Jewish wars against Rome, the nature of Jewish bravery shifts; it became the heroism of the defeated. With the return of the people of Israel to the land of the forefathers, however, it was destined to become once again the heroism of the triumphant. The carefully selected texts of Sefer hagevurah emphasized the courage of the Jews who had taken up arms to defend themselves in times of persecution and war. This anthology had been conceived of as a counterweight to a group of anthologies that had compiled descriptions of the murder of Jews from the early Middle Ages through the pogroms in the Ukraine in the early twentieth century. This was not to be a history of tears along the lines of Simon Bernfeld’s Sefer hademaot, but rather a history of courage and defiance.22 This is an effort to expose traits “that had never departed from Israel even in days of torture and debasement, and to establish links connecting the defenders of Masada, who took their own lives rather than tasting the taste of servitude, and those who, after 1,800 years, have raised the flag of Jewish defense and have climbed once again to return to her walls.”23 It is of great significance that among the selected texts, not a single one deals with the courage of Jewish fighters who took part in other peoples’ wars of national liberation, or who distinguished themselves as soldiers in the armies of various European countries. Berek Joselewicz, the commander of a Jewish military unit that was established during the Polish rebellion against the Russians in 1794, and who became a model for many Jews who wished to become integrated into Polish society and culture, is entirely absent from the book. Such acts of


courage were considered deviations from the proper channel of Jewish bravery, the sins of those who had yielded to the false allure of emancipation.24 The quantitative relationship between texts pertaining to Jewish courage in the Diaspora and those dealing with the budding Jewish defense activity in Palestine in the late nineteenth century is, not surprisingly, in favor of the Palestine-centered texts. Altercations with Arab thieves in Jerusalem neighborhoods are mentioned extensively, while the participation of hundreds of Jewish soldiers in the Prussian-French war of 1870 is all but erased from historical memory.

The Praises of Labor Like heroism and warfare, labor and creativity facilitated a complete revision of the manner in which the old texts were read. Shirat heamal25 treats traditional Jewish texts in a particularly radical manner. The volume begins with Genesis 1, continues with the prophets, and ends with the poetry of Hebrew poets of the 1930s and 1940s. The editor of the collection, Pesahfi Ginzburg, a Labor-Zionist intellectual, presents Zionist and socialist views in the spirit of his political affiliation and draws a connection between national redemption and the social redemption of the Jewish people. The single idea that runs through the over 300 pages of poetry in his collection is that the return from exile to the Jews’ historical homeland reconnects the nation with the soil and returns the “song of labor” to the Jews. This is the poetic expression of physical creativity that had been almost entirely absent during the Jews’ long sojourn on foreign soil. In the words of Pesahfi Ginzburg: “If there were no other proofs for the teachings of Zionism, this space between the ancient poetry of the Land of Israel and the new poetry of the same land would be enough to convert nonbelievers, and prove the land’s national destiny.”26 Like the previous collections, this anthology incorporates the idea that the texts hide a concealed stream connecting the days when Israel was a nation of labor residing on its own land to the early days of modern agricultural settlement, a stream that had not previously been exposed by Diaspora writers and poets. Why, he reasoned, was almost nothing written on the laboring masses of Jews in Babylon, North Africa, France, Germany, and Poland? The answer was that “the labor a Jew invests in foreign soil cannot by definition take root and bear fruit.”27 The anthology’s editor, who selected many poems that were based on verses of traditional Jewish prayer,28 was aware of the collection’s almost religious nature. This was a religiosity that came to replace the old religious faith while using holy language to describe a strictly secular experience. Moreover, Pesahfi Ginzburg identifies the labor poetry of the new socialist Zionism with the historicization of sacral time (the hour of worship) and the holy place (the land of Israel). He chooses to conclude his introduction to the anthology with a citation from Saul Tchernichowsky’s poem “Qibbuts oleh al haqarqa” (A Kibbutz Is Established on the Soil), in which history and sanctity are interchanged. History, that is, the Zionist activity of settlement and construction, in effect takes the place of sanctity: “The pulse of history is felt in our days: Holiness, holiness, and holiness! This is the act of history [Kakh osim divrei hayamim].”29


Zionist Pilgrims Traditional texts were not lacking in concrete and well-documented expressions of the continuous affinity between the nation and the land during the long years of exile. There were real and explicit expressions that did not need to be reconstructed or teased out or otherwise liberated from hostile contexts. They needed merely to be gathered and placed together into a single continuum. Among these were texts written by Jews who either traveled to Palestine as visitors or journeyed there to settle. All these texts were brought together by the bibliographer Abraham Yaari in a trilogy of anthologies published in the 1940s.30 The connection between the letters, memoirs, and travel stories was drawn in the Zionist spirit described above. Similarly, the final links in Yaari’s chain are also modern texts related to the new settlement enterprise in Palestine. Thus, out of the many travelogs written in German by Jews traveling to Palestine, it was—not surprisingly—Herzl’s diary of his voyage to Palestine in 1898 that was chosen to appear in the anthology. Like those mentioned above, Yaari read the modern national reality into the past and interpreted the old texts in a Zionist spirit.31

The Zionist Annual Cycle This survey of the anthological activity of this time and place cannot come to a conclusion without discussing the phenomenon’s most complex manifestation: Sefer hamoadim (Book of Festivals) and other collections of texts designed to draw a connection among the dimensions of historical time, geographic space, and the annual cycle. These combinations of literary texts, historical documents, and scholarly research sought to play a role similar to that played by the traditional text in traditional Jewish society: to connect it with the complex of regular rituals, and in so doing to provide it with semireligious authority in terms of the reading and performance of the text. On the whole, the nationalistic narrative replaced the religious meaning of the old text—not only on the textual level, but on the contextual one as well. The traditional Jewish calendar, with its festivals and days of commemoration, retained new secular meanings based on innovative interpretations of the text. Space (the land of Israel) and Time (Zionist version of Jewish history) were connected to a revised yearly cycle, to form a quasi-religious unity of both knowledge and experience. The editors of these compilations had in mind the cyclic performance of religious rites and customs. Sefer hamoadim is an enterprise of enormous scale connecting these three axes in a clearly Zionist spirit. The anthology includes writings from the holy Scriptures, halakhic literature, midrash and kabbalah, historical sources, Jewish folklore materials, and modern literature and poetry. The project was inspired by poet H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik with his Sefer hashabbat (Sabbath Book), which was published in Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Sefer hashabbat was yet another product of the kinnus project, aiming this time at collecting and preserving Jewish folklore, highly regarded as a true expression of the nation’s spiritual values. It was then continued with many volumes devoted to holidays, special dates, and memorial days, which appeared in the 1950s, after the establishment of the State of Israel. Yom Tov Lewinsky, the anthology’s editor,


a fervent student of Jewish popular culture, consciously intended to combine kinnus (ingathering) with shihfi zur (reconstruction). He hoped to provide generations of new readers in the Jewish community of Israel with a selection of sources from the many lands and generations of traditional society. The intended readers, Israelis who have long been cut off from the traditional contexts of the holiday observance, would presumably continue what they found positive in the Jewish heritage laid out before them. Even if they do not perform the strange and unfamiliar rituals, they will at least know about them. As with the other Zionist anthologies, however, rewriting played no less significant a role here than reconstruction. Certain holidays which had been marginal in premodern Jewish society were moved to the center by virtue of the importance attributed to them by the Zionist movement. Modern meanings utterly foreign to the traditional Jew were injected into the old holidays. Hanukkah, for example, celebrated for centuries to commemorate the miraculous purification of the Temple in Jerusalem, emerged as a secular festival of national liberation, military heroism, and statehood. Tu Bishvat, traditionally the trees’ New Year, became a feast of the new Zionist settlers’ reunion with the land, marking the victory of man over nature. The new Palestine forced itself on the traditional text and made a variety of changes and renovations in it. The case of the fifteenth of the month of Av, the day mentioned in the early sources (Mishnah, Gemara, and midrash) as a day of dancing and celebration in the vineyards, clearly demonstrates how Jewish holidays have been reshaped in Sefer hamoadim. These are the words of the anthology’s author with regard to the place of this holiday in the young State of Israel: When we renewed our covenant with the soil of the homeland, we began to return the celebration of dancing and the holiday of loving couples to the fifteenth of Av. Workers’ settlements such as Genigar have recently begun to celebrate the grape-harvest holiday on the fifteenth of Av. Admirable beginnings have been made in Degania, Kiryat-Anavim, and the dance holidays of Dalia have been crowned with great success. Writers and poets, especially from among labor circles, have created songs of harvesters and vineyard dances, and have indeed composed heartwarming melodies for them. Indeed, happy days are gradually returning to Israel.32

The traditional text was completely stripped away from its old religious context and placed in a completely secular reality that was utterly different, but that claimed to be a continuation of the ancient past. The conscious effort to create signs of a national culture—agricultural holidays, farmers’ folk dances—is conceived of as linked to the past and founded on its sources. But in reality, these “signs” have little connection with that past. A tendency latent in the earlier collections moves to the foreground in this anthology: the attempt to replace the traditional book with an “alternative” book. Here the anthology usurps the place of a variety of traditional collections of texts: Sefer haminhagim (Book of Customs), the collections of legends and midrash, the Passover Haggadah, and—if we are to go one step further—the siddur itself. It draws from them, rearranges their various components, and grants to what it takes from the old books new meanings unfamiliar to the traditional reader. It is in this


manner—whether in the realm of extended time, the annual cycle, or the dimension of space—that the anthology serves the project of rewriting the traditional Jewish text. This was a project that stood at the center of the Zionist cultural activity in its endeavor to re-create a nation, a land, and a calendar from the materials of the past.

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):77–93. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. Some major products of the kinnus project in the first decades of the twentieth century were Sefer haaggadah [Book of Legends], ed. H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik and Yehoshua H fi ana Ravnitzky (first published in Odessa in 1908–11); Otsar hashirah vehapiyut (Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry], Israel Davidson (New York, 1924); and the series Antologya lemiktsoot hasifrut hayisraelit [Anthology of the Fields of Jewish Literature], ed. Abraham Kahana (Sefer hahfi asidut and sifrut hahistorya hayisraelit, Warsaw, 1922–23). In his introduction to the English version of Sefer haaggadah, David Stern points out the “revisionist” nature of the editing process of aggadah, stemming from a decidedly romantic idea: “Bialik did seem to believe that the fragments of aggadah in rabbinic literature preserved what had once been an epic literature of the Jewish people. Part of the purpose of Sefer haaggadah was to recover that epic,” The Book of Legends, Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Legends of the Talmud and Midrash, trans. William G. Braude (New York, 1992), p. xxi. 2. H fi . N. Bialik, “On the Question of Hebrew Culture” [Hebrew], a lecture delivered at a seminar of the Labor party of Palestine in Nahalal, summer 1932, in H fi . N. Bialik, Devarim shebeal peh [Spoken Words] (Tel Aviv, 1935), p. 195. 3. The list of names I have found in the introductions to some of the anthologies includes Ben-Zion Dinaburg (Dinur), Abraham Avrunin, Abraham Yaacov Brawer, Abraham Kahana, Abraham Zifroni (Sefer haarets); Gedalia Alon, H fi ayim Wirszubski, Ludwig A. Meir, Joshua Prawer, Abraham Shalit (Sefer hagevurah [Book of Valor]); Yitshfi ak BenZvi, Moshe David (Umberto) Kasuto, H fi ayim (Yefim) Schirmann (Masot erets yisrael); Menahfi em Hartom (Artom), Yitshfi ak Baer, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Benjamin Klar, Getzel Kressel (Iggerot erets yisrael). 4. J. Fichmann, ed., Sefer haarets [The Land of Israel Book] (Tel Aviv, 1926), p. 5. 5. Ibid., p. 7. 6. Ibid. 7. E. Steinman, “Beit Alfa,” in Sefer haarets, pp. 511–12. It is interesting to note that in another Zionist anthology published the same year—but for the Orthodox Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the United States—the Jezreel Valley is also put in the center. The texts used to depict the valley’s redemption by the Zionist pioneers, however, were carefully chosen from Rabbis’ letters of support to the story of the first Hasidim settlement in the region (Kfar Hasidim), Otsar haarets [The Treasure of the Land], ed. R. Benjamin [Benjamin Redler-Feldman] (Jerusalem, 1926), pp. 86–89. 8. Refael Patai and Tsvi Samuel Wohlmuth, eds., Mivhfi ar hasippur haerets yisraeli [A Selection of Stories from Palestine] (Jerusalem, 1938). 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. J. Klausner, “Renewal of the Ancient Nation,” Patai and Wohlmuth, Mivhfi ar, p. 11. 11. Patai and Wohlmuth, Mivhfi ar, p. 166. 12. Ibid., p. 139.

The Ingathering of Traditions 257 13. Ibid., p. 143. 14. Ibid., p. 9. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., p. 11. 17. Ibid., p. 14. 18. Ibid. 19. I. Heilprin, ed., Sefer hagevurah [Book of Valor], vol. 1: Defense and Martyrdom from the Days of Masada to the Beginnings of Emancipation (Tel Aviv, 1941); vol. 2: Defense and Martyrdom from the Beginnings of Emancipation to the Early Days of Zionism and Jewish Socialism (Tel Aviv, 1944). A second edition combining both parts was published in 1950. A third edition, which included a third volume from the papers of Israel Heilprin, appeared in 1977. David Roskies’s claim, in Against the Apocalypse, that the publisher’s decision to publish a third edition was related to the period of despair that followed the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is not accurate. The decision to issue a third edition stemmed from the discovery of a manuscript of the third volume in Heilprin’s papers. It was reached by a committee of historians who had set themselves the goal of publishing works of Heilprin that remained in manuscript or that were incomplete. This committee decided to publish the three volumes of Sefer hagevurah approximately two years prior to the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, on October 6, 1973. On this committee, see: I. Bartal, “The Records of the Council of Four Lands” [Hebrew], in Pinqas vaad arba aratsot, arranged and annotated by Israel Heilprin, 2d and expanded ed. by Israel Bartal (Jerusalem, 1990), p. 28. See David G. Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 13. 20. B. Katzenelson, “With the Book” [Hebrew], in Sefer hagevurah, vol. 1, pp. 10–11. 21. Ibid., p. 9. 22. Simon Bernfeld, Sefer hademaot [Book of Tears], 3 vols. (Berlin, 1923–26); Jonas Gurland, Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael [To the History of Jewish Persecution], 7 vols. (1887– 92). 23. I. Heilprin, foreword to Sefer hagevurah, p. 16. On the evolution of the Masada story as a major Israeli cultural and political symbol, see N. Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (Madison, 1996) and Y. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995), pp. 60–76. 24. In an exchange of letters in the early 1940s between Berl Katzenelson and the writer A. Kabak, the battles of Jews for the sake of the freedom of other nations (such as the Poles) are presented as manifestations of Jewish energy being directed in various ways until some energy reaches the proper channel: Zionism. On this, see M. Opalska and Israel Bartal, Poles and Jews, a Failed Brotherhood (Hanover, 1992), pp. 118–19. 25. P. Ginzburg, Shirat heamal: Antologia [Song of Labor, an Anthology] (Tel Aviv, 1947). 26. Ibid., p. 7. 27. Ibid. 28. One of the most outstanding examples of radical-Zionist poetry alluding to the Jewish prayer is “Amal” (Labor) by Abraham Shlonsky (Shirat heamal, pp. 233–36). In this poem, the poet takes part in the creation of a new Hebrew city in Palestine, experiencing in his work a “secularized” morning prayer (Shahfi arit). The text is loaded with allusions to the traditional rite, while it is far away from any kind of observance or belief in God. 29. Ibid., p. 10. The poem itself appears on pp. 137–45 of the anthology. 30. A. Yaari, ed., Iggerot erets yisrael, shekatvu hayehudim hayoshvim baarets laahfi eihem shebagola mimei galut bavel vead shivat tsiyon shebeyameinu [The Epistles of

258 The Modern Period the Land of Israel, Written by the Jews Residing in the Land to Their Brothers in the Diaspora from the Days of the Babylonian Exile to the Return to Zion in Our Own Time] (Tel Aviv, 1943); idem, Masot erets yisrael shel olim yehudiyim, mimei habeinayim vead reshit yemei shivat tsiyon [Travels to Palestine by Jewish Immigrants from the Middle Ages to the Beginnings of the Return to Zion] (Tel Aviv, 1946); idem, Zikhronot erets yisrael, meah veesrim pirqei zikhronot mehfi ayei hayehudim baarets mehameah hasheva-esre vead yameinu [Memoirs of the Land of Israel, 120 Chapters of Memoirs on Jewish Life in the Land from the Seventeenth Century to the Present], 2 vols. (Jerusalem, 1947). 31. See, e.g., the manner in which Yaari read the letters sent by the Jews of Jerusalem and Safed to Sir Moses Montefiore during his voyage to Palestine in 1839. Yaari, the fervent Zionist, viewed these letters as the earliest expression of Jewish aspiration for productive labor and self-defense, all in the spirit of Labor Zionism. In fact, the letters discuss the possibility of establishing farms in which Arab peasants will work under the supervision of Jewish overseers. For extensive discussion of this episode, see I. Bartal, Galut baarets [Exile in the Promised Land] (Jerusalem, 1994), pp. 100–160. 32. Y. T. Lewinsky, “Israel Had No Better Days in Ancient Times Than in the Month of Av” [Hebrew], in Sefer hamoadim, vol. 6: Yemei moed vezikaron, purim, Lag baomer, tu beav [The Holiday Book, vol. 6: The Holidays of Commemoration, Purim, Lag Baomer, the Fifteenth of Av] (Tel Aviv, 1956), p. 500.

14 kathryn hellerstein

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Modern Yiddish Poetry

n 1928 Ezra Korman (1888–1959), a teacher and literary critic living in Detroit,

Ipublished a volume of Yiddish poems by women, entitled Yidishe dikhterins: antologye [Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology]. Clothbound, lavishly illustrated, replete with introductions, notes, and bibliographies, this book collected poems by seventy women who published between 1586 and 1927. The earliest figures represented in Korman’s anthology wrote popular devotional poetry in Krakow and Prague. The post-Haskalah poets in the late nineteenth century wrote on national and social themes, using metaphorically the images and conventions of devotional literature. The modern poets of 1910 to 1930 composed lyrics in America and in the Soviet Union, under the influences of socialism and cosmopolitan modernism. From the evidence of Korman’s collection, a reader might conclude that in 1928 women poets occupied an acknowledged and significant place in Yiddish literature and that there existed unambiguously a tradition of women writing poems in Yiddish. In fact, Korman’s anthology sets out to argue the case for such a tradition. But he was shouting into the wind. Just a decade earlier, Korman’s contemporaries—the Yiddish modernists in the United States—had engaged in their own struggle to establish the very idea of a tradition for Yiddish poetry. Anthologies of poetry were their tools. Among these was a collection, Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919 [Anthology: Yiddish Poetry in America until 1919], edited by the Yunge poet Zishe Landau (1889–1937) and published in New York in 1919, which asserted the criteria for a consciously modern and esthetic Yiddish poetry in revolt against the didacticism of national and social poetry.1 A year later, the newly self-proclaimed Intropectivist poets Yankev Glatshteyn (1896–1971), A. Leyeles (1889–1966), and Nahum–Borekh Minkov (1893–1958) published In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider [In the Self: A Collection of Introspectivist Poems], an anthology advocating an even more radical challenge to poetic use of language, form, and individual voice.2 In each of these works, the editors, according to their respective theories of modernism, selected poems to challenge the conventions holding that Yiddish poetry 259


must serve the collective good of the Jews. However, the anthology on which Korman most closely modeled his Yidishe dikhterins was Moyshe Bassin’s (1889– 1963) historical anthology of 1917, the deluxe two-volume Antologye: finf hundert yor yidishe poezye [Anthology: Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry], representing poets in Yiddish from 1410 through 1910, in what Bassin claims is strict chronological order.3 In contrast to the modernist anthologizers’ argument for artistic individuality, Bassin’s emphasizes the collective obligation of the Yiddish poet. By comparing Bassin’s and Korman’s anthologies of Yiddish poetry, this essay will argue that, while modern Yiddish poets compiled anthologies in order to define competing literary traditions for a newly self-conscious Yiddish poetry, these anthologies also defined what anthologies should be. An analysis of how Korman modeled his anthology of women Yiddish poets on Bassin’s more general anthology of Yiddish poetry will reveal the dynamics of the anthological tradition in modern Yiddish poetry. To set up the comparison, I will begin by describing Bassin’s two-volume anthology. The first volume consists of four parts and encompasses Yiddish poetry from 1410 through 1905, from the opening poem, “Shabes-lid” [Sabbath Song] by Reb Zelmelin, who died around 1456, through the folklike poems of A. M. Sharkanski, who immigrated to America in 1887. The second of the four parts contains folk songs, which, as Bassin explained in his introduction, usually are considered to be “the oldest form, the root of poetry” but which in Yiddish, the editor asserted, is predated by fifteenth-century written verse—acrostics, devotionals, love poems. The third and fourth parts contain poetry written between 1800 and 1885 and 1885 and 1905; respectively. Along with these obscure printed texts, the popular folk songs, which Bassin claimed to be sources for modern Yiddish poetry, and poetry of the nineteenth and the first five years of the twentiety century, the first volume contains scholarly apparatus—a glossary of archaic Yiddish words found in the poems and bibliographic and linguistic notes to the poetry. The second volume presents the most upto-date poetry. It begins with the famous Labor poet Morris Rosenfeld and ends with poems by Moyshe Bassin himself, who was twenty-eight years old in 1917. Both volumes include biographical notes on individual poets, portraits of the poets by S. Zagat, and decorative illustrations by Y. Likhtenshteyn and Zuni Maud. Bassin’s opening remarks to the first volume indicate that, in contrast to the ideological selectivity of the Yunge and the In zikh anthologies, his edition intended to be as inclusive and representative of all the kinds of Yiddish poetry as possible, although he stopped short of including “every single person who has ever jotted down a couple of verses.”4 Ber Borokhov (1881–1917) developed the anthology’s thesis even more explicitly in his brief but scholarly introductory essay. There he argued that Bassin’s anthology would ensure that the “Yiddish muse” would not be left “orphaned” by and “vulnerable” to the works of “mere dilettantes,” for it would present the “classical” tradition of Yiddish poetry. By stressing the idea that each individual poet fit into the overall development of a collective Yiddish tradition, Borokhov contradicted the Yunge ideal of individualism in the poetic voice. In Borokhov’s view, a poet’s intent—however individualistic or even iconoclastic—was subsumed by the writer’s participation in promoting the overall good. Borokhov reverted from the discriminating modernist ideas of a Yiddish

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Yiddish Poetry 261

poetic tradition proposed by the Yunge and the Introspectivists and returned to the authority of the collective. Such emphasis on the cultural collective corresponds to the ideologies of socialism and Jewish nationalism that the modernist poets had rejected. The idea of literary tradition that Borokhov stated and that Bassin’s anthology embodied was a political and nationalistic statement about the aims of Yiddish poetry. In this scheme, poetry serves the greater ends of peoplehood and national culture. This emphasis stood in opposition to the ideas of poetry that were driving the avant garde poets of that moment. These three anthologies—those edited by the Yunge poet Laudau, by the Introspectivists Glatshteyn, Leyeles, and Minkov; and by the literary historian Bassin—represented few women poets. Landau included two, Fradl Shtok and Celia Dropkin. The 1920 Introspectivist anthology contained eight poets, all men,5 although the first issue of the In zikh journal began with two poems by Celia Dropkin (1887–1956), the sole woman writer published there.6 From 500 years of Yiddish writing, Bassin included a total of nine women poets: Gele (1702–?), Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn) (1869–?), Roza Yakubovitsh (1889–1944), Zelda Knizshnik (1869–?), Anna Rappaport (1870 or 1876–?), Paula R. (pseudnonym for Pearl Prilutski) (1876–1941), Sara Reyzen (1885–?), Roza Goldshteyn (1870–?), and Fradl Shtok (1890–ca. 1930). From this list, a reader might conclude that only one woman wrote poetry before the late nineteenth century, and only eight others had written poetry after that. It was to address this misconception that Ezra Korman began work on his anthology, Yidishe dikhterins, which assessed the actual contribution of women poets in Yiddish. A contemporary of Landau, Glanz, and Bassin, all of whom had come to the United States before 1910, Korman remained active in the literary scene in Kiev, Warsaw, and Berlin until he immigrated to the United States in 1923.7 Korman himself was a teacher,8 a literary critic, a bibliographer, a translator,9 a poet,10 and the editor of two previous collections of Yiddish poetry of the Russian Revolution in the Ukraine.11 In his first American anthological effort, though, Korman recast the political agenda of poetry from the Russian Revolution to the sexual revolution. Was it with irony or adulation that Korman modeled his anthology of women Yiddish poets on Bassin’s anthology? While one might be tempted to view Korman’s collection of women poets as a radical correction of Bassin’s male-dominated canon, one might also see it as a tribute and enriching supplement to Bassin’s tradition building. Although, in his introduction, Korman stated his intention to establish the place of women poets in the tradition of Yiddish writing, he did not claim to be original. In copious footnotes, Korman credited others whose recent works had brought to light literate and literary women. Seeking to ground contemporary Yiddish culture in a centuries-long history of Yiddish literature, these publications included the first literary encyclopedia of Yiddish literature by Zalman Reyzen in 1914 Warsaw,12 scholarly essays such as Max Erik’s 1926 study of “Brantshpigl—di entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in zibetstn yorhundert” [Brantshpigl—The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Woman in the Seventeenth Century]13 and Sh. Niger’s 1913 article on “Yidishe literatur un di lezerin” [Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader], and Bassin’s 1917 historical anthology, Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye.


These works all shared the assumption that Yiddish writing of the early twentieth century would gain status and legitimacy in the view of modern world literature if it could prove its roots in a medieval past. Korman followed this model of establishing authority. By discussing at length the textual and bibliographical variants of the early poems that his anthology shared with Bassin’s, Korman acknowledged his debt to his predecessor and set his collection into an anthological tradition.14 Korman’s anthology resembles the Bassin anthology in its massiveness, its chronological span, its format, and its apparatus, but Korman does Bassin one better. Whereas the first edition of Bassin’s anthology was bound in boards imprinted with a stunning four-color folklike graphic design by Y. Likhtenshteyn, Korman’s anthology was clothbound in dark blue with gilded lettering and had a blue dust jacket, matching the endpapers, imprinted with black graphics by Todres Geler in the style of Russian Formalism. Korman also used higher quality materials than Bassin, for the Bassin volumes are extremely fragile today while Korman’s binding remains sturdy. Whereas the Bassin volumes featured S. Zagat’s sketched portraits of each poet, Korman, utilizing the more expensive printing technology of zincography, tipped in photographs of each modern poet as well as facsimile reproductions of significant pages from some of the original books of poems, such as the first and last pages of Toybe Pan’s seventeenth-century poem (a prayer for God’s mercy in time of plague), a variant version of that poem, and a photomontage of the title pages of modern poetry books.15 Whereas Bassin’s anthology had an alphabetical index of authors at the end of each volume, Korman’s opened with an eleven-page table of contents at the beginning of the book and ended with separate alphabetical indexes of the authors and the poems, as well as a list of pseudonymns. Whereas Bassin’s “A Few Words” and Borokhov’s introductory essay and concluding “Linguistic and Bibliographic Comments” on the poems for the first volume comprised a total of seventeen pages and for the second volume were one page, Korman’s introductory essay alone was thirty-eight pages long, including footnotes. Fiinally, the section of “Biographies and Bibliography” at the end of Korman’s volume was thirty-five pages long and included a 232-title bibliography. Divided into two main sections, “Sources” and “Literature,” Korman’s bibliography lists books of poems by individual authors, anthologies, handbooks, collections and periodical publications, studies and literary histories, articles and reviews, a bibliography of Old Yiddish literature, and translations of Yiddish poems by women into Hebrew, English, and Polish. With this bibliography, Korman accomplished several tasks. First, by documenting the sources for all the authors included in his anthology, Korman established his own credentials and the validity of his research. Second, he showed how widely published were these poets in their contemporary culture. Third, he established the range of audience these women poets had, for they appeared in anthologies, the specialized collections of literary movements, political and literary journals, daily newspapers, and even in a short-lived weekly journal for women, Froyen zshurnal—vokhenblat [Women’s Journal— Weekly].16 These various works were published both in the centers of Yiddish culture, such as New York, Montreal, Warsaw, Vilna, Moscow, Kiev, Lodz, and


in more remote places, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cape Town, South Africa. Fourth, he provided an invaluable tool for future readers of Yiddish literature in an era long after most of the ephemeral publications, the newspapers and journals, had been discarded, along with many of the Yiddish books themselves. One can read the bibliography for a portrait of the time in which women lagged behind men in the publication of books. For instance, Korman lists thirteen books of poems by individual authors,17 and 126 entries under “Collections and Periodical Publications.” These two lists show that, by 1928, women poets had published a relatively small number of books, while they had contributed more prolifically to periodicals.18 In contrast, during this same period, a much larger number of poetry books had been published by men. While many of the younger male modernists had published two or more books of their poems,19 their female counterparts had published no books. Two of the women whose poems regularly appeared in the American Yunge and Introspectivist journals—Celia Dropkin and Anna Margolin—were to publish only a single volume of poetry during their lifetimes. Other women, had brought out one book and were never to publish another. Korman describes as completed but not yet in print second book manuscripts by two women poets in Poland—Miriam Ulinover and Roza Yakubovitsh. These two volumes were never published.20 The “Introduction” set forth Korman’s ideological position. By presenting together with modern Yiddish poetry by women, or “the modern women-poetry” (der moderner froyen-dikhtung), examples of the works of women writers (froyenfarfasterins) who wrote in Old Yiddish (yidish-taytsh), Korman hoped to show the connection between the beginnings of a new Jewish literature in the sixteenth century, which marked the beginning of a new epoch of Jewish life, and the current period, in which the buds of that early period had blossomed. He emphasized the creativity of women, old and new. Although Korman explicitly denied a continuous poetic tradition between the women poets of the early and later periods, he implied a line of influence. Old Yiddish poetry for and presumably by women was “immeasurably huge and incomparable,” whereas modern poetry by women was merely a “thin thread” continuing that heritage which still affects the modern women poets. The Old Yiddish literature had an abiding influence over the moderns, because, Korman argued, there had been no single great modern voice to override it, restructuring the relationship of the new to the old. Significantly, although Korman stated that the old literature of women in Yiddish outweighed the new, his selections in the anthology reversed this judgment: The sixtysix modern poets contrast with the four examples of the premodern authors. Korman considered the new women’s literature as a positive development for the growth of Yiddish literature and culture in general: Un ver kon nevies zogn vos unzer tsukinftike froyen-shafung trogt mit zikh un far der literatur? [“Who can prophesy what our future female creativity bears within itself and for the literature?”]21 In this question, Korman attributed the unique creativity of women to the processes of biological productivity. These processes are implied in the phrasing that suggests a connection between poetry and pregnancy. In the verb trogn mit, “to carry, to bear” in a general sense and specifically in relation to childbearing, Korman drew an analogy between the making of poems and the making


of babies, both of which are froyen-shafung, “women’s creation.” Curiously, this analogy at once attempted both to characterize women’s poetry as having a special nature to distinguish it from poetry written by men, and to stereotype or limit it. Feminist literary theorists of the later part of the twentieth century have dealt with this analogy, but in 1928, when Korman’s volume represented the first compilation of poetry by women as an entity unto itself, this analogy served as point of departure for a critic to classify poetry by women in either elevated or deflated terms.22 In the “Introduction,” Korman emphasized the typical characteristics of women’s poetry in order to establish that a lineage existed. In the first part of his “Introduction,” Korman discussed the literature af yidish-taytsh (in JudeoGerman), dating from Sefer mides (Morality Book, published in 1542) and the Mayse bukh (Book of Tales, first published in Basel in 1602) through the eighteenth century. Korman cited the translations and compendiums that enabled women to study and pray, such as the Taytsh khumesh (the translation of the Pentateuch into Yiddish, Prague, 1608), the Tsenerene (Yiddish translation and elaboration on the Pentateuch, first known edition, Basel, 1622), and the tkhines (the supplicatory prayers in Yiddish, some of which were composed by women for the significant moments in the lives of women—for blessing Shabbes candles, for childbirth, for recitation at the ritual bath and at the graves of family members— from the sixteenth century onward).23 He dealt as well with other works created by Jewish women themselves, such as musar-sforim (morality books), composed and translated by women, tfiles and droshes (prayers and sermons), which, like some of the tkhines, were composed in rhymed verse, and even lyrics and poems, “which the pens of women possessed.”24 Within the context of this Yiddish devotional literature for women, Korman placed the four yidish-taytsh poets of his anthology: Royzl Fishls, Toybe Pan, Gele, and Khana Ka″ts (Kohen-Tsadik). His bibliographic information on and detailed discussions of these poems argue that the publication of such Yiddish writings signaled the creativity of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Jewish women.25 In contrast to such expressiveness by Jewish women in Old Yiddish literature, Korman explained, women were absent from Haskalah Yiddish literature because the Enlightenment “brought with it only half a liberation” and “barely affected the life of the Jewish woman, who remained but a mute witness.”26 Only with the secularism of the 1890s did a new literature by women emerge, as women joined the social and national political movements and acted in the newly established Yiddish theater in Poland and Russia. Korman described the tension between the modern and the traditional. Initially, he stated, Yiddish culture absorbed the voices of the modern, nayveltike (new-worldly) women along with the traditional. Soon, though, the modern voices dominated the traditional, causing both cultural pain and joy, as Yiddish-speaking women cast off the tkhines’ old pieties: Thanks to the girls, women, and mothers who were actresses and political activists, the matriarchs dimmed and slipped into the shadows, leaving the modern Jewish woman with sighs, tears, and a new kind of pleasure that had been, up to this time, as foreign to her as the foreignness of idolatry.27

