Some contemporary impressions of Rabbi S.J. Rapoport in 1839, 1843 and 1853, a meeting with an authentic apikores and Italian Jewish education.

In chronological order:

Narrative of a mission of inquiry to the Jews from the Church of Scotland in 1839:



Austria. Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Danube; Galicia, Syria, Moravia, Bukovina and the Military Frontier by Johann Georg Kohl, 1843:




The Story of My Life by August J. C. Hare, 1853:



Since the authors of the first mentions that they'd heard in Jassy that Rav Shir was "the head of the secret Society for undermining Judaism,"I thought I'd add some of what they'd heard in Jassy:



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Also, there's an interesting appendix in the same book, consisting of the curriculum of the yeshivos, elementary and higher level, in Leghorn (Livorno), for boys and girls:





Some of it does remind me of the description of Sephardic education in Amsterdam, 1680 in the שפתי ישינים:

An unusual 19th century edition of Maimonides' Mishneh Thorah.

Here are a couple of volumes of the 'Tsarist Mishneh Torah':









Click here for Dr. Michael Stanislawski's article describing איזה הלכות מיד החזקה לאדמו"ר הרמב"ם נ"ע.

Golems, forgeries and images of disrobed women in rabbinic literature.

Much to my pleasure I was cited by Dr. Shnayer Leiman in his post at the Seforim Blog, The Golem of Prague in Recent Rabbinic Literature. Like all benevolent scholars, he left a few corners for gleaning so that I can hopefully add a little bit to the discussion.

First of all, just to show how deeply embedded the notion that the Maharal created a golem is, here is a note from a recently produced Torah sheet:



The Chacham Tzvi's teshuva of course does not mention the Maharal (nor was he the Maharal's grandson). It will be reproduced below. (Edit: in view of a comment which contended that I am mistaken in my point, I would like to clarify what I mean here: my point is not that the author positively asserts that the Maharal made a golem. Indeed, he writes "tale?" in a paranthetical remark. But the author is mistaken that Chacham Tzvi is the Maharal's grandson. Why should this mistake occur? See below for the teshuva which discusses his actual "grandfather." But it seems to me that when someone has it in their mind that so-and-so's grandfather is said to have created a golem, unless they're careful and unless they check, none other than the Maharal pops into mind.)

Concerning Saul Berlin's Ketav Yosher, the satire which he wrote in defense of Herz Wessely's Divre Shalom ve-Emet pamphlet concerning Jewish education, Leiman copied and translated the relevant passage, but here it is in the original (last paragraph):



For some reason the Maharal's name is given as מוהר"ר לוי instead of לוואי or some similar spelling, and maybe this is why the passage had been overlooked. Before I put in my $.02 about this, every now and then one comes across something that seems to be symbolic of a great gap in thinking between different Jewish camps. Here is what Rabbi Ya'akov Kanievsky, the Steipler Gaon, had to say when asked about the propriety of publicly discussing the matter of the Besamim Rosh, the infamous forgery apparently created by the aforementioned Saul Berlin:

"In my humble opinion it is not at all proper to publicize the disgrace of the author of "Besamim Rosh" for several reasons:

"1) Due to the honor of his ancestors (Berlin's family was one of the most elite rabbinic families in all of Europe; his father, brothers, grandfathers, uncles - we're talking the heavyweights).

"2) Perhaps his soul has already achieved it's rectification in Gehinnom, being that more than 150 years had passed. Recalling his sin will cause his soul harm.

"3) This episode brings disdain on many great rabbis who supported the forgery, but were mistaken.

"4) Many men might weaken in their faith due to the confusion caused by their awareness that one who was great in Torah (i.e., Berlin) was able to stumble into heresy, God help us.

"However, it is permissible to compile an essay regarding the accursed Haskalah (here he makes a common pun which can only be seen in Hebrew, Haskalah - enlightenment - with a sin and Haskalah with a samech are homonyms of opposite meaning) which destroyed German Jewry, which departed from its heritage, and also spread to other lands, however the names of those Torah scholars who were caught up in it should be omitted."

Here we have the דעת תורה which basically forbids the Seforim Blog, my blog, and many others. By the way, I happen to agree with some of these points.

