Eating a peacock. On rabbis who rule strictly and act leniently.

In a chapter called "The Fourth Great Cause Which Separated the Hebrews From Any Intercourse With The People With Whom They Lived,—The Prohibition Of Partaking Of The Food Of Whoever Was Not An Israelite" in Isaac D'israeli's The Genius of Judaism (London, 1833), the author writes that "the Opinionists" [ie, פוסקים] can establish any opinion they choose." To convey this, he offers an anecdote:



(Since it takes up four pages in his book, the extract above is from the London Saturday Journal of Aug. 24, 1839.)

This reminded me of other stories of פוסקים who ruled strictly because of their adherence to the rules of פסק of but practiced leniently because of their lack of piety. The first story comes from Rabbi Baruch Epstein's Mekor Baruch (Vilna, 1928), v. iii pp. . Below is a partial English version of the story, and then the original Hebrew. ('My Uncle the Netziv,' a partial translation of a part of Mekor Baruch by Moshe Dombey is a very well known book due to well-known circumstances, but most do not realize that he published a second volume called 'RECOLLECTIONS The Torah Temima Recalls the Golden Age of European Jewry Rendered into English by Moshe Dombey Edited by N.T. Erline' (Targum Press, 1989):














At this time I want to mention a thing I've noticed many many times over the years. Many books translated from Hebrew use the most ridiculous transliteration of unfamiliar names of people and places. You can never go wrong if you write אלעזר פלעקלש without having a clue how that surname is pronounced, but once you try rendering it into English you run the risk of writing Eliezer Palklash (two absurdities in one) as he does on pg. 156 (should be Eleazar Fleckeles, although other spellings which basically convey this would do). Another book, a popular two-volume work on Jewish history by a notable Bible exegete renders עזריה די רוסי as "de Russo" (here the blame lies with his translator, who made many of those errors). These things detract from otherwise reasonable works.

Getting back to the excerpts above you can see that according to this story the rabbi renders a correct and strictly halachic decision for one who asks, but in practice didn't follow it since he felt that the halacha itself was incorrect, based on a misunderstanding by the rabbis of a biblical verse. When asked to explain himself, he says that the rabbi is like the pharmacist whose only role is to fill a prescription, not to debate it if he doesn't agree with it.

The rabbi is teasingly (and honorably) referred to by Rabbi Epstein as בפז, but he is Zacharias Frankel; the footnote gives it away to all but the most clueless. Rabbi Epstein instruct the reader that the euphemism is to be read left to right. Read that way, the first two letters are initials of his name. He even helpfully notes that the פ is to be read "f," not "p." The last initial is for the city in which his was ראש ישיבה, i.e., Breslau. In the first footnote (pp. 3-4) of Louis Jacobs' 'A Tree of Life' it is opined that it is "doubtful whether, in fact, Frankel actually said this, since it is contrary to his general philosophy of the halakhah." Unfortunately Jacobs says no more than this, but I think he meant that for Frankel, although halacha has a history, there can be no such thing as "the rabbis were wrong, so privately I won't listen to them." Alternatively, perhaps the story is true, but the identity of the rabbi is mistaken. Also interesting is that to Rabbi Epstein (writing possibly as late as 1923 when it was first published) and Rabbi Zalman Spitzer, the aged son-in-law of the Chasam Sofer, Zechariah Frankel was an Orthodox rabbi. A bad one, in their view, but they know nothing of Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch's contention, which is basically accepted today, that he was not Orthodox at all, or more likely they just ignore it.

I blogged about the second story almost three years ago, concerning Alexander Marx asking Louis Ginsberg if one was permitted to ride an elevator on shabbos. The latter replied no, but then took the elevator to a high floor where he was waiting for Marx who had taken the staircase. When Marx registered his surprise, Ginzberg tells him "You asked what the law was, so I told you. I didn't ask!"




