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Josephus Through the Eyes of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (1856–1943): Between Eastern Europe, the USA and Eretz Yisra’El

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Josephus Through the Eyes of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (1856–1943): Between Eastern Europe, the USA and Eretz Yisra’El Chapter 11 Josephus through the Eyes of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (1856–1943): between Eastern Europe, the USA and Eretz Yisra’el Tessa Rajak In Enlightenment and proto-Zionist circles, the writings and the persona of Flavius Josephus came to be a pillar of Jewish identity. In Eastern Europe in particular, the Hebrew translation of Kalman Schulman marked a mid- nineteenth century turning point, influencing even the traditional religious world. Rooted in its own time, the re-emergence of knowledge of Josephus went on to achieve considerable importance in shaping the Zionist conception of history, the culture and politics of the Yishuv in Palestine, and also the historical consciousness of American Jewry. I offer here a small case study, reflecting on the observations on Josephus (complete with their minor errors and inventions) that are recorded in the memoirs and sermon notes of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky, speaker and preacher of renown, maskil, Hebraist, Zionist campaigner and orthodox Jew.1 Masliansky was forced out of Russia when approaching forty years of age, and he reconstructed his family life and his public persona in the United States. He thus bestrides two worlds. His observations offer us a well- positioned entry into the evolving Jewish reception of Josephus, in an era of transition, complete with its ambivalence and contradiction. 1 A Brief Biography Masliansky left his hometown, Slutsk, in greater Lithuania (now Belarus, some 100 miles south of Minsk), for the Mir Yeshiva, where he apparently excelled, 1 I am indebted throughout to Zviah Nardi, the subject’s great-granddaughter as well as his translator, whose generous supply of texts, insight, suggestions and corrections has assisted me immeasurably. I am also grateful to Dr Naomi Passachoff (another great-granddaughter) for sparking off this investigation and for her continuing interest. This paper has benefited from the careful reading and comments of two friends, Professors Antony Polonsky and Daniel Schwartz. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004393097_013 Josephus through the Eyes of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (1856–1943) 265 but felt restless, leaving after two years without completing his studies.2 After the death of his father, when he was fifteen, he turned to teaching, and he quite soon acquired a post as tutor in a private household, following a not uncommon pattern; at seventeen he married the daughter of his employer, whose leased lands and mill were soon thereafter expropriated, following anti- Jewish legislation. Masliansky’s unsuccessful attempt to set himself up as a trader concluded with a return to pedagogy. He continued to study when he could. Masliansky writes, perhaps with a degree of hindsight and self-fashioning, and in keeping with the famous model of Moses Leib Lilienblum’s Ḥatot ne‘urim (Sins of Youth) and many others,3 that the pogroms of 1881, and the deep disillusionment that followed them led him to a dramatic change of direction. Masliansky joined the Ḥoveve Zion movement in Pinsk, where the young Chaim Weizmann knew him.4 Later, in Kharkov, he was sworn in as a brother in the Bnei Moshe, the secret society over whose founding in 1889 Ahad Ha’am had presided, and whose members dedicated themselves with oaths to ‘the rebirth of Israel in the Land of Israel’.5 As an emissary spreading Zionist ideology, Masliansky preached in different synagogues. With the police and the authorities on his tail, apparently after several brief spells of imprisonment, in 2 Masliansky’s (highly selective) autobiography appeared as the third volume of his Hebrew ‘Writings’: Ha-Rav Zvi Hirsch Masliansky, Kitve Masliansky, vol. 3 (New York, 1929). An English translation of this autobiographical volume was published in Israel, though not widely circulated, as Memoirs: An Account of My Life and Travels, trans. Isaac Schwartz and Zviah Nardi (Jerusalem, 2009). An earlier version of the memoirs had been published in Yiddish as Masliansky’s zikhroynes: fiertsig yohr leben un kempfen (New York, 1924). Major gaps in the Hebrew memoirs are filled in by a revealing series of articles that appeared in the last decade of his life in the Hebrew weekly Ha-Do’ar. Masliansky’s papers are housed in the Jewish Theological Seminary: http://www.jtsa.edu/prebuilt/archives/jtsarchives/masliansky_ zwi.shtml, and, in Jerusalem, in the Central Zionist Archives and the Jewish National and University Library. Further material is available in the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, where I particularly thank Joe Weber for his help. 3 On Lilienblum’s self-construction and the hermeneutics of suspicion, see Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning (Seattle, 2004), 58–68. Others who were seen to have turned Zionist after 1881 included Leon Pinsker. On Masliansky’s coup de foudre, see the judicious queries of Gary Philip Zola, ‘The People’s Preacher: A Study of the Life and Writings of Zvi Hirsch Masliansky (1856–1943)’ (ordination thesis, Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, 1982), 8–9. 4 Brief recollections of Masliansky appear in Weizmann’s Trial and Error (London, 1949), 39 and 42, triggered, perhaps, by one or more visits to Masliansky’s Brooklyn household in later years: see Jim Weinberg, ‘Afterword’, in Maskliansky, Memoirs, 422. Weizmann recalls Masliansky’s high profile as a teacher in Pinsk, and then his inspiring sermons. Zola, ‘People’s Preacher’, 21, is somewhat sceptical. 5 Masliansky, Memoirs, 51–61. The Bnei Moshe was a tight-knit but short-lived group..
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