Here's a classic excerpt from the כתב יושר:



"The actions of Haman and Ahasuerus allude to various disagreements and positions of the great posekim. Haman acted as he did because he held like the Rif, but Achashverosh held like the Rambam. Achashverosh asked like the Maharsha, and Haman answered according to the Maharam Schiff. Don't protest that this is anachronistic, Haman and Achashverosh couldn't know the disagreements of the posekim and the laws of the Talmud, because even an ox and a donkey knew more in earlier times, as we see from the greats of the present generation. Like the Rabbis said, if the earlier ones were like people, we are like donkeys, but not even the donkey of Rabbi Pinchas ben Yair. If this was said by the sages of the Gemara, certainly it applies even more so in these days."

When I happened across this mention in the כתב יושר of a miracle of the Maharal juxtaposed next to another rabbi creating a golem, I was excited. The Maharal's golem is now so embedded in the public consciousness, as we see above, that people simply cannot think of a golem without thinking of the Maharal, and perhaps they can't even think of the Maharal without thinking of the golem. Yet in 1784 (when Ketav Yosher was written) or in 1794-5 (when it was probably posthumously published) the association was obviously not embedded in the mind. I initially wrote Dr. Leiman because I figured he knew which Maharal legend it referred to. Since it's funny, I'll admit publicly that I understood הוריד בירה מן השמים to mean that the Maharal caused beer to descend from heaven for the Emperor Rudolf to drink. I couldn't imagine that בירה here meant castle; the Maharal caused a castle to descend from heaven? What on earth could that mean? Dr. Leiman knew the legend and that it indeed referred to the Prague Castle.

This legend is most interesting. In 1831-32 Julius Max Schottky published a 2-volume book called Prag, wie es war und wie es ist. On pg. 361 we find the following:



"Rabbi Bezalel Löw ("the tall Rabbi Löw") of whom we've spoken above, lived under the rule of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague, and with his excellent mathematical and astronomical knowledge became such friends with Tycho Brahe that the Emperor could honor the Jewish Quarter with a visit, in the house at the square with a stone lion in front that is still there. Among Prague's Jews there is still the following legend: They say that Löw was a wise magician, and that during the imperial visit he brought the Prague Castle into the Jewish Quarter, by magic. The legend is interesting because Bezalel Low was the inventor of the camera obscura, which was the means through which he could have shown the Monarch the Castle in the Jewish Quarter, which is right outside the Castle. "

Putting aside exactness of the translation, here we see a non-Jewish historian, relating a legend which he says the Prague Jews still told in the early 1830s. The Emperor Rudolph II had such respect for the Maharal that he visited him. As a magician, the Maharal actually conjured the Castle for him right there in the Jewish Quarter (to show his hospitality? I would have thought a beer sufficed, but I guess that's not a miracle for a royal guest). Schottky adds that the Maharal invented the camera obscura, an interesting assertion to say the least, and in his view perhaps the germ of the legend is that he was able to produce an image of the Prague Castle for the Emperor using a camera obscura. An interesting fact from the Wikipedia page: "The term "camera obscura" was first used by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler in 1604." This refers to his book Astronomiae Pars Optica. Look at the to whom Kepler dedicates this work:



In any case, clearly this is the legend which Saul Berlin is referring to, and it seems that the legend of the Maharal being הוריד בירה מן השמים which Schottky reports in the 1830s was in circulation toward the end of the 18th century.

Before I get to other golemic matters, it is interesting to pause and note that not only have no written sources prior to 1836 been found linking the Mahral to the golem, but that once they do appear they are all in German, not in Hebrew. Why is that?

In the first part of the 19th century in Europe there was a Romantic interest in collecting and publishing the oral folklore of the people, for the existence of the rich popular imagination of the masses was thought to be a potent sign of nationhood, and for the first time collectors sought to document it. This is when Grimm's collection of fairy tales were published, and the collection which included a German version of Chad Gadya (see here), with many other examples in the respective European nations. Suffice it to say, this is a 19th century genre. Schottky's recording of the legend of the Maharal and the castle is an example of this. Jews too were swept in by this trend, and they also began to print the folklore of the Jews, the popular legends which had not made it into the existing literature.

See how Berthold Auerbach wrote of whom told the the legend of the golem:



Chaya, the maid, an old woman. It was a bit of folklore, an old wive's tale. Auerbach is one of the first sources to put this story in print, in his 1837 novel Spinoza (above is an English translation from 1882).

The Jewish Romantics, writing in German, got it in the same way the others heard and then wrote down stories like Hansel and Gretel. This is why the story isn't in 'canonical' sources (ala Shu"t Chacham Tzvi) and why it appears exclusively in German in its original printed versions. It is remarkable that a story with such modest and humble beginnings eventually became a fundamental of faith. אל תטוש תורת אמך.