The truth is, I confess that I don't understand this precisely. The book is called 'Keeper of the Law,' and although this is not meant to imply that Louis Ginzberg was scrupulously careful in religious practice, observant he was supposed to be. This story has him not merely bending the law, but flouting it. However, the book was written by Louis Ginzberg's son Eli, who acknowledged that he himself didn't really understand much about Jewish learning. It is possible that Ginzberg had halachic reasons for leniency and thus was not violating what he knew to be the halacha. That this may be the case is hinted at by Eli's telling of his "father, always restive when confronted with the rigidities of German orthodoxy." That he was fond of telling this story and considered it humorous, and a joke at the expense of Alexander Marx ("the rigidities of German orthodoxy") lend further support for this interpretation.

All in all, here we have three versions of what are essentially one story. The first is reported by Isaac D'israeli (although it's unclear if he's made it up, or if it was an illustrative anecdote in the form a joke, etc.). D'israeli, it will be recalled, allowed his children to be converted to Christianity as part of his gradual response to London's Bevis Marks Synagogue hierarchy's election of him as a member of the Mahamad in 1813. Not religious in the best of times, D'israeli wanted nothing less than to be a synagogue officer. The rules of the synagogue stated that members couldn't refuse election or they'd face a hefty fine. The coercion outraged him, and he consented to have his children baptized into the Church of England instead, one of whom later gained fame as a novelist, although others might argue that Benjamin Disraeli's fame was as British Prime Minister.

Perhaps this sounds bizarre, but below you can see this rule in print, still extant in the very same synagogue in 1872, although by then the fine was half what it was in 1813. Bear in mind that in today's money £40 is almost $3000!



Although in the broad sense D'israeli wrote sympathetically of Judaism, clearly he found those who handled the rules, if not the rules themselves, utterly ridiculous. Thus his story of the rabbi who paskened that you can't eat a peacock, but ate it himself because his father paskened you can!

The second story, about Rabbi Zecharia Frankel may or may not be true, but it encapsulates very well the attitude of traditional Orthodox rabbis toward those of their colleagues who don't tamper with the halacha, but think in an unorthodox way.

The third story, concerning Ginzberg and the elevator, has the distinct advantage over the others in probably being mostly true (it is reported by his son that he was fond of telling it). However, it's unclear what was really going on there. What is clear though is that it's the opposite of those rabbis who pasken leniently, often for gain (as in kashrut or eruvin), but practice strictly themselves.

A Chief Rabbi's bookplate in a 19th century art magazine.

Here's an article about the bookplate used by British Chief Rabbi Naphtali Hermann Nathan Adler.

This is from The Studio v. 8 1896 (pg. 43):



This is the same Rabbi Adler who is acknowledged on the very last page of the very last massekhes of the Romm Edition of the Talmud (Vilna, 1886):

Forgive me for seeming to have Volozhin on the brain. I do not. However, I do want to plow through some of my archives. Here is a strange piece of an article from the Jewish Chronicle of January 18, 1861. Yes, I know; "Nishmath Hachaim."

Adam Hakohen, the Chafetz Chaim and the appropriateness of Lithuanian bochurim writing poetry inspired by Medusa and Minerva.

Here's a dirge on the death of Shadal, written by his friend the great poet Abraham Dov Ber Lebensohn (pen-named Adam Ha-kohen) Link:





It was originally published in Hamaggid 11-15-1865 pg 349. If you're the sort of person who likes to see it in the original, you can click below to enlarge:



Adam Ha-kohen is depicted below, bottom left:



Interestingly, here is a mention of Adam Ha-kohen on the Yated web site:

Once, somebody came to Rav Simcha Zissel on erev Shabbos when it was almost Shabbos, to give him a piece of good news, namely that Adam Hacohen, yemach shemo, the leader of the maskilim had died.

(I apply the wish yemach shemo to that rosho because the Chofetz Chaim also did, explaining that he didn't use the phrase about any Jew, with the sole exception of Adam Hacohen who destroyed and ruined many Jews. The Chofetz Chaim related that the maskilim used to search for gifted individuals, whom they would send to university in Berlin. He said that when he was fifteen, they tried to lead him off the right path R'l, but that boruch Hashem, was saved from them. That was the reason that he said yemach shemo.)

On that Shabbos, following the news that Adam Hacohen had died, HaRav Simcha Zissel's face wore its usual pale complexion, as he said, "Now he sees the truth, how he deserves to be pitied . . . " Rav Simcha Zissel was exemplary in the trait of sharing others' burdens with them. Thus, after the man had died and was no longer able to ruin others, he exclaimed that he deserved pity.

link.

