Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe
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JEWISH CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE ESSAYS IN HONOR OF DAVID B. RUDERMAN Edited by Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner HebreW UniON COLLEGE Press UniVersiTY OF PITTsburGH Press This publication is made possible with support from the Herbert D. Katz Publication Fund Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, and Hebrew Union College Press, Cincinnati, OH, 45220 Copyright © 2014, Hebrew Union College Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman / edited by Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8229-4433-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Jews—Europe—History—18th century. 2. Jews—Europe—History—17th century. 3. Jews—Europe—History—16th century. 4. Jews—Civilization. 5. Judaism—Relations. 6. Civilization, Modern—Jewish influences. 7. Europe—Ethnic relations. I. Ruderman, David B., honoree. II. Cohen, Richard I., editor. III. Dohrmann, Natalie B., editor. IV. Shear, Adam, editor. V. Reiner, Elchanan, editor. DS135.E82J49 2014 305.892’4040903—dc23 2014008210 CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction From Venice to Philadelphia—Revisiting the Early Modern Adam Shear, Richard I. Cohen, Elchanan Reiner, and Natalie B. Dohrmann xi I. REALMS OF AUTHORITY: CONFLICT AND ADAPTATION Continuity or Change The Case of Two Prominent Jewish Portuguese Clans in the Ottoman Empire Joseph R. Hacker 3 Don’t Mess with Messer Leon Halakhah and Humanism in Fifteenth-Century Italy Elliott Horowitz 18 Jews and Habsburgs in Prague and Regensburg On the Political and Cultural Significance of Solomon Molkho’s Relics Matt Goldish 28 Jewish Women in the Wake of the Chmielnicki Uprising Gzeires Tah· -Tat as a Gendered Experience Adam Teller 39 For God and Country Jewish Identity and the State in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam Benjamin Fisher 50 “A Civil Death” Sovereignty and the Jewish Republic in an Early Modern Treatment of Genesis 49:10 Anne Oravetz Albert 63 vi Contents II. KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS The Hebrew Bible and the Senses in Late Medieval Spain Talya Fishman 75 Printing Kabbalah in Sixteenth-Century Italy Moshe Idel 85 Persecution and the Art of Printing Hebrew Books in Italy in the 1550s Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin 97 Kabbalah and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution J. H. (Yossi) Chajes 109 Yosef Shlomo Delmedigo’s Engagement with Atomism Some Further Explorations into a Knotty Problem Y. Tzvi Langermann 124 III. “JEWS” aNd “JUDAISM” iN THE EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN ImAGINATION The Theater of Creation and Re-creation Giuseppe Mazzotta 137 Weeping over Erasmus in Hebrew and Latin Joanna Weinberg 145 “Fair Measures from Our Region” The Study of Jewish Antiquities in Renaissance Italy Andrew Berns 156 Christian Hebraism and the Rediscovery of Hellenistic Judaism Anthony Grafton 169 Contents vii Jews, Nobility, and Usury in Luther’s Europe Jonathan Karp 181 “Adopt This Person So Totally Born Again” Elias Schadeus and the Conversion of the Jews Debra Kaplan 193 The Conservative Hybridity of Miguel de Barrios Adam Sutcliffe 205 Le Don Quichotte d’Antônio José Da Silva, les Marionnettes du Bairro Alto et les Prisons de L’Inquisition Roger Chartier 216 IV. THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IN AN EARLY MODERN KEY The Collapse of Jacob’s Ladders? A Suggested Perspective on the Problem of Secularization on the Eve of the Enlightenment Michael Heyd 229 A Jew from the East Meets Books from the West Yaacob Dweck 239 Printing, Fundraising, and Jewish Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Livorno Francesca Bregoli 250 An Interpretive Tradition Connecting Europe and the “East” in the Eighteenth Century Andrea Schatz 260 Gibbon’s Jews Dead but Alive in Eighteenth-Century England David S. Katz 271 viii Contents The “Happy Time” of Moses Mendelssohn and the Transformative Year 1782 Shmuel Feiner 282 A Tale of Three Generations Shifting Attitudes toward Haskalah, Mendelssohn, and Acculturation Sharon Flatto 294 An Underclass in Jewish History? Jewish Maidservants in East European Jewish Society, 1700–1900 Rebecca Kobrin 307 V. FROM THE EARLY MODERN TO THE LATE MODERN (AND BAck AGAIN) Did North American Jewry Have an Early Modern Period? Beth S. Wenger 319 Language and Periodization Mendele Moykher Sforim and the Revival of Pre-Haskalah Style Israel Bartal 331 The End or the Beginning Jewish Modernity and the Reception of Rahel Varnhagen Vivian Liska 344 Between Yitzhak Baer and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz The Rift That Never Healed Yosef Kaplan 356 List of David B. Ruderman’s Publications Compiled by Yechiel Y. Schur 369 A JEW FROM THE EAST MEETS BOOKS FROM THE WEST Yaacob Dweck Princeton University 1 ha-h· ida’ ·hida hu’). This three-word Hebrew phrase puns on the) החידא חידה הוא Hebrew word for riddle, ·hidah, and the acronym for the Hebrew name of H· ayim Yosef David Azulai, H· IDA. One might paraphrase Churchill and say that Azulai is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Born in Jerusalem in 1724, Azulai lived in Ottoman Palestine and Egypt for the first three decades of his life. For a period of four years in the 1750s he traveled throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe as an emissary for the Jews of Palestine. He then returned to Palestine for some fifteen years before setting out on another journey of roughly the same duration in the 1770s. At the end of his second tour as an emissary, Azulai did not return to Palestine as he had formerly, but settled in Livorno, where he lived until his death in 1806. It was as an emissary and then as a resident of Livorno that Azulai wrote the works for which he is best known: Shem ha-gedolim, his bio-bibliographic anthology that occupies a pivotal position between the compendia of the previous centuries by Christian Hebraists like Bartolocci and Wolf, and the monumental achievements of the Jewish bibliographers of the next century such as Steinschneider and Neubauer; Birke Yosef, his glosses and explanations of Joseph Karo’s Shulh· an ‘arukh; and Ma‘agal tov, a travel notebook composed during his time as an emissary. But these three works for which he is justly known are only a fraction of his enormous literary 239 240 Yaacob Dweck output. Azulai was a graphomaniac of nineteenth-century proportions firmly en- trenched in the Sephardic diaspora of the eighteenth century. There is virtually no area of rabbinic literature that he did not write about: biblical exegesis, talmudic commentary, legal responsa, Kabbalah, both practical and theoretical, to name a 2 few. He even wrote a commentary on Sefer ·hasidim, a work of medieval German pietism seemingly quite far from his intellectual milieu. Amidst this vast and overwhelming display of rabbinic erudition, Ma‘agal tov stands out. It is one of his few works that does not take as its starting point either a sacred text or a legal problem. The book began as an account of his travels, as one can easily discern from its textual history. Sefer ma‘agal tov ha-shalem, as it was published by Aron Freimann in 1934, brings together Azulai’s account as he had recorded it in two separate manuscripts.3 Both manuscripts are quite small: that of the first journey 8 x 15 cm and that of the second 9 x 12 cm.4 The size of these man- uscripts bears directly upon their function. They were small enough to be carried on his person, either in the equivalent of a pocket or in a fold in his clothing. Internal evidence from the work suggests that Azulai kept other manuscripts in his pockets, as shall emerge below, and it stands to reason that while traveling he kept these notebooks on his person and entered his thoughts at odd moments. The accounts of the two journeys do not differ markedly in substance or style. Each contains entries that range from a single sentence to several pages; for certain periods, there is an individual entry for every day; for others, many weeks pass without so much as the stroke of a pen. Throughout, the language is extraordinarily dense and allusive: rhyming prose alternates with cascades of allusions to biblical and rabbinic literature. But the writing is often episodic, sometimes inscrutable, and frequently disjointed. Both notebooks include a remarkably similar introductory paragraph, in which Azulai described them as records of his travels and the many divine miracles performed for him on his journeys. These short statements, which appear to have been written retrospectively, offer alluring evidence that Azulai imag- ined an audience for his diary, but precious little indication as to who this may have been. Unlike Shem ha-gedolim, which he explicitly addressed to young Jewish men in a self-conscious echo of Karo’s Shulh· an ‘arukh, the work does not contain a named addressee. The later history of the manuscripts—they remained in the possession of his descendants well into the nineteenth century—might lead one to hypothesize that they were addressed to his children. Azulai was an extraordinarily prolific author who printed a number of works in his own lifetime, keenly aware of the power of the printed word and obsessed with writing. Azulai himself used the word sefer, or book, to refer to the notebook of his second journey, which he titled Sefer ma‘agal tov, and his other writings corroborate that he referred to his travel diary as a sefer. The word sefer was evidently labile enough for Azulai to encompass a text that would probably be called a kuntres in rabbinic Hebrew or a yoman in modern Hebrew.5 The diaries themselves offer a wealth of information—anecdotes, reflections, and data—about the printed Hebrew A Jew from the East Meets Books from the West 241 book at a crucial moment in European Jewish life.