From such figurative language in the “Introduction,” it becomes apparent that Korman’s anthology embraced the idea of a simultaneous movement toward and


away from women’s tradition. On the one hand, Korman’s phrasing suggests that the entire body of modern poetry by women exists only because the familiar biblical matriarchs of the tkhines and tsenerene withdrew into the shadows, as actresses and activists took the spotlight and introduced Jewish women to the foreign pleasures of secular “idolatry.” On the other hand, the very ability of these new women to find their voices and even to conceive of writing in Yiddish depended upon their knowledge of the obsolete devotional literature for women. The dependence of the new, the secular, the revolutionary poets on the religious literature against which they actively defined themselves is a paradox which extends both throughout Korman’s historical introduction and within the language and structure of many Yiddish poems by women. This paradox is another example of the way modern Yiddish literature reappropriated the past, at once subverting it and reclaiming it.28 Korman argued for the progress of Yiddish women’s poetry from 1899 to 1927 by placing individual women poets in the context of their contemporaries. He discussed Roza Goldshteyn, whose first poem appeared in Yudishn folks-blatt in 1888, in terms of her contemporaries, the Labor Poets, David Edelstat, Morris Vinshevski, Sh. Frug, and Morris Rosenfeld, to emphasize how her work was typical of the times, in its nationalist and socialist themes: “The disappointing belief in the earlier gods and the intellectuals’ turn to the Folk after assimilationist ideology proved bankrupt—these are the themes and motifs of Yiddish poetry of this period.”29 Such themes and motifs bolstered Korman’s sense that the history of Yiddish literature was linear and “progressive.” Therefore Korman condescended when he compared the Yiddish poetry of 1888 with the “improvements” evident in 1927. For example, characterizing the male poet Sh. Frug as “a cantor without a cantor’s desk,” Korman likened the sentimental Jewish nationalism of Roza Goldshteyn’s poems to Frug’s. In one of Goldshteyn’s poems, “Di yidishe muze” [The Yiddish Muse], he tells us, the muse, depicted as the embodiment of the Jewish people in exile, provided the poet with a diasporic sorrow as inspiration.30 Korman did acknowledge a margin of “improvement” in the poetry of the 1890s where he noted a change from the collective first person to “the personal ikh” (I) of the poet. Anna Rappaport’s poems, written and published in America from 1893 onward, reflected the conflict between the two possibilities of emigration for the Jewish poet—either to the Golden Land of America or the Promised Land of Eretz Yisrael. Korman called her “the modern Deborah, celebrating America in song” and praised her poems for evoking the collective experience of immigrants with the immediacy of a personal “I.” By describing the individuality of this 1890s poet in terms of her service to the Jewish collectivity, Korman strengthened his argument for the legitimate place that women writers occupy within Yiddish literary tradition. Korman developed this argument further by connecting modern Yiddish poetry with modern Hebrew poetry when he described the 1906–7 works by Paula R. (pseudonym for Pearl Prilutski) and Yehudis (pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn), who wrote after the failed 1905 revolution in Russia and the second wave of pogroms. Their verse, like that of Goldshteyn and another poet, Zelda Knizshnik, was characterized by “ideal language and colors” which expressed individual


moods and feelings in terms of the collective. Yehudis wrote “not about herself, but in the language of the majority,” and her poems showed the influence of Bialik’s famous 1904 Hebrew poem of the pogroms, “In the City of Slaughter.” Despite this “language of the majority,” Korman said, Yehudis’s poems revealed a greater sense of self than do those of her predecessors. He claimed that they heralded a new age of deepened individualism, like that of their male contemporaries, Yehoash, Leissen, and Reyzen, whose poems developed “individual lyricism and intellectual singularity beyond the tears of Morris Rosenfeld.” As an example, Korman quoted lines from Yehudis’s poetry, which praised the new and argued for discarding the old: Enough! Don’t write old-fashioned poems,— They are not yours . . . They’ve had their day! They can’t revive. Your poem now rings false.31

Despite his praise for this new poetic self, Korman argued that the individual voice in modern poetry had a complicated relationship to the folk tradition. A woman poet whose poetry alluded to or imitated conventions and tones of folk poetry, he suggested, sought to hide her individuality behind the tsnies (“modesty” or “virtue”) of Jewish peoplehood. As an example, Korman offered mixed praise to the aforementioned Paula R. for the new tone she introduced to Yiddish poetry through the folk motif: In the disguise and modesty of folk-language, one can afford to speak to the world about one’s own feelings and experiences and, with that popular virtue, cover oneself as if with a veil.32

Although Korman depicted such modesty as a weakness in the poems of Paula R., this weakness promised strength, because, he asserted, the good poet would learn to use the folk medium effectively. For Korman, then, the individual voice of the modern woman poet was necessarily connected to the collective voice of the Jewish people. The best poetry kept these two forces in balance. Korman praised Roza Yakubovitsh, who began writing in Poland in 1910, for her simultaneous respect for the “patriarchal” knowledge of Jewish suffering in the Diaspora and for the revitalizing lessons of personal rebellion.33 He mentioned Sara Reyzen, Yakubovitsh’s contemporary, whose later lyric poems show signs of possessing “the personal I.” Yet Korman’s sense of the modern, which he valued most, came clear when he discussed the originality with which the poetry of Fradl Shtok unveiled “the personal ‘I’.” Shtok was a poet from Galicia, who began writing in America with a sense of high culture in her literary form and content. According to popular belief, Shtok introduced the sonnet and the sonnet cycle to Yiddish poetry.34 Her diction and quality of imagination were innovative. The Yunge’s concept of “reyner dikhtung” (pure poetry) as written by Mani Leyb, Zishe Landau, Reuven Iceland, and Joseph Rolnik, influenced Shtok’s poetry. Korman praised her poem, Baym yam [By the Sea] for its “individual poetic vision” and the “personal ‘I,’ ” and he characterized her sonnet sequence as daringly erotic and bitter. Although Korman mentioned that Shtok also published a novel and


short stories, he avoided discussing her sudden silence and subsequent breakdown, which has been explained in part as a response to the reviews her short fiction received in the Yiddish press, most notably from A. Glanz in Der tog in 1919 and 1920.35 In contrast to his views of the passive folk voice of Paula R., Roza Yakubovitsh’s “gentle rebellion,” and Fradl Shtok’s modern sensibility and “personal ‘I,’ ” Korman held up the poems of Miriam Ulinover as having achieved the ideal balance between the traditional folk and the modern personal voices.36 Praising this European poet for her innovative style and substance, he presented “her poems, written in a folk-like, romantic tone, and wrapped in a thin veil of naive folkmysticism” as “approaching the classic.” These poems, from Der bobes oytser [My Grandmother’s Treasure] (Warsaw, 1922), were “a monument to the Jewish woman of the past . . . making luminous the customs and obsolete ways of Jewish life of more than one hundred years ago.”37 When he emphasized the cultural distance that the Jews of 1928 had traveled from the traditional Jewish ways of life, Korman found a safely modern perspective as a critic from which to extoll the poems that Ulinover had based on the tales, maxims, and utterances of an elter bobe fun iber hundert yor, a great-grandmother, more than 100 years old, who was “the poetic inspiration [for the] first selfpossessed woman poet in the new Yiddish literature.”38 Only by declaring his own firm modernity and faith in the progressiveness of progress (that recent poetry is better than earlier poetry) could Korman express an appreciation for Ulinover’s particularly female poetic achievement. Korman’s heavily qualified assessment pointed to the central question of how poetry by women fit into the idea of a Yiddish tradition. By attributing Ulinover’s achievement as the first “self-possessed” woman poet in modern Yiddish to the “poetic inspiration” of the greatgrandmother, Korman acknowledged that the “muse” of Yiddish poetry was situated as much in the oral traditions of women’s lives and their lived customs as in the modern world where individualistic notions of love and beauty vied with socialist-nationalist ideologies. This sense that the religio-cultural tradition lived by women in Yiddish was integral to modern Yiddish poetry distinguished Korman’s idea of poetic tradition from the revisionist and implicitly male ideas of poetic tradition expressed esthetically by Landau for the Yunge, formalistically by Glatshteyn for the Introspectivists, and historically by Bassin and Borokhov. According to Korman, even the most modern Yiddish poetry must acknowledge its origins in the old-fashioned devotional literature for and by women. In Korman’s dialectic between the collective and the individual, the traditional and the modern voices of a Yiddish poet that I have just delineated, we see how Korman’s tenets as an anthologizer imitated those of Bassin. In the same way that Borokhov’s introduction to Bassin’s anthology spelled out the idea of literary tradition as one that places individual writers into a collective effort to serve the Jewish nation and people, so Korman’s introduction valued the manifestations of what is typical in the individual poets; however, Korman added to the national and the folkloric qualities of these poets two other types of collectivity—the religious and the female. These particular qualities were especially sensitive points for Korman’s contemporaries.


To be sure, interest in women was not altogether absent from the literary scene. In the decade after 1910, a discussion arose about the role of women in Yiddish literature, and Korman’s anthology represented a response to this discussion as well as to Bassin’s anthology. This interest in women and culture first took form in the projects of Yiddishists, linguists, folklorists, and ethnographers in Russia and Poland. Expeditions by Noyekh Prilutski’s Warsaw group, the S. Ansky Vilna Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission of the YIVO Institute in Vilna recorded folklore and gathered artifacts in order to preserve the manifestations of a Yiddish culture vanishing with the changes brought by modernity. In addition, scholars such as Max Weinreich, Max Erlich, and Bassin’s introducer, Ber Borochov, were rediscovering Old Yiddish print literature.39 These projects sparked some interest in women as readers and writers of devotional Yiddish texts. For example, in 1913 Shmuel Niger (1883–1955) published a scholarly monograph on Yiddish literature and the female reader in 1913, Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin [Yiddish Literature and the Female Reader],40 which challenged the old prejudice against Yiddish as a medium for learned and literary writing. Yet Niger himself showed ambivalence about this gendered source for Yiddish writing. He wondered: If “literature in Yiddish was in the beginning a literature only for women and ignorant men,” then how could women and ignorant men be the only sources for the profundity of Yiddish maxims and witticisms?41 Even worse, Niger worried, modern, secular Yiddish literature might become suspect if it was, in fact, rooted in those Yiddish devotions that had enabled women, ignorant of the sacred tongue, to read Hebrew/Aramaic prayers and laws.42 Niger’s analysis of the devotional literature from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century argued that the female readership influenced the content and form of the Yiddish writings in their “womanly matter,” their lack of analysis, law, and interpretation, the predominance of stories, legends, and morals, and a style that appealed to the female readership.43 When Niger demonstrated how these “feminine” features of content and form penetrated into the worldly, nonreligious “belletristic” Yiddish literature of the sixteenth century,44 his ambivalence became downright contradictory: By characterizing the stories of the aggadah tradition as “womanly” when adapted into Yiddish, in contrast to the laws of halakhah, Niger feminized both the Rabbinic tradition of Midrash and the early “belletristic” Yiddish writings. Niger claimed these complex narrations for the source of modern Yiddish literature, yet he spurned them for their association with women. The second manifestation of this new interest in women took the form of a popular concern with the growing number of women poets and writers who had begun to submit work for publication; the increase in the number of aspiring women writers led men to reexamine the role of women in modern Yiddish literature.45 This appreciation eventually culminated in Korman’s anthology, but before that, on October 15, 1915, Arn Glanz (-Leyeles)—who, as A. Leyeles was to become, with Glatshteyn and Minkov, one of the founders of Introspectivism— wrote an article in the New York newspaper Di fraye arbeter shtime [The Free Worker’s Voice], called “Kultur un di froy” [Culture and Woman].46 In it, Glanz complained of the monotony and redundancy of recent poetry and philosophical


writings,47 which he blamed on the absence of “Woman” from the creative scene. Transferring the terms of Marxist analysis from class to sex, Glanz blamed the lack of male originality on modernism’s overemphasis upon the individual. The advent of women poets would, he predicted, give male poets a context and a counterpart to respond to and would help Man “find his real place, find himself.” Great poetry, Glanz suggested, emerges not from the renegade, isolated individual, but from the one who is conscious of the larger cultural tradition into which the individual’s work fits and which it changes with its presence. Yet in this call to power, Glanz set forth a paradox: on the one hand, he called for women to find their own, original voices in poetry, and on the other hand, he summoned this womanly originality and independence for the sake of men: “Woman must be what she is! Then she will be able to be great, to create a new world for us, and become a blessing for us men.”48 The trouble with Glanz’s theory of women’s creativity is that it was based only on what he considered inherent sexual attributes—the concreteness of menstruation, childbirth, nursing, and motherhood—as a model for intuition and the generosity of creation. Glanz’s initial metaphor of poetic creativity as sexual reproduction, then, limited the possibilities for women’s creativity. His model provided only the culture of sexuality, not any sort of temporal, literate culture, as a context for the potential poetry by women. The men poets, Glanz intimated, had come to a standstill, to what he called their “impotency,” over a period of time. To their history, men needed to add the component of a new sexual context. But for the women, Glanz provided no history, no past. Accordingly, without a conscious past, lacking an awareness of tradition, the individual talent, or woman poet, would not write good poetry. Glanz held, then, that what Yiddish culture lacked in 1915 was the felt presence of cultural creativity by women. He argued that women’s writing would revive the male-dominated, stagnated, overly rational Yiddish poetry of the day by adding to the cultural mix the “intution” naturally inherent in all women. Yet his complaint that women poets had not yet found their own artistic identities and modes proved hypocritical: Glanz famously discouraged the original contributions of women when he actually encountered them, as is suggested by his harsh review, in Der tog, of Fradl Shtock’s 1919 volume of short stories. The review, it seems, silenced her.49 The critical responses to Korman’s anthology revived the very ideas about women writers against which Korman had reacted. The tone of Melekh Ravitsh’s review in Literarishe bleter [Literary Pages] was mocking and suggestive. Published in the leading Warsaw literary weekly on October 19, 1928, the review began, “My dear, patient, infatuated, polygamist, Ezra Korman!”50 Discrediting Korman as an editor by attributing to him personal, sexual motives in his literary judgment and choices, Ravitsh also discredited the poets themselves. Perhaps his viciousness was due to professional envy of Korman, for the poet Kadya Molodowsky, in her response to an earlier review of women poets by Ravitsh, mentioned that Ravitsh had stated in print his own intention to publish an anthology of Yiddish women poets, “and with pictures!”51 Asserting that an editor’s ideal “principle is not to want to be original, but to include a poet’s best-known poem, as long as it is also


his best” (emphasis added), Ravitsh argued for the conservative role of an anthology, which should represent and perpetuate a canon established by popularity and fame. Ravitsh designated the poet worth anthologizing with the masculine prononun, zayn (his). “His” poems should already have achieved some fame, for they are “well-known poems.” Accordingly, an unknown poet, who may well be a woman poet, had no place in an anthology, and, conversely, there was no justification for an anthology of unknown poets. What Ravitsh most objected to in Korman’s anthology, though, was the idea of a women’s tradition within Yiddish poetry, for such a tradition would bring the devotional literature dangerously close to the secular, politically correct Yiddish poetry that Ravitsh himself wrote. Shmuel Niger’s review of November 1928 was somewhat more balanced in tone, but still condescending. Published in the “Bikher velt” column of Literarishe bleter, Niger’s review, “Froyen-lyrik” [Women-Lyric],52 differed from Ravitsh’s in its acknowledgment of a tradition of “women’s poetry [which] now occupies an acknowledged place in Yiddish poetry.” Yet despite this affirmation, Niger could not resist the urge to belittle froyen-shafung, the creativity of women, commenting that the forty-odd women in Korman’s anthology who began to publish poetry after the First World War “might have been able to do more useful things.”53 Like Glanz in his 1915 article on women and culture, Niger attributed to the female writer a sensibility distinct from that of the male writer. Claiming that the new “women’s poetry” was “still too young” to be able to boast of great and ripe talents, Niger nonetheless acknowledged the “gifted Yiddish women poets, [whose] chief virtue is that they are women in their poetry.” Like Glanz, Niger argued that the woman poet contributed a necessary femininity, a softness and gentleness to counteract the harshness of the war years. Yet Niger saw limitations in this benefit, for the poems by women connoted a collective rather than strong individual voices. Like the Yunge and Introspectivist critics, Niger attributed an advanced literary style to the degree to which the individual voice could elevate itself above the collective. Consequently, he judged that “women’s poetry” lacked the “artistic universalism, in which we sense more the personality of the poet than the collective to which he belongs.” “Sincere and straightforward,” this “group poetry, a type of folklore of the female sex,” “conveys a sense of the feminine disposition.” By preserving “that element of feeling, that intimate tone” which “has become such a rarity in male verses since the war,” women poets could provide Yiddish culture with what contemporary men poets no longer possessed. In naming the role of women’s poetry as subservient to men’s creative endeavors, Niger equated the “eternally-womanly” with the “eternally-lyrical” and thereby circumscribed the definition of poetry by women. These condescending critical responses to Korman’s anthology in the most prestigious literary paper, Literarishe bleter, published in Warsaw and Vilna, reveal the inability of the evolving self-defined literary tradition of Yiddish poetry to accept the work of women. The inventors of this modern tradition resisted new literary work by women, it seems, because they sensed a threat to the modernity of their own achievements when Yiddish was associated with women. In the culture of religious Judaism that valued Hebrew and Aramaic as the sacred tongues


of Jewish law, prayer, and lore, languages available almost exclusively to men, the Yiddish language was perceived as the medium for a literature written only for “women and men who are like women in not having much knowledge.”54 Not wanting to be like women, neither in ignorance nor in any other way—a fear augmented by European anti-Semitism, which had conventionally cast Jewish men in a feminized role55—the modern Yiddish critics diminished the works of their female contemporaries. Although Korman’s contemporary critics were unable to accept the implications that women held a legitimate place in Yiddish poetic tradition, readers today can evaluate how Korman’s selections, in contrast to Bassin’s, changed the images of some of the poets. Korman included more poets and more poems per poet, as well as poems with religious content or context, unlike Bassin, who represented modern women poets only with fashionable poems or with poems that fit the idea of the feminine as spelled out by Niger and Glanz. The second volume of Bassin’s anthology contains ninety-five poets, most of whom were writing in the United States. Of these, eighty-seven are men and eight are women. Of the men, thirty-two poets are represented by four or more poems, and fifty-five are represented by three or fewer poems. Of the eight women poets in Volume Two, only one, Fradl Shtok, is represented by more than three poems. Two poets, Zelda Knizshnik and Yehudis, have three poems each; one, Sara Reyzen, has two; and four (that is, half of the women writers)—Roza Goldshteyn, Anna Rappaport, Roza Yakubovitsh, and Paula R. (Pearl Prilutski)—are each represented by a single poem. While one must take into account that, as of 1917, many books of poetry by women had not yet appeared and that other women poets had not yet published anything,56 nonetheless, this list reveals how meagerly Bassin represented women poets, in the number of both writers and works. That Bassin limited the number of women poets and the kinds of poems to represent them suggests this editor’s sense of the place of women poets and of the kind of poetry he thought they could or should write. Bassin’s implied ideas about uniformly “feminine” poems were spelled out by contemporary critics like A. Glanz, writing in 1915 on women and culture, and Sh. Niger and Melekh Ravitsh, writing on women’s poetry in 1927 and 1928, who characterized a poetic style endemic to women as private, vague, conventional, intuitive, romantic, and appropriately emotional. When Korman, in contrast, represented the same eight poets chosen by Bassin (along with fifty-eight other modern poets), he clearly attempted to give a more varied and interesting view of these women’s works. In mere numbers, for example, Korman represented Zelda Knizshnik with eleven poems, as opposed to Bassin’s three; Yehudis with seven poems, to Bassin’s three; Roza Goldshteyn with five poems (Bassin, one); Anna Rappaport with three (to Bassin’s one); Roza Yakubovitsh with ten poems (to Bassin’s one); Paula R. [Prilutski] with three (to Bassin’s one); Sara Reyzen with fourteen poems (to Bassin’s two). The only poet represented comparably in both volumes was Fradl Shtok, with twelve poems in Korman and eleven poems in Bassin. While this contrast in quantity reveals the relative importance that Bassin and Korman gave to women poets, a comparison of the types of poems each selected


will underline the difference in each editor’s ideas of what poetry by women was and should be. It is instructive to contrast treatments by Bassin and by Korman of two poets essentially unknown today, Zelda Knizshnik, born in 1869 in Vyazin, Vilna Province, and Yehudis, the pseudonym for Rokhl Bernshteyn, born in 1869 in Minsk. In the first case, although Bassin lamented that “Yiddish poetry possesses very few women poets, and it is truly a shame that only a small part of Knizshnik’s poems in Yiddish were published,”57 he chose only three lyrics by Knizshnik, all of which depend upon rather conventional romantic tropes for sentiments of desire, wanderlust, and passion.58 Korman’s selection of eleven of her poems, including those in Bassin, presented a fuller sense of Knizshnik’s poetic range, her more distinctive voice. The tropes in her poems play as often upon the imagery of traditional religious life as upon romantic poetic conventions. Thus, in addition to the sentimental Baym fenster [At the Window], Vinter [Winter], and Morgen [Morning], which Bassin included, we find in Korman poems called Kapores [Atonement], Un ven dayn neshome [And When Your Soul], O, heylike boyre [Oh, Holy Creator]. In Mayn letste likht [My Last Candle], for example, Knizshik takes on the dramatic persona of a male yeshiva student who is left in the dark by his sputtering taper, for both his poverty and his loss of faith have kept him from lighting another. Employing the familiar image of a candle, the poet puns ironically on the possibility of the student’s enlightenment. The device of the dramatic persona and the densely Hebraic diction of this speaker, who edges ever nearer to the door that will release him from the darkened house of study and prayer, give the poem the edge of a wit more engaging than the vague wanderlust in Volkns. Moreover, with the male persona and “masculine” Hebraic diction, the poem disguises its female author. In Kapores, Knizshnik again shifts the perspective from the personal by exhibiting an unexpected pity for the ritual object—chickens that will be made into the symbolic scapegoat in the ceremony of atonement before Yom Kippur. Knizshnik’s last poem in the Korman selection, Mayn man iz in amerike [My Husband Is in America], presents another dramatic persona—a wife and mother who has stayed at home, alone, as her entire family left der alter heym, the Old Country. Again, Knizshnik plays upon this character’s predicament as the ironic embodiment of the ultimate homelessness of a solitary woman, dependent upon her relationship to the family to define her existence. In the second case, Bassin included three of Yehudis’s poems, all of which are spoken in a personal voice: In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn [In a Corner of My Heart], Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts [The Night is deep, the night is dark . . . ], and Breyte himlen, erd a groyse [Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous].59 From these three poems alone, one reads Yehudis as a poet essentially in the same vein as Zelda Knizshnik—a poet relying upon the conventional tropes of the seasons and the diurnal cycle to express romantic themes. Even in these poems, though, Yehudis exhibits a more daring nonconformity, for her persona speaks of embracing her child in sleep, while tempted and then thrown into despair by the illicit passion in a “youthful dream”60 of her lover. Her poem of romantic ennui, Breyte himlen, erd a groyse, speaks first in a generalized voice of despair but breaks, midstanza, into rebellious individuality. Even as Bassin allowed Yehudis’s bold voice to be audible, his limited selection of poems emphasized a misleading similarity


between Yehudis and Knizshnik, as in the conventional figure of a locked door that imprisons desire. Zelda Knizshik writes: “Under lock and key remains/ A restrained desire.”61 Yehudis writes: “In a corner of my heart/ My youth is deeply hidden: Locked away from the years/ With a rigid lock, an old one.”62 In Bassin, then, these two poets sound very much alike. In contrast, Korman, represented Yehudis with seven poems that show a far greater range of imagery and voice. At the center of one such poem is a trope of the womanly craft of weaving, suggesting an analogy between the making of a life and the crafting of a poem.63 More important, Korman included Yehudis’s daring attack on a kind of poetry she considered old-fashioned, an attack addressed to her contemporaries, in Tsum dikhter [To the (male) Poet]. The collective voice in this poem of artistic protest has the bravado of political poems of the revolution. Although Yehudis cannot transcend the hackneyed forms of political poetry, her poem reveals a public voice, distinguishable from the private voice of the “poetess” and the “feminine lyric” that dominated Bassin’s selection. Korman’s presentation of Yehudis worked against this stereotype. By contrasting the Bassin and Korman selections of these two poets who are now obscure, we see how the choice of poems can color the way a poet appears in an anthology. Next, let us turn to the intriguing poet Roza Yakubovitsh. The ten poems with which Korman represented her emphasized a strong personal voice speaking from a religious context. Thus in Korman, Yakubovitsh stood out in sharp contrast to such sometimes bombastic protest poems as those by Roza Goldshteyn and Anna Rappaport, to whom Korman gave less emphasis.64 In Bassin, these three poets appeared in equal measure, with one poem each, and Yakubovitsh was essentially buried among them.65 Yakubovitsh’s single poem in Bassin, Tsu mayn tatn [To My Father],66 while interesting in that the speaker sees God personified in her father’s piety, does not convey the full range of this poet’s achievement. Yakubovitsh’s work has a genuine originality and expressiveness that even Yehudis’s spirited assertions lack. For example, she places the persona of one poem, On a statsye [Without a Station], in the midst of a struggle between a young woman’s desire and the morality imposed upon her by Jewish society. Yakubovitsh presents this struggle through the extended metaphor of a railroad train—a symbol of the modern world that recurs throughout Yiddish literature.67 Yakubovitsh dramatizes this conflict between what an individual woman wants and the religious or social strictures that limit her in what she can achieve in the distinctive voices of characters in the stock roles of traditional Jewish women, such as the kale (bride) and the akore (barren woman). The best of her poems, from the series Biblishe motivn [Biblical Motifs], speak in the voices of legendary biblical women, such as Rachel, Hagar, Miriam, Esther, Shulamit. In these poems, Yakubovitsh offers an interpretation of the traditional text while she fleshes out each ancient character in modern terms, an approach that forshadowed the better-known poems by Itzik Manger in the 1930s.68 Yakubovitsh’s poems, which Manger may have read, combine knowledge of three powerful literary conventions—traditional Hebrew and Yiddish biblical interpretation, the Western European love lyric, and the dramatic monologue. Korman’s generous inclusion of poems by Yakubovitsh reveal her to be a compelling, accomplished writer who developed beyond the earlier poets,


Knizshnik and Yehudis. Yakubovitsh’s treatment of religious themes distinguishes her from the anti-religious, polemical strain in these and other earlier poets, as well as from the estheticism and eroticism of her modernist contemporaries. The one poet that both Bassin and Korman presented in full force was Fradl Shtok, a modernist writing in New York; Bassin included eleven of her poems, as many as the important male writers, and Korman included twelve, ranking her with the now better-known poets Kadya Molodowsky, Anna Margolin, and Celia Dropkin. In the context of both anthologies, Fradl Shtok stood out as an innovator in verse forms, enriching the meters and stanzas of Yiddish poetry.69 The musicality of her poems, almost impossible to convey in translation, is evident in the six-line strophes of a love song, “Serenade.”70 Yet the euphony of the lyric contrasts with the turn of her imagination, as eroticism takes on a threatening tone. In A vinter ekho [A Winter Echo], the connotations of sweetness in the diminutive nouns naming the lover give way to a metaphor likening marriage and burial.71 In another poem, Farnakhtn [Dusks], Shtok transforms the quietude of dusk into a threatening atmosphere and the singing nightingale of romantic poetry into a stinging bee,72 thus subverting literary convention in the manner of a modernist. Shtok’s sonnet cycle, which Malka Heifetz Tussman claimed was the first to be composed in Yiddish,73 was an innovation both for Yiddish poetry and for the subgenre itself. Shtok imports to Yiddish the formal as well as the thematic tradition of European love poetry since Petrarch. At the same time, she distorts the very conventions of that love poetry, for the female persona controverts courtly convention in sonnets that most unconventionally declare love in the form of resentment and eros in the form of rage.74 Both Bassin in 1917 and Korman in 1928 recognized Shtok as one of the innovative modernist poets in America. Yet she appeared in Bassin as the only substantial woman poet of the moment, whereas in Korman, Shtok stood as one of a good number of strong, modern voices. Although Korman placed Shtok’s poems chronologically, between the generous selection of Yakubovitsh and an extremely small group of poems by Rivke Rozental, her poems resonate with those of her American modernist contemporaries, Anna Margolin and Celia Dropkin. Whereas in 1917 Bassin would not yet have been able to read and thus include poems by Celia Dropkin in Finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, because that year she had begun to write but not yet publish her poems in Yiddish, Zishe Landau’s Antologye of 1919 included two of Dropkin’s new poems, Mayn vayse shney printsesin [My Snow-White Princess], dated 1917 in Dropkin’s 1935 book, and Kh’hob zikh gezen in kholem [I Saw Myself in a Dream]. With these two poems—one a spring poem, mourning the death of winter, and the other narrating a suicidal dream—Landau placed this poet at the cutting edge of the new Yiddish poetry. Dropkin’s poems join eroticism and morbidity, a combination that becomes her trademark. Interestingly, these are also the qualities of the single poem by Fradl Shtok, Du trogst dos harts [You Carry Your Heart], which Landau placed last in his volume, allowing Shtok to have the final word on Yiddish poetry in 1919. Whereas these three poems by women included in Landau’s anthology stand out in his selection, replete with erotic innuendo in the themes of death, adultery, and betrayal, their radical attitudes and shocking imagery are folded into the fabric


of Korman’s collection. In the context of Landau’s book, these selections suggested that women poets wrote only about sex and death. Korman’s volume, however, presented these subjects as only some of the many addressed in Yiddish poems by women. Bassin had expressed no explicit poetic ideology to explain the relationship of the secular to the religious, nor of the place that women poets occupied in the larger tradition of Yiddish poetry that his anthology sought to establish. Yet his selection of poems by women implied a definition of “women’s poetry” as romantic, private, domestic, and secular. In contrast, although Korman expressed a poetic agenda in his introduction that favored the modern and the secular over the religious strain in Yiddish poetry, in fact the poems he included transcended these limitations. Korman’s selection showed that modern women could write all kinds of Yiddish poetry—the romantic, private, domestic, and secular poetry that their contemporaries expected of them, but also modernist, public, political, erotic, and religious poetry. Women could use forms and themes that violated the cliche´s about women and the ideological boundaries of modernism. The quantity and the range of poems that Korman selected by each poet presented a broad vision of the types of poetry women could write in Yiddish. Moreover, while he argued rather strenuously to deny any relationship between post-Enlightenment poetry by women and Yiddish devotional poetry, his juxaposition of these two bodies of material superseded his protestations of the distance between them. Whereas Bassin’s anthology set out a historical survey of Yiddish poetry through five centuries, in which poetry by women played a very small role and which relegated religious poetry to the premodern past, Korman’s anthology, ostensibly modeled on Bassin’s, argued in the end for a deep and important connection between the religious and the modern in Yiddish poetry, put forth most centrally in writings by women of his own day. Literary anthologies of the 1910s and 1920s played an important role in the way that modern Yiddish writers developed a sense of their literary tradition. In the end, we see two kinds of anthologies. On the one hand are the modernist efforts documenting the present moment and looking forward to the future, foremost among them the Yunge and Introspectivist anthologies. On the other hand are the historical anthologies looking backward in order to figure out how the literature could continue to move ahead, anthologies such as those of Bassin and Korman. Even as Korman modeled his anthology on Bassin’s, however, he transformed the project of constructing a tradition. Although the earlier anthology was most innovative when it juxtaposed rediscovered Old Yiddish texts and newly appreciated folklore with modern Yiddish belles lettres, it languished in conventional notions of the roles women played as readers and as writers. Such unexamined ideas about women as literary players reflected the activities women were thought to perform in society. Literary critics, despite their intentions to stir up the status quo, repeated these hackneyed terms of the domestic, the private, the emotional, and the sexually procreative to describe and proscribe women’s writing. In his decision to compile an anthology solely of women poets, Korman began to question the unstated assumptions about gender in Bassin’s anthology and beyond it. The poets and the poems Korman chose to include in this anthology expanded


and complicated the image of what kinds of women could write poetry and what kinds of poetry they could write. Korman’s anthology did not make a large impact when it was published. Rather, in the cultural climate of its day, this serious compilation of works by women inspired more scorn than praise and failed in its effort to demand that the tradition of Yiddish poetry include women. Had Bassin learned from Korman, his 1940 anthology of Amerikaner yidishe poezye [American Yiddish Poetry] would have held more than one woman poet, among thirty-one.75 Korman’s was a work before its time. Regarded in the kinder light of a more open cultural milieu some seventyfive years later, though, perhaps Korman’s anthology can finally find a place of its own.

