Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

StRos 38/39

Herman Prins Salomon1 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera (1596-1660) was born in Venice and is thought to have been a student of the famous preacher, theologian and poet Leon Modena of the city’s Ashkenazic community, to which Mortera also be- longed.2 From 1612 the young Mortera served Dr Philip Rodrigues Mon- talto as secretary and presumably also as Hebrew teacher. Montalto was a Portuguese New Christian who had adopted Judaism at Venice, where he immersed himself in the study of the religion and wrote a short polemical treatise against Catholicism.3 Mortera accompanied Montalto to Paris, where the latter was appointed court physician. He continued to tutor Montalto and his children in their Jewish studies and took part in a theological study group set up by his patron. In 1616 Montalto died at Tours and Mortera took his embalmed body to Amsterdam for burial. Mortera arrived at Amsterdam in September 1616. Here he joined Bet Ya’acob, the oldest of two Sephardic congregations, each with its own synagogue and rabbinate. That same year Mortera, aged 20, married Ester Soares, a native of Lisbon. The marriage produced ﬁ ve children. In 1619 the records of the Bet Ya’acob community mention Mortera with the title of hakham. When the by then three Sephardic congregations of Amsterdam merged in 1639, Mortera became senior hakham and head of the academy of the united Talmud Torah community, named by him after the Spanish-Portuguese community of his native Venice. It was at the by now sole Amsterdam Portuguese synagogue, that the excommunica- tion of Spinoza (aged 24) took place in 1656, with Mortera’s consent. Saul Levi Mortera wrote various theological and didactic tracts in Por- tuguese and Hebrew on issues such as the eternity of punishment for un- repentant sinners, the merits of Judaism compared to Catholicism, and the halakhah regarding paintings and sculptures of people as decoration for the home. In 1659 he began work on his magnum opus, his ‘Treatise on the Truth of the Law of Moses’, a Portuguese work which remained un- published until 1988. He fell ill before completing the book and died in 1660.

216 Herman Prins Salomon

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 221616 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1413:17:14 Mortera preached in Portuguese each Sabbath and on festivals from 1619 to 1639. When Amsterdam’s Sephardic congregations merged in 1639 he was appointed to preach three times each month and to teach Talmud to advanced students. Giv’at Sha’ul, published in Amsterdam in 1645, con- tains 2-line descriptions of 500 sermons and fi fty drafts in Hebrew. Mortera’s students, who collected the material, noted in their introduction that by 1645 the total number of his sermons had reached 1,400, an average of 50 a year. In 1990 the Rabbinical Seminary of Budapest report- ed it held a Hebrew manuscript of preliminary drafts of 550 sermons by Mortera, in the preacher’s own hand, bound in fi ve volumes (also entitled Giv’at Sha’ul).4 This is the largest extant corpus of homiletic texts from any Jewish preacher before the nineteenth century. Professor Marc Saperstein has studied in depth the 550 Hebrew sermon drafts located in Budapest.5 Mortera even tried his hand as a dramatist, in collaboration with the Portuguese poet Paulo de Pina (alias Rehuel Jessurun). On Shavuot of 1624 his biblical drama in Portuguese Diálogo dos Montes was enacted at the Bet Ya’acob synagogue. The principal characters were the seven biblical mountains, Sinai, Gerizim, etc. It was published in 1767, and in a schol- arly edition with English translation in 1975. The only Portuguese sermon by Mortera printed during his lifetime was the funeral sermon for his young student Moseh de Mercado, published in 1652 (there is also a Hebrew draft in the Budapest collection). The late Professor Richard Popkin located a fi ne illuminated manuscript in the library of the Univer- sity of California at Los Angeles, dated 1644, containing seven of his Sab- bath and Festival sermons as he actually delivered them in the synagogue, in Portuguese.6 These are his only Portuguese synagogue sermons to have been preserved; until 2003 none had been published or analysed.7 The manuscript appears to have been written by Samuel de Cáceres, one of Mortera’s students, an excellent calligraphist, who married a sister and later a half-sister of Spinoza. Of these seven Portuguese sermons only the one preached on Sukkoth corresponds to a Hebrew draft in the Budapest collection.8 The seven Portuguese sermons are not dated by year. Yet a rough esti- mate can be attempted. Mortera progressed verse by verse through each parasha (pericope) year by year, beginning in 1619.9 For instance, his text for Shabbat Bereshit (the fi rst Sabbath of the Jewish year) in 1619 was Genesis 1:1; in 1620, Genesis 1:2; in 1621, Genesis 1:3; etc. The text for the sermon discussed here is Numbers 19:2. Thus we may hypothesise that it was delivered on Shabbat Huqqat in 1619 or in 1620, at the beginning of his career.10 However, the possibility cannot be excluded that Mortera preached (or repeated) this sermon on a Shabbat Para11 of another year during his long incumbency. The initial verses of Numbers 19 are as fol- lows:

