Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A rebbishe ma'aseh about Moses Mendelssohn.



Incidentally, this story seems to be quite the favorite in the chicken soup blogosphere.

11 comments:

  1. I was hoping to see "Berthold Auerback, historian" instead of "Berthold Auerback, novelist," but you can't always get what you want. -- Phil

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  2. I'm missing the source and date. Pleeease.

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  3. Hanoch Teller tells the same story about some chassidish figure being lame. But he copies and "kashers" a lot of his stuff.

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  4. The Neu-Sandecer Rov, I believe.

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  5. Sorry that I didn't get to this until today. The source for this particular excerpt in the post itself is relatively unimportant (although I think it's from 1884). It was an oft-repeated story, that as far as I can tell first appears in the book Felix Mendelssohn und seine Zeit (1859) by Heinrich Eduard Jacob. Berthold Aurbach also told the story in a piece called "Wie der Weltweise Moses Mendelssohn seine Frau Gewann", which appeared in 1879, but according to a secondary source also appeared in 1860 in the Illustrierten Deutschen Volkskalender. All told, it seems that the late 1850s are when the story makes its appearance into print, and seems to have become popular in English beginning in the 1880s.

    In any case, the way it is presented in the Felix Mendelssohn biography is that the story is a Mendelssohn family legend.

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  6. Great Maiseh. Seriously! Very hartzig.

    DF

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  7. As told in Khareidi circles, the protagonist in this story is the Divrei Chaim/Sanz. I was even told this story on a date.

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  8. Etti Ankri's modern, 'frum' version of the legend:

    http://bdld.info/2011/02/20/legends-of-the-jews-of-predestination-and-pyramids/

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  9. And the kind that speak like that.

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