Notes All translations are by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Some of this material was previously published in different forms in “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish,” in Handbook of American-Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources, ed. Lewis Fried (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), and in “Canon and Gender: Women Poets in Two Modern Yiddish Anthologies,” first published in Shofar 9.4 (Summer 1991), which was abridged in Women of the Word; Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994). I am grateful for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, during Spring 2003, where I worked on a book in which this article is a part. 1. Zishe Laundau, Antologye: di yidishe dikhtung in amerike biz yor 1919. Illustrations Z. Maud (New York: Farlag Yidish, 1919). 2. Introspektive lider (New York: Farlag M. N. Mayzel, 1920). 3. Moyshe Bassin, ed., Antologye: finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, Vol. 1. (New York: Farlag dos yidishe bukh, 1917), pp. i–ii. Despite Bassin’s insistence that the anthology include no poems published after 1910, a number of selections actually appeared after that date, such as poems by Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, H. Leyvik, and Mani Leyb. 4. Bassin, Antologye, Vol. 1, p. i. 5. In zikh: a zamlung introspektive lider 1920 (New York: M. N. Mayzel Farlag, 1920). The poets are M. Apranel, A. Gurieh, Yankev Glatshteyn, Bernard Lewis, Reuven Ludvig, A. Leyles, N. Minkov, Yankev Stodolski. 6. Celia Dropkin, “Du erniderigst mikh haynt” [Today You Humble Me] and “Mayne hent”[My Hands], p. 11. 7. Leksikon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1981), vol. 8, pp. 137–38. 8. According to Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, California, telephone interview, December 1985. 9. Korman’s reviews are “Vegn miriam ulinovers Der bobes oytser” (Bikher velt, no. 1, Warsaw, 1922) and “Vegn glazer-andrus, In halb shotn, celia dropkins un rashel veprinskis lider” (Bikher velt, no. 6, Warsaw, 1922). Cited in Ezra Korman, ed., Yidishe dikhterins: antologye (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1928), p. 373, n. 215. 10. Korman’s original poetry appeared as Shkye: lider [Sunset: Poems], 1932. Poems also appeared in Mattes Deutch, ed., Antologye: mitvest-mayrev [Anthology: Midwest-West]

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Yiddish Poetry 277 (Chicago: Farlag Tseshinski, 1933), pp. 152–55, 197. The biography on p. 197 states that Korman, born in 1888 in Kiev, began to write in 1910 for Sh. Godelik’s Almanakh. He was a journalist for various European and American newspapers and published poems in the journals Milgroym [Pomegranate], Kultur [Culture), and Yidish [Yiddish]. He also compiled bibliographies of Sh. Niger and A. Tseytlin, in Zalman Reyzen’s. Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese [Lusican of Yiddish Literature and Press] (Warsaw: Farlag Tsentral, 1914). 11. Ezra Korman, ed., In fayerdikn doyer—zamlung fun revolutsionerer lyrik in der nayer yidisher dikhtung (In Fiery Duration—Collection of Revolutionary Lyric in New Yiddish Poetry, (Kiev, 1921), and ed. and intro., Brenendike brikn—antologye fun revolutsionerer lyrik in der nayer yidisher dikhtung fun ukraine (Burning Bridges—Anthology of Revolutionary Lyric in the New Yiddish Poetry of Ukraine (Berlin, 1923) (second edition of In fayerdikn doyr). Cited in Ezra Korman, “Kvaln un literatur,” (Sources and Literature), Yidishe dikhterins: antologye, p. 360, nos. 16, 17. 12. Zalman Reyzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur un prese [Lexicon of Yiddish Literature and Press] (Warsaw: Farlag Tsentral, 1914). 13. Max Erik, “Brantshpigl—di entsiklopedye fun der yidisher froy in 17tn yorhundert” and “Bleter tsu der geshikhte fun der elterer yidisher literatur un kultur” [Pages toward the History of Old Yiddish Literature and Culture] Tsaytshrift [Periodical], Book I (Minsk, 1926). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xxx, n. 3. 14. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. xxvii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxiii–xxxv. 15. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxvii–lxxxiii, 357. 16. Froyen zshurnal-vokhenblat (New York, 1922). Cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 364, n. 73. 17. Miriam Ulinover, Der bobes oytser [My Grandmother’s Treasure] (Warsaw, 1922); Anna Blokh, Poezye fun a litvishe(r) meydel in afrike [Poetry by a Lithuanian Girl in Africa] (South Africa, 1921); Roza Gutman, Far gor dem noen(t)stn: lider. [For the Nearest and Dearest] (Berlin, 1925); Ida Glazer-Andrus, In halb-shotn [In Half-Shadow] (New York, 1922); Leah K. Hofman, In kinderland [In the Land of Children], 2d ed. (New York, 1921); Pesi Hershfeld, Kareln [Carols] (Chicago, 1926); Khana Vurtsel, Hundert lider [A Hundred Poems] (New York, 1927); Rashel Veprinksi, Ruf fun fligl [Call of Wings] (New York, 1926); Khana-Loye Khaveydanski, Gedikhte un aforizmen [Poetry and Aphorisms] (Ponevezsh, 1922); Roza Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen [My Songs] (Warsaw, 1924); Yudika, Naye Yugent [New Youth] (Kovne, 1923); Kadya Molodowsky, Kheshvendike nekht. lider [Nights of Heshvan. Poems] (Vilna-Warsaw, 1927); Sara Reyzen, Lider [Poems] (Vilna, 1924). 18. This bibliography, though, is not complete, for among the biographies, Korman mentions at least one book, Paula R.’s Der malakh un der sotn: poeme [The Angel and the Devil: Long Poem], (Warsaw, 1908), which does not appear in the bibliography. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 350. 19. Among the earlier generation of Labor Poets, editions of the collected works of Morris Rosenfeld and David Edelstat had appeared in 1908 and 1909, signaling a selfconscious making of a canon. Of the Yunge, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern had published his two collections of poems; Mani Leyb had published at least twelve books of poems, children’s poems, and other writings; Reuven Ayzland had published one volume of poems and several of translations; Zishe Landau had published a play, the anthology of 1919, and translations. Of the Introspectivists, Yankev Glatshteyn had published three books, and A. Glanz-Leyeles had published at least six volumes, including poems, plays, and scholarship. 20. See Dov Sadan, “Guardian of the Treasure: On Miriam Ulinover” [Hebrew], In Der bobes oytser by Miriam Ulinover (Jerusalem Mosad Harav Kook, 1975), pp. 1–8. 21. Korman, Yidishe dikherins, p. xxix.

278 The Modern Period 22. See Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity in the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse.” Feminist Studies 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 49–82. Also see Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth Century Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). pp. 13–17, 131–223. Julia Kristeva, “Semiotics of Biblical Abomination,” in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). pp. 90–112. 23. See Chava Weissler, “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women” and Voices of the Matriarchs. Also Israel Zinberg, “Historical and Travel Literature: Memoirs and Tehinnot” and “Popular Literature. Tze’ena U‘re‘enah,” pp. 119–39, 229–59, in A History of Jewish Literature: Old Yiddish Literature from its Origins to the Haskalah Period (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press; New York: KTAV, 1975), vol. 7. Also Solomon B. Freehof. Devotional Literature in the Vernacular,” Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1923, repr. from Yearbook, vol.33, pp. 1–43. 24. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xxx. 25. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxiv–lxv. 26. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. xlvii. 27. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. xlviii–xlix. 28. David G. Roskies has pointed this out in reference to Jewish literature responding to catastrophe. See David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Jewish Cultural Responses to Catastrophe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 17, 77–108, 225–57, 283, 289. 29. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. l. 30. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. li. 31. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. liv–lvi. 32. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. lvi. 33. Roza Yakubovitsh, Mayne gezangen [My Songs], (Warsaw, 1924). Lider tsu got [Poems to God] not published as of 1928. 34. Conversation with Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, Cal., September 1978. Fradl Shtok published her sonnets in groups, for example, the eight sonnets in the anthology Di naye heym (New York, 1914). However, A. Tabatshnik argues that this is a popular misconception that originated with Bassin’s Antologye: 500 yor yidishe poezye; rather, Morris Vintshevski was the true innovator, writing sonnets between 1892 and 1908. A. Tabatshnik, “Fradl Shtok un der Sonet” [Fradl Shtok and the Sonnet], Dikhter un dikhtung [Poets and Poetry] (New York: Published by author, 1965), pp. 505–8. 35. Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers, 1890– 1940,” 70.1 (September 1980), pp. 78–79. 36. See also Ezra Korman, “Vegn miriam ulinover’s Der bobes oytser,” cited in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 373, n. 215. 37. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. lxiii–lxiv. 38. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. lxiv. 39. For a study of the Warsaw group, led by Noyekh Prilutski, the S. Ansky Vilna Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society, and the Ethnographic Commission of the YIVO Institute in Vilna, see Itzik Nakhmen Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Jewish Folklorists of Poland. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003). On the efforts of S. Ansky (Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport) to collect folk literature and folk art before and during the first World War, see also Roskies, Against the Apocalypse, pp. 133–62. 40. Sh. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” Der pinkes (Vilna, 1913; reissued, Vilna, 1919). In Geklibene verk fun sh. niger, volume 2: bleter geshikhte fun der yidisher literature (New York: Sh. Niger Book Committee of the World-wide Jewish Culture Congress, 1959), pp. 35–107. See also Freehof, “Devotional Literature in the Vernacular,” pp. 1–

Gender and the Anthological Tradition in Yiddish Poetry 279 43; Israel Zinberg, “Popular Literature; Tze’enah U-re’enah” and “Historical and Travel Literature; Memoirs and Tehinnot,” pp. 119–39, 241–59. 41. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,”p. 37. 42. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” pp. 52–53. 43. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” pp. 55–68. 44. Niger, “Di yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” pp. 69–73. 45. Fifty women Yiddish writers first surveyed from a cultural historical perspective by Norma Fain Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics: Yiddish Women Writers 1890–1940, American Jewish History 70 (September 1988),” pp. 68–90. 46. A. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” Di fraye arbeter shtime, October 30, 1915, pp. 4–5. Brought to my attention by Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” p. 77, n. 18. 47. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” p. 4. 48. Glanz, “Kultur un di froy,” p. 5. 49. Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics,” p. 79. 50. Melekh Ravitsh, “ ‘Den mir hobn zunshtn keyn andri (mekhaye) in der velt’: E. Korman—Yidishe dikhterins: antologye” [Then We Have Hardly Any Other Pleasure in the World: E. Korman—Yiddish Women Poets: Anthology], Literarishe bleter 5, 42, (October 19, 1928):830–31. 51. Kadya Molodowsky, “Meydlekh, Froyen, Vayber . . . un Nevue,” Literarishe Bleter 4, 22 (June 3, 1927):416. 52. Sh. Niger, “Froyen Lyrik,” Literarishe bleter 5, 46 (November 16, 1928):909–10. 53. Niger, “Froyen lyrik,” p. 909. 54. Chava Weissler translates this conventional Yiddish and Hebrew phrase, which often appeared at the beginning of religious Yiddish books from the seventeenth century on, such as Brantshpigl: “This book was written in Yiddish for women and for men who are like women in not having much knowledge.” Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), pp. 38– 44. See also Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 55. For a study of the feminization of Jewish men by European anti-Semitism, see Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington, 1995). 56. Such as Kadya Molodowsky, whose first poem appeared in 1921, or Malka Heifetz Tussman, whose first poem appeared in 1919. 57. Bassin, Antologye, p. 47. 58. Zelda Knizshnik, Unter shlos [Under Lock and Key], Volkns [Clouds], and A shpetige royz [A Late-Blooming Rose], Bassin, Antologye, 2:47. 59. Yehudis, In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn [In a Corner of My Heart], Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts [The Night Is Deep, the Night Is Dark . . . ), and Breyte himlen, erd a groyse [Ample Heavens, Earth Enormous), Bassin, Antologye, 2:49–50. 60. Yehudis, Di nakht iz tif, di nakht iz shvarts, in Bassin, Antologye, 2:49–50; Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 64–65. 61. Knizshnik, Unter shlos, Bassin, Antologye, 2:47; Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 55. 62. Yehudis, In a vinkl fun mayn hartsn, Bassin, Antologye, 2:49; Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 62. 63. Yehudis, Ikh endik mayn veben [I Finish my Weaving], Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 65. 64. Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 84–92, 344. Roza Yakubovitsh remained within a traditional Jewish context, having been raised in a rabbinical household in the Polish prov-

280 The Modern Period ince of Plotsker; she was educated in Russian and then Polish Jewish government schools, as well as by her father, a rabbi. She published in Peretz’s collection Yudish (Warsaw, 1910), and in her own volume, Mayne Gezangen [My Songs] (Warsaw, 1924). Her second book, Lider tsu Got [Poems to God] was destroyed in World War II. 65. Of course we have to take into account the fact that Yakubovitsh’s book, Mayne gezangen, was not published until 1924, and thus Korman had more to choose from. 66. Roza Yakubovitsh, Tsu mayn tatn, Bassin, Antologye, 2:125–26; Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 88–89. 67. Roza Yakubovitsh, On a statsye, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 86. 68. Roza Yakubovitsh, “Rokhl” and “Hagar,” (from Biblishe motivn), Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 89–91. 69. Melekh Ravitsh referred regretfully to the sudden silence of Fradl Shtok, the poetess from Galicia, whom he accused of being more woman than poet in his review of the anonymous women poets in 1927. In the biographical notes, Korman simply reports that she was born in 1890 in Skala, Galicia, came to America in 1907, had a literary debut in 1910, and published a collection of short stories, Gezamelte Dertseylungen, in New York in 1919. On her subsequent life, see Pratt, “Culture and Radical Politics.” 70. Fradl Shtok, “Serenade,” Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 93–95. 71. Fradl Shtok, A vinter ekho, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 94–95. 72. Fradl Shtok, Farnakhtn, Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, pp. 96–97. 73. Conversation with Malka Heifetz Tussman, Berkeley, Cal., September 1978. Fradl Shtok published her sonnets in groups, for example, the eight sonnets in the anthology Di Naye Heym, (New York, 1914). Zishe Landau’s Antologye of the Yunge poets (New York, 1919) presents only one Shtok sonnet. A decade later, Itsik Manger included a series of his sonnets on biblical themes in his first book, Shtern Afn Dakh (Bucharest, 1929), pp. 62–67. 74. Fradl Shtok, “Sonnet,” in Korman, Yidishe dikhterins, p. 98. 75. Moyshe Bassin, ed., Amerikaner yidishe poezye: antologye [American Yiddish Poetry: Anthology] (New York: A komitet, 1940). Of the thirty-one poets, Bassin includes one woman, Anna Margolin.

15 hannan hever

“Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove” Anthologies of Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael

And it is indeed possible to view [this] book as the orange grove of our poetry, with its great and little trees, a grove whose earth is also covered with shrubs, flowers, and weeds. A spirit of sadness stalks the garden, and the gay sound of birdsong is heard there only seldom. But many are the paths of the orange grove, royal roads and side paths, mountain ranges and valleys, and it is full of breezes and pleasant odors, sights, and colors that take the breath away and that expand the mind.1

ince the earliest days of the Jewish settlement (yishuv) in pre-State Israel, the

literary form of the anthology has served as an instrument for creating as well S as documenting Hebrew cultural discourse. Once it was included within an anthology and thereby transmitted to the community of writers and readers, even an individual poem or story played a role in the construction of what Benedict Anderson has called the “imagined national community.”2 Yet in contrast to Anderson’s description of the formation of such a national community—as a linear, homogeneous process—the case of anthology shows that this process is profoundly hybrid, simultaneously encoded as natural and yet always bound up with the operation of mechanisms of production and distribution.3 This duality or oscillation between the natural and the artificial may already be observed in the first anthology of Western culture known to us: Stephanos (literally, a “garland”), a collection of minor poetic works, mainly epigrams, edited by Meleager, a first-century a.d. inhabitant of Gadara. Etymologically, “anthology” in ancient Greek means “bouquet.” Anthos is a flower, and legein denotes the action of gathering or picking up. The metaphorical use of “bouquet” presents the anthology as belonging to the plant realm and therefore as coming into being naturally or organically. Like the bouquet of flowers, however, the anthology is structured through the artificial arrangement of the bouquet’s natural constituents. The esthetic effect of the anthology is, therefore, one of heterogeneous beauty founded on two constituents: the organic and the artificial. The first points to an 281


immediate link, the natural sign of a certain cultural/textual reality whose full, appropriate, and authentic reflection the anthology constitutes, thus lending the individual text appearing in its pages an exemplary or illustrative status. By contrast, the second constituent points to an artificial act, a reflection that has been constructed, which is the product of human intervention, and which mediates between a cultural/textual reality and its representation in the anthology. The duality between the natural and the artificial is basic to the enterprise of the anthology. This duality is responsible for the hybridity of the anthology as a cultural signifier: an anthology simultaneously generates a natural effect and displays its unnatural making. In the one case, the anthology appropriates representations of cultural texts and confers upon them an illustrative status. In the other, the anthology never conceals its constructed nature as a product of human intervention. The anthology can thus never wholly erase the signs of human agency or of the hand that has compiled it. Forewords to anthologies and their compositional scaffolding (chapters or subdivisions, footnotes, editors’ comments, and the like) play a central role here. This hybridity and commingling of the organic with the artificial allow the anthology to function in two ways. While claiming merely to collect representative texts that mirror what is already there, the anthology is itself at work producing such new entities as “modern poetry,” “Hebrew love poetry,” or “workers’ poetry,” and so on. All these are joined with the material presence of the anthology in the distribution and preservation of texts in culture. But these acts of publication and distribution already imply an announcement, the naming of a privileged closure within the field of culture. When an anthology arrives on the scene, it therefore already bears the status of a representative gathering of representative texts, each of which is itself a representation. By collecting, concentrating, and distributing these texts as a group, the anthology constructs its authority. But at the moment of its crystalized appearance in the general literary discourse, the anthology is a “representative representation.”

The “Comprehensive” Anthology and Universal Nationalism Schocken’s 1938 volume Mivhfi ar hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah: Antologya hamekhila et mivhfi ar hashirah halirit haivrit bemeshekh matayim shanah, merabbi moshe hfi ayyim lutsato ad hayom [A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology Containing Two Hundred Years of Select Hebrew Lyric Poetry, from Rabbi Moses H fi aim Luzzatto until the Present], the work of the writer and editor Asher Barash, would become a far more central text than any other yishuv anthology. Barash’s volume achieved a more widely representative and popular status than any of its counterparts and continued to be seen as the authoritative embodiment of the history of the new Hebrew poetry for generations, long after the period of the yishuv. This anthology did not appear under the aegis of any one literary camp or political orientation but represented itself as a compendium of Hebrew poetry at large. At a time—the late 1930s—when the modernism and avant-gardism of Eretz Yisraeli poetry had long been institutionalized, Barash’s perspective was deliber-

“Our Poetry Is Like an Orange Grove”

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ately general and sought to allow each of the various schools and streams within Hebrew poetry to coexist in harmony. It is worth noting that the general rubric had long been a feature of the Hebrew poetry anthologies of the yishuv (select examples of its use would include “Love Poetry,” found in H fi aim Toren’s anthology Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu [Love Poems in Israel: From Ancient Times to the Present];4 “Poetry of the 1936 Riots” in Shirat hadamim: Kovets shirim mitovei meshorereinu al meoraot tartsav;5 and “Generations of Jewish Heroism,” in an anthology edited by Zerubavel Gilad in 1944 containing poems of past glory as a species of heroic testament).6 But the diverse titles and organizational rubrics of these anthologies notwithstanding, the “comprehensive anthology” emerges as worthy of special scrutiny: the field it represents expands to include “the totality of poetry,” where this “totality” pointedly refers to the national whole. This national norm of anthological representation became a fundamental principle of modern Hebrew criticism. Dov Sadan, one of the most important critics of modern Hebrew literature, speaking from the Zionist perspective at the end of the fifties, and paraphrasing Bereshit Rabbah (3, 7), states emphatically that the anthologist who “labors over the entire field of poetry and poets” cannot act on the basis of mere caprice alone.7 The particular poetic text that is included in the “comprehensive anthology” appears to have a general status whereby it exemplifies a collective whole and assumes a certain authority and privilege as this type of representation. Barash, who stands at one generational remove from H. N. Bialik, edited anthologies of Hebrew poetry from a Zionist national perspective. To this end, he constructed the anthology as a conservative site that reduplicates the norms of the hegemonic common denominator through positing a supposedly harmonious and shared system of high national culture, one that negates or ingests political, generic, religious, class, ethnic, or racial differences and conflicts, instituting in their place a shared representation aspiring to a general or universal status. In Barash’s A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry, as well as in other anthologies, the organizing agency is noteworthy precisely because it produces its overall representation through the postponement of conflicts and the exclusion of anyone deemed likely to generate conflict or to harm the yishuv’s view of itself in terms of the shared national image it had constructed. Thus, for example, in Barash’s volume, a revolutionary political poet like Alexander Penn is represented by means of a lyric poem, “Bli daat lamah” [Without Knowing Why], rather than by means of any of his political poems (p. 484). The comprehensive Hebrew anthology seemingly uses the criterion of writing in the Hebrew language as the disguise for a series of constraints on the type of material it might contain. Anterior to the norm of texts written in Hebrew, there exist criteria concerning ethnic origin, class, and religious or gender identity, which grant legitimization to the texts eventually included in the Hebrew anthology. The appearance of national-universalism that Barash’s anthology generates under the cover of its status as an anthology of Hebrew poetry is actually the product of particular representations that do not violate the constraints of the


national image. This image is admittedly produced in poems written in the Hebrew language, but its authors are of exclusively Jewish origin, are mainly male (Leah Goldberg, who had already published her Tabaot ashan [Rings of Smoke], does not appear), are identified as secular writers (although a minority are religious), and are all (with one exception: Yosef Halevi, born in Adrianople, Turkey) ethnically Europeans, in total disregard for contemporary Hebrew poetry then being produced by poets of Eastern descent, such as Yemenites8 or North Africans.9 In order to institute its universal authority, the comprehensive anthology does not render the individual poem central, nor does it grant prominence to a specific political or historical event. In their stead, we find the individualistic figure of a poet with a personal biography, someone who is represented to the readership as having created poems whose worth must be measured against the universalist standards pertaining to the esthetic products of creative genius. It is thus only to be expected that the most crucial cultural category employed in the development of the inclusive hegemonic representation in the field of poetry will be the lyric. In terms of this category, to conform to the lyric mode is to obey criteria of beauty, esthetics, naturalness, and authentic immediate personal expression, all of which erase the oppositions, conflicts, and incoherencies of the cultural community. Indeed, paralleling the increasing crystalization of the Hebrew Eretz Yisraeli cultural community as a national one, we see a corresponding expansion of the power of the category of the “lyric,” which becomes a kind of umbrella concept bridging gaps, resolving conflicts, and bringing into being an imagined community possessing a uniform narrative of linear progress that spans the present to take in a shared future. Barash explicitly formulates these considerations in the foreword to his anthology: I have restricted my focus to the lyric alone, because this is the most prolific and most developed form of poetry in Israel throughout the generations, from the holy texts and the poetry of medieval Spain to the present day. Well into this generation, the lyric poets have been the crowning glory of our poetic literature. The Book of Psalms, and the Book of Lamentations, and a portion of the Song of Songs are the foundations supporting the edifice of Hebrew poetry as a whole. Here is the soul of the Hebrew nation and of the Israeli man revealed in its exultation and its pain, in all of its agitation and fine nuances of feeling. Throughout all the sacred and the secular did the Israeli soul find in the lyric its zenith, and through it does the Hebrew language achieve heights of choice beauty and pleasantness. (p. 1)

The proliferation of poems whose theme concerns the writing of poetry as a universal artistic act—and thus one that is destined to serve the needs of the people as a whole—also contributes to the crystalization of images such as these in the anthology. One case in point is the first stanza of Hameshorer livnei ever [The Poet Addresses the Sons of the Hebrews] by Issakhar Ber Horwitz, whose inclusion in Barash’s anthology (p. 95) nevertheless fails to rescue him from oblivion. Paradoxically, Horwitz’s subsequent disappearance from the eyes of posterity merely confirms the power of the anthology, which exploits the lyric as the common denominator of the national poem, using this overall organizing principle to confer a certain status on the little-known text. Like Y. L. Gordon’s famous poem Lemi


285

ani amel? (For Whom do I Labor?), also included in the anthology (p. 80), the basic thematic principle of this national lyric is that the poet’s contribution to his people is founded on that people’s lack of recognition for his contribution. The substance and forms of the national poem are predetermined to be unacceptable to the public at large, for whom they are nevertheless written. The tradition of the biblical prophet serves here to create a modern national consciousness, in terms of which the national poet is the guide whose instruction will always be refused as a foregone conclusion by the people. But through this paradoxical existence, the poet (whose labors are always in vain) isolates and institutes his independent authority as a universal artist, whose chief vehicle of expression is the lyric: ,rb,[e ynEb.li rrEAvm.h; lAm[]y: aw>v' $yae > !H: Gon>li rAa fArp.yI qyrIl' wyr"yvib.W

rb,q, d[; !j,B,mi Arz>nI Hy"-tT;m; tArc.x; ~h; ,ryVih; tArc.x;b.W —bv,q' br: wyr 'yvil.W wyg 'h]Ko varo aWh ~v' (95) .bv,x'yE a lo AKr>[, ,lq;yE AM[;b.W ,H: lo a/

[How the poet labors in vain for the children of Israel. / How he seeks in vain to spread a blazing light! / God’s gift to him is the laurel, which he bestows from the womb to the grave; / The courtyards of his poems are the courtyards of God, / Where he is the high priest and his poems are heard with rapt attention— / Though the people underestimate him and pay him little heed.]

Anthology as a Narrative of Literary History Upon the appearance of Barash’s anthology, Yaakov Fichman wrote of it as a unique event, the first of its kind. “More than in any scholarship or explanatory tract,” he states, “do we find in this book the means to educate [the public] toward the reception of the lyric, thus enabling the reader to appreciate this highly varied poetic form.”10 In response to the question of why similar works had not appeared earlier in the annals of Hebrew literature, Fichman argued that this was due to the fact that “Hebrew readers in general have only a blurred conception of the essence of lyric poetry, and it is to be feared that precisely the most excellent examples [of the genre] in this book are those that will create astonishment in the minds of many: For what reason were these [particular poems] chosen as masterpieces?” Fichman ultimately praises Barash’s courage in devoting his book to virtually pure lyric poetry alone, without shying away from our readers’ lack of training in this field. For this reason, the book has certainly been reductive in one obvious respect—some of the most important poets and personalities of the Haskalah [Enlightenment] period have been underrepresented. . . . Final judgment [of the anthology] demands the expansion of the notion of the lyric with respect to some poets, since the lyric is sometimes found to be extremely robust in philosophical poetry. Ultimately, it is necessary to present each poet first and foremost in the properties in which he has been blessed.

The lyric, it would appear, is interpreted as a focus of affiliation and cooperation that eliminates every potential challenge to its functioning. The pure image


of the lyric lends a degree of continuity to the historical development of Hebrew poetry, whose lyrical homogeneity continues to serve as a cultural site transcending all division and conflict. Fichman’s comments concerning the Hebrew reader’s lack of competence in the reception of the lyric provides indirect testimony to the simultaneity of Barash’s anthologizing work and the internal split that divided the Hebrew cultural and poetic field. Precisely at the time of its publication—during the height of the great debate over the Partition plan, and the heated confrontations between the Labor movement and the Revisionists, that is to say, a time when the very existence of a common notion of nationalism and national culture in Eretz Yisrael was in jeopardy—the massive efforts of Eretz Yisraeli culture to generate a supposedly apolitical enclave emerge most clearly into vision. It should be remembered that the Symbolist school, led by Avraham Shlonsky, had attained literary hegemony over the Hebrew poetry of this era, largely through the neutralization of poetic political utterances.11 But in opposition to the universalist symbolism of Shlonsky and his coterie, we find the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (in the wake of the publication of his work Sefer haqitrug vehaemunah [The Book of Admonishing and Faith])12 enunciating new heights of nationalist sentiment in all its political radicalism. As radically nationalist, Greenberg’s poetry indicated through its very presence a challenge to the collective place it could not occupy. Greenberg’s status as the “absent presence” of the Hebrew anthology has various manifestations. Barash anthologized various “lyric” poems by Greenberg, appending at the end of the volume, apparently by prior agreement, a note stating that these poems were included against Greenberg’s will because “I [Barash] did not intend these poems to convey the essence of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s [vision of the] national destiny in Hebrew poetry” (p. 503). A similar note concerning a “famous [poet] of our generation, who opposes in principle being included in ‘compendiums’ ” appeared some years later in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu, edited by H fi aim Toren. An even clearer enunciation of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s position, outlining the type of collaborative effort in which he himself refused to participate, appeared in yet another anthology, published in 1938, Shirateinu hahfi adashah: Liqutim lemiqra uldiqlum, edited by Eliyahu Meytus. In his foreword, Meytus remarks that “a certain poet has not been included here, because of his opposition in principle to the compilation of a collection representing [our] poets as a whole.”13 Thus does Meytus lay bare the problematics inherent in the very act of collecting and instituting this very “totality” of poets as a uniform, common field. Meytus’s anthology is different from Barash’s anthology, which presents the lyric as an obligatory ideal. In his foreword, Meytus emphasizes that it is a compendium of poems, from among our poets’ best work, which will serve to amuse the lovers of poetry, will assist the performer in search of pieces for public recital, and might also simultaneously serve as a textbook of the development of Hebrew poetry. . . . This book includes poems that are appropriate for recital, both those that show dramatic content and those that are purely lyrical, where a talented performer having the proper good taste might show off his talents, because a good lyric poem, in my opinion, is a poem that may pleasantly be recited. . . . As to those poets who are already publicly accepted, I included such poems as


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are already established in the repertoire of recital, relinquishing my own taste in the process, even if the particular poems in question are not exactly characteristic of a given poet and even if they are not among the best of his poems considered from an artistic point of view. (pp. 1–2)

Since public recital is the dominant function of this collection, poems that show no “recital interest, even if they are good from a poetic point of view” may be excluded. But despite the more limited aims of his collection compared with those of Asher Barash, Meytus continues to obey the rules in terms of which a tradition is fabricated over the course of a shared national historical progression. This is reflected in the chronological ordering of the poems: the anthology contains 200 years of poetry, says Meytus, “with all its progressive periods, stylistic changes, and formal alterations. This date order is doubly beneficial for the reader, whose sequential reading will enable him to judge the diversity and wealth of the poetic repertoire our literature contains, and to learn to recognize its different metamorphoses.” What emerges clearly from this citation is that Meytus, despite having defined his anthology as seeking to fulfill the specific public function of recital (a function that deviates from the lyric ideal, which is apparently based on anti-functionalist and universalist criteria of poetic quality), nevertheless confirms the status of the comprehensive anthology as the tool of inclusive national representation, since it becomes the normative model that Meytus himself employs in editing his own recital-oriented anthology. Both Meytus’s anthology and that of Barash reiterate the accepted view of the development of the new Hebrew poetry, which H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik had already enshrined. Given his desire to institute a common and continuous national history of poetry from the perspective of the “National Revival,” Bialik points to Rabbi Moshe Haim Luzzatto as the pioneer who made the beginnings of Haskalah literature accord with the coming into being of a new national literature. In his mystical and romantic reading of Luzzatto, which was to be highly influential for Hebrew literary historiography, especially in Fishel Lahfi over’s writings, Bialik proposes Luzzatto as the father of the new national Hebrew literature primarily by virtue of his fusion of old and new, Jewish and foreign European. After 400 years of secret existence in the world of the kabbalah, Hebrew poetry emerged, says Bialik, at the time of Shabbetai Zevi during the seventeenth century, through Luzzatto’s “volcanic eruption” that restored it to the light of day. “Luzzatto,” writes Bialik, “was also the first European in Hebrew poetry.” It was through his poetic spirit’s harmonious coupling of the might of the Bible and the pleasantness of the German language, that he delivered unto us a fine and pleasant fusion. He used a meter poised between ancient and European ones and found once again the route to the revival of our poetry, and it is for this reason I see Rabbi Moshe H fi aim Luzzatto as the father of the new Hebrew poetry whose existence continues into the present.14

Elsewhere, Bialik emphasizes Luzzatto’s internal contradictions as the source of inner wealth. Reliance on this inner wealth lends his character universal power, which enables Bialik to present Luzzatto as a messianic-national poet. It is through


coupling Luzzatto’s ideological commitments to the form of the lyric that Bialik is able to present him as the forerunner of the new national culture. Through attributing to Luzzatto’s poetry inherent power stemming from the inner depths of his soul rather than being imposed on him from some external source, Bialik is able to invest Luzzatto with a type of national Zionist authority capable of serving as a model for the fashioning of the new Jew who derives his strength and life’s meaning from universally accepted values of inspiration and spiritual power. For “all of these contraries were united in the heart of the ‘young of Padua,’ the man whose destiny it would be to bring the literature of Israel from the lowest point of its degradation—to extract from within the very depths of [this literature’s] being— the great message of awakening and renewal, the message of the Revival.”15 These historiographic assumptions achieved wide currency in Hebrew literature between the two world wars. Taviov’s anthology16 —encompassing texts from the time of Menakhem ben Sarug’s early contributions to medieval Spanish poetry up to the work of Immanuel Francish in Italy—represents yet another prime example of the sheer ease with which they were naturalized. Taviov’s introduction sketches the development of Hebrew poetry, positing Luzzatto as the chief initiator of the national turn in the history of Hebrew poetry.

