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The History of Medieval Jewish Libraries

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The History of Medieval Jewish Libraries Title: The History of Medieval Jewish Libraries: The Interplay between Orality, oral transmission, and Textuality Within the Context of Rabbinic institutions and Educational Curriculum “However when the wise man lies down in death with his fathers, he leaves behind him a treasured and organized blessing: books that enlighten like the brilliance of the firmament (Daniel 12:3) and that extend peace like a river (Isa. 66:12)” Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, Zohar HaRakia, HaKadma, 1361–1444 My pen is my harp and my lyre; my library is my garden and my orchard. ~ Judah Ha-Levi Spanish Poet, Physician, 1075–1141 Make books your companions; let your bookshelves be your gardens: bask in their beauty, gather their fruit, pluck their roses, take their spices and myrrh. And when your soul be weary, change from garden to garden, and from prospect to prospect. ~Rabbi Judah Ibn Tibbon, Provance, France, c. 1120-1190 Short Abstract: The evolution of Jewish medieval library collections evolved over the Tannaitic (70 CE to 200 CE), Amoraic (200-500 CE), Savoraim (500-600) Geonic (600-900), Rishonim (900-1450), Achronim (1450- Shoah)periods as the genres of Jewish knowledge expanded and the world of Jewish knowledge developed in an oral tradition that later was set down. Simchah Assaf, Mordecai Breur, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Isidore Twerski, Adin Steinsaltz, Menachem Elon in Mishpat Ivri, and Nathan Drazin have shown that this evolution of the Jewish library within the context of Jewish educational “institutions” such as the medieval Yeshivot, Rabbinic Academies, Beit Midrashim, Synagogues, and self-regulating Jewish Communal government (kehilah) allowed for the classification and organization of manuscripts and sefarim. Assaf gathered source materials on premodern Jewish education which has recently been updated and reedited, which hopefully a sign of augmented interest in premodern Jewish education. materials organized geographically and chronologically. Assaf’s first volume is devoted to sources for the history of schooling in Ashkenazic Jewry, ranging from France and Germany and on into Poland; the second volume is devoted to materials from premodern Mediterranean Jewry--Spain, southern France, and Italy; the third volume is devoted to Jewish communities of the Middle East; the fourth and final volume consists of materials discovered by Assaf subsequent to the prior volumes. Of the large sets of historical overviews by Graetz and Baron, (1) Graetz's focuses on Jewish learning is confined to the elites of scholarship the master scholars and their works, (2) Baron’s Jewish Community, a three--volume work published in 1942, In the second volume, Baron included a rich chapter entitled Education and Public Enlightenment. Note the sections into which Baron divides his chapter: communal responsibility, rewards of learning, educational goals, books and libraries, escape, and fulfillment. Other articles on Jewish education include Albert Baumgarten's "Literacy and the Polemic Concerning Biblical Hermeneutics in the Second Temple Era;" "Isaiah Gafni's On the Education of Children in the Talmudic Era: Tradition and Reality;" and Yom Toy Assis's "Jewish Elementary Education in Christian Spain (13th- 14th Centuries): Communities versus Charitable Societies." and a significant treatment of premodern jewish education can be found in the recently published volume entitled Visions of Jewish Education, edited by Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, and Daniel Marom (2002). The heart of this volume lies with four essays intended to lay bare a variety of educational views held within segments of the Jewish world. The first of these essays, written by the late Isadore Twersky, focuses on Maimonides and attempts to identify the heart of his educational system. It is a path--breaking effort toward the elucidation of the educational views of a major premodern Jewish thinker. Also Ivan Marcus in his book, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe, in chapter 3 offers the important essay, “Ancient Jewish Pedagogy” and the two books by Robert Chazan (Fashioning Jewish Identity in Medieval Western Christendom) and Theodore Steinberg (Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages) shed light on the topic of medieval Jewish learning. Jews invested in learning and intellectual capital rather than often building Cathedral like structures and with the prohibition on “graven images” (lo oseh likhah pesel) the emphasis was on literacy so art did not play the kind of role it plays in Christianity to teach the alogos “Bible stories” by viewing paintings, stained glass windows, and statues.1 Literacy and memorized 1 Israel Jacob Yuval recognizes that orality of transmission of oral text “is esoteric” however takes a historical and sociological approach to explaining the hegemony of pervasive orality of torah sheb’eal peh. He argues that oral law and the insistence upon its transmission and study in an oral manner developed against the background of parallel developments in early Christianity which the Rabbis