CHAPTER FOUR

THE DEBATE BETWEEN ELIEZER AND MAHARAL

Status Quo in the 1570s

Before examining the debate between Eliezer Ashkenazi and Maharal, it would be good to review the status of philosophy among North European Jewry in the 1570s. Not much was happening in the first half of the decade. In 1570, Isserles published his Law of the Sacred Offering, cloaking his meditations on philosophy and mysticism in an arcane labyrinth of allegory. It produced scarcely a ripple at the time. Maharal, in his 50’s, was still serving in Nikolsburg, possibly disputing with the Bohemian Brethren on which was truly God’s Chosen People, but learning their pedagogical methods and working on The Lion’s Whelp, his erudite supercommentary on Rashi on the Torah. When published in 1578, it would show scarcely any evidence that its author had yet made any acquaintance with philosophical ideas. In 1572, Isserles died. About the same time, Mordecai Jaffe returned from his ten-year Italian sojourn and was installed in Grodno. His scholarly focus must have been primarily on legal matters, to adapt to his new environment (where he stayed for the next 20 years), and to make progress on his monumental code, the Royal Garment. In 1573, Maharal moved to Prague and started his klaus. It may have been about that time that he started the long series of aggadic monographs, starting with Prodigies of the Lord, that would eventually (after a shift in his own thought) become the vehicle for expressing his own personal synthesis of ideas. He would incorporate more references to philosophy and natural science the further he progressed on this series of works. In 1574, Solomon Luria died, never having changed from the anti-philosophic stance he expressed in his letter to his cousin Moses Isserles some twenty years earlier. Luria’s student, the young Ephraim Luntshitz, was developing his skills as a peripatetic preacher in the Polish hinterlands, his head suffused with traditional midrash and moralistic lore, which he would crystallize into the City of Heroes in 1580—still (at least prior to Eliezer Ashkenazi’s arrival) as innocent of philosophy as his master Luria and his older colleague Maharal.

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In the second half of the decade, two lights were lit. In 1577, Abraham Horowitz published Lovingkindness of Abraham, his commentary on Maimonides’s Eight Chapters, the introduction to Maimonides’s com- mentary on Ethics of the Fathers. This work had great popularity and became a staple in the Polish-Jewish curriculum. From this time on, the basic conceptual framework of Aristotelian psychology, mediated by Maimonides, became common coin in general learned discourse, as we can see from the frequent references in later Maharal and Ephraim to the orders of being (mineral, vegetative, animal, human) and their corresponding faculties (nutritive, sensitive, and rational). These were so taken for granted as part of common parlance, that it was not nec- essary to give attribution to their source, or call them into question as too “philosophical.” Also, in 1576 Eliezer Ashkenazi moved from Cremona, Italy to Posen, Poland. Having spent the first six decades of his life in Mediterranean lands (Salonika, Egypt, Cyprus, Venice, and Cremona, with a brief sojourn in Prague in the 1560s), he may have found it challenging to adapt linguistically, culturally, and intellectually to Yiddish-speaking, Talmud-immersed Polish Jewry. (To be sure, the name Ashkenazi signals that his family had roots in that milieu.) He also had a reputation as a leading Talmudist. Yet his frequent moves (from Posen to Cracow to Gniezno within a decade) may have been symptomatic of adjustment difficulties. Having spent his maturity in lands where poetry and phi- losophy were part of the cultural furniture, he returned in his old age to the land of his fathers, which was a backwater by comparison.1 The manuscripts of the old peddlers and the more recent extracurricular ventures of Isserles’s students had reached few people. If Eliezer wanted to have conversations about philosophy with his new neighbors, he would have to teach it to them first. In time, his acknowledged influence among the next generation of Polish exegetes would be considerable, as Jacob Elbaum documents.2 But his unacknowledged influence adds further to this record. We shall argue that one of his students was none other than his peer and colleague, Maharal, by now of Prague.

1 A half-century later, Joseph Delmedigo was to make the same move from Italy to Poland. He recorded his culture-shock in these words: “Pitch blackness covers the earth, and the ignorance is fearful. . . . Of secular wisdoms they have no concept whatsoever.” (Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, HUC/Ktav 1974, IV, 157.) 2 Elbaum, Openness and Insularity, p. 47 note 60, p. 87 note 16. Elbaum lists nearly a dozen authors who profited from Eliezer Ashkenazi’s interest. But he mentions neither Maharal nor Ephraim Luntshitz, who should now be added to this list.

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