What's amazing about this piece is that the author, a famous maggid, appears to me to miss and undermine the mussar message he was trying to bring out! It's one thing to say that the Chofetz Chaim used it because he felt it was appropriate given his personal experience. It's another thing to use the phrase yourself even as you mention that the great ba'al mussar R. Simcha Zissel felt that the proper attitude toward him after his death was pity. Can that be squared with an epithet like yemach shemo?

In any case, this is a well known piece of Lithuanian yeshiva lore. Another Yated article mentions it along with the evident source. Below is the discussion about it in Rabbi Nathan Kamenetsky's Making of a Godol, which is worth reproducing even though it basically comes from the same source (pp. 264-65; however I combined it into one image):



I'm a firm believer that history is best illustrated not only by quotes from primary sources, but whenever possible to see the sources themselves. In this role there's nothing quite like newspaper and periodical articles to awaken the awareness that history was once current events. For me and many readers, this is best seen in English, where another layer of foreignness, and hence remoteness, is removed. Below is a news blurb in the October 4, 1850 edition of the Jewish Chronicle:



Also of interest, see Iggerot Shadal Vol. 2 pg. 1093:



Here, in a letter dated 10-2-1850, Shadal chides Adam Ha-kohen's son Michael (also known as Micha) Yoseph Lebensohn, who is considered by many to have excelled his father as a Hebrew poet (he's also depicted above, upper left). He would send Shadal his poems for judgment and criticism, and he would respond. Here Shadal is chiding him for his references in his poem קֹהֶלֶת to Minerva and Medusa. It's very hard for him to understand, writes Shadal, how a Jewish Lithuanian bochur reared on a diet of the Prophets, the Tannaim and the Amoraim could be inspired to write poetry by the Greek gods of old.

The issue of classical imagery in Jewish literature is a very interesting one, and deserves a post some time. There is one very notable example, of a great posek whose poetry included such imagery. Suffice it to say, while it was perfectly consistent for Shadal to be dismayed by Hebrew poetry inspired by Greek thought, such imagery was far from absent in Italian Hebrew poetry. But Italian Jewish culture was Italian Jewish culture. Here Shadal appears to be particularly dismayed to see such an incursion into Lithuanian Jewish culture. What's a Litvak bochur doing writing about Medusa?

To me, the mussar lesson is not that one of the greatest of the maskilim felt this way, but that despite having such a sharp disagreement and criticism of the very approach the young man had taken, he still loved him, wanted to dialog with him and be a positive influence on him.

Unique rabbinic portraiture; I stand up for the honor of the Beis Halevi, I think. Reb Chaim Ozer fans should have a look as well.

SoMeHoW Frum includes the following painting in illustration of a post:

It can be yours for $1200! (link).

I could not help but thinking that it's really a disrespectful depiction (surely unintentionally so). But I'd like to throw my point out there to see if people agree or not. While recognizing that in reality Reb Chaim is the true patriarch of the House of Brisk, is it not crass to place him front and center and largest of all, right next to the Beis Halevi?

(As an aside, I think these composites which seem fashionable these days are deliciously bizarre. The partisan Satmar ones are especially so.)

Since we're doing portraits, here's a unique one:



As you can see, this is R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinsky done in micrography while he was still living!

The intrigue of missing haskamos and veiled allusions to Mendelssohn in the collected sermons of a disciple of the Gaon.

I came across something interesting relating to the great maggid and grammarian Rabbi Yehuda Leib Edel of Slonim (1757-1827), disciple of the Vilna Gaon. There were many editions of his two-volume collection of sermons אפיקי יהודה (editio princeps, Lemberg 1803). As it happens, an edition was published by his great-grandson Rabbi Hersch Edel in Lemberg in 1863. The second volume of this edition contains haskamos from an assortment of prominent rabbis of the day. Some of these notable rabbis include R. Yoseph Shaul Nathanson, Shlomo Yehuda Leib Rapoport, Yaakov Ettlinger, and Zecharia Frankel. There are numerous other approbations; I judge these the most interesting (and famous) for the purpose of this post. I will reproduce three (they've been slightly edited for illustrative purposes, eg, combining Shir's which originally appeared on two pages):

Here is Shir's:



Zechariah Frankel's:



Ettlinger's:



Note that in 1863 it appeared entirely natural to collect these haskamos. But I'm no fool, I know that Frankel's at least would never reproduced in a modern reprinting. But why not the others?