Nationalism and the H fi alutz Anthology The need to construct national historical continuity in the Hebrew poetry anthologies of the twenties and thirties is not uniformly central. Earlier stages of the development of the poetry anthology in Eretz Yisrael show no such pretensions to the authoritative historical narrative of the national development of the new Hebrew poetry. In 1904, at the tail end of the First Aliyah and in the early days of the Second Aliyah, a small volume of poetry entitled Kinor tsiyon [Harp of Zion] appeared. Its 1914 edition contained “fifty national and folk songs currently sung in the cities and settlements of the Holy Land,” and its editor was Abraham Moses Luntz, a researcher of the land of Israel and a publisher.17 The territory to which Luntz’s work lays claim was defined by him in quintessentially national terms. The collection was “one of the basic and most important devices in the cultural inventory of the elders of the Yishuv, and it accompanied them to every public forum.”18 The title of the collection, which was reprinted in seven editions, was drawn from the Zionist songbook Kinor tsiyon, which the Tushiya publishing house published in Warsaw in 1900, just before the Fourth World Zionist Congress in London.19 In contrast to the universal facade of the lyric in Barash’s anthology, Luntz’s work uses more disparate elements, which will ultimately create a very different collective image from the national-universalist one fostered toward the late thirties. Luntz’s anthology had an explicit function: it was a songbook of national poems. Its authority derived from its use as a collection of songs “currently sung in the cities and settlements of the Holy Land.” But instead of a general national authority presaged on a historical narrative—an authority that makes claims for the continuity and homogeneity of the national narrative whose individual poems are welded together to tell of the development of a national poetry having a fixed


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national and historical common denominator—Luntz’s anthology displays a rather more modest collective image, whose transient authority is born of actual circumstance. Luntz himself emphasizes this facet of his collection through entitling his introduction Zemanim ahfi erim: Shirim ahfi erim (Other Times: Other Songs):20 If you want to know the status of a given nation, its programs and goals at a given period, pay attention to the songs of that generation, for every generation has its own songs. And the visions of the long life of our nation can be viewed as if in a polished mirror in its poetry from “Then sang Moses and the Children of Israel” to the songs of our contemporary songwriters. Our generation is the generation of revival. Our people has arisen from its long dreams and slumber: seeing that time has misinterpreted them, it has begun to strive with all its might for a new life. New poets have arisen to pluck the strings of their harps, and new songs have been aired, songs of awakening. Many are these songs at present that would imbue our people with energetic desire and fierce enthusiasm, and it is common nowadays for those present at social gatherings to request, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” But not everyone knows these songs by heart; thus, we have attempted to gather the best and most appreciated of these songs into a single collection printed on good-quality paper, in the hope that the honorable public will be well disposed to this collection, which will be our reward.21

The fact that the organizing principle behind Kinor tsiyon is not historical but is rooted in actual circumstances of performance in a given place and time by given participants is reflected in the heterogeneity of this anthology, which does not require any uniformity from its constituents. Unlike other songbooks, which gradually became a “natural” component of popular Hebrew culture in Eretz Yisrael (and which fall beyond the scope of this discussion), Luntz’s anthology still makes no clear distinction between the songbook per se and the poetry anthology. So folk songs that exist only in oral performance, like H fi ushu ahfi im hfi ushu [Hasten Brothers, Hasten] by N. Pines are found side by side with poems like Masat nafshi [My Soul’s Desire] by M. Z. Mane, or Hatikvah (The Hope) by N. H. Imber, which—in addition to being sung—are assured of a place in the canon of high Hebrew lyric poetry. But this dependence on actual conditions also deprives Luntz’s anthology of its authority as a persistent and stable national representation with long-term validity extending from the present into the future. The national image created by Luntz’s anthology is a particularistic one of a community or grouping whose claims and expectations are far more circumscribed than those that characterize the modernist national consciousness. This type of modest national orientation persisted into later years. The hallmark of this nonuniversalist and limited national self-representation lies in its regionalism, its rootedness in the locale of Eretz Yisrael. The national territory was still not perceived in abstract terms as possessing universal meaning for the nation as a whole—in accordance with the universal norm of freedom, and rootedness in the nation’s own land. Rather, the space of Eretz Yisrael was seen in terms of belonging concretely to concrete locations: a belonging brought about through the pioneer’s, or hfi aluts’s, manual labor. Thus, for example, the pioneers’ poetry from the time of the Third Aliyah onward is seen as the local expression of native inhabitants anchored in their soil and their land. Such poems appeared in the


anthology Hahfi alutsim, which M. Narkis edited in 1925 and which was illustrated by the artist Meir Gur-Aryeh, an associate of the Bezalel Art Academy. The anthology’s chief goal is evident in its albumlike coupling of the poetic texts with Gur-Aryeh’s silhouettes so as to construct this cultural product as a popular national one, depicting the poetry of the hfi alutsim as representative of a popular stratum of the people. With the exception of three texts, all the poems (which include musical notes) are anonymous. The cutout silhouette illustrations, says Narkis in his preface, are also intended as a link in the long chain of popular Jewish art. The poems were selected not on the basis of their universal esthetic worth, or for their individual folk characteristics, but according to the criterion of their appropriateness in terms of the popular whole that the anthology sought to create. “I am aware of the difficulty of collecting these poems,” writes Narkis, “especially when their poetic worth is so limited and even when their popular status is in doubt.”22 While emphasizing the populist goal of the anthology, its editor nevertheless does not downplay the artificiality inherent in creating this effect. For this reason, he juxtaposes both the popular and the ethnographic principles, and even fashions a historiographic hypothesis regarding Hebrew poetry’s neglect of the topic of the hfi aluts: As we have noted, this movement [of the hfi alutsim] is held not to have influenced Hebrew poetry at all (except for a few individual and isolated cases: in poems and idylls). But if we are honest with ourselves, we will not reject the matter out of hand. We are dealing with the question of an elemental force, and only by virtue of the confusion of our tongues [Yiddish and Hebrew] have we lost hfi aluts poetry. This poetry has, however, a popular and ethnographic basis, and anyone tracing the development of these poems will sooner or later witness and discover gradual refinement.23

Populist characteristics are identified here with Yiddish, whose decline in prestige vis-a`-vis Hebrew is held to have had an adverse effect on popular texts, whether those written by the hfi alutsim or those that they sang: texts valued more for their tunes than for their verbal patterning. The latter poems, writes Narkis, were included “only in a small number of cases, where they displayed the special originality of life on the roads.”24 Canonical hfi aluts “Labor poetry” (presumably that of Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avraham Shlonsky, Yitshfi ak Lamdan, and others) is presented as “really” bearing little connection with the popular hfi alutsic tradition. The valorization of the local, and the specific group expression of the hfi aluts as a national archetype, found their expression in the creation of a poetry anthology that fashioned a nonuniversal national image, in opposition to the canonical stance of Hebrew poetry in Eretz Yisrael of the period. Unlike one of the founding assumptions of the canon, which saw in the pioneer (someone in advance of the camp) the incisive embodiment of national universal values, Narkis’s anthology (which included texts of recognized poets alongside anonymous folk- or “road-paving” work songs) promulgates the


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alternative image of a local collective—an image sharply at odds with the tradition of modern national Hebrew poetry.

Politics and Anthological Warfare There would be no successors to this type of specific anthology, whose representativeness does not obey the demands of universal or pan-national representation. The highly crystalized nature of the field of Hebrew culture in Eretz Yisrael in effect invested the anthological act with considerable power: the very act of collating poems into a single volume itself became the immediate symbol of a general national representation. Such a stance was still problematic, however, during the 1920s. The second half of the decade would witness the politicization of Hebrew poetry in Eretz Yisrael. The basic principles of an all-embracing nationalism (in terms of which the shared image of the hfi aluts as depicted in Shirat haavodah [Labor Poetry] had been central) began to be criticized. The poetry of the extreme leftist Lyova Almi, and later, even more powerfully, that of Uri Zvi Greenberg, rewrote the central representations of Eretz Yisraeli poetry, and the hfi aluts began to be perceived as the site of contest rather than consensus. In a series of poetic interventions, these avant garde poets attacked the foundations of Shirat haavodah, its agricultural metaphors, its compositions—which were well on the way to becoming a national teleology—and especially, the taken-for-granted continuity that Shirat haavodah constructed between the individual hfi aluts, whose body bears the suffering of the Zionist revolution in Eretz Yisrael, and the political leaders of this revolution—leaders that the avant garde sees as having abandoned or cynically exploited this suffering to their own political ends.25 One direct result of such exacerbated politicization was the conflict between the two rival factions of Eretz Yisraeli poetry, which reached its peak in the midthirties. One camp centered on the dominant presence of Uri Zvi Greenberg, turned to the Expressionist poetry of national messianic aspirations. It generated a blunt form of poetic discourse that stood in almost total opposition to any of the forms of Eretz Yisraeli Hebrew culture. The second camp, led by Avraham Shlonsky, had begun from the early thirties to crystalize around an abstract symbolism, having universal-existential claims that reached their epitome in Shlonsky’s Avnei bohu (Stones of Chaos), published in 1934.26 When, in 1932, Avraham Shlonsky published Lo tirtsahfi : Yalqut qatan shel shirim neged hamilhfi amah on the eighteenth anniversary of World War I, all its texts—with the exception of those by Avigdor Hameiri, who was prominently identified with anti-war literature—were translations of European poetry. The poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ernst Toller, Noel Martine, Karl Otto, and others are collected here in an act that displaces the discussion from the polarized field of Zionist national culture in Eretz Yisrael to the world of Europe. It is only in his introduction to the anthology that Shlonsky refers to the political situation of Eretz Yisrael. He links the pacifist spirit of the anthology to Eretz Yisraeli politics and compares the rift dividing the Zionist right and left to the political polarization of Europe in the wake of World War I. The European right and its Eretz Yisraeli


counterpart, claims Shlonsky, share an admiration for political messianism, while both support Fascist-style militarism and violence: For even in our circles, even before we have achieved sovereignty or its symbols, the “lead soldiers” of extreme nationalism have been clamoring continuously for years. We have youth, leaders, and a party in our midst, who have made brute force into the symbol of revival, who sanctify the symbols of bravery and extol the outer trappings of hollow militarism.27

Here, Shlonsky takes aim at all those who “have taken upon themselves to set this mental intoxication to poetry in the best rhythms and rhymes, and to infiltrate the Israeli poetic brew with such notions as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘vision’ ” (p. 31). But there can be no doubt that his main target is Uri Zvi Greenberg, whom he openly attacked for his political and literary views, singling him out as someone who had wrought militaristic changes in the hfi alutsic ethos, during the course of which: “ ‘barracks’ terminology has been infused into the poetry of the Messiah and the Kingdom of the House of David” (p. 31). Shlonsky chose to stage his opposition to Uri Zvi Greenberg and to the acute political polarization characteristic of the Eretz Yisraeli Hebrew culture of the time through the medium of his essays rather than in poetry. Shlonsky left poetry outside the theater of direct conflict, thus enacting—and testifying to—the distance his school sought to establish between poetry, on the one hand, and overt public or political engagement, on the other. While war and military conflict could legitimately serve as the subject of an anthology of poetry, for Shlonsky and his increasingly powerful school, such issues could be addressed only through the indirect channels of universalist pacifism, which distances its testimony from the military dimensions of the local arena, through the inclusion of translated poetry rather than Hebrew poetry, which is represented discursively only in an analytical manner and only in his opening essay.

The Consummation of the Nationalist Anthology In 1936, at the start of the great Arab rebellion known to the yishuv as the “1936 riots,” another anthology appeared, Shirat hadamim: Qovets shirim mitovei meshorereinu al meoraot tartsav. The members of Shlonsky’s school were not represented here (with the exception of the marginally affiliated Yaakov Orland). Instead, one finds the marked presence of people like Saul Tchernichowsky, David Shimonowitz, and Yehudah Karni, who belonged to previous generations of Hebrew poets; some of Shlonsky’s contemporaries, like S. Shalom and Avraham Broydes; and even younger poets, like Moshe [Tabenkin], who were unaffiliated with Shlonsky’s school or coterie. In the introduction, entitled Bli hfi aruzim [Without Rhymes], Avigdor Hameiri (who was associated with right-wing factions of Eretz Yisraeli politics) formulated a national apologetics for the involvement of poetry in current affairs. His starting point was the moral or universalistic inquiry whether the Zionist refusal to recognize the Arab rebellion as a national one stemmed merely from the particularism of the Zionist perspective. Hameiri’s emphatic answer was that the contrary, in


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fact, held, and that “we are faced with the loathsome nature of the rebellions: the overlords of property and pleasures are employing the miserable oppressed stratum to increase its own oppression, and to eliminate both soap and the candle from the dark and musty tent of the Bedouin or fellahfi [peasant].”28 Only after this categorical refusal and after reiterating the morality of the Jewish position in the Jewish conflict with the Arabs does Hameiri discuss war poetry, justifying it as a form of national expression that gives primacy to universal or moral issues that stand beyond all esthetic considerations. The fact that “included in this collection you will find poems whose artistic value does not enhance it” testifies to an alternative viewpoint. It reflects the opinion of those who hold that “I am forbidden to keep silent on this good occasion. That is to say, let me join the chorus, let me raise my voice in the national performance [literally, hfi azzanut, or ceremonial chanting] that is eagerly attended by many ears. Such individuals also find their place here. And they are also worthy of it. If not their artistic worth, surely their moral worth justifies their being and their inclusion” (pp. 4–5). The dominant strategy in Shirat hadamim represents the national position as a universalist and a moral one. This strategy eventually culminates in the fusion of nationalist morality with the national needs of the local Eretz Yisraeli collective. It is only after he has established the larger nationalism that Hameiri, in the conclusion to his introduction, reveals its local or Eretz Yisraeli functionality: “As for the Israeli moral or human function of these poems: more than a generationsold lament, they unite into a rousing victory chorus. This is not the Book of Lamentations . . . not the complaint of death but a ground plan for the eternity of Israel” (p. 6). But what, in 1936, is for Hameiri still the subject of polemical contest and proof appears slightly later as the self-evident subject of consensus. Asher Barash’s anthology, published only two years later, already assumes the Eretz Yisraeli nationalist ideology to be self-evident. Here, the Eretz Yisraeli national center is held to be of primary importance. The entire development of Hebrew poetry over the preceding 200 years is represented as progressing toward its Zionist fulfillment in Eretz Yisrael. Further proof of this is found in the year of publication of Barash’s anthology when the Antologya shel shirah ivrit baameriqa [Anthology of Hebrew Poetry in America] appears under Menahfi em Ribolov’s editorship. In order to decide whether to include a given poet in the anthology, the editor found it sufficient for America to have served as a stage in his development (in a trajectory that often leads to Eretz Yisrael), thus reaffirming the peripheral nature of the Hebrew center in the United States vis-a`-vis its Eretz Yisraeli counterpart.29

Nationalist Anthologies and Universal History Immediately hereafter, during the Second World War and later, during the struggle for independence and the 1948 war, the anthology of Hebrew poetry became established as a quintessentially Eretz Yisrael institution. The pan-national and regionalist representations fuse so that the moral-universalistic stance and the localist one unite into a single central nationalist affirmation. Thus, even though anthologies dealing with the war and the military struggle against the Arab nations


do appear at this time, the national framework goes unchallenged, and the Eretz Yisraeli arena becomes the most natural stage for the national representation of Hebrew poetry. The substitution of more specific anthologies for the comprehensive and lyric-oriented one augments—rather than diminishes—the anthology’s universalist dimensions: the shift rendered the elevated and harmonious representation supposedly inhering in the lyric an overt source of collective resources and a tool of the struggle. Shlonsky’s poetic school, which valorized this universalist conception of the lyric, was then at the height of its powers. In 1941, Shlonsky edited a representative collection of the school’s contribution, entitled Shishah pirqei shirah [Six Chapters of Poetry],30 which included the work of Refael Eliaz, Natan Alterman, Yocheved Bat-Miriam, Leah Goldberg, Alexander Penn, and Shlonsky himself. But the school’s most dominant imprint lay in the translations contained in one of the best-known anthologies of the period, Shirat rusyah [Russian Poetry], which appeared in 1942, at the height of the war years, and which was jointly edited by Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg. Published by Haqibbuts Haartsi Hashomer Hatsair, this anthology expressed a universal humanism, in the light of the editors’ and publishers’ identification with the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazism. As was the case with the esthetic and ideological assumptions of Barash’s anthology, here too a refined universalism (in whose name the anthology claims to speak) serves to ground all historical occurrences. The events of the day and its political trends did not move Shlonsky from his commitment to a position that derived its hegemonic authority from the universal. Whereas in Barash’s anthology, esthetic ideals fostered the Zionist spirit of the nation, Shirat rusyah renders central the lyric as the source of those moral qualities that unite all humanity—including the Jewish people—in its struggle against the common enemy during this dark historical hour: Yalqut shirat haamim [Compendium of Poetry of the Peoples]—this is an inclusive name for six poetic sequences conceived as one unit of the new world poetry across its various nations and tongues—especially in lyric form—texts that begin with Russia, not necessarily for formal reasons. The intention is not to such-andsuch selected poetry or to so-and-so unique poets of genius. The intention is to sketch the portrait of a generation, [to write] its moral biography, which achieves its highest expression in each language and each nation through the medium of poetry. Poetry—which is apparently the expression of a particular period—speaks to all periods precisely by virtue of this fact. [Poetry is] apparently the introspective dialogue of a generation addressing its own heart, and of each individual nation addressing its own soul. But ultimately, [it is] a single chorus of the nations of the world. For each and every generation fashions through its poetry (in its general ensemble rather than through the individual play of poets of genius) its own character; and in the essence of its being, all true poetry is rooted in the here and now: springs from its own place, suckles [the milk] of its own times. Because it aims to express the essence of what is human, the boundaries of time and place are necessarily violated and poetry ascends the intergenerational and international bridge of the human spirit. And it is appropriate for the poetry collected here to open this series of collective confessions—regarding the emotions of a generation, its high and low tides, its hates and loves. It will certainly be said in the annals


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of this generation: this was a hard-hearted generation of sinners that nevertheless sought redemption and atonement.31

In 1943, when the Holocaust was at its peak, a literary critic identified with Hashomer Hatsair and the left, Azriel Schwartz (who later called himself Uchmani), edited a small anthology called Alei teref: Mishirei haamim bamilhfi amah. Its poems, which had appeared in contemporary periodicals, were to be judged “not according to the merit of each poem, but in its ability to join the poetic chronicle of our times, a tragic chronicle whose beginnings lie twenty-nine years ago, in that fateful junction between two ‘histories’—that of ‘blood and selfishness’ and that which ‘creates the lives and souls of nations.’ Today it lies in the scaffold of public execution and horror, in heroism and the sanctification of the name of humankind, and its end lies in that distant day, whose warm breath is only apprehended from time to time by a heart’s guessing.”32 Hebrew poetry is the last of the sections of this book, which contains mostly representative translations of poetry from Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland, England, Greece, Serbia, the U.S.S.R., as well as Yiddish poetry. But the universal gaze is soon revealed to have a specific political commitment that sees the U.S.S.R.’s war against Nazi Germany as part of the large struggle of the socialist camp. The universalist humanism that it sees in the poetry of the Jewish Holocaust is given a strictly political reading: It is no coincidence that it is the Jewish poet who is currently voicing the plea “from the vanities of the monster’s mouth, we beseech, protect the tribe.” [It is no coincidence] that it is he who waits so eagerly for a day when “all our words will be told to return from the den of distortion and the grinding of teeth.” Destiny? Surely. Tragic destiny, but splendor inhabits its margins. In our day, this bears no name other than socialism. (p. 6)

Accordingly, the historical narrative in whose framework the poems are ordered presents the socialist interpretation of the Second World War. It is held to derive from the events of the First World War, which the socialists saw as a conflict between nationalism/capitalism versus humanism/socialism. In the anthology that Shlonsky edited two years later, Shirei hayamim: Yalqut mishirat haolam al milhfi emet haolam, the universalist stance is even more blatant. Here, the editor in fact declares his intention to use the poems he has anthologized in order to write a universal history: Songs of the Days: modeled on the Book of Chronicles. A kind of autobiography of a generation, written collectively in rhyme. Poetic testimony on the forecasts and events that opened World War II, on that which preceded it, on the war, the war itself when it reached fruition, ripe in its sins and its retributions. . . . And thus, from people to people, from matter to matter. A kind of montage of poems, which aim to give expression to the major and minor dates of the period. If not to all of them, at least to most, insofar as they fuse into a general picture, a fabula of the time, insofar as they are to be read in a manner that differs from the way anthologies are usually read. That is to say, [they are not to be read] randomly, but in sequence, one after another, the way one reads a book whose plot unifies it. . . . The main aim of the book: to focus mental identification on the rage of

296 The Modern Period men and nations, the lamentations of cities and countries, all plunged alike into the abyss of blood—and not taken by surprise or overcome by the way of the world, but intentionally destined to it, for the sins they committed, everyone, everyone, down to the very last individual.33

The conflict between commitment to hegemonic universalism, on the one hand, versus the horror of the actual forces ranged against the Jewish people, on the other, brought Shlonsky, ever loyal to his universalist conceptions, to portray the Jewish national Holocaust as part—admittedly, the most appalling part— of the larger world tragedy. “Min hatevahfi ” [From the slaughter], he would write, is “the name of the Israeli section of this inclusive book. . . . For despite the uniqueness of our destruction, which is a result of our actual/historical singular destiny, is it not also ‘inverted,’ the result of the general destiny of the world? These chronicles prove this in cutting (in both senses of the word!) terms” (p. 6). Shlonsky fused national and universal destiny through combining his own poetry with translated poems, as well as by means of a key poem entitled Otot (Signs), which he wrote specially for the collection. Each of its stanzas serves to introduce the different sections of the anthology; thus, for example, the section “Otot,” which deals with the historical buildup to the war in Europe, including the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi rise to power in Germany and which contains poems by H. Leyvik, Fritz Brigel, Pablo Neruda, and others, as well as poems by Shlonsky himself. Taken as a whole, the poem’s symbolist framework and its plot of lights culminate in the optimistic gesture of “You, and You again, command there will be light” (p. 6), which interprets actual events in a lyric and universalist fashion. But in the note concerning the rights of public reading of the collected poems, which Shlonsky appends in the margins of the anthology—a note that is indicative of the direct enlistment of the anthology in the national cause—we might discern a certain confusion of the traditional generic boundaries between written lyric poetry and poetry for recital. The implicit recommendation that the poems be recited in public may be linked to the fact that the anthology has as its object indisputably collective themes—“war,” “bravery,” “illegal immigration to Palestine,” “settlement”—each entailing previously institutionalized and fixed public meanings outside of the orbit of poetry. Unlike the collective anthology, which produces and represents the imagined national community only indirectly in a lyric transcendence of oppositions, now, at the height of the struggle for Independence, we find the anthology being used more and more frequently as a direct tool of propaganda bearing instructions to its readers on its public use. Mapilim: Miqraah lanoar velaam, a work edited by Zvi Zohar and published in 1940, is a characteristic example of the anthology that engages in specific and immediate issues in public life. Berl Katzenelson’s address to the Twenty-First World Zionist Congress opens the volume: an address that links the contemporary illegal immigration to the ongoing sequence of Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael as clear expression of “the common Jewish destiny.”34 The anthology contains a diversity of texts—articles, stories, prose essays, and extracts from plays and poetry—which are ordered chronologically to reflect the history of immigration to Israel from Yehudah Halevi to the refugees fleeing Nazism who had begun to


297

make their way to Israel from Europe. In the preface to a similar anthology, Pirqei gevurah, the editor Zerubavel (Glas, and later, Gilad) writes: This collection is the product of the needs of the hour: tens of thousands of our friends have joined their units, and are serving in the distant corners of the world—they require this anthology to assist them on festivals and other occasions suitable for public reading that are integrated in our lives. [It is also needed] for reading around the campfire, when out camping, or when marching on the road.35

One consequence of the dominance of the propaganda function lies in the blurring of the genres of texts selected now for their direct and overt contribution to the propaganda effort. In Pirqei gevurah, as well as in its second edition, which bore the title Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael, popular songs stand alongside canonic poetry, stories, articles, and memoirs. But all are arranged according to the chronology of the Jewish national struggle from biblical times through the period of the Holocaust to the struggle against the British Mandate. The stated intention is to construct a continuous saga of Jewish heroism, which unites the Diaspora tradition of martyrdom, or Qiddush Hashem, with the need for self-defense in such a way that “Jewish self-defense will resound through the generations as the vision of the heroism of the few who opposed the tsars; those who extended their necks in powerful exultation of the martyrs and as the mighty and passionate defenders bearing arms—a source of pride and a fortified wall against the evildoers. Until this very day.”36 The anthology Lamagen: Pirqei shirah [To the Defender: Selected Poetry], edited by Yehudit Hendel and published in 1948 by the Information [Hasbarah] Department of the Executive Committee [Havaad hapoel] of the General Labor Union [Histadrut haklalit shel haovdim], is devoted entirely to poetry, but its didactic intent is underscored by its glossaries as well as by its blurring of the boundaries between “high” and “low” texts; between translated and original texts; and between the lyric and poetic prose. It includes biblical extracts, Yiddish poems, popular songs (Natan Alterman’s Zemer haplugot [Song of the Brigades], for instance), and canonic poetry by Alterman, Saul Tchernichowsky, and others. A similar heterogeneity marks other literary and documentary works published during the war, collections devoted to contemporary literary products that sought transparently to reflect the events of the time. Thus, for example, we have Beiqvot lohfi amim: Mivhfi ar reportaz'im meet tseva haganah urshimot midivrei yishuvim bamaarakhah [In the Footsteps of Soldiers: Selected Reports from Defense-Force Writers and Notes from Front-Line Settlements], which appeared in 1949, or the collection Qeshet sofrim: Yalqut ledivrei sifrut shel sofrim hfi ayalim [The Writer’s Bow: A Collection of the Literary Output of Soldier Writers], published under Moshe Shamir’s editorial direction in 1949 by the cultural wing of the IDF press (Hotzaat Sherut Hatarbut Shel Tseva Haganah Leyisrael). The latter anthology contained poetry, stories, and articles. Despite the fact that it is supposedly a collection produced by “soldier writers,” the presence of writers of the generation of the Palmahfi and of Shlonsky’s successors among the poets of the forties—Ayin Hillel, Binyamin Galay, and H fi aim Guri—is marked.


The Boundaries of an Anthology For the anthologies of war literature published during the war, national engagement seemed to be a dictate of reality. But in 1948, when H fi aim Toren published his Shirei ahavah beyisrael, we find the same overt nationalist criteria still in force. The guiding principle is encoded in the full title of the work: Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu. The editor took pains to imbue the anthology with the appearance of continuity through the inclusion of biblical texts (from Genesis, the Song of Songs, and Proverbs), the literature of the aggadah, medieval Spanish poetry, Hebrew poetry composed in Italy, Haskalah poetry, H fi ibbat Tsiyon poetry, revival poetry, all alongside the early modernists, as well as the modernists of the thirties and forties. These texts are included in the anthology under the rubric of common national sources. The chronological organization of the work is constantly interrupted through deviations, such as the placing of extracts from the Song of Songs at the end of the sequence, thus ensuring a cyclicity that unifies the sequence into a kind of synchronous existence through returning to the biblical period with which it begins. The editor chose to open the anthology with Yaakov Fichman’s preface, Al shirat haahavah besifrut yisrael, where he narrates the history of Hebrew love poetry as a form of national teleology. In the same way that morality provided the universalist underpinnings for the representation of national culture in the anthologies of war poetry, so do Eros and love perform a similar function here: Love, which is the yeast of experience, is also the yeast of poetry. From time immemorial, poetry has seen love as the root of all growth, of every great awakening in the human heart or in nature. All folk poetry begins with it, blossoms with it. . . . Love poetry teaches one of the uniqueness of the individual soul, and of the nation as a whole. Just as each individual loves differently, so each nation loves differently.37

Fichman proceeds to recount the development of Hebrew love poetry as a national saga, where, for example: The Song of Songs is the most complete and full expression of Israel’s affinity for love and nature, which fuse together in all true lyric poetry. . . . But the erotic song, which flows forth from the heart of the shepherd in the Song of Songs under a burning sun, is completely cut off. There is not a single love poem in Hebrew literature until the Spanish period. This was one of the most harsh signs of Diaspora. It reveals a kind of fear of life and love of life. The national genius was forced into a dim corner: the light of religion and the Torah absorbed all other sources of light. And while there can be no doubt that the masses of the people expressed the delight of their spring in oral poetry, no written traces have survived. (pp. 5–6)

The metaphor of poetry as life and vice versa becomes the central figure for the fusion of the metamorphoses of poetry and the metamorphoses of the nation into one homogeneous tale. Thus, the story reaches its climax with the poetry of Bialik and his generation in the Zionist narrative in Eretz Yisrael:


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Particular mention must be made of the young Hebrew poetry that Erets Israel has generated—this cult of dawn that has derived sustenance from our new life. This is a special case—the first pages of a new story in poetry as well as in life. It has one color, one rhythm. Certainly, all great love is blessed with joy and with pain—this has its character since the Song of Songs until the present: anxiety and security are always bound up in it together. Nevertheless, the love poetry that accompanies the new flowering is more the poetry of day, of the sun-filled with the light of renewed experience. (p. 19)

The editor, Toren, in his afterword, similarly reiterates the storytelling mold that identifies love poetry with Jewish existence in its homeland, and the absence of love poetry with the experience of the Diaspora. The exception that proves the rule is Hebrew poetry in Spain and Italy. Like Fichman, Toren progresses inexorably to Eretz Yisrael, where, in the boundaries of the motherland, hammer meets anvil—and the ears are open and ready to absorb the abundance of sounds and voices. Here, nature and love poetry are heard in their full power and momentum, as is appropriate to a people undergoing an awakening of body and soul.38 But the process of fashioning a national image by means of love poetry also involves confronting questions of gender identity in the individual/national love story. When the editor comments on the inclusion of women poets in the anthology, his intervention comes to be a complex form of exclusion. To justify their inclusion, he relies on the notion of national fulfillment in Eretz Yisrael: “The very appearance of a group39 of Hebrew women poets is a great innovation (Elisheva, Rahfi el, Y. Bat-Miriam, Anda Pinkerfeld, Leah Goldberg, and others). Their coming reveals to us the inner world of the woman, and elucidates something of the secret of her being, in all its delicate and complex experiences” (p. 342). When the discussion turns to the inclusion of women, the norm of the individual lyric is suspended. Instead, Toren uses the metaphor lahakat meshorerot (“flock of women poets”), translating the traditional metaphor of the lyric as a form of birdsong (Goethe) into the collective formulation of a flock of birds. Women writers’ contribution to the institution of imagined nationalism is made possible here through their enclosure within a stereotype, whereby they are the collective representatives of the female in national culture and are supposed to embody this femininity through such “female” qualities as gentleness, irrationalism, and secret mystery. Since they fulfill the legitimate norms of nationalism, the national hegemony grants them a space of inclusion, but it does so within rigidly defined and circumscribed limits. The contemporary equivalent to Toren’s Shirei ahavah beyisrael is the anthology Shirat haamal, edited by Pesahfi Ginzburg. Ginzburg chose a topic like Labor, whose national implications are unmatched. “Labor poetry” reached its zenith in the days of the Third and Fourth Aliyah. The historical specificity of the phenomenon is made by the anthology into a pan-national one, which is invested with a continuity stretching from the days of the Bible until present times. The continuity of Jewish culture is absorbed into the continuity of the Zionist culture of the day. This inclusive representation also assumes Eretz Yisrael affiliation to be the turning point in the development of the poetic corpus. As we have


already noted regarding Toren, here, too, there is total overlap between the development of the poetry and the Zionist teleology: The song of the land—how fundamentally it differs from Hebrew poetry in the Diaspora. Diaspora poetry is no more, and while most of the Diaspora poets have settled in Israel, their immigration has produced a new melody in their poetry. This is the melody of a special type of rejoicing, the rejoicing of workers, the reward of productive labor, which was almost unmentioned in Hebrew Diaspora poetry despite the fact that it treated other human issues. And wonder of wonders: this “new” song contains the echoes of a very ancient one indeed: the song of “they that sow in tears shall reap in joy.” This melody, thousands of years old, was preserved for a wandering people in the sacred parchments and whispered prayers, where the people throughout its wandering sought union with its God and with its devastated, far-off land. It seems that these echoes grew more and more faint until the people returned to beautify the dust of its land.40

In Shirat haamal, however, as in the other anthologies, the organizing agency may be seen to produce the inclusive and seemingly natural representation through the deferral of conflicts and the exclusion of dissident elements for the construction of the shared imagined nationality. Once again, the anthology seeks out the alibi of “writing in Hebrew” in order to disguise a much larger system of constraints affecting participation in a representative anthology of Hebrew poetry. It is not the criterion of the Hebrew language, but norms concerning ethnicity, class perspectives, religious and gender identity that establish which texts may legitimately be included in the pages of the anthology. Thus, despite his stated commitment to the tradition of the theme of work in Hebrew poetry, Ginzburg consistently refuses to include in his anthology all political or class-bound representations of work produced in Eretz Yisrael, such as the proletarian poetry of Lyova Almi or Alexander Penn. Instead, his evidence is distanced in both time and space to alight on the work of the Hebrew socialists Morris Winchevsky (BenNetz) and Yitshfi ak Kaminer, written in the Diaspora in the period of H fi ibbat Tsiyon. The exclusion of unworthy candidates is, once again, the gesture that fixes the legitimate boundaries of the national anthology, rather than the use of Hebrew in and of itself.

Lyric and the Universal Nationalist Experience In the afterword to Shirei ahavah beyisrael, H fi aim Toren testifies to having spent about four years editing the volume—that is to say, from the period of the world war and the Holocaust to the appearance of the book in 1948. But alongside this admission, Toren stresses his didactic motives (p. 342). In this sense, his anthologizing gesture serves to transplant the literary act far from the arena of suffering and death, which was so directly and strongly felt at the time. So once again, under the guise of its universalism, nationalist discourse evades direct confrontation with the events and polarizations of its period, just as the anthology once again achieves its status as representation through the displacement of deferral of oppositions and incommensurate fragments.