Here is the Chacham Tzvi's famous question concerning a golem:



He mentions that his ancestor (not grandfather) Rabbi Elijah of Chelm (also known as Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem) was reputed to have created a golem using the Sefer Yezira. Not a word about the Maharal. And why should there be? 70 years later the Chacham Tzvi's own great-grandson, Saul Berlin himself, also doesn't mention the Maharal's golem.

The question is, why doesn't Saul Berlin mention his own ancestor, Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, instead of Rabbi Naftali's golem? Here we have to guess, and my guess is that Berlin's own family was off-limits. Yes, he was mocking the concept that rabbis not only can but also did create golems, or more accurately the belief that the remains of a golem could yet be seen today, but he wasn't about to cite his own ancestor and drag him into the satire. Or maybe Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem himself could have been a target, having died 200 years prior, but mentioning him would have just drawn attention to the Chacham Tzvi, his father's grandfather. But I really don't know.

Incidentally, it seems that many believe that Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem was the Chacham Tzvi's grandfather. This is understandable, since he calls him זקני in the aforementioned responsum, and so does his son in Sheilas Yaavetz II.82:



However, think about this logically. How likely is it that Rabbi Elijah (1550-1583) was the grandfather of Chacham Tzvi (1656-1718)? How much older than you are your grandfathers? Are we to believe that the Chacham Tzvi's father was in his 70s when he was born? Not only that, his maternal grandfather, R. Elijah ha-Kohen of Alt-Ofen was born in 1616. That would mean that Chacham Tzvi's father was at least 33 years older than his own father-in-law! So logically this does not make sense, even though the Jewish Encyclopedia has Rabbi Elijah as Chacham Tzvi's grandfather, a mistake repeated in both relevant Wikipedia pages (here and here). It is also repeated in the text and the notes on pg. 150 in the very interesting Artscroll book Great Jewish Letters by Rabbi Moshe Bamberger (which I intend to review). What does Chacham Tzvi's son, Rabbi Yaakov Emden say about this ancestry? On pg. 4 of Megillas Sefer he writes:

אבא רבה הוא הגאון החסיד שבכהונה בעל ס' שו"ת שער אפרים ז"ל, ראש ב"ד בק' ווילנא המעטירה אז בהיות בשלותה, והיה לו כתב יחוסו עד אהרן הכהן, וחתן לאחד מן בני בניו של הגאון ר' אליהו בעל שמ הזקן ז"ל, שהיה אב"ד בקק' חעלם בימים ההם

In fact the Chacham Tzvi's paternal grandfather was married to the grand-daughter of Rabbi Elijah. Regarding Megillas Sefer, see here for a recent entertaining discussion about the provenance of this autobiography.

Next is a really interesting account of a golem. Commenting on Sefer Yezira 2:5, Rabbi Sa'adya Gaon writes the following:



"I have heard that Ibn Ezra created a creature before Rabbenu Tam and said 'See what God allows to be accomplished through his holy letters.'"

Rav Saadya lived 200 years before them you say? Hmm.

Since this is a Maharal post, it is worth glancing at the title page of his תפארת ישראל, published in Venice in 1599 (that is, ten years before the Maharal died):



I am not arguing anything about how the Maharal viewed such things, but facts are facts. There are many more such examples of nudes on the title pages of venerable seforim. Not only were they written by important rabbis, but in many cases we know who owned them (and who, therefore, did not deface them). A future post will show an interesting example of one such sefer owned by one rabbi with an extremely zealous reputation.

In 1989 there was a reprint of a commentary on the Torah by Rabbi Menachem Avraham Ha-kohen "Rapoport" (d. 1596).



Toward the end of the second volume is a reproduction of the famous coat-of-arms of this family, except that the bare-breasted women are now wearing "shirts" (albeit tight ones!):



Here is the original, which if memory serves is actually reproduced sans censorship in one of Rabbi Berel Wein's history books published by Artscroll's Shaar Press. I will check later.