Sure enough, the two volumes were reprinted in Jerusalem in 1999. This is really a deluxe edition. It's got everything. A lengthy and informative introduction, a facsimile of the original edition's title page, a facsimile of a manuscript in the author's hand, a letter from the author (with mistaken ID, see below), and haskamos:

It's interesting that not a single haskama from the Lemberg 1863 edition is reproduced, and it's not as if they weren't aware of the edition. It mentions the editor, and even cites the haskama from R. Ettlinger (footnote 19):



It's enough to make you go "hm." Interestingly, the letter by the author which is reproduced above is addressed to Rabbi Moshe Chefetz, which the editor misidentifies as the author of Maleches Machasheves. The aforementioned rabbi died in 1711 (see here). The Chefetz's (Hefez Gentili) were a prominent Italian rabbinic family, and likely the Rabbi Moshe Chefetz this was addressed to was the rabbi of Gorizia who died in 1798. I assume he was a grandson or even great-grandson of the author of Maleches Machasheves. He was also, interestingly enough, the rebbe of Isaac Samuel Reggio (Yashar).

Another interesting detail worth mentioning is that Rabbi Yehuda Leib Edel, talmid of the Gra, maggid of Slonim, euphemistically mentions Moses Mendelssohn in Afike Yehuda. In discussing theories of authorship at the very beginning of his second sermon (volume 1), he writes the following (pg. 13 in the hbooks pdf):



That is, he writes that no two authors write alike, and in the brackets he gives two sources which presumably discuss this [ ר"מ פ' חלק והאשכנזי בהקדמתו] -- that is, the Rambam in Perek Helek and "the Ashkenazi in his introduction," meaning Moses Mendelssohn in Nesivos Shalom, the introduction to the Pentateuch.



I think it's not too hasty to say that they missed this one.

When you donated to the Chofetz Chaim's yeshiva in the 1930s . . .

. . . this was your receipt:



Click to enlarge and read.

Sabbath keepers, and converting counts.

Here's an interesting article about Subbotniki, or Judaizing sects in Russia from July 27, 1877. Of special interest is the mention of the legendary Ger Tzedek of Vilna, although the writer of this blurb places him in the 17th century instead of the 18th:



If you want to know more about Subbotniki, visit here.

The wrong Hildesheimer, the other Adler, and an inflated Napoleonic reputation.

I came across something on Rabbi Berel Wein's Facebook page (did you know he had one?):



At the outset let me just say that pointing out a mistake is not a huge deal; we all make mistakes and slips of the pen or tongue, my posts included. But this is a mistake, as Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer obviously not did not deliver any address on March 9, 1807, not being born until 1820, and had nothing to do with the Napoleonic Sanhedrin. (Actually when I first wrote the post I included the year 1823 as his year of birth. I did that from memory. However I thought it would probably not do for me to have such a mistake here, so I double checked and corrected it to read 1820, which I guess is the point.)

However, a man known as Isaac Hildesheim (who would go on to call himself Justus Hiller among other odd things) did make that address. The aforementioned Hildesheim was part of a delegation sent to the Sanhedrin from Frankfurt-am-Main. The other representative was Rabbi Saloman Abraham Trier, who is probably best known for having solicited rabbinic responsa on the grave importance of circumcision, and collected them and published them in 1844 in the face of an attempt to do away with circumcision on the part of extremist elements in the Reform camp (see here for the book, and here for a post about it from a friend). To mention some of the more famous names: Rabbis Nathan Marcus Adler, Jacob Ettlinger, Seligmann Baer Bamberger, Samuel David Luzzatto, Isak Noah Mannheimer, Solomon Judah Rapoport, Abraham Sutro, Julius Fuerst, Jacob Zvi Mecklenburg and others. In the proceedings of the Sanhedrin, you won't find the name Trier. He is called Salomon Treve, after the French name of Trier (which after all is just the German name of Treves).