217 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 221717 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1413:17:14 Zot huqqat ha-torah: This is the ordinance of the Torah [...]. Tell the Isra- elites to bring you a red cow without blemish or defect, which has never borne the yoke. You shall give it to Eleazar the priest that he may take it outside the camp and slaughter it before his face. Eleazar the priest shall take of its blood on his ﬁ nger and sprinkle of its blood towards the front of the Tent of Presence seven times. The cow shall be burnt in his sight, its skin; ﬂ esh and blood with its dung shall be burnt. The priest shall take cedar-wood; hyssop and scarlet thread and cast it into the midst of the burning cow. Then the priest shall wash his clothes and shall bathe his body in water [...]. The one who burns it shall wash his clothes in water [...] then he who is clean shall add the ashes [to the water]. [...] And [the mixture] shall be kept for use by the Israelite congregation [...]12

The following is a somewhat abridged13 yet faithful English rendering of Hakham Mortera’s Portuguese manuscript sermon, entitled, in Hebrew, Para Aduma (Red Cow).14 As in all of his sermons, Mortera starts with the nose (theme-verse or text),15 in this case Numbers 19:2, followed by the ma’amar (rabbinic dictum), here a Midrash from Bemidbar Raba. Both are cited ﬁ rst in the original Hebrew, then in his own Portuguese translation.

This is the ordinance of the Torah.

[...] When Moses was told in Leviticus 21:1-3 how Aaronite priests ac- quire uncleanness by coming into contact with corpses, he was not told how they were to cleanse themselves. So he requested the Lord to tell him. But he received no answer and was disheartened. When he got to the section on the red cow (Numbers 19), the Lord said, ‘Now I’ll tell you: “for such uncleanness they shall take some of the ash from the burnt mass of the sin offering (i.e., of the cow),16 etc.”’ 17

Thus, impurity from contact with corpses requires special cleansing. But why of all things a red cow?

Well, our Master Moses was the greatest of the prophets. He foresaw everything that later prophets foresaw and more:

‘My servant Moses is not such a prophet; he, of my entire household, is faithful’ (Num. 12:7).

‘There is nothing in my treasury so secret that it is not accessible to him.’

218 Herman Prins Salomon

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 221818 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1413:17:14 Fig. 1 Title page of the late seventeenth-century copy of Saul Levi Morteira’s seven halakhic homilies. Ets Haim Livraria Montezinos, Amsterdam, EH 48 C 7

Fig. 2 First page of the sermon for Shabbat Para in the late seventeenth-century copy of Saul Levi Morteira’s seven halakhic homilies. Ets Haim Livraria Montezinos, Amsterdam, EH 48 C 7

219 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 221919 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1413:17:14 Accordingly, the ﬁ rst 40 days on Mount Sinai the Oral Law was revealed to him; the next 40 days he was engaged in continual prayer; the last 40 days the whole future was revealed to him.18 These predictions were then ciphered and included in the Ceremonial Law. A perfect ex- ample is this section on the red cow.

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakai was asked by his disciples to explain the meaning of this section. He replied (Bemidbar Raba): ‘In point of fact, contact with a corpse does not render a person impure, nor do the ashes of a red cow render a person pure. However, huqqa huqqati, gezera gazarti; en leka reshut leharher ahareka (‘I proclaimed a law, I decreed a decree, and that is it; just do it without questioning’). But surely Rabbi Yohanan did not think that the whole red cow ceremony proceeded from some divine whim, has ve-shalom (Heaven, forfend!), because no human mind could have conceived such a thing haphazardly nor, kal va-homer (a fortiori), the divinity in its inﬁ nite wisdom. So there has to be something else behind it. R. Yohanan b. Zakai meant that God pre- scribed this ceremony in His inﬁ nite wisdom and we must unquestion- ingly observe it. Yet we are free to delve into the true meaning and the Talmudic rabbis indeed have attempted many explanations.

There are three sins for which, rather than commit them, we should let ourselves be killed, namely idolatry, adultery, murder. These are called tuma (deﬁ lement) in Scripture. Examples:

Idolatry.

‘Do not deﬁ le yourselves with the idols of Egypt’ (Ex. 20:7).

‘They shall never again be deﬁ led with their idols’ (Ezek. 37:23).

Adultery:

‘You shall not deﬁ le yourselves in any of these ways’ (Lev. 18:24).

Murder:

‘You shall not deﬁ le your land by bloodshed’ (Lev. 18:24).

Of the three, idolatry is the severest grade of deﬁ lement, because it is associated with the cult of the corpse, which is the worst deﬁ lement in the world.

‘They joined in worshipping Baal Peor and ate meat sacriﬁ ced to the dead’ (zivhe metim) (Psalm 106:28).