From Herald of Destiny by Rabbi Berel Wein:



Finally, a note about my discovery of the earliest known source for the Maharal's golem (link). It's a pity (for me) that it wasn't early enough to have made it into the impressive book Path of Life. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (cal. 1525–1609). In the relevant article by Byron Sherwin, "The Golem of Prague and His Ancestors" it mentions that for a long time it was thought that the first appearance of Rabbi Loew's golem was in an 1841 article by a non-Jew, with it appearing in Jewish sources beginning in 1847. However, he writes, Shnayer Leiman showed Jewish sources from 1837, and [I forgot!] showed non-Jewish sources from that same year. I showed one from 1836, written by Ludwig A. Frankl, a Jew. I'm under no illusion that this must definitely be the first written source. Earlier ones may yet be found. However the way in which I discovered this should be mentioned. I'm not going to pretend that I printed out pages of the Oesterreiche Zeitschrift für Geschichts und Staatsunde for some light reading. Rather, the discovery is a nice piece of fruit borne out of the digitization of literature. Who knows what truly important discoveries are yet to be found in overlooked literature?

Benjamin Franklin's Parable on Tolerance, and its appearance in the unpublished writings of Nachman Krochmal.

Masoret has a couple of posts about Benjamin Franklin's famous Parable Against Persecution (I, II).

Briefly, the Parable Against Persecution is a story about Abraham written in the biblical style. Apparently Franklin was fond of asking for a Bible at dinner parties, opening it and then reciting his parable as the fictitious 51st chapter of Genesis.

The story is that a weary traveler comes to the tent of Abraham, who invites him as his guest, and feeds him. When Abraham saw that the man did not bless God, he questioned him about whom he worships. The man told him that he is an idolater. Abraham reacts angrily and tosses him out of his abode. That night God communicated with Abraham and asks him what happened to the stranger? Abraham replies that he doesn't worship you, so I drove him out into the wilderness. God tells Abraham that he himself has been providing for this man for 198 years, even though he is an idolater. But you can't provide for him for one night? Abraham immediately confesses his wrong and prays for forgiveness. Then he went into the wilderness himself to find the man, and brought him back and treated him kindly, sending him away in the morning with gifts. Then God tells Abraham, for your sin your descendants will be strangers in a foreign land for 400 years. But because of your repentance, I will redeem them, etc.

The parable was published in Henry Kame's Introduction to the Art of Thinking (1761). It is reproduced below from the Scots Magazine (1764) because the whole thing is included on only one page:



This particular story made a big splash in the 18th century, and it was reprinted many times, and probably repeated and even memorized. It was taken as yet another beautiful rational truth, presented by the ingenious Benjamin Franklin. Gradually it was discovered that although the style was Franklin's, the kernel of the idea was not his at all.

In fact a very similar story appeared in the end of the 2nd edition of Jeremy Taylor's The Liberty of Prophesying Shewing the Unreasonablenes of Prescribing to other Mens Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting differing Opinions.(1651, I think - why it did not appear in the first edition, 1647, will be explained).





As you can see, this is essentially the same story, only it isn't rewritten as biblical prose. However, aside for Franklin adding 98 years to the man's age, there a specific detail in Taylor's which isn't in Franklin's. In the story we're told what kind of an idolater he is; he's a fire-worshipper (which sounds Zoroastrian, which is Persian).

Taylor writes that he "find[s] the story in the Jews' books." However, no one was able to discover which Jews' book, as it truly isn't in the Talmud or midrashic literature, although many readers are perhaps reminded of a well-known passage in Talmud Bavli Sotah 10a-b:



The truth is that Taylor did sort of find it in a Jewish book, but it's not part of the book itself, and it's not a Jewish story. In 1651 George Gentius published his Latin translation of Solomon ibn Verga's שבט יהודה under the title Historia Judaica. Here is the title page:



In the preface, in which Gentius dedicated the work to the rulers and people of Hamburg whom he says treat the Jews well, a version of this story is included, given in the name of Sadus (13th century Persian poet Sa'adi):






As it happens, Gentius had published his own translation from the Persian of the 13th century work Gulistan (Rose Garden) by Sa'adi in 1651, called the Rosarium Politicum of Musladini Sadi. He included a small story by Sa'adi in his other famous work, the Bustan (Orchard) in the preface to the Shevet Yehuda. Thus it is likely that Jeremy Taylor's "Jews' books" is actually the Latin version of Shevet Yehuda, the Historia Judaica published in 1651. This is why the first edition of Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying doesn't have this story at the very end; he hadn't read it in Gentius's book, since it hadn't appeared in print yet.