301

In this sense, even the historically comprehensive anthology such as Shirah ivrit: Antologyah shel hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah meramhfi al vead yameinu, which Yitshfi ak Ogen edited, still constitutes a form of displacement. Retrospectively, viewed in the wake of the Holocaust, it seems to attempt a nostalgic preservation of the world of Jewish culture that had been destroyed. And it is not alone in this respect. H. B. Ayalon-Bernik’s 1946 anthology Hayo haya maaseh: Folqlor shel yehudei mizrahfi europah [Once upon a Time: Folklore of the Jews of Eastern Europe] explicitly inscribes itself as seeking to save the spiritual possession of European Jewry. Ogen, one of the central authors in the group affiliated with the periodical Gilyonot, edited by Yitshfi ak Lamdan, seems to have sought to use his anthology to invest the poetic voice with public and national authority and legitimacy—a poetic voice, however, which spoke in accordance with a Bialikan poetics that was already beginning to be seen as outmoded during the early forties. Although intended as part of a series stretching into the present, the anthology had no successor—and it ended, in fact, with the poetry of the H fi ibbat Tsiyon movement. But the presence of Bialik and his generation is inescapable, especially in Ogen’s treatment of Luzzatto as someone who sought “to redeem the people so that its redemption is a redemption of experience itself in the mystical apprehension of the Hebrews. [Luzzatto] opened new horizons for Hebrew poetry, using it in the quest for the people’s redemption.”41 Similarly, Ogen proposes a nostalgic and anachronistic reading of Haskalah and H fi ibbat Tsiyon poetry in the shadow of the Holocaust: While its primary orientation concerns social questions, throughout its course it shows a strong and emphatic individualistic principle. . . . Poetry deals with the public and its needs, serving as a mouthpiece for its preoccupations, but it nevertheless does not neglect the general human problems of the individual, or purely artistic problems. These are refined, exposed, and commemorated in expression, in imagery, in vision and character. (p. 2)

Unlike the almost compulsory attitude of disparagement toward the poetry of the Haskalah, brought about largely because of the interventions of Shlonsky and his associates42 in the wake of the devastation of the European Diaspora, the emphasis shifts to a late rehabilitation of the poetry of the Haskalah. The overall organizing principle of the anthology still manifests the same fixed tension between the romantic nationalist stance and the recognition of the rationalism and rhetoric of Haskalah poetry. But Ogen seeks to overcome this tension, to espouse two incommensurate positions simultaneously in the cause of the construction of a consensual, continuous framework for the national literature. Thus, on the one hand, he states his editorial policy to have privileged “the individual lyric principle in the work of each poet,” over “the social publicist” elements, which are in turn privileged over “epic principles” (p. 4). But on the other hand, he declares his intention to familiarize the reader and the student with the poetry of Haskalah and H fi ibbat Tsiyon (p. 2). In the wake of the Holocaust, the fixed model of the universalist representation of the national experience through the individualist lyric emerges as the most


effective and most widespread means of instituting a shared national image by means of the Hebrew anthology.

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):199–225. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. Asher Barash, foreword to A Selection of the New Hebrew Poetry [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv, 1938). 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1991). 3. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 157–60. 4. Jerusalem, 1948. 5. Tel Aviv, 1936. 6. Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael [The Legacy of Heroism: Chapters from the Literature of Israel] (Jerusalem, 1948). 7. yli—!y"nh. " —al" —!Wht.y ;w . yli—!y"n>h"—!yDE. Dov Sadan, “Poetry and Its Selection,” in Avnei bedeq: Al sifruteinu, masdah vaanafeha [Stones of Repair: About our Literature, Its Foundations and Its Branches] (Tel Aviv, 1962), p. 69. 8. Yehuda Ratsabi, ed., Shirat teiman haivrit (leqet nivhfi ar) [Yemenite Hebrew Poetry (Selections)] (Tel Aviv, 1989). 9. Hazan Efraim, ed., Hashirah haivrit bitsfon afriqa [Hebrew Poetry in North Africa] (Jerusalem, 1995). 10. Y[aakov] F[ichman], “The Selection of New Hebrew Poetry” [Hebrew], Moznayim 6 (1937–38):399. 11. Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautupia [Captives of Utopia] (Kiryat Sde Boker, 1995), pp. 95–177. 12. Tel Aviv, 1937. 13. Foreword to Shirateinu hahfi adashah: Liqutim lemiqra uldiqlum [Our New Poetry: Compilations for Reading and Recital] (Tel Aviv, 1938). 14. H fi . N. Bialik, Devarim shebeal-pe [Oral Presentations], 2 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1935), 2: 17–18. 15. H fi . N. Bialik, “ ‘The Young of Padua,’ with the Publication of The Book of Plays by Ramhfi al” [Hebrew], in Divrei sifrut [On Literature] (Tel Aviv, 1974), p. 137. 16. Y. H. Taviov, Otsar hashirah vehamelitsah [Treasury of Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1922, 1929). 17. Kinor tsiyon [Harp of Zion] (Jerusalem, 1993 [1914]). 18. “Other Times: Other Songs,” Kinor tsiyon. 19. Eliahu Hakoen, “Introduction to the Facsimile Edition,” Kinor tsion. 20. Shir, the Hebrew term that was used in the original text, covers meanings of both a poem and a song. 21. “Other Times: Other Songs,” Kinor tsiyon. 22. M. Narkis, preface, Hahfi alutsim [The Pioneers] (Jerusalem, 1925). 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Hannan Hever, Paytanim uviryonim: Tsmihfi at hashir hapoliti bashirah haivrit beerets yisrael [Poets and Zealots: The Rise of Political Poetry in the Hebrew Poetry in Eretz Yisrael] (Jerusalem, 1994). 26. Hannan Hever, Bishvi hautopia: Masa al meshihfi iyut ufolitiqah bashirah haivrit


303

bein shtey milhfi amot haolam [Captive of Utopia: An Essay on Messianism and Politics in Hebrew Poetry on Eretz Yisrael between the two world wars] (Kiryat Sde Boker, 1996). 27. Avraham Shlonsky, introduction to Lo tirtsahfi : Yalqut qatan shel shirim neged hamilhfi amah [Thou Shalt Not Kill: A Small Compilation of Anti-war Poems] (Tel Aviv, 1932), p. 27. 28. Avigdor Hameiri, “Without Rhymes” [Hebrew], introduction to Shirat hadamim: Qovets shirim mitovei meshorereinu al meoraot tartsav [The Poetry of Blood: An Anthology of the Best of Our Poets Concerning the 1936 Riots] (Tel Aviv 1936), p. 4. 29. Menahfi em Ribolov, “Lasefer” [For the Book], Antologyah shel shirah ivrit baameriqah [Anthology of Hebrew Poetry in America] (New York, 1938), p. 2. 30. Avraham Shlonsky, Shishah pirqei shirah [Six Chapters of Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1941). 31. Avraham Shlonsky and Leah Goldberg, preface to Shirat rusyah [Russian Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1942), p. 7. 32. A[zriel] S[chwartz], preface, Alei teref: Mishirei haamim bamilhfi amah [Fallen Leaves: From the Poems of Peoples at War] (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 5. 33. Avraham Shlonsky, preface, Shirei hayamim: Yalqut mishirat haolam al milhfi emet haolam [Poems of the Days: A Collection of World Poetry on the World War] (Tel Aviv, 1945), p. 5. 34. Berl Katzenelson, “Instead of a Preface,” in Zvi Zohar, ed., Mapilim: Miqraah lanoar velaam [Illegal Immigrants: A Reader for Youth and for the People] (Jerusalem, 1940), p. 8. 35. Zerubavel [Glas], preface, Pirqei gevurah [Chapters of Heroism], 1944. 36. Zerubavel [Glas], preface, Moreshet gevurah: Peraqim misifrut yisrael, p. 3. 37. Yaakov Fichman, “Al shirat haahavah besifrut yisrael” [On the Love Poetry in the Literature of Israel], in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu [Love Poetry in Israel from Ancient Times to the Present] (Jerusalem, 1948), pp. 1–2. 38. H fi aim Toren, “With the Book,” in Shirei ahavah beyisrael: Mimei qedem ad yameinu, pp. 341–42. 39. The Hebrew word is the feminine lahaqah, literally, “flock.” 40. Pesahfi Ginzburg, introduction, Shirat haamal [Work Poetry] (Tel Aviv, 1947), p. 5. 41. Yitshfi ak Ogen, preface, Shirah ivrit: Antologyah shel hashirah haivrit hahfi adashah meramhfi al vead yameinu [Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology of the New Hebrew Poetry from Rabbi Moses H fi aim Luzzatto until the Present Day] (Tel Aviv, 1948), p. 6. 42. See esp. Eliezer Steinman’s comments in his Bemizreh hazman [In the Winnowing Shovel of Time] (Tel Aviv, 1931).

16 jeffrey shandler

Anthologizing the Vernacular Collections of Yiddish Literature in English Translation

he cultural value that Jews have long invested in translation and their attraction

to what David Stern terms the “anthological habit” converge in anthologies T of Yiddish literature in translation. While these collections bear traits in common 1

with other anthologies in the Jewish library, they are distinguished by the association of Yiddish with vernacularity, especially with the particulars of Ashkenazic vernacular speech and culture as they took shape within a variety of multilingual Diaspora milieus. Anthologies of modern Yiddish literature translated into English (the largest corpus of Yiddish belles lettres rendered in a non-Jewish language) seek to present the unique achievement of this modern secular literature to new audiences—not only to non-Jews and non-Ashkenazim, but to the growing number of descendants of Yiddish speakers who no longer speak or read Yiddish and who have a very different sense of Jewish linguistic and cultural vernacularity than did their recent forebears. For this reason, these collections are of interest not only as literary works of translation and canonization, but also as agents of cultural transmission. My examination of selected anthologies of Yiddish literature in English translation does not center on issues of literary connoisseurship involved in selecting and translating works, which have been ably addressed by others.2 Rather, my focus is on how issues of canon, format, taxonomy, and framing in these volumes relate to the anthologists’ conceptualization of their respective readers and of the readers’ mission. In each example examined here the mission is, ultimately, extraliterary, imposing both on the works themselves and on their readers an onus of cultural, even communal, survival. The volumes I’ve chosen for discussion are therefore not necessarily those of the highest artistic merit; rather, they articulate the dynamic relationship of English-speaking Jews with Yiddish literature and culture at strategic moments over the course of the twentieth century.3 At the turn of this century, Yiddish language and literature were poised on a cultural threshold, as notions of Jewish vernacularity were in the throes of a signal change. In what Benjamin Harshav has termed the “modern Jewish revolution,” 304

Anthologizing the Vernacular 305

the semiotics of traditional Ashkenazic multilingualism experienced abrupt, radical reconfigurations on an unprecedented mass scale.4 Many European Jews were embracing local non-Jewish languages as their vernacular in the spirit of integration, and growing numbers championed the revival of Hebrew as a language of daily life. At the same time, the status of Yiddish—the mother tongue of the majority of world Jewry and almost universally spoken by the several million Jews living in Eastern Europe—was transformed, by both its detractors and its champions. The remarkable achievements of modern Yiddish literature and culture were wrought in this linguistically volatile situation; some of the staunchest champions of Yiddish were learning the language as something other than their mother tongue (e.g., the great linguist Max Weinreich, whose first language was German), while others were abandoning it as their vernacular (the children of the three klasiker—Sholem Jacob Abramovitsch, Sholem Aleichem, and Isaac Leib Peretz— were raised speaking Russian or Polish, not Yiddish). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that one of the first major studies of modern Yiddish literature was written not in Yiddish by a native speaker, but in English by a man whose first language was neither Yiddish not English. Leo Wiener’s The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1899) is of interest here in that it also contains the first significant collection of Yiddish belles lettres published in English translation. Yiddish may not have been spoken in the Wieners’ home, suggests Elias Schulman, in his introduction to the 1972 reissue of Wiener’s study. Instead, Wiener may have acquired his knowledge of it (as Weinreich did) from “playmates and friends.”5 A native of Bialystok, Wiener was the son of a Maskil who educated the author in Russian, Polish, and German before his immigration to the United States in 1882 at the age of twenty. There Wiener eventually pursued a career as a professor of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages, ultimately at Harvard University, where he taught Slavic languages from 1896 to 1930. As an adult, Wiener was a progressivist and assimilationist in his personal convictions; he belonged briefly to a Fourier colony in Missouri and later sent his son to a Unitarian Sunday school. Wiener’s intellectual and ideological background is reflected in his approach to the study of Yiddish. While bemoaning the lack of scholarly attention and low regard generally paid to Yiddish letters, Wiener was not, Schulman notes, an advocate of Yiddishism. Rather, Wiener viewed the language within a larger evolutionary perspective on Jewish culture, in which he saw the emergence of Yiddish as a kind of happy accident of late medieval Jewish life: “Had there been no disturbing element introduced in the national life of the German Jews [during the sixteenth century], there would not have developed within them a specifically Judeo-German literature.” While characterizing Yiddish as “not an anomaly, but a natural development,” Wiener also saw its imminent passing as inevitable: “It is hard to foretell the future of Judeo-German. In America it is certainly doomed to extinction. Its lease of life is commensurate with the last large immigration to the new world. In the countries of Europe it will last as long as there are any disabilities for the Jews, as long as they are secluded in Ghettos and driven into Pales.”6 Wiener thus positions his study of Yiddish literature near its inevitable denouement.


Wiener’s approach to this subject involved intensive research of a phenomenon that was, in his view, as active as it was evanescent, as fervid as it was obscure. (“The purpose of this work will be attained,” he writes, “if it throws some light on the mental attitude of a people whose literature is less known to the world than that of the Gypsy, the Malay, or the North American Indian.”7) In his introduction, he describes the challenges of collecting works of Yiddish literature that had been published over the course of the nineteenth century, and he lists an impressive roster of authors whom he was able to interview for his study during visits to Eastern Europe, including Peretz, Jacob Dineson, Mordecai Spector, Sholem Aleichem, Abramovitsch, and Isaac Joel Linetzky, among others. The final hundred pages of Wiener’s book consists of a chrestomathy (i.e., an anthology of literary excerpts) of Yiddish literature spanning the nineteenth century. Fifteen writers are represented in eighteen samples: eleven poems (ranging in length from a few lines to several pages), five short excerpts from longer prose works (up to five pages in length each), one brief excerpt from a drama, and one complete short story. Arranged in chronological order of their composition, they chart the development of Yiddish literature from the Haskalah to the (then) present. This is exemplified by the first and last works in the chrestomathy: the former, an excerpt from Mendel Lefin’s Yiddish translation of Ecclesiastes, written by 1788;8 the latter, Peretz’s short story Bontshe shvayg, which had first been published only five years before Wiener’s study appeared. These two works bracket the development of modern Yiddish literature, starting with a work tied to Jewish religiosity and traditional Ashkenazic internal bilingualism (albeit striving to transform them), and ending with an avowedly modernist, linguistically independent literary work that offers a sharp critique of traditional pietism. In between are texts that demonstrate the emergence of Yiddish belles lettres from its folkloric origins—for example, a poem by Eliezer Zweifel and an excerpt from an Abraham Goldfaden play. Other works, such as the fiction of Abramovitsch and Sholem Aleichem, and the poetry of Shimon Frug and Morris Rosenfeld, demonstrate Wiener’s connoisseurship (no doubt influenced, at least in part, by some of his author informants) of quality works of Yiddish literature, distinguished from the efforts of such “scribblers” as Shomer and M. Seiffert, who have “not only corrupted the literature but also the language of the Jews.”9 As Wiener explains in a brief preface to the chrestomathy, the selected works serve as illustrations of literary arguments made in the body of the anthology: The main intention . . . is to give a conception of the literary value of JudeoGerman literature. . . . The translations make no pretence to literary form: they are as literal as is consistent with the spirit of the English language. . . . The choice of the extracts has been such as to illustrate the various styles, and only incidentally to reproduce the story; hence their fragmentariness.10

Indeed, some of the excerpts, especially from longer prose narratives, are so fragmentary as to be of limited value as works to be read on their own. The format of Wiener’s presentation of the translations further demonstrates how different his interest in Yiddish literature was from that of its contemporary native audience. Translations with, as he states, “no pretence to literary form” are


printed opposite romanizations of the Yiddish originals, which use a transcription system modeled on German orthography.11 Works of Yiddish literature are offered as linguistic specimens and as artifacts, fragmentary by their very nature, of a passing cultural phenomenon of interest to scholars at an intellectual as well as geographical remove. Rather than stand on their own, these excerpts serve to illustrate a much more ample history of their existence, which Wiener envisions as the primary mode of encounter for his readers. Nevertheless, Wiener was aware of the appeal of this literature beyond the Yiddish-speaking world and promised that, “should the present work rouse any interest in the humble literature of the Russian Jews, the author will undertake a more complete Chrestomathy”—a promise he never realized.12 Helena Frank’s Yiddish Tales, first published by the Jewish Publication Society in 1912, is, in a sense, a fulfillment of Wiener’s proposed collection, offering English translations of forty-eight short stories by twenty authors.13 Addressed to a popular rather than scholarly readership, Frank’s collection foregrounds the stories themselves, though, like Wiener’s collection, Yiddish Tales also calls attention to Yiddish writers and their cultural milieu. Moreover, Frank and Wiener are similarly concerned about enlightening an audience ignorant of the treasures of this undeservedly esoteric literature, which serves as a point of entry into “that strangely fascinating world so often quoted, so little understood (we say it against ourselves), the Russian Ghetto—a world in the passing.”14 The volume’s organization is also chronological, according to the birth dates of its authors, who were between twenty-seven and sixty-one years old at the time Yiddish Tales was first published. These dates and other information about the writers are given in brief introductions throughout the volume, providing readers with an opportunity to observe the dynamics of modern Yiddish literature over a generation, from Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and their contemporaries to Sholem Asch, Lamed Shapiro, and others whose careers were just beginning. Thus, Yiddish Tales can be read both as a literary ethnology of Old World and immigrant Yiddish-speaking Jews and as a capsule history of the development of Yiddish literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The former, dominant agenda offers a retrospective and often plangent view of an endearing, yet beleaguered, folk community in decline. The latter agenda, though secondary, portrays an active, diverse community of writers—and, implicitly, of readers—intensely engaged in literary responses to the challenges that modernity posed to Yiddish-speaking Jews. The first major collection of Yiddish literature in English translation published after World War I, Samuel J. Imber’s 1927 anthology Modern Yiddish Poetry, offers a radically different image of Yiddish belles lettres. Unlike Frank or Wiener, Imber was himself a Yiddish writer (five of his own poems appear in this collection), and the primary mission of Modern Yiddish Poetry seems to be an extension of his personal interest and involvement in the development of modernist literary esthetics in Yiddish. (However, he too sees his anthology as being, in part, a corrective to those who “regard that Cinderella among languages with indifference, if


not contempt.”) In his preface Imber celebrates the swift, diverse efflorescence of modern Yiddish poetry as well as its rapid rise in sophistication: “The artistically worthwhile Yiddish writing, dating back not over half a century, is already reaching the level attained by the other literatures of the modern world.” Significantly, he situates Peretz—who less than thirty years earlier figured as the culmination of Yiddish literature in Wiener’s collection—as the “father” of Yiddish literary modernism, “the saviour of the Yiddish Muse.”15 Indeed, whereas Wiener and Frank portray Yiddish literature and its culture in decline, Imber’s vision is uncompromisingly ascendant and forward-looking. Imber’s selections—166 poems by 53 poets—foreground the modernist aspirations of Yiddish writers, especially evident in their range of subject matter. Whereas most of the tales in Frank’s collection portray Jewish life in the Old World, the New World—and “the new”—dominates in Modern Yiddish Poetry. Most of the poets represented by four or more poems had careers that were entirely or prominently set in America: Jacob Glatstein, Moshe-Leib Halpern, Reuben Iceland, Zishe Landau, Mani-Leib, Anna Margolin, Abraham Reisen, Joseph Rolnick, Yehoash. Prominent among the anthology’s contents are poems about American life, especially in New York (including poems titled “New York” by A. L. Feinberg, Y. Kissin, Aaron Nissenson, and Joel Slonim), as well as works that demonstrate the wide-ranging cosmopolitan spirit of Yiddish poets’ interests (e.g., Leon M. Herbert’s A melodye fun Shubert, Michael Licht’s Mishel Fokin, Yehoash’s Yang-se-fu). Imber states that his goal is to offer an alternative to the sort of Yiddish literature hitherto favored by anthologists, which he characterizes as either “the typical nationalistic pseudo-art of our earlier authors” or “the typical folkloristic genre-art.” Rather, his collection strives to present the Yiddish poet “not as solitary traveler, but as good comrade in the universal march of the world’s art. . . . Art is the guiding principle in this book and the Yiddish poet as part and parcel of the modern artistic family is its main object.”16 The selection, organization, and presentation of the contents of Imber’s anthology stress the anthologist’s valuation of Yiddish poems, true to the modernist spirit, as absolute works of art in and of themselves. The poems in Modern Yiddish Poetry are not organized by any taxonomic or narrative system. Rather, they are printed in alphabetical order of the poets’ last names—in effect, a random ordering with regard to form, content, chronology, generation, poetic school, nationality, gender, or other substantive category. No biographical information or dates of composition accompany the poems; historical or culturally specific references in the verses go unexplained (e.g., the identity of the protagonist of Zishe Landau’s Iz der heyliker Balshemtov . . . ). At the same time, Imber’s presentation of the texts themselves refracts their poetics, separating form from content. Like Wiener’s collection, Modern Yiddish Poetry employs a modified bilingual format: The Yiddish originals, in a hybridized Germanic romanization, are printed on the verso, facing prose translations in English. This presentation gives readers who know no Yiddish access to the sound play in the original, but the language becomes, in effect, a musical presence, divorced from its semantic value. For their part, the utilitarian English translations


that Imber offers make no effort to convey a sense of the interaction among imagery, poetic forms, and the Yiddish language. The overall impact of Imber’s anthology is of a literature that has been atomized: individual poems are given a bisected presentation, and the corpus is presented apart from any chronological, geographical, or esthetic orientation. While this strategy is intended to allow readers to savor poems as examples of modernist art, it does so at the expense of the cultural and social—not to mention esthetic—context that enriches their artistic achievement. Such an approach to Yiddish poetry was, perhaps, only possible in the 1920s, which witnessed the peak of Yiddish poets’ pursuit of avant-garde estheticism. In the decade following, the work of Yiddish poets was increasingly attuned to onerous social, economic, and political realities, as was the next major anthology of Yiddish poetry in English translation. Indeed, Joseph Leftwich’s The Golden Peacock (hereafter, Peacock) provides a singular opportunity to consider the impact of the events that culminated in the Holocaust on a Yiddish literary anthologist’s sense of mission. Leftwich’s anthology was first published in 1939; a revised version appeared in 1961.17 Changes in the contents, the organization of the translations and their contextualization, as well as elements that remain unchanged from the prewar to the postwar versions indicate how some Yiddish literati during the middle years of the twentieth century negotiated the terrible breach in Yiddish culture wrought by the Holocaust. Unlike Imber’s anthology, Leftwich’s collection offers translations only, and these poems are, as the title page of the 1939 edition proclaims, “translated into English verse.” In the volume’s preface Leftwich rejects Imber’s argument that endeavoring “to preserve the full meaning of the original text . . . is hardly possible in versified translations.” Leftwich, also a Yiddish poet, counters that “all that is necessary in translating poetry is to have a poet translate it.” Most of the translations in Peacock are, in fact, his own work; other translators include Isadore Goldstick, Abraham M. Klein, and the collaborative efforts of Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank. Far from apologizing for the limitations of literary translation, Leftwich touts its virtues, citing no less a figure than Goethe (who, on hearing a translation of one of his own poems, is said to have likened the experience to a “light [falling] through a stained-glass window”). Moreover, Leftwich argues that “the translator, by making accessible the work of other people and ages, by diffusing thought and suggesting new ways of thinking, influences the whole course of civilisation.” Translation is also, he posits, a distinctive virtue of Jews as cultural middlemen, who served, for example, as “the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”18 The Jewish contribution to Western civilization doubtless took on special urgency for Leftwich in the late 1930s (he was then living in England), as animosity toward Jews and their culture grew with unprecedented malevolence in Europe. Indeed, whereas America is foregrounded in Imber’s anthology, epitomizing the frontier of Yiddish modernism, Europe is at the symbolic center of Peacock. In his preface Leftwich positions the Old World as the fountainhead of Yiddish cultural creativity, citing Israel Zangwill: “The question is sometimes raised . . .


whether Jews are Europeans. They are more, for they have helped to make Europe.”19 In his prefatory overview of the history of Yiddish literature, Leftwich characterizes it as indigenous and continuous; at the same time, he limns its diversity, articulating “the pious note” that runs through much of Yiddish poetry as well as its cosmopolitanism: “Yiddish poets think of the world as a whole and of the future of all mankind, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.20 By the anthologist’s own admission, such assertions make the task of selecting and organizing the corpus of material in the anthology especially challenging: “My method of arranging the anthology . . . is neither alphabetical nor chronological, nor even strictly regional . . . , and I expect there will consequently be some disagreement with my . . . classification.” Leftwich groups the extensive number of poems in the collection (the work of 239 authors, plus forty folk songs, in the 1939 edition) according to multiple criteria, including connoisseurship (“Great Figures”), chronology (“Older Poets”), gender (“Women Poets”), and geography (Soviet Poets, Galicia, America, South America, Poland, Roumania, Palestine, France, England). This last criterion embraces the majority of works, yet, as Leftwich notes, it entails problems of its own, especially given the large number of immigrant poets. The emphasis on national or regional groupings may have been intended to call attention to the Jewish people’s geographic presence at a time when their rights as citizens were increasingly endangered. Like the title image of the golden peacock, which traditionally invokes the splendor of Jewish life in the Diaspora, Leftwich’s taxonomy, for all its awkwardness, characterizes Yiddish literature as having extensive historical length, geographic breadth, and cultural depth. Particularly interesting in light of this characterization is Leftwich’s sizable selection of premodern works, especially their position in the volume. While Peacock opens with ample selections from the nine “Great Figures” (Reisen, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Peretz, Zalman Schneour, Yehoash, Rosenfeld, Halpern, H. Leivik, Mani-Leib), it concludes with works by “Older Poets” (thirty-six authors, from Elijah Levitah to Frug), followed by an ample selection of “Folk Songs.”21 This arrangement offers an implicit narrative frame for Yiddish poetics that moves backward in time, from the first half of the twentieth century to the late Middle Ages (the poems in the “Older Poets” section are themselves arranged in reverse chronological order) and that retreats from its contemporary literary acme to anonymous, undated works that originate with “the folk.”22 Leftwich’s choice to conclude Peacock in this manner further reflects his focus on the “European-ness” of Yiddish culture and may have also been responsive to contemporary concerns for the legitimacy of European Jewry. Thus he cites folklorist Joseph Jacobs’s assertion: “That Jews by their diffusion of folk-tales have furnished so large an amount of material to the childish imagination of the civilised world is to my mind no slight thing for Jews to be proud of.”23 The revised version of Peacock appeared twenty-two years after the first edition, sixteen years after the end of World War II. Leftwich’s foreword (dated 1959) begins by considering what has transpired since the 1939 edition, but surprisingly—at least by current expectations—the Holocaust is not foremost in his discussion. Rather, he begins by considering then recent positive cultural developments, call-


ing readers’ attention to the fact that “a great deal has been published in the past twenty years about Yiddish literature, and several adequate translations have demonstrated its value.” These two decades have also “seen a great advance in Yiddish poetry,” including the maturation of such poets as Abraham Sutzkever, Chaim Grade, Bunem Heller, and Israel Emiot. Leftwich offers the existence of these and even younger poets, such as Jeremiah Hescheles, as evidence that “in spite of the Hitlerist extermination of the Jews of Europe”—the anthologist’s first reference to the Holocaust—“Yiddish still lives.”24 Indeed, Leftwich’s affirmation of the vitality and viability of Yiddish literature begins with his dedication of the revised anthology: “To the Yiddish poets who will be writing Yiddish poetry fifty years hence.” (The 1939 edition was dedicated to Leftwich’s daughter, Joan.)25 Although Leftwich makes no organizational innovations in the postwar edition of Peacock, he does discuss and present examples of what had emerged as the dominant new genre of Yiddish belles lettres: “Churban literature.” He characterizes writing on what was, at the time, just coming to be known in America as the Holocaust as giving Yiddish literary activity a new agenda, even a renewed sense of purpose, and as transforming the valuation of the language itself. Thus, he cites an unnamed survivor of Nazi persecution: “Yiddish, which I hardly knew before, the language of my parents and grandparents, has become my most sacred credo, . . . and I swear that if there is anything I can write out of my experiences, it will be written in Yiddish, the language hallowed by our millions of martyrs.”26 Leftwich also offers the examples of Itzhak Katzenelson and Uri Zevi Greenberg, who turned from Hebrew to Yiddish in order to address the Holocaust in their poetry. Like more recent scholars of the subject,27 Leftwich situates Churban literature in a longer history of Jewish literary responses to persecution, including Jeremiah’s Lamentations, medieval responses to anti-Jewish attacks, and the more recent “pogrom literature” of the late nineteenth century. (He also links the tragedy of the Holocaust to the Soviet persecution of Yiddish culture in the early postWorld War II years.) Perhaps with this sense of precedent in mind, Leftwich chose not to present Churban literature as a separate category in the revised edition but to integrate it into the volume’s existing schema. Leftwich may have also been concerned about distinguishing Holocaust poetry as the culmination of Yiddish literary activity. Mindful, perhaps, of the problematic consequences of characterizing the most recent developments in Yiddish literature as being centered around loss, Leftwich concludes his introduction with a discussion of “Jewish survival” that serves to validate both the endurance of Yiddish literature and its translation. Citing Aaron Zeitlin, he makes the case for Yiddish as part of Jewish cultural literacy, which is key to Jewish continuity: We are not addicted to the nonsense of the mysticisms of race, blood, and philogenic legacies. To be a Jew is simply the accident of being born to parents who are Jews. It is only when this accident of birth is accepted as destiny-andcommitment that the accidental Jew becomes a purposive Jew. There is therefore a Jewish mode of lyrical expression which is not inherited but acquired by the acceptance of the Jewish destiny and the commitment of its obligations.28

Key to maintaining Jewish cultural literacy and continuity, Leftwich argues, is Jewish bilingualism, epitomized by the translations in his volume—indeed, by the


act of translation itself, which he champions as a bridge, rather than a border, between past and present. In the preface to the 1961 edition of Peacock, Leftwich mentions the publication of Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg’s 1954 A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (hereafter, Stories) as exemplary of positive developments in Yiddish literature’s stature during the early postwar years.29 Howe and Greenberg’s collection is, indeed, a landmark work, being the first major new anthology of Yiddish literature in English translation to appear after the Holocaust. Still in print at the turn of the millennium, the volume has had an extensive impact on the reputation of Yiddish literature in the English-speaking world. As David Roskies has observed, “the measure of [the anthologists’] success . . . is the large number of students of Jewish literature whose familiarity with Yiddish rests solely on the introduction to A Treasury of Yiddish Stories . . . and the subsequent anthologies that drew their Yiddish materials exclusively from that collection.”30 Unlike the previous efforts already discussed, the creation of this anthology does not rely on the vision of a single scholar or belletrist but results from a joint effort between these two perspectives. This collaboration bridges a generational gap defined not only by age, but also by country of origin, native language, and notions of cultural literacy: Greenberg, an established Yiddish poet (he was about fifty-eight years old when Stories appeared in print), was a native of Bessarabia and had emigrated to the United States in 1913. In the early 1950s he was a leading figure in the Yiddish PEN Club and in 1953 received a prize from the National Jewish Book Council for Baynakhtike dialog, a volume of poems. Howe, the New York-born son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, was in his early thirties and at the start of his career as a literary scholar and social critic. He had just begun teaching at Brandeis University and was about to begin his long association with the new socialist journal Dissent.31 The two men’s relationship as anthologists would continue until Greenberg’s death in 1977. During this time they produced four more collections of Yiddish writing in English translation.32 Theirs was a strategic joining of distinct, complementary talents, as Howe later described: What we established . . . was a cultural chain. First, from [the] translators to myself, who am an amateur in this field, and whose knowledge of Jewish tradition is severely limited and whose knowledge of Yiddish is fairly limited. Then, from myself to Greenberg, a veteran Yiddish poet, and then of course from Greenberg to the whole Yiddish tradition itself. This chain is terribly precarious. It can be snapped at any number of points.33