wished to separate themselves from. He notes that the written torah is a text but around the time of the birth of Christianity “the law of Jesus” was not considered a text but an oral tradition concerning his life. Thus according to Yuval the rabbis put in place a competing ideological culture of orality by the doctrine of emphasizing the dual torah which separates Judaism from Christianity whereby the rabbi transformed orality into a coterminous divine revelation with written torah. Because Christians also claimed the written torah the rabbis responded with an oral torah which the Christians could not appropriate and because Christianity defined itself by means of an alternative text- the NT. The Jews responded by creating an alternative text “the Mishnah and thereafter the two Talmudim. Thus whenever Judaism wanted to separate itself from Christianity it evokes the esoteric tradition of oral torah that is transmitted only to initiates in an oral manner. The rabbis were therefore intent upon preserving their teachings in an oral manner to exclude competing religious sects like Christianity. It is only by virtue of oral esoteric torah transmitted orally that Judaism can separate itself fully from and exclude Christians. In response to Christians the rabbis separate from them by fencing off oral secret traditions that are only transmitted orally. Yuval writes, “Precisely in light of the heavy threat posed by Christianity and in light of its attempt to adopt the Jewish scriptures as its own, Rabbinic Judaism developed a new religious doctrine emphasizing two elements: halakhah and orality. The halakhah is the contents and orality is the language by whose means there was created the rabbinic answer to the Christian soteriology. It was not faith in Jesus that redeems, but rather the observance of God’s commandments and their oral study, transmitted from mouth to ear. (p.248) Thus oral torah transmitted orally is seen to arise out of knowledge that is internalized is portable like movable capital (mitaltalein) and thus the Jews could transport their education from their wanderings in the diaspora. Exogenous factors such as restrictions in medieval charters, discrimination as dhimis or paying additional Jew taxes, persecution such as pogroms and Crusades, and massacres ensured literacy, learning and education that was mobile for one cannot take away from one what one knows. Nehemya Allony studied _Book Lists from the Cairo Genizah _ . Geniza scholarship can be characterized however by methodologies and approaches . For instance Davidson looked at poetry from the Geniza and the Israeli scholars Menachem Zulay, Hayyim Schirman (Hebrew Poetry from Spain and Provence), and Ezra Fleischer of the Israel National Academy for Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry exponentially increased the knowledge of the medieval poetic genre from the Geniza. Goitein in his multivolume set _The Mediterranean society_ and _Letters from the Geniza_ focuses mostly on trade and account book documents bringing order to the common daily trade documents and organizing this detritus of history with a mystical sense of resurrecting the vibrant life of the Medieval Mediterranean. Jacob Mann has looked at documents of Evidence- letters, contracts, court records on communal life. Scholars such as Rabinowitz, Schechter, and many others looked at halakhic/legal texts from the Geniza. Schechter2 also gave Louis Ginzberg a text which Ginzberg published under the title _Ein Unbekannte Juedische Secte_ which related to_The Damascus Document_ which my teacher Rabbi Joseph Baumgarten published and edited with notes and critical apparatus in Studies in the Judean Desert_ from a facsimile of the Damascus document found at Qumran in the 1950s. More recently Mark Cohen of the Princeton Geniza project which hosts a “text garden” database with an ethical social conscience has looked at the status of the vulnerable in Jewish society such as widows, poor, orphans, divorced women, etc. from texts in the Geniza published in a 2 vol. set Poverty and charity in the Jewish community of medieval Egypt. Thus the Geniza has been approached with many methodologies and types of approaches. The Librarian Stefen Reif who has focused on liturgical aspects of the genizah. Most recently since 1999 Toronto currency trader and bibliophile Albert Friedberg has financed under the auspices of cyberwizard Yaacov Choueka is revolutionizing access to Geniza texts, with the goal of making available at the mere click of a mouse on the Friedberg website along with nearly half a million items of data about the 331,351 folios from the Ben Ezra cache. historical forces in the Pharisees struggle with the challenge of the adoption of the written torah by Christianity, see: Yuval, Israel Jacob, “The orality of the Jewish oral law: from pedagogy to ideology”, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the course of history: exchange and conflicts, 237-260.) Yuval recognizes that this separation by means of the ideology of the orality of the oral torah also takes on a role of esotericism. He writes, “even if the oral text is canonic and transmitted very faithfully, its transmission is very limited and can be kept away from unwanted listeners (p.
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