For the Francophones, from Organisation civile et religieuse des Israélites de France 1808:



Some time ago I came across something I found surprising. I was surprised to read in an offhanded way that the brother of Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler, (Rabbi) Baer Adler was also a delegate to Napoleon's Sanhedrin from Frankfurt. (I will explain the parentheses soon.) Rabbi Nathan Marcus was born in 1803, and his brother was a delegate? It seemed almost as anachronistic as placing Rabbi Israel Hildesheimer there (I've noticed that many don't realize that his legal or secular name was "Israel"). It made little sense to me. Plus there was the little problem that neither his name or anything like it appears in the published proceedings and accounts of the Sanhedrin.

Looking into it a little more, it turned out that this older Adler was not a delegate, at the tender age of 23 no less, rather he was chosen as an assistant to Rabbi Trier. But such is historical writings that even such participation (he was there, after all) sometimes gets pumped up into full membership.

Here is one the notices I saw, from a blurb in a British newspaper in 1890 (it's likely source, an extremely interesting one, will be shown below):



While it's hardly surprising that (Rabbi) Baer Adler's actual role was inflated, and his youthful prominence sort of took on a life of it's own so that 85 years after the fact his actual role -- probably sitting with a notebook and pen -- turned him into a delegate of the Sanhedrin. Let me digress to explain the parentheses. Obviously by today's standard he was a rabbi. He was one of the dayyanim of the Frankfurt beis din, along with Rabbi Trier (the Av Beis Din) and Rabbi Aharon Fuld. But the various obituaries of Baer Adler make a point of noting that he refused a rabbinic position. He was a rabbi in the classic sense, an unpaid teacher of Torah who made his living as a businessman.

The most clear statement on the entire issue I found in English is in Stephen M. Poppel's 1983 LBIY article "The Politics of Religious Leadership, The Rabbinate in Nineteenth-Century Hamburg" page 452-53: "Baer Adler was a talmudic scholar living in Frankfurt, who had trained other men for rabbinical positions, but had never accepted rabbinical appointment himself (though he had served as a dayyan). Almost fifteen years earlier, at the age of twenty-three, he had been sent by the Frankfurt community board to the Parisian Sanhedrin as the deputy to Rabbi Salomon Trier, the delegate from Frankfurt." His footnote indicates where the two chief sources of information about him are, German obituaries in two Jewish periodicals. (You can look them up quite easily on compactmemory.de if you want, but I'm not reproducing them here. the footnote reads: "Information on Adler from obituaries in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, XXX (1866), pp. 36-37, and Der Israelit, VII (1866), p. 104. (References to these obituaries from the recent and useful Hans-Otto Schembs, etal., Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Frankfurter Juden, 1781-1945, Frankfurt a. Main)"

A 19th century gossip reporter named Edmund Yates' founded a weekly magazine called The World. It regularly had a feature called 'Celebrity at Home' in which he met with and profiled famous people. There are three volumes of collected Celebrities at Home features from 1877-79. They include figures like Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, the Pope, Richard Wagner, Kaiser Wilhelm, to mention a few with name recognition in 2010. In 1889 one featured none other than Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler at his vacation home in Brighton (he loved it so much that the 86-year old Rabbi Adler calls it "Dr. Brighton"). I also must comment on the delicious language in the piece. A sukkah described as "an al fresco bower"? Priceless.

I didn't see the original, but some of the text, or at least an account of it, was reprinted in the Jewish Chronicle. It mentions that Baer Adler was a Napoleonic delegate, and I assume this is the source for the clipping above. The whole thing is extremely interesting so I reproduce it all:





When Rabbi Baer Adler passed away in 1866, the Jewish Chronicle naturally printed an obituary. It too repeats the exaggeration that he was actually a delegate to the Sanhedrin, and one wonders in view of the fact that when his brother was personally interviewed the feature mentioned it, if the source for this wasn't the Chief Rabbi himself, who was after all only a very small child when his much older brother was hobnobbing with VIPs in Paris.

It's worth reading for some of the interesting information it contains. Here it is (first notice is dated February 2, 1866; the second is February 9):