Just as Howe characterizes his collaboration with Greenberg as a test of (and testament to) the highly contingent persistence of Yiddish cultural continuity, so too is Stories a work of homage to the distinctive, tenacious phenomenon of modern Yiddish prose. In this sense, Stories has a different agenda from Wiener’s and Frank’s collections or from such English-language anthologies as Leo Schwarz’s The Jewish Caravan (1935) and A Golden Treasury of Jewish Literature (1937). The latter two are compendia of far greater scope (Schwarz’s vaunts “Great Stories of Twenty-Five Centuries”), in which Yiddish works are integrated into a literary


canon that strives to offer “a collective portrait of the Jewish people,” celebrating their longevity and geographic dispersion through works originally written in almost a dozen languages.34 Howe and Greenberg’s anthology focuses specifically on Yiddish prose and, moreover, on the particular history and character of the cultural moment that created this body of work and which it, in turn, is seen as embodying. Like previous English-language anthologists of Yiddish literature, Howe and Greenberg describe their task as one of shedding light on a phenomenon “virtually unknown to Americans.” At the same time, they conceptualize Yiddish literature differently than do their predecessors, first by treating it as a phenomenon that has all but run its course. A half century earlier, Wiener had also expressed doubts about future Yiddish literary activity, though he attributed its expected imminent demise to Jewish culture’s own evolution. By contrast, Howe and Greenberg’s view of Yiddish literature as an all-but-closed canon was defined by the abrupt and cruel annihilation of its base culture: “The world of the East European Jews showed severe signs of internal stagnation, but its recent destruction came not from within but from without.” Thus, in contrast to Leftwich’s sentiments in the revised edition of Peacock several years after Stories appeared, Howe and Greenberg did not look for forward movement in Yiddish literature; their gaze is directed exclusively toward the past. Their anthology offers its selections and commentary as a “brief and tragic history.”35 Stories presents the act of retrospection that Yiddish literature facilitates as an entry into a singular artistic and cultural accomplishment, whose discovery is as rewarding as it is challenging. At the same time that the editors remind readers of the daunting historical barriers that stand between them and the original milieu of Yiddish literature—their volume is dedicated “to the Six Million”—they offer words of encouragement; the epigraph to their introduction is Kafka’s famous assertion that “you understand Yiddish better than you suppose.” Just as the distinctiveness and the remoteness of Yiddish culture are fundamental to the editors’ presentation of Stories, so is a humanistic valuation of Western literature assumed to be the readers’ point of entry. Howe and Greenberg expect their readers to be familiar with English literary history and with that of other European (especially French and Russian) literatures as well. Throughout their introduction, the editors compare works, writers, schools, and themes of Yiddish and other literatures (e.g., in introducing the Ba’al Shem Tov: “had he lived a century later in New England, he would have called himself a Transcendentalist”). At the same time, they assert that “the cultural distance between East European Jewry and Western society is much larger than the distance, say, between American and French culture.” The reader of the anthology must therefore “be willing to enter an unfamiliar world and to adjust himself to literary modes and expectations that differ from those of his own culture.”36 The editors thus felt that their readers required “a minimum of special information,” and to this end they drafted an extensive introduction (seventy-one pages long) and capsule biographies of the authors whose works are included in Stories (another twenty pages)—prefatory materials that constitute a full seventh of the volume.37 Like previous anthologists, Howe and Greenberg offer an overview (al-


beit with greater detail and drawing on more advanced scholarship) of the history of Yiddish language and letters from its medieval origins to the present. But they preface this with a discussion of the “World of the East European Jews,” thereby situating the ensuing chronicle within a conceptualization of the Yiddish-speaking world as a cohesive, self-contained social entity—“a kind of nation, yet without nationhood”—whose cultural patterns are “probably without parallel in Western history.”38 The editors’ characterization of this world cites Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Earth Is the Lord’s39 and invokes another “American-Jewish classic of the 1950s,”40 Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog’s Life Is with People, which had appeared in 1952.41 Indeed, Stories itself can be viewed as another example of what Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has termed “the popular arts of American Jewish ethnography,” which provided the American public, Jews as well as non-Jews, in the post-World War II era with portraits of prewar East European Jewish culture as “a total world.” Though destroyed during the Holocaust, this “world” can be virtually reanimated, these works promise, through anthropology, personal memoir, biography, performance, or belles lettres. Moreover, all these works were widely perceived by audiences not merely as popular art but as authoritative examples of “autoethnography.” In this respect, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett argues, these works attain a power to enable audiences to imagine a way of life remote in time, place, and culture by situating their subject within what Raymond Williams terms a “structure of feeling.” Howe and Greenberg’s anthology exemplifies the value of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s attention to matters of “affective elements of consciousness” and how they relate to the form and content of such works.42 That Stories is a work of popular ethnography is perhaps best demonstrated by the organization of the texts included in it: fifty-two short stories or excerpts from longer prose works by twenty-three authors, as well as a brief sampling of folktales and proverbs. Unlike works in previous anthologies, these selections do not appear in chronological order according to their date of authorship or their authors’ lives, nor are they grouped thematically or regionally. Instead, Howe and Greenberg organize them according to an innovative scheme: Prose works from Abramovitsch through Grade are fashioned into a hypertext that narrates the emergence, efflorescence, and destruction of Yiddish modernity. Part One, labeled “The Fathers,” presents one selection from each of the three klasiker; Part Two, “Portrait of a World,” the largest section by far, offers thirty-five selections, including five more stories by Sholem Aleichem, eight more by Peretz, plus works by twelve other authors. Part Three, “Jewish Children,” both marks generational continuity from “the fathers” and constitutes something of an idyllic interlude in the anthologists’ master narrative, with texts by Moshe Nadir and Itzik Manger and yet another selection from Sholem Aleichem. This is followed by Parts Four, “Breakup” (three stories) and Five, “New Worlds” (eight stories). (Part Six, “Folk Tales”—which functions, much like the selection of folk poetry that concludes The Golden Peacock, as a kind of coda—is offered as a demonstration of “how intimate is the relationship between the culture of the East European Jews and the formal Yiddish literature that arose during the nineteenth century.”43) The distribution of stories within these sections is decidedly subjective, giving primacy to the compilers’ own general sensibilities and readings of particular texts


than did the Yiddish anthologists discussed earlier, who strove to use more substantive taxonomic criteria. Howe and Greenberg link works in an intertextuality of their own making, crossing generational, geographic, and stylistic boundaries as they fashion discrete works into chapters of a master narrative that, like their introduction, traces pathways that lead to, and then away from, “Maidanek and Auschwitz.” (The sense that all these discrete prose works are part of one larger master narrative is subtly underscored by their punctuating the volume with graphics by Ben Shahn—spare line drawings of shtetl “types.”44) Indeed, in their prefatory writing Howe and Greenberg sometimes situate individual texts within their master narrative in ways that would be inconceivable in their original presentations. For example, of “The Return,” a selection from Glatstein’s 1940 novel Ven Yash iz gekumen, they write: Through the frail figure of the precocious Hasidic student the story suggests that even before Hitler invaded Poland the Jewish community was beset by the same crises of belief that have troubled the Western world. The young Hasid thinks he has found the way to the Jewish masses, but it is only a hallucination; over his brilliance hangs the threat of tomorrow’s concentration camp.45

The epicenter of Howe and Greenberg’s master narrative is, as Roskies has observed, the shtetl—reflecting both the predilections of a preponderance of Yiddish prose writers and the anthologists’ preference “for literature as a critique of observable reality” over “the fantasy school in Yiddish fiction.”46 Moreover, Howe and Greenberg identify the shtetl as the crucible of Yiddish modernism: “Modern Yiddish literature focuses upon the shtetl during its last tremor of self-awareness, the historical moment when it is still coherent and self-contained but already under fierce assault from the outer world. . . . Yiddish reaches its climax of expressive power as the world it portrays begins to come apart.”47 Situated at a historical and cultural crossroads, the shtetl also becomes the strategic locus for looking back at the “World of the East European Jews.” Key to facilitating Howe and Greenberg’s cultural retrospection is the prominent place they accord Yiddish and the values they attribute to the language. In celebrating its orality (“Yiddish culture was oriented toward speech: its God was a God who spoke”) and its tenacity (“it was extraordinarily virile and stubborn, and its survival over the centuries reflects the miracle of Jewish survival itself”) they link Yiddish to the Jews’ covenantal relationship with God. At the same time, the introduction celebrates Yiddish as the embodiment of a vital and mutable subversiveness: Yiddish itself was a language of great plasticity, neither set nor formalized, always in rapid process of growth and dissolution; it was a language intimately drenched with idiom, and thereby a resourceful term in a dialectic of tension of which the thesis was Hebrew and the synthesis a blend of speech so persistently complex and ironic—really a kind of “underground” speech—as to qualify severely the very values it was dedicated to defend.48

Howe and Greenberg’s Stories strives not only to reanimate the lost “world” of East European Jews, but also to reconfigure an audience for Yiddish literature in light of the relationship that it had, at its acme, with a reading public that was


understood as “the folk.” The challenge for the anthologists—and for their readers—is nothing less than forging a new conceptualization of Yiddish vernacularity in the American post-Holocaust milieu, in which fluency in Yiddish language and the cultural literacy of prewar Yiddish-speaking Jews are no longer central. The works in the volume cannot, therefore, “stand on their own,” as they are understood to have done previously; readers now require supporting material (introductions, glossaries, annotations) as well as an overarching metanarrative to contextualize individual works. Significantly, the anthology situates them not so much in some kind of experiential context as in a historical and cultural intertextuality with each other. Indeed, the only affective relationship that Howe saw postwar American readers already had for Yiddish culture “takes the form of sentimental nostalgia,” which he repudiated: “What they want is to remember it while keeping it safely tucked away in memory; they do not want it to be part of their living experience.”49 Rather than tolerate an audience’s emotional ties to this literature and its “world,” which Howe found problematic, he preferred to forge a new relationship through his anthologies with Greenberg and, after the poet’s death, with other collaborators.50 This relationship, while affectively engaged, was ultimately an appreciation informed by intellectual notions of historicity and connoisseurship. Following Howe and Greenberg’s subsequent anthologies, other collections of Yiddish literature in English translation have continued to pursue some of the broader agendas set out in Stories. Foremost among these is the continued presentation of Yiddish literature as a subject to be encountered, like other world literatures in translation, within the rubric of comparative literature studies. An amateur (in both senses of the term) relationship to Yiddish poetry and prose has become increasingly professionalized and academized.51 In addition to scholarly introductions and other supporting materials, more recent anthologies of Yiddish literature in English translation provide other academic apparatus, including bibliographic information on source texts and, in some poetry collections, the original texts printed in Yiddish.52 At the same time, the self-consciously personal approach to selecting and organizing anthologies of translated Yiddish literature that informs Howe and Greenberg’s collections can be found in more recent efforts. Benjamin and Barbara Harshav’s 1986 anthology American Yiddish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology offers a decidedly personal vision of this corpus, centered on the high modernism of the Inzikhistn. The Harshavs offer in-depth selections of just seven poets, presented in nonchronological order: A. Leyeles (Aaron Glanz), Glatstein, Halpern, Y. L. (Judd) Teller, Malka Heifetz-Tussman, Berish Weinstein, and Leivick. Significantly, the Harshavs characterize their approach as “a kind of traveling exhibition of several artists from a distant culture.”53 The notion that American Yiddish Poetry constitutes a personal curatorial vision of a particular cultural moment is extended by the anthologists’ decision to illustrate the volume with the work of modern Jewish artists—including Louis Lozowick, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, Abraham Walkowitz, and Max Weber—who were the seven poets’ contemporaries. Perhaps no recent anthologist/translator has offered more strikingly idiosyn-


cratic visions of Yiddish literature than Joachim Neugroschel, especially in his first two collections, Yenne Velt: The Great Works of Jewish Fantasy and Occult (1976) and The Shtetl (1979). Yenne Velt offers a diverse selection of Yiddish prose works, from tales culled from the Mayse-bukh and told by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav to works by the klasiker (Peretz, Abramovitsch) and Soviet modernists (Der Nister, Moshe Kulbak, David Bergelson). These texts, ranging from short tales to complete novels (including Abramovitsch’s Di klyatshe), call readers’ attention to works of Yiddish literature informed by the mystical and supernatural, themes that are generally neglected in Howe and Greenberg’s prose collections and most other translations of Yiddish prose, which tend to foreground works that reflect historical and social realities. The selections in Yenne Velt thus not only are otherworldly in subject but present readers with an “other world” of Yiddish literature. Neugroschel does not offer his selections in a chronological or obviously thematic order but groups them as stages of a mystical journey of his own design, distributed over seven “days.” (The First Day, for example, comprises a tale from the Mayse-bukh and short works by S. Ansky, Abramovitsch, Der Nister, and Peretz.)54 Neugroschel’s Shtetl collection resembles the core of Howe and Greenberg’s Stories in its organization of selections into a narrative that traces the efflorescence and destruction of East European Jewish small-town life. But Neugroschel’s selections are more varied chronologically as well as stylistically, beginning with excerpts from the Tsene-rene and Hasidic tales and also including the pioneering Maskilic novel Dos shterntikhl by Israel Aksenfeld and Kulbak’s expressionist novel of the early Soviet period, Montik. An especially adventuresome translator, who has also translated prose and poetry from French, German, and Russian, Neugroschel does not shy away from challenging works, including the fiction of Abramovitsch, which Howe, among others, characterized as more or less untranslatable into English. An epitomizing example of Neugroschel’s approach, perhaps, is his “jive” translation of Sholem Aleichem’s early novel Stempenyu, famous for its incorporation of klezmer slang: “Di kapore zolstu vern, Yerakhmiel!” zogt Stempenyu gants oyfgelegt. “Azoy gikh bist du gevor gevorn? E, zi it dokh take gor a klive yaldovke! Ze nor, ze, vi zi matret mit di zikres!”55 “You’re too much, baby!” said Stempeniu cheerily. “You checked it out that fast? Man, she is really dynamite! A righteous chick! Dig those eyes!”56

Neugroschel’s choices as anthologist and translator both reflect personal predilections and are responsive to the growing corpus of Yiddish literature available in English translation judged against the much vaster range of all that has been written in Yiddish. Thus, in addition to considering it his mission to call attention to mystical and supernatural literature in Yiddish, Neugroschel has also translated Ansky’s Khurbn Galitsye, which describes anti-Jewish persecutions that the author witnessed during World War I.57 “Translation tends to be curatorial,” Neugroschel commented in a 2000 interview, echoing the Harshavs, and he characterizes the task as proactive and creative: “I really feel as if I’m like an actor or a concert pianist. Translation is performance of a foreign text.”58 In his most recent anthology, No Star Too Beautiful: An Anthology of Yiddish


Stories from 1382 to the Present, Neugroschel has taken on limning the full “story of the Yiddish story.” As its subtitle indicates, the collection extends the span of Yiddish narrative beyond what is presented in most anthologies of Yiddish prose in translation, which are typically works from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, by beginning with “Virtuous Joseph,” an excerpt from the Cambridge Codex, the earliest known dated Yiddish literary work, and concluding with an excerpt from Chava Rosenfarb’s novel Bociany, published in 2000. Neugroschel characterizes these six centuries of Yiddish literary activity as part of “an excruciatingly bumpy ride” that is as wide-ranging as it is lengthy. “One of my goals in compiling this anthology is to show the overwhelming variety of Yiddish fiction,” he writes in his introduction, “from its . . . medieval debut to its modern traditions and experimentations,” thereby demonstrating how this literature “run[s] the full gamut of human creativity.”59 At the turn of the twentieth century, modern Yiddish belles lettres was still something of a novelty. A rapidly developing national, secular literature, it aspired to be the equal of major Western literary traditions, doing so in a language that had no official aegis and had little more to sustain it than the urgent needs and the vitality of its widespread community of several million vernacular speakers. For the English reader of the time, Yiddish literary activity was at most a curiosity of exotic and humble origins. Over the course of the past century it has emerged as “classic” Jewish literature, prized by many admirers, Jews and non-Jews alike, as a distinctive cultural achievement; since the Holocaust, it has been transvalued as a “heritage” literature, a link to a murdered population and its way of life.60 Translations have played a vital role in this dynamic—not merely instrumentally, providing millions who know no Yiddish with a point of entry into its literature, but also symbolically. As Walter Benjamin observed, “a translation issues from the original—not so much from its life as from its afterlife. . . . Translation marks [its] stage of continued life. . . . In its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change.”61 Each translation assigns a new meaning to the literature by articulating a relationship between the original work and the target readership. In the process of translation—which moves not only from one language to another, but across time and place, cultural and literary sensibilities—the value of Yiddish literature has been variously deemed the embodiment of Jewish continuity and of Jewish rebellion, of avant-garde impulses and of folksstimlekhkeyt, of imaginative vision and of ethnographic authenticity. Indeed, while the canon of Yiddish literature has become more established over time, the nature and perceived needs of target audiences for Yiddish literature have expanded and developed considerably, thereby demanding changes in what is translated and how translations are presented.62 The translation’s attribute of adding value to the original is both intensified and complicated in the case of translation anthologies, especially the ones examined here. The meanings of individual works, already transformed by the process of translation (and by the very fact of their selection for translation) are altered


along another dimension, through their classification and juxtaposition with other translated works. These collections provide readers a simultaneous encounter with decades, generations, sometimes centuries of literary activity, often taking place over an extensive geographic or ideological range. In this sense, the curatorial element of these anthologies resembles that of art museums, where visitors can, in a single visit, traverse art history’s full range from the ancient to the modern over several continents.63 What Benjamin observes about the translator’s agenda can also be said of the anthologist: “The intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, graphic; that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational.”64 Yiddish anthologies constitute an especially intense example of the distinctive, transformative power of encountering literary works in translation collections, given the history of this literature and its writers and readers in the twentieth century. While these collections evince a variety of curatorial agendas, they also reiterate certain tropes. In particular, the anthologists repeatedly characterize their work as an effort to enlighten the uninformed—not merely sharing with them unfamiliar literary works and their histories, but providing readers with a corrective cultural engagement with a community (of writers, readers, and subjects) variously regarded as exotic, evanescent, or extinct. The anthologists’ task therefore is not limited to transmitting information or texts, but ultimately entails creating a new means of engaging with Yiddish literature for Ashkenazim whose linguistic and cultural vernacularity is so different (as well as facilitating an appreciation of Yiddish among non-Ashkenazic Jews and non-Jews). This onus is already implicit in collections published before World War II, but it becomes explicit—and much more daunting and more urgent—after the Holocaust. Indeed, in this respect, anthologies of Yiddish literature in translation evince a signal shift in modes of vernacular cultural transmission parallel to the “rupture and reconstruction” that Haim Soloveitchik discusses with regard to Orthodox Jewish religiosity in the postWorld War II era: a shift from mimetic transmission of mores to “the new and controlling role that texts now play” in Jewish life.65 At the turn of the twenty-first century, anthologies of modern Yiddish literature in translation figure strategically in a watershed period of Jewish culture marked by signal changes as great as those that enabled the efflorescence of this literature a century earlier. As this great period of Yiddish literary creativity moves beyond living memory, readers striving to understand this formative moment in Jewish modern culture will turn to these collections, perhaps more than any other resource, in an effort to link their own notions of Jewish vernacularity with that of the past.

Notes 1. David Stern’s introduction to this book, p. 3. 2. See, e.g., Avram Nowersztern, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” Prooftexts 8, no. 3 (September 1988):355–63; David Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” Prooftexts 3 (1983):109–14; as well as the discussion of this issue in Kathryn Hellerstein’s article in this volume. 3. This essay does not attempt to address every example of Yiddish literary anthologies

320 The Modern Period in English translation, and several categories of anthology are not addressed at all: collections of works by a single author, drama anthologies (which raise special questions of performativity), and collections of essays, folklore, and other non-belletristic Yiddish works. 4. See Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 5. Elias Schulman, “Introduction to the New Edition,” in Leo Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Herman Press, 1972), p. ix. 6. Wiener, History of Yiddish Literature, pp. 3, 10–11, 24. Worthy of further study is the matter of how these various anthologies conceptualize Yiddish as reflected in the use of terminology (e.g., “Judeo-German” vs. “Yiddish”) and in their chronologies of the language, especially when, where, and how the language is described as beginning. 7. Ibid., p. xxxiii. 8. Lefin’s translation was not published until 1873; see Nancy Beth Sinkoff, “Tradition and Transition: Mendel Lefin of Satanow and the Beginnings of the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe, 1749–1826,” (Doctoral Diss., Columbia University, 1996), p. 219. 9. Wiener, The History of Yiddish Literature, p. 22. Sholem Aleichem’s influence is evident on Wiener’s assessment of Shomer; see pp. 172–74; 200–21. 10. Ibid., p. 257. 11. Although Wiener states in the preface to the chrestomathy that his intention is to focus on the literary merit of Yiddish literature “and not . . . its linguistic development,” Yiddish as a linguistic phenomenon was clearly of prominent interest to him. This is also evident in his earlier bilingual collection of the poems of American Yiddish poet Morris Rosenfeld, entitled Songs from the Ghetto (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898). In this volume Wiener offered English-language prose translations facing Yiddish texts in a Germanic transcription, set in Fraktur. At the back of the volume every Yiddish term used in the poems is glossed and its source language is indicated. 12. Wiener, History of Yiddish Literature, p. 257. In 1899 Wiener contributed translations of two short stories (complete texts, not excerpts, by Peretz and Mordecai Spector) to The Universal Anthology: A Collection of the Best Literature, Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern, with Biographical and Explanatory Notes, eds, Richard Garnett, et al., vol. 29 (London: The Clarke Company, 1899). In this context, Yiddish literature is situated within world literature—here, sandwiched between “Specimens of Slavonic Literature” (also translated by Wiener) and examples of Chinese and Japanese drama. 13. The collection is anticipated, in part, by an article Frank wrote in 1906, in which she provides an overview of works by several contemporary Yiddish writers. Among the works mentioned are four of the stories included in Yiddish Tales. Frank’s article mentions Wiener’s then recently published study. See Helena Frank, “On Yiddish Literature,” Jewish Literary Annual, ed. Albert Hyamson (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1906), pp. 82–89. 14. Yiddish Tales, trans. Helena Frank (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1912), p. 6. Frank’s introduction is dated “London, March, 1911.” 15. Samuel J. Imber, ed., Modern Yiddish Poetry (New York: East and West Publishing Co., 1927), pp. xiii, xvi, xx. 16. Ibid., p. xviii. 17. Joseph Leftwich, ed., The Golden Peacock: An Anthology of Yiddish Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art Publishers, 1939), hereafter Peacock 1939; Joseph Leftwich, ed., The Golden Peacock: A Worldwide Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), hereafter Peacock 1961. 18. Peacock 1939, pp. xviii–xxii, passim.

Anthologizing the Vernacular 321 19. Ibid., p. xxiv. 20. Ibid., pp. xxxiv, xxxviii, xli. 21. The selection included in this section of Peacock 1939 suggests that the first volume of M. Basin’s Yiddish poetry anthology influenced Leftwich’s choice of poets and works. See M. Basin, ed., Antologye: finf hundert yor yidishe poezye, ershter band: 1410–1800 [Anthology of Five Hundred Years of Yiddish Poetry, vol. 1: 1410–1800] ([New York]: Farlag Dos yidishe bukh, 1917). 22. A similar, though far less elaborate schema appears in Frank’s Yiddish Tales, which concludes with a folk tale (“The Clever Rabbi,” pp. 581–87). Such an arrangement calls to mind art-song recitals, in which performers conclude an evening of classical Lieder or arias with songs from their own national or ethnic heritage (e.g., Bidu´ Sayao˜ singing Brazilian folk songs or Jessye Norman singing spirituals), thereby offering a public celebration of Volksgeist on par with “high” art. 23. Peacock 1939, p. xxii. 24. Peacock 1961, pp. 15–19, passim. 25. The 1961 edition of Peacock retains the same organizational principles (and prefatory agonizing over the challenges posed therein) and many of the same selections as the 1939 edition, though with differences that Leftwich notes. Although the corpus of Yiddish poetry had grown considerably since the first edition of Peacock, Leftwich’s revised anthology is more selective and more avowedly subjective in its inventory. While adding some recent poems, he eliminated quite a few more from the first edition, so that the revised version is considerably shorter than the original (the 1939 edition is 907 pages; the 1961 edition is 713 pages). Leftwich characterizes this difference as motivated both by the desire to offer a more personal selection and by a decision to omit the verses written by authors (such as Sholem Aleichem and Moshe Nadir) who are primarily known as prose writers, as well as by poets of lesser quality, those whose work constitutes “mere versifying.” Moreover, all translations in the 1961 edition are Leftwich’s translation; those by other translators that appear in the 1939 edition were removed or replaced. 26. Peacock 1961, p. 20. 27. See, e.g., David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 28. Peacock 1961, p. 31. 29. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, eds., A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Viking, 1954); hereafter, Stories. 30. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 110. 31. According to Edward Alexander, Stories “helped to get Howe his appointment at Brandeis” and marks “a turning point in his career,” foreshadowing his best-known work, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). Alexander sees Stories not only as an act of cultural rescue on Howe’s part, motivated by remorse over the destruction of East European Jewry during the Holocaust, but also as key to the development of Howe’s personal Jewish secularism. See Edward Alexander, Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 78–87, passim. 32. A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969); Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972); Selected Stories: I. L. Peretz (New York: Schocken, 1974); Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet Yiddish Writers (New York: Schocken, 1977). 33. Irving Howe, “Translating from Yiddish,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 15 (1974): 233. Howe discusses here the process of preparing translations for A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, which involved a somewhat different dynamic than the preparation of Stories.

322 The Modern Period 34. Leo W. Schwarz, ed., The Jewish Caravan: Great Stories of Twenty-five Centuries (New York: Rinehart and Co., 1935), p. xi. 35. Stories, pp. 1, 3, 2. 36. Ibid., pp., 1, 2, 15. 37. Scholars attribute the authorship of this introduction (and those of subsequent volumes) to Howe (see, e.g., Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 110; Alexander, Irving Howe, p. 79). As the introduction to Stories is signed by both men, Greenberg’s contribution must not be entirely discounted, though the prevailing sensibility is surely Howe’s. 38. Stories, pp. 2, 3. 39. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Earth Is the Lord’s: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950). For a discussion of the history of this publication, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Heschel and Yiddish: A Struggle with Signification,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 2 (1993): 268–84. 40. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 111. 41. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is with People: The Jewish Little-Town of Eastern Europe (New York: International Universities Press, 1952). For a discussion of the history of this publication, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s introduction to the 1995 edition of Life Is with People (with the subtitle The Culture of the Shtetl) published by Schocken Books. 42. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Imagining Europe: The Popular Arts of American Jewish Ethnography,” in Divergent Centers: Shaping Jewish Cultures in Israel and America, ed. Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 155–91. 43. Stories, p. 601. 44. These illustrations first appeared in an earlier collection of Yiddish fiction in English translation: Sholem Aleichem, Inside Kasrilevke (New York: Schocken, 1948). 45. Stories, p. 92. 46. Roskies, “The Treasures of Howe and Greenberg,” p. 111. 47. Stories, p. 28. 48. Stories, pp. 8, 10, 21. 49. Howe, “Translating from Yiddish,” p. 231. 50. Howe discusses this issue at length in the epistolary introduction to The Best of Sholom Aleichem, an anthology he coedited with Ruth Wisse (New York: New Republic Books/Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1979). E.g.: “The writer universally adored as a humorist . . . turns out to be a self-conscious, disciplined artist rather than merely a folk-voice (or worse yet, the ‘folksy’ tickler of Jewish vanities).” (pp. vii–viii) 51. A telling example of this shift can be seen in comparing two English translations of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye monologues: Tevye’s Daughters, trans. Frances Butwin (New York: Crown, 1949), and Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, trans. Hillel Halkin (New York: Schocken, 1987). The more recent version, the inaugural volume of the Schocken Library of Yiddish Classics series, offers an academic presentation of the texts, based on the Folksfond edition and with a scholarly discussion of the history of the work, translation questions, and textual varioria. The earlier version offers no such academic discussions and intersperses a selection of the Tevye monologs with other Sholem Aleichem stories. This approach is “evocative of, and perhaps even modeled on, the experience of those of Sholem Aleichem’s original audience who would have read these episodes individually as they first appeared in various newspapers or journals over a period of years.” (Jeffrey Shandler, “Reading Sholem Aleichem from Left to Right,” YIVO Annual 20 [1991]: 324) 52. In particular, see Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry: A Bi-

Anthologizing the Vernacular 323 lingual Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Chone Shmeruk, eds., The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), as well as Nowersztern’s insightful review of these two collections, “Yiddish Poetry in a New Context,” pp. 355–63. 53. Harshav and Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry, p. 5. 54. Neugroschel extends his anthological investigation of supernatural themes in Yiddish literature in a more recent collection, The Dybbuk and the Yiddish Imagination: A Haunted Reader (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000). The volume includes a translation of Ansky’s drama The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, other works by Ansky, as well as folktales, Hasidic writings, and literary works by other modern Yiddish writers (including Peretz Hirschbein, Der Nister, Peretz, Sholem Aleichem). 55. Sholem-Aleykhem, Stempenyu: a yidisher roman, in Ale verk fun Sholem Aleykhem (New York: Sholem-Aleykhem folksfond oysgabe, 1919), vol. 11 (Yidishe romanen), p. 136. In his text, first published in Di yidishe folksbiblyotek (Odessa, 1888), Sholem Aleichem glosses the following terms at the bottom of the page: klive ⫽ sheyne, matret ⫽ kukt, zikres ⫽ oygn. 56. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. and trans., The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe (New York: Richard Marek, 1979), p. 293. For a discussion of this translation, see Shandler, “Reading Sholem Aleichem from Left to Right,” passim. 57. S. An-Ski, The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002). 58. Jeffrey Sharlet, “An ‘Actor’ Who ‘Performs’ Texts: Talking with Translator Joachim Neugroschel,” The Forward [English-language edition], June 16, 2000, pp. 11–12. 59. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. and trans., No Star Too Beautiful: An Anthology of Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002), pp. xv– xvii. 60. On “heritage” mode, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 61. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 71, 73. 62. Although anthologies of Yiddish literature translated into languages other than English are beyond the scope of this essay, a comparative study among these would no doubt yield interesting results. The demands, for example, of Hebrew readers in Israel, Russian readers (both in Russia and elsewhere), or German readers, to take but a few examples, would yield valuable insights into the image of Yiddish literature, its subjects, and its original readers as symbolic entities in these various societies. (On the translation of Yiddish literature into German, see Jeffrey A. Grossman, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2000), pp. 5–6.) Ultimately, these translation collections will reveal more about the target cultures as they understand themselves vis-a`-vis Yiddish culture than they will about Yiddish literature per se. 63. This notion is discussed by Marcus Moseley in his contribution to the Introduction to Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (London and New Haven: Yale Univeristy Press, 2002), ed. Jeffrey Shandler; see p. xxviii. 64. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” pp. 76–77. 65. Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction”: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 65.

17 galit hasan-rokem

Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book Folk Narrative Anthologies and National Identity in Modern Israel

hether it is the work of the Grimm bothers or the Finnish epic Kalevala,

Wcollecting oral folk creativity, writing it down, and publishing it in anthologies is one of the most noted components in the formation of national identity in modern times.1 These great anthologies all have their origins in a matrix of ideology and politics, and those matrices not only engendered them but also endowed them with their singular features. Certainly, this was the case with folk-narrative anthologies in Israel. The work of Dov Noy, the preeminent scholar of Jewish folklore and the founder of the Israel Folk Archives, produced and stimulated a vast and impressive retrieval of Jewish lore from the major Jewish communities of the world just at the moment when most of these communities had ceased to exist, whether by destruction, modernization, or removal to Israel. The shifting dialectic between this enormous anthological project and the emergence of the modern State of Israel is the subject of this essay. This inquiry is part of a larger effort by folklorists in many countries to deconstruct the functional connection between nation building and folklore studies and to understand the purposes the discipline has historically served. Dov Noy was born in 1922 in Kolomea in the Ukraine. Although Yiddish was spoken in his home, Noy was tutored in Hebrew as a young boy by the poet Shimshon Meltzer, and he later learned German and Polish in the gymnasium. Noy immigrated to Palestine in 1938, the only member of his family to do so; the rest perished in the Holocaust, except for his brother Meir, who became a musician and ethnomusicologist. After serving in the British army in World War II, Noy held a central position in organizing educational services for Jewish refugees who had been sent by the British to Cyprus after trying to enter Palestine illegally. Working with these survivors—among whom he discovered his brother Meir— proved a turning point for Noy. The sudden and shocking awareness of the destruction of an entire culture created in Noy the urgent need to reconstruct the narrative universe of these lost worlds. After completing his doctorate at Indiana University under Stith Thompson, 324

Textualizing the Tales of the People of the Book 325

the doyen of American folktale research, Noy returned to Israel and founded the Israel Folktale Archives (IFA) in Haifa in 1955. At the beginning, Noy worked mostly with volunteers, who approached narrators from various ethnic backgrounds and recorded their repertoires. The singling out of narrators was intuitive rather than systematic, and often based on personal acquaintanceship. The recording was done in writing by hand, and the documentation was often haphazard. Later, the procedures of the IFA became much more systematic. Audio or video recordings were accompanied by meticulous documentation of the circumstances of the narration as well as the narrators’ biographies. The same process of professionalization was evident in the case of publications. The first publications of the IFA were initiated for several reasons: to gratify the volunteers for their efforts in collecting material; to enhance the self-image of the narrators; and to gain respectability for an enterprise that was entirely dependent on public sponsorship. The publications, like the collection efforts on which they were based, later became more systematic and more formally annotated. From the inception of the project, the work of the IFA was animated by two contradictory impulses. On the one hand, in gathering into a central Israeli archive folk materials that originated in widely dispersed Jewish communities, the IFA was enacting and contributing to one of the great ambitions of the young state: mizug galuyot, the ingathering of the exiles, the process whereby Israeli society became a melting pot for the emerging national identity. On the other hand, there was an equivalent, but opposed, tendency of the folk material to enhance particular ethnic identities. Rather than disappearing into the melting pot, groups were reinforced in their separateness by the ethnographic mirror held up to them by the work of the folk archives. In the first two decades of the IFA’s work, the first imperative was given preference, a fact can that clearly be seen from the institutional settings and the linguistic medium in which the folk narratives were published. Noy published much of this material in his capacity as a columnist for the daily Omer, which was a labor-union–subsidized newspaper aimed especially at new immigrants. The paper was written in a consciously simplified register of Hebrew called ivrit qalah, which was designed to create a common ground for adult immigrants who were struggling to learn Hebrew. By 1967, Noy had produced seven slim volumes based on his column. The series, Yahfi ad shivtei yisrael [All the Tribes of Israel Together], was published by the Ministry of Education for the promotion of the Hebrew language and was addressed primarily to the audience of new immigrants. The series strove to create a multicultural dialogue among immigrants from various backgrounds speaking various languages. The selections were organized according to ethnicity and represented Morocco, Tunisia, Persia, Poland, Rumania, Kurdistan, and Yemen. Although universal and fantastic folktales with no Jewish elements whatever abound in the archives, Noy chose for this series tales with strong Jewish markings. In particular, he sought to represent the folk literature of the gathered exiles as a Jewish folk literature. IFA’s own independent series of collected narratives was active between 1961 and 1978. Its core series consisted of H fi odesh hfi odesh vesippuro [A Tale for each Month], each volume of which includes twelve narratives that were selected by the volunteers of the archives and the contributors through a complex process of


voting. The series was organized around the cycle of the year, one of the overarching principles of folk culture (the other being the life cycle, which was less clearly expressed in the publications). Smaller collections included repertoires of individual narrators, such as Seven Folktales by Miriam Yeshiva (1963, 40 pages) and Grandma Esther Relates by Esther Weinstein (1964, 96 pages), or ethnic repertoires such as Samaritan Legends (1965, 96 pages), Folk Stories from Hungary by G. Bribram (1965, 48 pages), and Folktales from Sanok (Galicia) by Sh. Z. Pipe (1967, 72 pages). For each volume, Noy provided a scholarly apparatus that noted relevant international tale types and motifs as well as parallels in Jewish tradition, thereby providing the necessary sociocultural context for the tales. Bibliographies and biographical sketches of the narrators accompanied each volume. Some volumes carry names of editors in addition to Noy, including his disciples Aliza Shenhar (former rector of Haifa University and ambassador of Israel to Moscow) and Edna Hechal (administrative director of IFA to this day), as well as Noy’s brother Meir. Incidentally—or maybe not—the first larger collections of IFA narratives were not initially published in Hebrew. Noy’s Folktales of Israel was published in 1963 in the prestigious series “Folktales of the World” of the University of Chicago Press. The German volume Jefet Schwili erza¨hlt, published by Walter de Gruyter, included the almost complete repertoire of one narrator who was born in Yemen (recorded by Heda Jason, then a young scholar and Noy’s student, later an internationally recognized folklorist herself). The publications abroad stimulated publication in Israel, even leading Abba Hushi, then mayor of Haifa, to subsidize further publication activities of IFA, which eventually contributed to making Haifa the home of the Israeli Folktale Archives, which it is to this day. Between 1964 and 1967, the small volumes were accompanied by four lengthier ethnic collections personally edited by Noy: Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of Morocco (1964); The Beautiful Maiden and the Three Princes (120 tales from Iraq, 1965); Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of Tunisia (1966); and Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of Libya (1967). This particular series, it should be noted, was discontinued in 1967 after the Six-Day War, when, it appears, institutional interest in ethnic traditions became transformed into interest in Jewish identity as embodied in the holy sites of the newly occupied territories. In any case, some two decades later, the four large collections were followed by My Father’s Treasure (101 Sephardic tales, 1989; 2d edition, 1992), edited by Noy in cooperation with Tamar Alexander. In their foreword to the new volume, the editors stressed the effects of the augmented professionalism that has been introduced into Israeli folk narrative research in the twenty years that had passed between the early series of publications and the present volume. Noy had firm ideas as to how a folklore collection should be sent out into the world. The shape of the typical folk narrative anthology that Noy put together inevitably reflected the following features: 1. A foreword presenting the cultural and ideological background of the entire project and the conditions surrounding the publication of the volume, especially the challenges faced by publication and the institutions and individuals who supported the project.