Getting back to Franklin, in 1789 a book called The New Asiatic Miscellany appeared, which all but accused Franklin of plagiarism (except that it sneered that he couldn't have gotten it from the original Persian and must have gotten it from a translation - the Taylor connection hadn't yet been made). The book included Franklin's parable, the original Persian of Sa'adi, and its translation into English:







At this stage of the game Franklin had become aware that he was being accused of plagiarism, seemingly from reading a review of the New Asiatic Miscellany in The Critical Review, and addressed it in a letter to Benjamin Vaughan on November 2, 1789:



Discussion concerning the origin of Franklin's parable continued well after his death in April of 1790. In the November 1790 issue of the Gentleman's Magazine a writer signing his name Inquisitor (!) identified Franklin's source as Jeremy Taylor:



The connection of Franklin to plagiarism hardy went away. Here's a note from 1808:



Naturally there's a more Jewish angle to this story, but before I get to it, here are a couple of interesting references to Benjamin Franklin in 19th century Jewish literature:

In a note to the 2nd edition of Nachman Krochmal's Moreh Nevuchei Ha-zeman (1863) Letteris refers to Benjamin Franklin (pg. 13) in discussing another famous maskil of Lemberg, Menachem Mendel Lefin:



I must admit that my American pride flared up when I read of the חכם האנגלי האדון פראנקלין. But when you consider that Franklin was already 70 years old in 1776, I guess it's alright.

The second reference is only an aside, but highly interesting. Letter 19, pp.125-130 in Kerem Chemed 4 (1839) , by Lelio della Torre (הלל הכהן דעלאטאררע), co-professor with Shadal at the Collegio Rabbinico of Padua discusses Jewish names and naming practices. Toward the end he writes of something which he says was common in Italy of his day, that people name their children whichever non-Jewish name they like, and then they think of a Hebrew name which sounds similar, and give it to them as an afterthought so they can use it when they're called up to the Torah, or for marriage or divorce. Earlier he gives an example of Massimo for משה or Arnoldo for אהרן. He contrasts this with the pious British and Dutch people, who are proud to use Biblical names:



Once again, Franklin is English. I'm starting to get the impression that Europeans didn't really get used to the United States being independent from England very easily.

I imagine that Benjamin Franklin would have been pleased as punch had he lived to see that his Parable Against Persecution was eventually translated into Biblical Hebrew. In 1844 a periodical called ירושלים appeared in Zolkiew. It included a prose piece written in Biblical Hebrew style by Nachman Krochmal called משלי מוסר.

Although Franklin is nowhere mentioned, there is no doubt that this is a translation of the Parable Against Persecution. Although it is ironic that Franklin, who himself did not cite a source, is not given credit, I don't think anything should be made of that as Krochmal hadn't submitted it for publication, having died in 1841. This journal (only one issue appeared) was edited jointly by Jacob Bodek and Mendel Mohr, students of Krochmal (I described Bodek a little bit here). Likely the piece was found in a notebook of his, and perhaps no source was mentioned.

As far as I can tell, the 'discoverer' of this translation, that is to say the first one to read it who was likely to have made all the necessary connections, was George Alexander Kohut in a 1903 JQR article called Abraham's Lesson in Tolerance (Kohut was an American, knowledgeable in Jewish literature, and the son of a Persian scholar). In this piece Kohut conjectures that the reason why Sa'adi's story was thought to come from Jewish literature was because it first appeared in Latin in Gentius's translation of ibn Verga. Originally I had thought this was his original contribution, but then I noticed that the connection was already made in 1839, in the first volume of The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor. There Reginald Heber writes, among other things, that though he knew Taylor's source in Gentius, he initially had thought that "Sadus" was none other than Sa'adya Gaon (!) from the fact that Gentius calls him "venerandae," which seemed to him to be a translation of "Gaon." However, a friend pointed out to him that the correct identifiation is Sa'adi, not Sa'adya. Thus, it was that Taylor fell to "the common fate of those who quote at second hand, he ascribed to a Jew what his author had taken from a Persian," and that is why he thought Gentius was quoting a Jewish source.

Kohut's original contribution therefore was in bringing Krochmal into the equation. Kohut guesses that Krochmal had seen it in English or in German translation. I myself have no idea if he knew English, and German seems the better guess. For some reason Joshua Bloch, the author of the article on Nachman Krochmal in the Universal Jewish Encylopedia (v. 6 1939) feels justified in writing that "Benjamin Franklin's autobiography in the German version of A. von Binzer (Kiel, 1829) made a profound impression upon him." While this seems reasonably likely to have been where Krochmal had read the poem, I'm not sure how we know what impression the Autobiography made upon him!

Interestingly, a Hebrew instructional book for students from 1952 included it, complete with its grammatical deconstruction: