INTERVIEW with MENACHEM FISCH JUNE 15, 2014 Hava Tirosh

INTERVIEW WITH MENACHEM FISCH JUNE 15, 2014 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson Professor Fisch, thank you for agreeing to participate in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers. The interview will begin by discuss- ing your upbringing, your intellectual trajectory, and your intellectual identity. Please tell us where were you born and where did you spend your formative years? What kind of education did you receive? I was born in Leeds, England, to Harold and Joyce Fisch, both of whom were born in England, too. My grandfather on my father’s side was Rabbi Solomon Fisch, who in a sense set the tone for my father and even for myself. He was born in Wolbrom, Poland, left home at a young age to study Torah in Germany, and finally migrated to England to serve as the rabbi of small communities in Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, and eventually Leeds. He was a strict, old-school, Orthodox community rabbi. Yet at the same time, he studied for a doctorate in divinity at Manchester University. His doctoral dissertation, which took him years to complete, was a scientific edition of Midrash Hagadol Bamidbar, a late rabbinic midrashic text. The critical edition he produced was based on a Yemenite manuscript, for which he had to master Arabic and Greek to address the many philological problems it posed. So already my grandfather possessed a sort of dual personality: a serious religious commitment on the one hand and a deep commitment to academic research on the other. But it wasn’t a split personality. My grandfather’s academic and scientific involvement was an integral part of his religious persona. He was the model for my father, Harold Fisch, who was also a deeply religious Jew, but at the same time, a first rate scholar, fully at home in Western culture. After World War II, my father, who had already earned a B.A. in English literature, went to Oxford to complete his graduate work, and he was hand- picked by the provost of Leeds University, together with Asa Briggs and Steven Toulmin, to serve on its faculty. At the time he was twenty-three or twenty-four and did not even have a doctorate. My parents made their first home in Leeds, where I was born in 1948. After ten years at Leeds university, 156 INTERVIEW WITH MENACHEM FISCH and critical of the way the British had conducted themselves during the Suez crisis (1956), my father accepted an invitation from the newly founded Bar-Ilan University in Israel to help establish the English Department there. So in the summer of 1957, just as I was turning nine, the family made aliyah and the rest, as it were, is history. I would like you to say more about your father’s association with Bar-Ilan University. Did he not eventually become the Rector of the university? Yes. For my father Bar-Ilan was a dream come true, a fully fledged university he saw as dedicated to the same authentic twofold commitment to religious seriousness and academic excellence that he had experienced at home. What was the impact of Bar-Ilan University on your upbringing and intellectual makeup? I did my first degree at Bar-Ilan in physics and mathematics. My high school education was an interesting experience, and my years there were undoubtedly formative in certain respects, but the school was not very good. Midrashiyat Noam, of which you may have heard, was one of the first two so-called yeshiva high schools that were founded in Israel during the mid-1940s. However, neither of them succeeded as did Maimonides, the high school established a few years earlier by Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik and his wife in Boston, in offering an authentic and natural welding of a traditional religious education and a Western secular education. Maimonides School modeled itself on the persona of Rabbi Soloveitchik and translated his philosophy into a way of life. In this environment being an Orthodox Jew and being committed to philosophy were complementary aspects of an integrated and religiously engaged life. In Israel, by contrast, the yeshiva high schools were far more schizophrenic. The two halves of the day (i.e., the mornings devoted to traditional Jewish learning and the afternoons to secular learning) failed to mesh and to relate in any way to one another. In fact, the secular subjects were implicitly taught as merely instrumental to getting ahead in society. This was a school for the so-called religious intel- ligentsia in Israel, but the school never really took itself seriously as pio- neering a new and truly integrated vision of Torah and derech eretz. Indeed, unlike Rabbi Soloveitchik, the two rabbis who established the two first yeshiva high schools in Israel, Rabbis Neriah at Kfar Haroeh and Yagel—or Yogel as we all called him—at the Midrashiya, were Haredi-trained rabbis .

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