2. An introduction expounding on the characteristics of folk literature in general—style, content, performance—and the individual traits of the specific ethnic corpus represented in the volume based on the holdings of IFA, such as the comparative evaluation of the interaction between Jews and non-Jews as it emerges in each corpus. 3. Full narrative texts in Hebrew, translated by either the narrator or the field worker-collector or else edited from a version in spoken Hebrew into a “printable” register of the language. 4. A generic display of the oral narrative repertoire that clearly foregrounds the fictional and easily recognizable genres of folktale and legend. Life stories, jokes, and other less clearly distinguishable genres of folk literature are in the main dismissed or sparsely introduced. The individual titles of the narratives seem to have originated in most cases from the collectors or the editor rather than from the narrators. In the larger anthologies, there are proportionately more examples of the universal and intercultural genre of the folktale, which is associated with fantasy and entertainment, than in the smaller volumes, which include more legends that are clearly grounded in Jewish culture and take on historical, religious, and generally serious values. The folktales in the smaller collections tend toward ecotypification—ecotypes (oikotypes) being intercultural tale types that have undergone a process of cultural assimilation, so that the resourceful princess of the international tale type may be the daughter of the rabbi who excels in Torah studies. 5. Extensive notes accompanying each narrative. This is the site of the most explicit theoretical statements about the project, which specifically expound the rich bibliographical and methodological achievements of the then influential geographical-historical school of folk narrative research. Noy systematically and meticulously annotated the tales according to the international type and motif indices, including references to outstanding comparative corpora such as the Grimm brothers’ collection of folktales, Thousand and One Nights, Disciplina Clericalis, and others. These citations of comparative material orient the local, ethnic texts in clear relationship to their intercultural connections as well as to the international and humanistic character of the research. Thus, the primarily particularistic character of these ethnic anthologies is offset by the universalistic aspects of the scholarly annotation. The particularistic tendency remains, however, much more visible on the surface, since the scholarly apparatus with the comparative materials appears only in relatively small print at the back of the book, where it is conveniently inconspicuous to lay readers. Noy also tends to emphasize literary parallels to classical Hebrew and Jewish sources—Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and others—thereby creating a common Jewish genealogy to the ethnically diverse narratives. 6. Short biographies of the narrators as well as of the collectors represented in the volume.


7. Photographs of two types: those representing the visual aspects of the country and culture of origin, which present them as elements of cultural continuity; and snapshots of collectors seated with the narrators in Israel, thereby reflecting the processes of recording and collecting for the IFA themselves as elements of cultural change and exchange. The texts and subtitles to the pictures often speak in a literally familiar idiom, referring to the field workers and narrators as members of “the IFA family.” With photographs, they reveal a contextual awareness directed to the wider cultural context as well as to the situational context of the recording, thereby acknowledging the impact of the research itself on the process of textualization. Noy’s forewords also refer to the social and political conditions that interacted in the production of the folk narrative text alongside such more traditionally recognized elements as motifs and plot structures, sources and tradition; 8. A list of bibliographical abbreviations, idiosyncratic enough to be easily recognizable as the “Noy style manual.” These various folk-narrative anthologies that Noy published during this period reflected his own ideological commitments—he was a Zionist from his youth— and those of the cultural and educational elites in contemporary Israeli society of the time. For one thing, this was a period shaped and dominated by two events of enormous historical disruptive force. First, it goes without saying, was the tragic destruction of European Jewry, the extinction of the living and organic Jewish folk culture of a large part of the Jewish people, if not its majority. The effect of this traumatic destruction was not diminished by the fact that European Jewish culture had been the ground from which Zionism had sought to uproot itself, and that Zionists had fought against Yiddish as the language of Eastern European Jewish culture—and folk culture in particular—to establish the unquestioned primacy of Hebrew as the language of national rebirth. After the Holocaust, it was a tragic and an ironic fact that Israel became the main locus for commemoration and recollection of the heritage that its own founders had rejected in their struggle to divert the path of Jewish history from the Diaspora to the national homeland. Not surprisingly, the capacity for reclaiming the Ashkenazic folk heritage of European Jewry was thus seriously impaired by the ambivalence projected on it as a legitimate root of Israeli national identity. Yet apart from the Holocaust, early Israeli culture was also shaped by a second cluster of events—the traumatic displacements caused by the Israeli War of Independence and the entire nexus of incidents associated with the hostile relations that ensued between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East before the war and after it, a nexus that includes the mass emigrations of Jews from the Arab countries in the fifties and sixties, and the continuing Israeli–Palestinian conflict to this day and its effects upon the popular perception of the folk culture of Jews from Arab lands. In certain respects, that perception was even more ambivalent and problematic than the ambivalence that informed the reception of European Yiddish culture. Because the Jewish folk culture of the Middle East seems to have interacted more dialogically with the native folk cultures of its host societies than did the


folk cultures of European Jewry—a fact that may have been derived partly from the lengthier historical stability of the Jewish presence in the Middle East—the Jewish folk culture of the Middle East was often perceived as Arabic (not Jewish) culture. As that perception was exacerbated by the actual historical conflicts between Jews and Arabs, and with Palestinians in particular, the language, folk beliefs, narrative motifs, proverbs, costumes, and numerous other components of the folk life of the Jewish emigrants from Arab countries were identified with those of the enemy, and that identification played no small part in creating an almost impervious barrier against their inclusion in the newly forming Israeli national identity. Only in the late seventies, as a result of the sociopolitical unrest caused by economic and social discrimination against the edot hamizrahfi , the Jews of Middle Eastern origin, did the barrier begin to crack slightly. Even so, it led primarily to a major change in national leadership, but it did not significantly change the larger picture of cultural rejection (nor did its brief softening during the optimistic days of the budding peace process during the last decade). To be sure, there also exists a common popular (mis)conception to the effect that the Ashkenazi culture of the Israeli political and cultural elite deliberately sought to obliterate, even exterminate, the Sephardic, Oriental cultural heritage of Middle Eastern Jewry. This misconception should stand corrected, I hope, by the preceding analysis of its larger context. The tendency in Israeli public discourse to a parallel conceptualization of the two traumas—the destruction of European Jewry, on the one hand, and the ongoing enmity between Jews in Israel, including a number of wars, on the other—as twin manifestations of archetypal anti-Semitism only underscores the degree to which Middle Eastern Jewish folk culture was perceived as part of the enemy culture of the Arabs. To understand the processes through which these various diasporic folk cultures were assimilated within modern Israeli culture, it may be helpful to invoke the parallel concepts introduced by the titles of two now classic theoretical works of the recent past, both of which focused on the narrative, fictional aspect of the construction of national identity. I am referring here to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s Invention of Tradition and to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities2—two phrases that similarly attempt to identify the making of national identity as a complex interaction of strategies and tactics (to cite Michel de Certeau’s terminology)3 in the public and in the private dimensions of culture, which aim at managing and deploying discontinuous, destroyed, and traumatized identities from the past. The relevance of these terms to the case of the construction of national identity in Israel not only is obvious but also highlights the degree to which the Israeli case is an example of universal insight. To understand what is perhaps more singular about the Israeli case, it is necessary to take into account the more general treatment of cultural sources in the Israeli cultural imagination and consciousness. The status of such sources in modern Jewish culture has been constructed mainly by engaging two kinds of discourses from the past: classical sources, namely, the foundational, canonical texts, mainly from the ancient and medieval periods, and mainly from the religious tradition of Judaism, most of which were written in Hebrew or Aramaic, the two languages of “high” Jewish culture; and the ethnic sources comprising much of


what we have been calling in this essay the folk and popular literary tradition, whose texts were written mainly in the various Jewish languages that Jews created for themselves and used as their daily language in the various centers of the Diaspora. The introduction of these two kinds of sources—or “roots,” to use Kapferer’s idiom—to generate the “sentiment of national unity” tends to appear, as theoreticians such as Kapferer have shown,4 in cultural formations that are simultaneously characterized by competitive erasure of each other and double exposure. In the first two decades of the State—during the fifties and sixties—the combined conditions of collective trauma and cultural hegemony, along with specific ideological preferences, led to a clear privileging of the first tendency, namely, competitive erasure, over the second, double exposure. Indeed, from its outset early in the century, the programmatic formulation of the systematized rebirth of Hebrew culture had focused on the vitality of the classical heritage. In his comprehensive cultural program for reclaiming Hebrew literature from all its historical strata to construct what Itamar Even-Zohar has called a literary polysystem of Zionist culture, H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik already included the transposition of Jewish folk culture from contemporary non-Hebraic ethnic articulations and their translation into Hebrew and Aramaic.5 While Bialik elegantly argued for the centrality of folkliterary expression within the classical corpus of Jewish literature—aggadah, in particular—he also argued for a radical substitution of the Diaspora folklore by a new Zionist canon and the supplanting of the former within the body of the latter. Bialik’s powerful vision has informed Israeli cultural practice in virtually every sphere: from the teaching of history to the printing of stamps, from the choice of hiking routes for camping trips to the naming of streets in cities, not to mention such more routine cultural practices as Israeli theater and advertising. One result of this practice has been the effective collapse of temporal difference in the chronology of the literary canon, its effective synchronization, a phenomenon that is reflected in such practices as referring to Israeli soldiers as “modern Maccabees,” or calling the adversaries of the state by such names as Amalek and Haman, or by applying the historical mythology of David and Goliath or, most famously, of Masada, to contemporary military and political crises. These strategies for constructing national identity utilize ancient texts as repositories of collective memory and also illustrate the way in which collective memory and national identity can effectively overlap with the actual physical topography of the country. Parallels between the narratives found in canonical Jewish texts (and even semicanonical ones, such as Josephus) and the recent events of our century are reinforced by the resettlement of sites in the historical land where the legendary narratives of the past supposedly occurred. The contemporary cultural uses that have been made of such narrative events as the battles connected with the figure of Bar Kokhba and the story of Masada are topics that have already merited extensive research by recent scholars.6 Within the context of these dominant tendencies in using ancient Jewish sources as archetypes for constructing an Israeli national identity, Noy’s folkloric anthological project stands out as a relatively early attempt to do something very different—namely, to pay considerable attention to the inherent tension between


ethnic particularity and Israeli universality. By systematically listening to folk and popular voices as indices to individual cultural codes, Noy was able to sharpen awareness of the multivocality of the Israeli national voice and to highlight its different registers, and thereby to slow down the effort to create an instant new Israeli identity. In contrast to the popular stereotype epitomized by Yisraelik, the perky little sabra boy in shorts and sandals with a tembel on his head—a caricature created by the Hungarian-born cartoonist Dosh—Noy introduced through his anthologized folktales an alternative cast of many characters who were, in fact, far more familiar to most Israelis and thus capable of being identified with. In effect, Noy’s project, which acknowledged the severe extent of cultural loss that was indeed the loss of many Israelis at the time, may have been the first documented recognition of the unhappy fact that the then dominant voice of Israeli culture had pushed aside more than one cultural repertoire. Further, the victims in this process were not only the voices of Middle Eastern Jewry, whose culture was identified as the enemy’s because it was perceived through the lens of the Arab– Israeli conflict, but even the voices of Ashkenazi culture itself, whose heterogeneity had been similarly erased, by mythologically sustained revivalism of a pre-Diaspora fantasy and by the need to repress the horror of the Holocaust. To combat this process of erasure, Noy’s anthologies presented to their readers particular ethnic voices—such as those of the Yemenites and the Rumanians— individually, that is, within their native contexts, and simultaneously, as though they represented the twelve tribes of ancient Israel—namely, as separate families within a larger corporate entity. He thus masqueraded the ethnic as the tribal. This strategy was directed not only toward Jewish ethnicities but also toward Arab and other non-Jewish populations, such as the Bedwi, Druse, and Samaritan, in line with Itzhak Ben-Zvi’s agenda to find Jewish roots for all the indigenous inhabitants of the land of Israel. The geographical land itself thus served as the tenor of the metaphorizing process through which contemporary ethnic groups were transformed into ancient tribes. The briefest, though most pointed, articulation of this strategy is the very title Yahfi ad shivtei yisrael [All the Tribes of Israel Together], which, as was noted earlier, was given to one of the minor series of anthologies that were written in ivrit qalah, “easy Hebrew.” A far lengthier and more comprehensive articulation of the strategy can be found in the introductions to the larger collections, particularly in the comprehensive program that proposed to publish an epic of twelve volumes, each of which was to be entitled “Seventy-One Tales of the Jews of. . . .” Indeed, the very decision to publish the series in twelve volumes is virtually sufficient in itself to expose the mythologizing, narrativizing, fictionalizing program underlying the project—even if the project came to a premature end after only four volumes were published, a fact that tends to conceal its openly stated original purpose of transforming modern Israeli ethnicity into ancient Israelite tribalism. It is worth repeating that the project, which was funded by the Ministry of Education and the Jewish Agency, was called to a halt after the Six-Day War, when projects of national identity construction began to shift ground and take a new direction based on the settlement of the land. This early project was also quite different from the official ethnic revival that began in the mid-seventies, after


demonstrations initiated by youths of North African descent. Indeed, one of the nearly direct products of the social unrest in the seventies was the relatively extensive funding of research projects dealing with the history and culture of the edot hamizrahfi , the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa. What has happened to the anthology project since then? The most recent development is a plan to publish five future Israeli Folktale Archives anthologies, but in English and in America. The plan, co-directed by Noy with the IsraeliAmerican folklorist Dan Ben-Amos, bears witness to major professional and ideological shifts in the field. The proposed language of these new anthologies, as well as the planned site for their publication, suggests a desire (if not a need) to address a new audience—to a large extent, the international readership of folk-narrative scholars, and partly perhaps an American (and possibly European) audience of Jewish readers, but certainly not a native Israeli community of readers. Both choices serve to contest the openly Zionist objectives of the earlier publishing projects that were conducted mainly in Hebrew and in the State of Israel. Further, the decision to organize the new series in five volumes was made primarily not because five is a conventional formulaic number in traditional Judaism and its culture, but to accommodate the five language groups that are the focus of the volumes—Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), Judeo-Iranian, and miscellaneous groups. This focus on language groups reflects a theoretical shift from a content-focused approach to a performance-centered one, a shift that is also reflected in the far more precise recordings that are now made of narratives in comparison with those done in the fifties and sixties. From its beginnings to its current status, then, the Israeli project of folktale anthologizing directed by Noy and his students has been closely related to the changing fortunes of national identity construction within the larger cultural context of contemporary Israel. In this, the Israeli case is not different from that of other modern nations that, as I noted at the beginning of this essay, often shared as one of their primary components analogous projects connected to the collection of oral folk tradition. Yet unlike their famous predecessors, the folktale anthologies of the brothers Grimm or the Finnish Kalevala, Noy’s various projects have never managed to achieve a national canonical status. There are several reasons for this. Noy’s anthologies came into existence at a time when the state, the national entity, already existed, not when it was still an idea or fantasy, which was the case with most of the earlier nationalist anthologies. Further, the various texts of fantasies, dreams, and miracles that constituted a good part of the material in the early folklore anthologies failed, it would seem, to connect sufficiently to the realistic pragmatism that very much infused the cultural atmosphere in the first decade of Israel’s existence as a state—even though comparably miraculous and fantastic material has since then assumed a role in Israeli public and political discourse and even, at times, tried to dominate it. The central cultural institutions may also have been sensitive to the relative strength of the subversive rather than the consolidating potential of the project, and thus rejected it instead of canonizing it. Nonetheless, the great national projects of folktale anthologies in nineteenthcentury Europe and Noy’s Israeli anthology project share one singular feature: both eventually gave birth to new academic fields, namely, the study of folklore


in its various national traditions. Forty years after its inception, even after having to overcome many obstacles that lay on the path to its recognition as a legitimate intellectual and academic discipline, the faculties of humanities in all major Israeli universities include scholars of folk-narrative literature, some of whom are internationally acclaimed figures.7 The focus of these scholars’ research varies—from fieldwork-based studies of contemporary material to more historically inclined scholarship dealing with ancient Hebrew texts—but in nearly all cases, this research has served to create highly interesting interdisciplinary junctures, particularly in Jewish studies. Two institutions, Haifa University and Ben-Gurion University, have created partial programs for folklore studies. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a full-fledged undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral program in Jewish and comparative folklore. The Israel Folktale Archives has itself become a division of Haifa University; the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem publishes an annual journal, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore. The folktales of the Jews have indeed made their way from the mouths of the people to the stacks of the national library.

Notes Prooftexts 19 (1999):71–82 䉷 1999 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. The best-known European collections are those of the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were preceded by a number of earlier collections, especially of folk songs. The Finnish author Elias Lo¨nnrot based his epic collection Kalevala on orally performed epic songs. These activities took place in the first half of the nineteenth century. John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago, 1983); Linda De´gh, “What Did the Grimm Brothers Give to and Take from the Folk?” in Narratives in Society: A Performer-Centered Study of Narration (Helsinki, 1995), pp. 263–82; Brynjulf Alver, “Folklore and National Identity,” in Nordic Folklore, ed. R. Kvideland and H. K. Sehmsdorf (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), pp. 12–20; William A. Wilson, “The Kalevala and Finnish Politics,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 12 (1975):131–55; Vaïno¨ Kaukonen, Lo¨nnrot ja Kalevala (Helsinki, 1979). 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983; rev. ed., 1991); The Invention of Tradition, ed. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (London, 1983); for a critical view, see Charles Briggs, “The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ ” Cultural Anthropology 11 (1996):435–69. 3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Cal., 1984), pp. 38–39: “[S]trategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power . . . , elaborate theoretical places . . . capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed”; “Tactics are procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time . . . or the polemology of the ‘weak.’ ” 4. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, D.C., 1988), p. 1. 5. See the essays “Hasefer haivri” [The Hebrew Book] and “Lekhinusah shel haaggadah” [On the Anthologizing of Aggadah] in H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik, Kol kitvei [Collected Works] (Tel Aviv, 1983), pp. 232–44. On the polysystem of early Hebrew literature in Palestine, see Itamar Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Studies,” Poetics Today 11 (1990):97–191.

334 The Modern Period 6. Notably, Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, 1995). 7. Galit Hasan-Rokem and Eli Yassif, “Jewish Folkloristics in Israel: Directions and Goals,” Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division D, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1990), pp. 33–62; Dan Ben-Amos, “Jewish Folklore Studies,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991):17–66.

18 david g. roskies

The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists

t the center of their single-minded effort to extirpate the Jews of Europe, the

AGermans turned the conquered territories into a dystopia. Within a few select ghettos—Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, Cracow, Bialystok, Vilna, Terezıń—they concentrated Jewish populations from far and wide; villagers and city-folk, the pious and politically active, east and west, the law-abiding and the criminal class, the apostates and the atheists, a veritable babble of tongues. When ghettos proved insufficient to effectuate their master plan, the Germans built special camps, some primitive, some state-of-the-art, and from the south of France to the Pripet marshes, from Riga to Salonika, the surviving Jews were transported there to labor, to starve, and to be ground into ash. The apotheosis of the German dystopia was the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage in Frankfurt, the final repository for the plundered Jewish books and cultural treasures, a diabolical caricature of a future encyclopedia on the vanished Jews of Europe.1 One way that the Jews responded to their forcible concentration was through the creative anthology. At three known points on the Holocaust compass—Warsaw, Lodz, and Auschwitz-Birkenau—the very subjects of this coerced ingathering compiled anthologies whose aim it was to encompass the temporal and spatial, the linguistic and societal contours of the German blueprint. Just as the literature of and on World War I attempted to reflect the multinational and intergenerational scope of this first total war, which just yesterday had divided all of Europe along the Western, Eastern, and home fronts, so the aim of contemporary wartime anthologists was to reflect the pan-Jewish scope of this unprecedented slaughter. By September 1939, European Jewry, both east and west, had become so thoroughly secularized that there was never any question of adopting or adapting the classical anthological models. Those responsible for chronicling the destruction did not assemble a latter-day Miqraot gedolot, in which the only ontological reality was that of the sacred text as interpreted by the sanctioned commentators. If anything, the operative category in wartime was encyclopedic, as the staff of the ghetto archives assembled eyewitness accounts, diaries, autobiographies, personal 335


letters, official and underground documents, statistics, questionnaires, monographs, novels, short stories, plays, reportorial fiction, poems, songs, jokes, music, charts, maps, photographs, and graphic art. Indeed, an Encyclopedia of the Lodz Ghetto was very nearly completed, with concise definitions from A to Z, designed for postwar consumption. Meanwhile, in Warsaw, Emmanuel Ringelblum handpicked the staff of his underground archive, code-named “Oyneg Shabes,” to compile the data and to begin writing a comprehensive social history of Polish Jewry in extremis. Ringelblum gave pride of place to the sixty-odd monographs he had commissioned, each documenting the life and death of a different Polish-Jewish community.2 Not every collaborative effort was designed to be anthological, but every wartime anthology was both collaborative and anonymous. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944, as its abridged version is known to English readers, achieves a single reportorial tone although it was compiled by a stellar group of GermanJewish, Polish-Jewish, and Polish-Yiddish intellectuals laboring day in, day out, to cover every aspect of ghetto life. It is a seamless work, a remarkable testimony to absolute group discipline and unity of purpose. Lo´dz´ Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (1989) represents the very opposite editorial principle. Here the reader is exposed, albeit in English translation, to the unique style and sensibility of a dozen or so voices—that of Moravian-born Oskar Rosenfeld, Prague-born Oskar Singer, Polish-born Jozef Zelkowicz, the anonymous young man who recorded his ghetto experiences on a copy of the French novel Les vrais riches, not to speak of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski himself, the king of the ghetto. The intent of the editors Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides is to create a chronological collage, from August 24, 1939, until the liberation of a Judenrein Lodz by the Red Army, which cuts and pastes across generations, ideologies, languages, and various media (sketches, oil paintings, photographs), and draws its material from Jewish and German sources alike.3 The encyclopedia, the collaborative chronicle, the collage: each is a compilation of authentic wartime data. The mark of authenticity insofar as writings of the Holocaust are concerned is their strict adherence to chronology, to a clear demarcation of Before, During, and After. Ringelblum was acutely aware of this when deciding the scope and assigning the specific tasks of the Oyneg Shabes archive. He devoted one entire research project to “Jewish Participation in the September 1939 Campaign,” not only in order to chronicle the extent of Jewish involvement in the defense of Poland (a central tenet of his ideology), but also to recapture an important narrative that later events would otherwise have eclipsed. Aware of the cataclysmic changes occurring all around them, Ringelblum and his staff dedicated their efforts to rendering a sense of durational time. Soon after the war, some literary gleanings from the Oyneg Shabes archive were published in Communist-ruled Poland, most notably Peretz Opoczynski’s Reportorial Sketches from the Warsaw Ghetto (1954), which provided a microscopic view of the ghetto’s social organism and a chronological overview of how this part-for-the-whole (be it the courtyard, the delivery of mail, the culture of smuggling) was transformed over time.4 Among the realistic prose offerings anthologized in Leyb Olicki’s Tsvishn lebn un toyt [Between Life and Death] (1955), the most impressive by far are Leyb


Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day” and two works by the veteran novelist Yehoshue Perle: “The Destruction of Warsaw,” his detailed chronicle of the Great Deportation; and “4580,” the anatomy of a Jew who is turned into a number. Had Ringelblum lived to oversee the publication of his archive, the chronology of occupation, concentration, disease and starvation, accommodation, mass destruction, and resistance would have been its organizing principle. What a shame that editor Joseph Kermish lost sight of this or any other clearly defined principle when compiling To Live with Honor and Die with Honor! . . . , 772 pages of densely printed text, which provide the richest sampling to date of Ringelblum’s colossal project. Worse yet is what happens in the process of translation. Readers of this Oyneg Shabes anthology may experience what it’s like to decipher a hodgepodge of archival materials in a foreign tongue. The English ranges from passable to butchered; the juxtaposition of material is idiosyncratic and lacks internal consistency; references that cry out for annotation are left unglossed. Israel Lichtenstein’s last testament, a moving and memorable document, concludes as follows in Kermish’s anonymous translation: Wish we were the redeeming sacrifice for all other Jews the world over. I do believe in the survival of the People. Jews shall not be wiped out. We the Jews of Poland, of Czechia [sic!], of Slovakia, of Lithuania, of Latvia, we are the redeemers for the entire People of Israel in all other lands. (p. 59)

Compare this rendering by Lucy Dawidowicz: May we be the redeemers for all the rest of the Jews in the whole world. I believe in the survival of our people. Jews will not be annihilated. We, the Jews of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia, are the scapegoats for all Israel in all the other lands. (A Holocaust Reader, pp. 296–97)

As even this briefest of excerpts makes clear, the demarcation of time in authentic wartime writings was fraught with convenantal meaning. Indeed, the first creative anthology produced during wartime was specifically designed to bond the ideologically committed youth of Jewish Warsaw through a sense of convenantal time. Payn un gvure in dem yidishn over in likht fun der kegnvart [Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in the Light of the Present] (1940) is a 101-page mimeographed anthology of literary responses to catastrophe from the Crusades until the Jewish self-defense during the Ukrainian civil war and the battle for Tel Hai. This anthology rests its case on modern literary texts that actualize the past within the present, notably Isaac Lamdan’s expressionist poem “Masada” (1929). Three years later, Yitzhak (Antek) Zukerman, the co-editor and translator of this anthology, was inspired by Lamdan’s poem to take up arms in a desperate last stand against the Germans. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the point of end-time, the crucible of despair, yet the desire to bear witness was the last to die. How else can one explain the writings of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish men assigned to “special duty” at the gas chambers, or the almost executed plan of “publishing” a literary-historical miscellany titled Auschwitz in January 1945? Of the latter—to have included poems, eyewitness accounts, and documents pertaining both to the camp itself and to life in the ghettos—only the introduction survives, which reads, in part:


; ; ~wnhyg ja' ~[d !wp r[ywj ~[d @a; .sywra; ; ; jXyn !yna;d !wp ; qydyb[l !l[ww rym `!syyww rym sa'ww [la; rya ,gnwnpa'h yd q[wwa; jpra;ww” `!byrXygpywa qyjna;hngyya lwwyy;j r[d ja'h “larfy [mX” r[d !yy;z ; sa'd la'z ,[!yy;z] hdwwtm $yz !lyww rym “.!yy;ra; r[ha; jmwq ; sa'ww rwd !Xyga;; rj a; !wp ywdyww yd !yy;z la'z sa' ; d .twrwd [dnymwq yd ra;p r[r[zdnwa $yz !ba'h syp [Xyjyka;r [nyy;z sa'ww ,[ba; ; gpywa !yy;z wc !sqa;wwr[d ![wwyg jXyn zya @a; ja'h jyy;c yd sa'ww ~wjr[ryjra;m !wp jsa;l r[r[wwX r[d r[jnwa ; !ka'rbygr[jnwa (195 :[1946] 27 r[j[lb-a'wwyIy) .jgyyl[gpywra; s[cyylP [nyy;z We know: We will not come out of here alive. On the gates of this hell the Devil has inscribed with his own hand: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter herein.” We wish to confess our sins; this will be our proclamation of “Hear O Israel [the Lord our God, the Lord is one]” for all future generations. May this serve as the confession of a tragic generation that was not equal to its task, whose rachitic legs buckled under the heavy weight of the martyrdom that the age had placed upon its shoulders.

These anonymous, collective chronicles, written in the first-person plural, have rightfully been dubbed Megiles oyshvits, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, by the historian Ber Mark. For even as they bespeak the desperate desire to atone for the moral degradation that attends “survival in Auschwitz,” they have recourse to Dante and reveal a spark of literary ambition. Underground anthologies produced in wartime required absolute group discipline, a common culture, and a common goal. It is no wonder that the surviving “scrolls” of Auschwitz were written in a fluent Yiddish by young Polish Jews just one step removed from the heder and house of study, whose last words of confession and condemnation were addressed to the Yiddish Diaspora. The Auschwitz miscellany was apparently intended for the YIVO Institute, “the archive of Jewish suffering.” A similar unity of purpose, to rouse the conscience of the Polishspeaking community living in freedom, informed the writing of Z otchłani [De Profundis] (1944), a slim anthology of poems by Czesław Miłosz, Mieczysław Jastrun, Jan Kott, and others. The underground Jewish National Committee, an association of Zionist parties operating out of (officially Judenrein) Warsaw, smuggled a copy to the West, where it was republished in 1945. What even these prescient young poets and prose writers could not have imagined, as they raced against time in Auschwitz and Warsaw, was that the communal mandate and universal human values they upheld so courageously would not survive the liberation. The demarcation of time was the first thing to go. In an effort to work through the collective trauma, the surviving Yiddishists blurred the distinction between the culture that was irrevocably lost and the response to that destruction from afar. The first Holocaust anthology to appear in Yiddish was Kiddush hashem (1948), subtitled “a collection of selected, oftentimes abbreviated reports, letters, chronicles, testaments, inscriptions, legends, poems, short stories, dramatic scenes, essays, which describe acts of self-sacrifice in our days and also in days of yore.” No attempt was made to verify the record, for “legend is truer than fact.” Rather, this massive, latter-day seyfer, or sacred tome, was to restore the lost collective by presenting the material in order of community, making it that much easier for the


mourners to locate their unmarked graves and to celebrate the heroism of their lost sisters and brothers. Equal emphasis on the survivors as on the martyrs further underlined Jewish continuity. And the reversed chronological order underscored the greater scope of the present catastrophe over anything that had ever happened before. With the notable exception of Poland, where a Marxist, and therefore historically driven approach to the Jewish destruction prevailed, postwar attempts to anthologize the literature of the Holocaust were guided by liturgical considerations. Shmerke Kaczerginski’s Lider fun di getos un lagern (1948) represents one of the earliest efforts to collect and record the lyrics and music of Yiddish songs from the Holocaust. Although Kaczerginski always identifies the names of his informants, tries to credit the original author(s), and provides a thumbnail sketch of their specific Sitz-im-Leben—whether the concert hall, the ghetto streets, the work battalion, or the camp barracks—the songs are nowhere listed either by point of origin or by author. Instead, they are grouped thematically, impressionistically. And although many songs are contrafacts, new lyrics set to old melodies, only the most obvious prewar source is given: “Afn pripetshik,” “Tumbalalayka,” “Tango.” Worse yet, the editing of the song texts was entrusted to the American-Yiddish poet H. Leivick. Still laboring under early Romantic conceptions of the Volk, Leivick took the liberty of improving upon the texts. The grit and vulgarity have been expunged, along with local dialect and grammatical infelicities. Fortunately, this song culture lives on, as I discovered from a recent interview with Leah Holtzman (neé Swirsky) in Ramat Gan, Israel. One two-hour conversation yielded missing stanzas, much relevant data, and all the melodies to her eight songs that appear in the Kaczerginski-Leivick volume. Most important, I learned that the melodies were all borrowed: five from popular Russian songs, one from Polish, and only one from the prewar Yiddish song repertory. (Swirsky’s “Look at the Moon,” written five days before the liberation, was composed to be read and not sung.) Kaczerginski’s informant remembered the lyrics, however, with remarkable accuracy, and even today, when the surviving women from her work battalions get together, they sing the songs that Leah wrote.5 Before we abandon the authentic corpus of wartime writing, it is worth taking inventory of what little was deemed appropriate for postwar consumption. The songs traveled best, popularized by live performers as diverse as Emma Schaver and Pete Seeger, and pressed into service at Holocaust commemorations the world over. Nowadays one can even hear ghetto songs performed at klezmer concerts, and I will have more to say later about their radical recontextualization on the dramatic stage. Diaries are the next most viable genre. Like lyric poetry, diaries preserve an individual voice, allowing readers to identify with a personal narrative. Only in recent years has the reportage, or journalist sketch, a central genre in the literature of the Holocaust, begun to make its way into anthologies—although Zelkowicz, Opoczynski, and Auerbach have hardly become household names. Least accessible are the most overtly “Jewish” forms of self-expression, such as the few surviving sermonic texts: Kalonymus Shapira’s Esh kodesh [The Holy Fire] (1941–42) and Issachar Teichtal’s Em habanim semeikha [A Joyful Mother of Children] (1943).6 It requires a staggering amount of annotation simply to lay bare their


denotative—let alone, referential—layers of meaning. In general, the more timeand culture-bound a wartime text proves to be, the shorter its bookspan. Herein lies the paradox facing anthologists of the Holocaust. For if the destruction of European Jewry in the years 1939 to 1945 is not rendered as a time- and culturebound event, how else can one make sense of it? Among survivor communities, the Zionists had the most profound stake in historical memory.7 For them, the end of one war was the beginning of another. American Zionist intellectuals were particularly well situated to access the unprecedented outpouring of testimonies in Yiddish and Hebrew. As director of the Joint Distribution Committee in the American Zone of Germany, the veteran anthologizer Leo W. Schwarz was able to do his own fieldwork among the inmates of the DP camps and to consult with the first scholars of the Holocaust who were stationed in Europe, Lucy Dawidowicz and Philip Freedman. While acknowledging his debt to Niger’s Kiddush hashem, Schwarz’s The Root and the Bough (1949) takes a fresh look at The Epic of an Enduring People (the subtitle of his book). Dedicated to “The Sheerith Hapletah,” the anthology concludes with “Homecoming in Israel,” a collective journal of Kibbutz Buchenwald. Still more explicit in its ideological focus is Marie Syrkin’s literary-historical compilation, Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (1947). The “liturgical” impulse, shared by Schwarz and Syrkin, is to deny the terrible finality of the Holocaust by incorporating it into a coherent “epic” or “story.” Another, less blatant way of achieving the same purpose is by limiting one’s choice to a single genre, say, lyric poetry, and then to obliterate all temporal boundaries. Anthologies of lyric verse, redolent with the stock phrases of Jewish lamentation, and barely distinguishing between the living and the dead, the literature of the Holocaust and the literature on the Holocaust, can double as a secular liturgy. In Kadia Molodowski’s anthology of Yiddish Holocaust poetry (1962), an anemic selection of eleven “Martyrs” precedes an overrepresentative sampling of vicarious survivors. Excluded from the latter, presumably because they are not sufficiently “Jewish,” are the Soviet-Yiddish poets and the sensibility of American-Yiddish modernism. Most problematical is the status of the survivor-poet Abraham Sutzkever, represented by four poems, only one of which, his popular ballad “Mira the Teacher,” was written in the Holocaust proper. In a comparable collection of Hebrew verse (1974), edited by Natan Gross et al., the two bona fide poet-victims, Yitzhak Katzenelson and David Fogel, are lost within a chronological ordering of too many poets, whose diction and literary allusions are heavily liturgical. No one would deny the Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking survivor community the right to mourn, or to enlist the poems of and on the Holocaust for liturgical ends. Yet the succor they offer comes at a price. As Molodowski knew only too well, the prophet whom Yiddish poets heeded was sooner Marx than Moses, while the greatest poems in the Yiddish secular prayerbook—Peretz’s “A Night in the Old Marketplace,” Halpern’s “A Night,” Markish’s “The Heap,” Greenberg’s “Mephisto”—were poems of blasphemy. As for Hebrew verse, the most oft-quoted poet in the Holocaust is the one who is missing from the Gross anthology—H fi ayyim Nahfi man Bialik—presumably because he died in 1934. Instead of dredging the


bottom of the barrel to demonstrate the depth of the Israeli poetic response to the Holocaust, it would have been more honest to acknowledge the break that occurred between the generation of statehood and those European-born poets who came before.8 Then we have anthologies of Holocaust verse that mix and match Before, During, and After; “truth” and “lamentation”; Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and all the languages of Europe. Here, almost anything goes. Milton Teichman and Sharon Leder include both poetry and prose fiction in their Truth and Lamentation (1994) and do accord special status to authentic wartime writing. As a descriptive model, however, the distinction between “truth” and “lamentation,” between the facts and the meaning of the facts, does not work, because it is obeyed mostly in the breach. After spelling out their feminist and modernist agenda, the editors deliver a generous sampling of women writers, writing about women, and a strong esthetic preference for the ironic, understated, poetic voice. The culture of American English departments, in other words, is the final arbiter of taste. Teichman and Leder wisely limit their choice to works that engage the historical reality of the Holocaust; therefore, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” for all its feminist and modernist credentials, is excluded from the canon. Not so anthologist Hilda Schiff. In her compilation of Holocaust Poetry (“119 poems from 59 poets,” 1995), the inclusion of Plath’s poem is defended on the grounds that it “embodies an instance where Holocaust imagery abounds, some might say is exploited, in the service, not of the Holocaust itself, but of the poet’s parental vendetta, showing how Holocaust terms have become absorbed in everyday language” (xxiii–xxiv). Heeding these guidelines, the editor ought to have cast her net even wider and included some poetry from black and Chicano “ghettos.” Needless to say, no poem in either New Critical anthology is burdened with a date or any bibliographical data. And this is where the greatest lie is perpetrated. The autobiographical referent of Plath’s poem is obvious to the point of absurdity, so that pairing it up with Natan Zach’s “Against Parting,” a bitterly ironic portrait of a Holocaust survivor, is fair game. Both are typical of “Second Generation” responses to the Holocaust. But elsewhere in her anthology, under the heading of “Rescuers, Bystanders, Perpetrators,” Schiff pairs Miłosz’s “Campo di Fiori,” his courageous poem written on the Aryan side of Warsaw and first published in the underground anthology Z otchłani, with Denise Levertov’s exoneration of Adolf Eichmann (“During the Eichmann Trial”). An editor who uses sleight of hand to suggest such a moral equivalency is guilty, in my book, not only of falsifying history, but also of sacrilege.9 The problem with these anthologies of Holocaust poetry is essentially the same: they all respond to the utopian impulse in the anthological imagination, whereas what is needed here is precisely the opposite. Any anthology that purports to be “about” the Holocaust should attempt to mimic the claustrophobia, the containment, the exclusivity, the dystopian quality of the thing itself. Every anthology is an imagined community on the printed page, where the generations magically engage in dialogue, where materials differing in origin and audience are seamlessly joined. But an anthology devoted to the systematic destruction of European Jewry—an event that from a late twentieth-century perspective already


verges on science fiction—cannot be allowed to define a totality that did not exist in a state of nature. Unless the anthologist wishes to be truly encyclopedic, to include every poem by every poet who ever dealt with the subject, however obliquely, there is nothing to be gained by having Sylvia Plath “speak” to Czesław Miłosz, or by allowing every Yiddish versifier who was living comfortably in New York City to feed off the moral stature of the martyred poets of Europe. An encyclopedia of Holocaust poetry, moreover, would have to begin with those hundreds of murdered poets who wrote in Yiddish and Polish in a poetic idiom far removed from the postwar sensibilities of America, England, or Israel. Bringing them to life again—that alone would be a utopian venture worth pursuing. Anthologists, as distinct from encyclopedists, are faced with draconian choices. Holocaust anthologists must further choose either to pursue a strictly historical approach, allowing chronology and the facts on the ground to dictate the order and selection of materials, or to follow a metahistorical blueprint, displacing the Holocaust in space, in time, or in both. Each approach entails a different set of priorities, a different sequence, and above all, a different literary canon. Published by and for the Reform movement in North America, Albert H. Friedlander’s extremely influential Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature (1968) reflects the seismic shift in postwar consciousness from the historical to the ecumenical axis. It is also, not coincidentally, the first anthology to give Elie Wiesel a dominant voice. Because Reform is of German provenance, this anthology understandably shifts the order of Holocaust priorities from Eastern to Western Europe, from history to theology. Wiesel’s tale of Elijah the Prophet as a Hungarian-Jewish deportee makes up the prologue, while the book concludes with a Judeo-Christian dialogue on God “after Auschwitz.” Sandwiched between is the central theological chapter of the Reader, titled “The Great Silence,” which moves from the complicity of the gentiles to the silence of God. “Can God speak out if man is silent?” asks Friedlander in his introduction. “When we believe in man,” he replies, “God speaks through man. And when our fellow man fashions the darkness of hell at Auschwitz—God hangs upon those gallows.” The latter image alludes to the famous (excerpted) chapter in Wiesel’s Night (1956, 1960), which describes a public hanging in Buna-Monowitz as a travesty of the crucifixion. Friedlander’s Reader admirably serves the esthetic and theological needs of its interpretive community: second-, third-, and fourth-generation American Jews. If Yiddish proper makes but a symbolic appearance, during a lyrical interlude of “Songs of the Night, the Art and Music of the Shoah,” it is because the only usable Eastern European Jewish past is one that foregrounds the individual. Otherwise, two brief selections stand in for authentic wartime writings: the obligatory Diary of a Young Girl and Chaim Kaplan’s The Scroll of Agony. What Friedlander accomplishes, then, by framing his anthology with Wiesel’s fiction on the one hand and Holocaust theology on the other is to recontextualize the literature of and on the Holocaust within the existentialist worldview of the individual facing a godless void. The Franco-Jewish writers fare especially well within such a framework: Piotr Rawicz at one extreme, Wiesel and Andre´ Schwarz-Bart at the other.


Rather than pick and choose, edit and translate, with one’s interpretive community held firmly in view, an alternative, more radical approach is to turn the process around, viz., to harness the integrative power of an anthology in order to create an interpretive community. Thus far there have been three main attempts to do so in English, each piggybacking on the anthologist’s prior research: Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s A Holocaust Reader (1976), my own The Literature of Destruction (1989), and Lawrence L. Langer’s Art from the Ashes (1995). A Holocaust Reader follows the exact contours of Dawidowicz’s epoch-making The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945, which is to say, it brings together all relevant sources: the precise unfolding of the “Final Solution” as revealed and concealed by official German documents; the ordeal of German Jewry as expressed in its public stance toward the Third Reich; the ordeals of the ghettos in Eastern Europe as reflected in their songs, reports of social welfare and cultural activities, Rabbinical decisions, and political broadsides; the ordeals of the Judenra¨te, as reflected in their official documents; the ordeals of deportation, as revealed in diaries, testaments, letters, appeals, and contemporary reportage; and finally, the “ordeal of desperation,” as revealed in the calls-to-arms, the communique´s from the battlefront, the eyewitness account of the surviving commander. In a brief but indispensable introduction, Dawidowicz instructs her readers on the manifold dangers that attend the study of Holocaust documents. “To extract the full value of any document,” she writes in her uniquely authoritative voice, the historian must first screen it for defects. He must try to establish its genuineness and authenticity. He must verify its credibility, accuracy, and veracity, study the internal evidence of its language, style, and content, and confront it with other, often contradictory, evidence. The documents of the Holocaust should, indeed must, undergo such scrutiny and examination, for they too suffer from the defects spawned by subjectivity and partisanship, bias and prejudice. (pp. 9– 10)

Holocaust documents, according to Dawidowicz, are different in degree but not in kind from comparable documents written in secrecy, in extremity, in duplicity. No one is spared her historian’s rigor: neither Ringelblum nor Czerniakow (the first chairman of the Warsaw Judenrat); neither propagandists nor pietists. Dawidowicz, preceded by the historian of the Judenra¨te, Isaiah Trunk, and succeeded by the historian of the Lodz ghetto, Lucjan Dobroszycki, brought about a fundamental shift in the order of scholarly priorities, from the exhaustive documentation of the Final Solution—of what the Germans did to the Jews, when, and why—to an examination of the Holocaust itself—the complex internal response of the Jewish victims, particularly in Eastern Europe. Riding on her coattails a decade later, I set out to reclaim the multilingual canon of Jewish responses to catastrophe in the light of the Holocaust but not superseded by it. In Against the Apocalypse (1984), I trace the development of an aboveground, cumulative literary tradition. My primary sources are earlier anthological attempts at Jewish self-understanding, from the Kinot for Tisha bAv and Jonas Gurland’s Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael (1887–92), to Gutkowski’s and Zukerman’s Payn un gvure (1940), Israel Halpern’s Sefer hagevurah (1941–50), A. M. Haberman’s Sefer


gezeirot ashkenaz (1945), and S. Niger’s Kiddush hashem (1948), not to mention the thousand or so yizker-bikher, memorial volumes for the murdered European Jewish communities. What defines a text as “canonical” within this vast body of writing is its intertextuality, its pious or parodic reference to earlier responses to catastrophe. As of the 1890s, with the rise of militantly secular ideologies, such references were increasingly eclectic. There emerged, I argue, two distinct schools of Jewish literary response to catastrophe—the one metonymic and neoclassical, which tended to prey upon Jewish texts exclusively, and the other mythic and apocalyptic, which cast a wider net, embracing Christian symbols and sancta as well. One line of development led from Mendele to Bialik to Sholem Aleichem to Ansky to Glatstein to Agnon to A. M. Klein, while another described an apocalyptic arc from Lamed Shapiro to Isaac Babel to Moyshe-Leyb Halpern to Avigdor Hameiri to Isaac Lamdan to Uri Zvi Greenberg to Piotr Rawicz. Together, they define the mental curriculum required to “read” catastrophic events archetypally, through the polished lens of Jewish collective memory. Now that two generations have passed since the end of World War II, and sufficient groundwork has been laid publishing, translating, and evaluating authentic wartime writings, I could describe the literature of the Holocaust as a closed chapter of Jewish literary history; closed and utterly distinct, because of the enormous amount of individual talent and collective energy that went into shaping an anthological response commensurate with the catastrophe itself.10 Each major ghetto had its underground archive. Each archive had its resident chroniclers who labored, day in, day out, to encompass the genocidal slaughter in its temporal and spatial totality. As the first anthologist to roam free among the sheymes, the sacred fragments of this wartime geniza, I selected those exemplars of literary art that also succeeded in finding the part that stood for the whole, whether by enlisting a neoclassical or an apocalyptic approach: Opoczynski’s “House No. 21,” Goldin’s “Chronicle of a Single Day,” Perle’s “4580,” Shayevitsh’s “Lekh-lekho,” Sutzkever’s poetry from the Vilna ghetto, Katzenelson’s Song of the Murdered Jewish People, and, above all, Rachel Auerbach’s “Yizker, 1943.” Although only four out of twenty chapters of my anthology are devoted to authentic wartime writings, these four constitute its core. I would even say they justify the whole endeavor. Such is the anthological power of these texts that they redefine the artistic canon both forward and backward. It is impossible to reread Sholem Aleichem’s tales of Kasrilevke without being reminded of Opoczynski’s reportorial fiction from the Warsaw ghetto, or to think of Bialik without hearing the echoes of his pogrom poems reverberate in the poetry of Shayevitsh, Sutzkever, and Katzenelson—just as it is impossible ever again to recite the Memorial Prayer on Yom Kippur without the mediation of Rachel Auerbach. The Literature of Destruction is a primer in Jewish collective memory. Designed to be “Jewish” both in form and substance, it advances a neotraditional mode of reading by means of a glossary, intertextual references, and explanatory notes that appear alongside the text, in a Latin facsimile of Rashi script. What such a textual apparatus gains in depth, however, it sacrifices in scope. While it presents a descriptive model broad enough to encompass the early short stories of Aharon Appelfeld, or the poetry of Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, and Nelly Sachs (all


of whom I foolishly omitted), it is not catholic enough to make room for the concentration-camp prose of Tadeusz Borowski, the philosophical essays of David Rousset and Richard Antelme, or the psychoanalytic cartoon art of Art Spiegelman.11 In point of fact, I could not cast my net much wider than I did because the method of creating meaning through creative memory is extremely laborintensive. Each writer must first be situated within a nexus of language, genre, stylistic register, poetic and parodic tradition—in short, requires a crash course in Polish, German, French, Israeli, or American culture. Even if I possessed the requisite knowledge and linguistic competence to do so, I would still prefer to situate the literary response to the Holocaust within an anthological framework of Jewish collective memory alone, both for the sake of reconnecting a severed link in that chain, and for the sake of an imagined future. Lawrence L. Langer sets out from a completely different point of departure and has a fundamentally different goal in mind. With a consistency of vision second to none and a rigor of judgment that rarely misses its mark, he has fashioned an apocalyptic countermodel, first in such critical studies as The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975) and The Age of Atrocity (1978), and most recently in Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology (1995). For Langer, the Holocaust is emblematic of ultimate Evil, the Jews are viewed not as heroic “survivors” but as victims of massive psychic trauma, of modern technology gone mad. His is a vision as global as mine is hermetic, as subversive of hope as mine is insistent upon continuity. From first to last, Langer’s approach to the Holocaust has been guided by the principle “Abandon all cultural and ethical conventions, ye who enter herein.” Langer sees the accumulated weight of the past as merely a hindrance in confronting the radical otherness of “the Holocaust experience.” He evinces, moreover, an ever-growing skepticism about literature and art per se. Just prior to compiling this 694-page anthology, Langer promoted the use of video testimonies of former Holocaust victims in his prizewinning book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory.12 Langer makes a similar case in Art from the Ashes by giving primacy to documentary and historical writings that eschew an artistic design. In this way, he forces the reader first to confront the unmediated “truth” of the Holocaust. Through the multilingual scope of his anthology, its texts originally written by Jews and gentiles alike in German, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, in addition to English, Langer refuses to privilege any one culture. His generic sweep, finally, is extremely diverse and includes courtroom testimonies, eyewitness accounts, letters, diaries, reportorial fiction, essays, short stories, novellas, prose poems, lyric poetry, and one full-length drama. He concludes with reproductions from the artists of Terezıń. What Langer values most about authentic wartime writings, to which he pays much greater attention here than in any of his prior work, is its immediacy, its unmediated quality. Hence, he selects those passages from the diaries and journalistic prose of Abraham Lewin, Jozef Zelkowicz, and Avraham Tory that treat the most horrific events in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno ghettos, respectively. By the same token, Langer chooses those of Sutzkever’s poems that express the poet’s moments of radical self-confrontation. Rather than present a potpourri of poets,


Langer wisely focuses on six who have consistently struggled to find “a form for chaos by including chaos as part of the form”: Abraham Sutzkever, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan, Miklo´s Radno´ti, Nelly Sachs, and Jacob Glatstein. Significantly, the poets are put in next-to-last place. Because, for Langer, the Holocaust is self-contained, defying analogy, it demands a strictly mimetic order of priorities. After one establishes “The Way It Was,” one may sample the journals and ghetto diaries written by those who knew what was happening in front of their eyes but could not apprehend the full extent of the horror. Then and only then may one move on to fiction, drama, and poetry, leaving graphic art for last. A work is judged by its success in rendering the radical otherness of the Holocaust, and indeed, most of Langer’s selections are justified in terms of his goals. A good example is the meticulously written fictional memoir “The Season of the Dead” by Pierre Gascar, a writer whom Langer introduced to American readers. There is one writer, however, who works against Langer’s own professed values of truthfulness, and that is the Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol, whose drama Ghetto is the longest single text in Langer’s anthology. As a dramatic, self-contained setting, the Nazi ghetto is every playwright’s dream. The Aristotelian unities of time and place come ready-made, courtesy of the SS. (Two out of the four plays included in Robert Skloot’s anthology of The Theatre of the Holocaust are set in the Lodz ghetto.) Here, as in all of Western drama, conflicts abound between members of different social classes, nationalities, generations, or genders. Sobol’s drama, commended for its “theatricality,” seems to pass Langer’s mimetic standard with flying colors. The well-worn device of writing a play-within-a-play invites the audience, in Langer’s words, “to experience simultaneously history as performance and performance as history.” But what new truths about the Holocaust are revealed by this English adaptation of a contemporary Israeli play, complete with original lyrics by Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick?13 That the surviving Jews of the Vilna ghetto defied their fate through creative vitality? Surely Sutzkever’s poetry is testimony enough. That the ghetto populace and leadership were faced with “choiceless choices”? Virtually every other selection in Langer’s anthology makes the same point. Or is it Sobol’s bold leap from past significance to present meaning? The destruction of European Jewry is here reduced to a morality play at best, a piece of agitprop, at worst, which pits power against powerlessness; the former is represented by SS officer Kittel and his Zionist-Revisionist lackey Jacob Gens, while the anti-Zionist chronicler of the ghetto, Herman Kruk (erroneously called Herschel in the play), represents the humane alternative to the exercise of raw power. Small wonder that Sobol recasts the Vilna ghetto into a Brechtian cabaret. The truth-claim of a work of the historical imagination such as Sobol’s Ghetto has little to do with its verisimilitude or theatricality. History is not performance, and (this particular) performance is not history. The only reality accurately reflected—or refracted—in Sobol’s play is that of present-day Israel. It “speaks” most eloquently to a politicized theater audience that shares Sobol’s vision of a brutalized present versus a sentimentalized Yiddish past.14 As someone who insists that Holocaust literature be judged on its own terms, be answerable to its own poetics, Langer ought to be held responsible for checking


Sobol’s sources, for explaining why the portrait of Kruk, the play’s main protagonist and mouthpiece, diverges from his Diary of the Vilna Ghetto; for noting how the Yiddish and Hebrew productions actually performed in the ghetto differed from Sobol’s grotesque-sentimental songfest. (The historian must labor to verify the “credibility, accuracy, and veracity” of each text, wrote Dawidowicz, “study the internal evidence of its language, style, and content, and confront it with other, often contradictory evidence.”) And if the bottom line reveals more debits than credits, Langer ought to reconsider whether including so flawed a drama was really worth it, just to be able to claim that all main literary genres have been duly covered.15 Ultimately, Langer pays a high price for his consistency of vision and rigor of judgment (with the exception of Sobol’s play). The individual works appear stripped of their cultural context and do not answer to creative memory. As in his critical studies, Langer repeatedly exhorts his readers to renounce their normal reading habits. Writers of Holocaust fiction, he asserts, “know the limitations of their art, when the issue is mass murder. The evil they need to portray is so unlike Satan’s, the suffering so remote from Job’s, that the very categories inspiring their literary ancestors prove useless to them” (p. 238). Kafka and Camus, Faulkner and Joyce are likewise dismissed as inadequate guides to Holocaust fiction. Rather than engage in a hermeneutic wrestling with the past for the sake of the future, that future is dead-ended. Consider this: Langer’s first survivor-author is Ida Fink, who writes in Polish and lives in Israel. She is about as “displaced” a writer as they come. From her collection A Scrap of Time, Langer does well to select “A Spring Morning,” a story about a man who tries to save his child from death. The story is spare to a fault, as naked as biblical narrative. And indeed, when the story is done, the reader schooled in the Hebrew Bible immediately recognizes its antecedent, the terrible Akedah, here invoked in two ways: the father is first seen carrying his child along the road to death, like a sacrificial offering, and only then does he urge her to walk away from the procession of the doomed; and the event takes place on “a spring morning,” as it is written, “So early next morning, Abraham saddled his ass and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac” (Gen. 22:3). The final tableau of the father once again carrying the child, now dead, is a heartrending reversal of the patriarch whose son was spared by the intervention of a heavenly angel and the substitution of a ram. This is as surely the intention of Ida Fink as Shayevitsh meant his “Lekh-lekho” to counter God’s command to Abraham to “Go forth” from his native land. As Katzenelson wrote The Song of the Murdered Jewish People to be a countercommentary on Bialik’s poems on the Kishinev pogrom. As surely as Bialik repudiated the liturgy commemorating the Chmielnicki massacres and the Crusades. As surely as the Crusade chronicles redefined the meaning of the Temple sacrifice in the light of Jewish mass martyrdom. The literature of and on the Holocaust derives its unique power from the deliberate—and desperate—ingathering of all these possibilities. Writers and anthologists alike selected from the vast corpus of Jewish and world literature what could be brought to bear on the twin subjects of destruction and resistance— however futile—to destruction. This radical concentration of cultural resources


expressed the personal desire and the collective need to counteract the German drive for global conquest, which was predicated upon the forced ingathering of European Jewry in preparation for their final slaughter. One was a creative, lifeaffirming, response to the murderousness of the other.

Anthologies Cited Adelson, Alan, and Robert Lapides, eds. Lo´dz´ Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege. New York: Viking, 1989. Anonymous. “The Auschwitz Miscellany.” YIVO-bleter 27 (1946):194–97. Apenszlak, Jacob, ed. Z otchłani: Poezja ghetta i podziemia w Polsce [De profundis: Ghetto Poetry from the Jewish Underground in Poland]. 2d ed. New York: Association of Friends of Our Tribune, 1945. Brown, Jean E., Elaine C. Stephens, and Janet E. Rubin, eds. Images from the Holocaust: A Literature Anthology. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Publishing. Co., 1996. [This volume appeared too late to be included within the purview of my essay.] Dawidowicz, Lucy, ed. A Holocaust Reader. New York: Behrman House, 1976. Dobroszycki, Lucjan, ed. The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–1944. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984. Friedlander, Albert H., ed. Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968. Gross, Natan, Itamar Yaok-Kest, and Rina Klinov, eds. Hashoah bashirah haivrit: Mivhfi ar [The Holocaust in Hebrew Poetry: An Anthology]. With an intro. by Hillel Barzel. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz hameuchad, 1974. Gurland, Jonas, ed. Leqorot hagezeirot al yisrael [To the History of Jewish Persecution]. 7 vols. Jerusalem: Kedem, 1972; orig. pub. 1887–92. Gutkowski, Eliyohu, and Yitzhak Zukerman, eds. Payn un gvure in dem yidishn over in likht fun der kegnvart [Suffering and Heroism in the Jewish Past in the Light of the Present]. Warsaw: Dror, 1940. Haberman, A. M., ed. Sefer gezeirot ashkenaz vetsarfat [The Persecutions in Germany and France, 992–1298]. Jerusalem: Ophir, 1971; rep. of 1945 ed. Halpern, Israel, ed. Sefer hagevurah: antologiya historit-sifrutit [The Book of Valor: A literary-Historical Anthology]. 3 vols. 3d ed. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1977. Kaczerginski, Shmerke, and H. Leivick, eds. Lider fun di getos un lagern [Songs of the Ghettos and Concentration Camps]. New York: CYCO, 1948. Kermish, Joseph, ed. To Live with Honor and Die with Honor!: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath). Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986 (actually published in 1988). Langer, L. Lawrence, ed. Art from the Ashes: A Holocaust Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Mark, Ber, ed. The Scrolls of Auschwitz. Trans. from the Hebrew by Sharon Neemani and adapted from the Yiddish original. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1985. Molodowski, Kadia, ed. Lider fun khurbn, taf-shin–taf-shin-hey [Poems of the Holocaust, 1939–45]. Tel Aviv: I. L. Peretz, 1962. Niger, S., ed. Kidesh hashem [Kiddush Hashem: A collection of selected, oftentimes abbreviated reports, letters, chronicles, testaments, inscriptions, legends, poems, short stories, dramatic scenes, essays, which describe acts of self-sacrifice in our own days and also in days of yore]. New York: CYCO, 1948. Olicki, Leyb, ed. Tsvishn lebn un toyt [Between Life and Death]. Warsaw: Yidish-bukh, 1955. With a foreword by Ber Mark.

The Holocaust According to Its Anthologists 349 Roskies, David G., ed. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Schiff, Hilda, ed. Holocaust Poetry. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Schwarz, Leo W., ed. The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1949. Skloot, Robert, ed. The Theatre of the Holocaust: Four Plays. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Syrkin, Marie, ed. Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Teichman, Milton, and Sharon Leder, eds. Truth and Lamentation: Stories and Poems on the Holocaust. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Notes Prooftexts 17 (1997):95–113. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. For a recent study of the Jewish response to the systematic German plunder of Jewish books, see David E. Fishman’s English-Yiddish monograph “Embers Plucked from the Fire”: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna (New York, 1996). 2. Excerpts from the Encyclopedia in Hebrew translation appear in Yediot beit lohfi amei hagetaot, nos. 7, 8, 9–10, and 11–12 (1954–55). It was later fully exploited by Nachman Blumental in his valuable reference work, Verter un vertlelkh fun der khurbn-tkufe [Words and Sayings from the Holocaust] (Tel Aviv, 1981). The best account of the activities of the Oyneg Shabes archive is still Ringelblum’s own, written in January 1943. For a slightly abridged translation, see my The Literature of Destruction (Philadelphia, 1989): 386–98. For Ringelblum’s social-historical mandate, see Samuel D. Kassow’s forthcoming article, “Two Ghetto Diaries: Herman Kruk and Emanuel Ringelblum,” in The Individualization of the Holocaust, ed. Lucjan Dobroszycki and Robert Shapiro (New York, 1997). 3. Under the strict tutelage of the late Holocaust historian Lucjan Dobroszycki, the editors included only authentic wartime materials from the surviving ghetto archive, the writings of deportees unearthed in Auschwitz, or from diaries reconstructed by survivors immediately upon liberation. This unfortunately excluded the short stories of Isaiah Spiegel, available at that time only in their revised, postwar versions. But see, now, Isaiah Spiegel, Proza sipurit migeto Lodz´ [Yiddish Narrative Prose from the Lodz Ghetto: 16 stories edited from rescued manuscripts with introductions and a series of oral interviews with their author], ed. Yechiel Szeintuch (Jerusalem, 1995). Josef Zelkowicz, the major Yiddish writer in the Lodz ghetto, is finally receiving his due. See the first attempt in any language to collect his writings: Bayamim hanora im hahem: reshimot migeto Lodz´ [In Those Nightmarish Days: Reportorial Sketches from the Lodz Ghetto], ed. Michal Ungar, trans. Aryeh Ben Menahem and Yosef Rav (Jerusalem, 1994). 4. Peretz Opoczynski, Reportazhn fun varshever geto [Reportorial Sketches from the Warsaw Ghetto], ed. Ber Mark (Warsaw, 1954). 5. For non-Yiddish readers, the most accessible selection of Yiddish songs from the Holocaust is We Are Here: Songs of the Holocaust, ed. Eleanor Mlotek and Malke Gottlieb, with singable translations by Roslyn Bresnick-Perry (New York, 1983). A scholarly study on this subject, with new song texts in Yiddish and Polish, is Gila Flam, Singing for Survival: Songs of the Lodz Ghetto, 1940–45 (Urbana, Ill., 1992). 6. See Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Northvale, N.J., 1994), and Harav Issachar Shlomo Teichtal, Em habanim semeikha, 2d ed. (Jerusalem, 1983). For a very provocative

350 The Modern Period discussion of Teichtal’s book, see Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, “Confession on the Brink of the Crematoria,” The Jerusalem Quarterly 34 (Winter 1985):126–41. 7. See Israel Bartal’s essay in the present volume. 8. The same uncritical approach characterizes the companion volume to this anthology, Hanna Yaoz’s study of Hashoah beshirat dor hamedinah [The Holocaust in Hebrew Poetry of the Statehood Period] (Tel Aviv, 1984). 9. Schiff also presents a caricature of Emanuel Ringelblum and a fallacious biography of Abraham Sutzkever. 10. This line of argument is developed more fully in two subsequent studies of mine: “The Library of Jewish Catastrophe,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 33–41, and “Ringelblum’s Time Capsule,” in D.G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington, IN, 1999): 26–40. 11. My original plan had been to end The Literature of Destruction with “Hagerush,” a short story by Appelfeld about a Hasidic anti-pilgrimage. Appelfeld, however, refused permission to have it translated. In this instance, the anthologist’s design for “canon formation” clashed with the authorial design for self-canonization. Appelfeld, to put it simply, wishes to be known abroad on the strength of his later novels and novellas, which, sadly for my enterprise, partake much less of classical sources than do his earlier short stories. Stymied by Appelfeld’s refusal, and at a late stage in my own work, I was sent scrambling to find a new way to end. That is when I decided to move beyond the European continent and return my story to its point of origin—the covenantal relationship of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. To this end, I concluded with three different responses to the Israeli War of Independence: Natan Alterman’s ballad “The Silver Platter,” Abba Kovner’s “Battle Bulletins” from the front, and S. Y. Agnon’s “Kaddish for the Fallen Soldiers of Israel.” The loss of Appelfeld was more than compensated for. For a reading that contextualizes the poetry of Dan Pagis within Jewish literary history, see Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Dan Pagis—Out of Line: A Poetics of Decomposition,” Prooftexts 10 (1990):335–63. 12. So far as I know, mine was the only dissenting voice. See David G. Roskies, “Through a Lens, Darkly,” Commentary (November 1991):58–59. 13. After revising the play numerous times and for different audiences, Sobol published a definitive Hebrew edition of Ghetto in the Or-Am series of theater scripts, 2d ed. (Tel Aviv, 1992). Comparing this Israeli version with the English adaptation that appears in Langer’s anthology is so depressing a task, that I leave it for others to do. 14. See Yael S. Feldman, “Zionism: Neurosis or Cure? The ‘Historical’ Drama of Yehoshua Sobol,” Prooftexts 7 (1987):145–62. 15. Another literary text that lies is Arnost Lustig’s story “The Lemon,” anthologized by Teichman and Leder. Set in the Lodz ghetto, it describes the confrontation between two Jewish boys, the cynical Chicky and the morally vulnerable Erwin. Lustig dramatizes Chicky’s cynicism by having him say, “They [i.e., the deported Jews] went up the chimney long ago.” The most basic fact about the Lodz ghetto, as distinct from all the others, is that no one, with the possible exception of Rumkowski, had any idea about the gas chambers and crematoria. The responsible anthologist, therefore, must either flag this as an example of “poetic license” or choose another story. In Lustig’s case, any story set in Terezıń, where he himself was interned as a child, would have been preferable.

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