220 Herman Prins Salomon

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222020 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 Now, if idolatry is deﬁ lement by association, when the cult is actually rendered the body of a dead person, then we are dealing with the most excessive and extreme form of deﬁ lement, about which the Lord proph- esied through Zechariah:

‘I shall remove from the land the quintessence and soul of deﬁ lement’ (Zech. 13:2).

The Lord, foreseeing that a sizeable part of humanity would at some point land into this kind of deﬁ lement, instituted the red cow ceremony to cleanse the world of it:

‘Tell the Israelites to bring you a red cow’ (Num. 19:2).

The red cow is none other than Daniel’s Fourth Monarchy, called Edom, which means red and Edom also means Esau.

Question: why a red cow? Why not use for this puriﬁ cation the scape- goat sent into the desert, called Sa’ir, meaning hairy, which refers just as much to Esau, the hairy one, father of Edom, whose land is called Se’ir? Well, our hakhamim tell us that in the verse:

Venasa ha-sa’ir alav et kol avonotam (‘The goat [sa’ir] shall carry all their sins’, Lev. 16:22).

The word avonotam (their sins) may be read as two words: avonot tam (the sins of the perfect one), namely Jacob, who is called ish tam, yoshev ohalim (‘a perfect man, dweller in tents’, Gen. 25:27). But we are talking here about the sins of Esau, the founder of the Edomite monarchy, which may have been comparable to a little goat when it was still in the developing stage, but then grew to monstrous proportions:

‘The fourth beast, which signiﬁ es a fourth kingdom to appear upon the earth, shall be different from all others’ (Dan. 7:23).

Thus, it is represented by a cow (para), which means full grown and blown up. So that ‘to take you a red cow’ is like saying: ‘take you the full- grown Idumea’. Let us look at our verse:

‘A perfect red cow’ (para aduma temima).

What is meant by ‘perfect’ in this exposition? All the homiletic com- mentators agree on ‘perfectly red’ (asher en ba mum, ‘in which there is no defect’ taken to mean: ‘in which there is no spot of another colour’). Well, there is nothing redder than this Edomite monarchy. Our Sages,

221 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222121 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 commenting the verse hu’ esav avi edom (‘he is Esau, the father of the Edomites’, Gen. 36:43) say:

‘He is red, his food is red, his land is red, his warriors are red, his clothing is red; the one who is going to take vengeance on him is red, with a red outﬁ t’ (Bereshit Raba).

They back this up scripturally:

He is red: ‘and the fi rst one came out ruddy (admoni)’ (Gen. 25:25) His food is red: ‘let me have a taste of this red, red dish’ (Gen. 25:30) His land is red: ‘the land of Seir, the red fi eld’ (Gen. 32:4)19 His warriors are red: ‘the shields of his reddish warriors’ (Nahum 2:4) The one to take vengeance on him is red: ‘My beloved is white and red’ (Cant. 5:11) In a red outfi t: ‘because your clothing is red’ (Is. 63:2).

One would expect them to say that the vengeance will be by the hand of David, of whom it is said that he is ruddy (admoni: I Sam. 16:2). They do not, because the vengeance will be carried out by the Lord bikvodo ub’atsmo (‘by Himself in His glory’) as we read in the Haggadah about the smiting of the ﬁ rst-born or, as Isaiah says:

‘I have trodden the winepress alone; no man, no nation was with Me’ (Is. 63:3).

Thus, properly interpreted, ‘a red cow without a blemish or defect’ means ‘totally and perfectly red.’ Figuratively applied to the Edomite monarchy, it means ‘lacking nothing in human grandeur,’ to the point of proclaiming itself divine and lord of all divine matter at the moment when it will be seized to cleanse the deﬁ lement of the cult of the dead man. As Daniel says:

‘The king will do what he chooses, he will exalt and magnify himself above every god; against the God of gods he will utter monstrous blas- phemies [...] he will meet his end with no one to help him; at that moment Michael shall appear [...]’ (Dan. 11:36, 45; 12:1).

Let us analyse our second verse:

‘[...] tell the Israelites to bring you a perfectly red cow without defect, which has never borne the yoke [...]’ (Num. 19:2). ‘Which has never borne the yoke’ (asher lo ala aleha ol) is another indica- tion of this cow’s nature, the sublime state she possesses, not recognis- ing anyone else’s superiority. As Obadiah says:

222 Herman Prins Salomon

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222222 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 ‘Look, I made you the least of all nations, an object of contempt. Your proud, insolent heart has led you astray, you who haunt the crannies among the rocks, making your home on the heights (merom shivto), you say to yourself: ‘Who can bring me to the ground?’ (Obad. 1:2, 3)

To paraphrase: ‘At the beginning I set you up in a modest little country next to the Holy Land. Then in your overwhelming pride, with your armies you occupied the city of Rome (me-rom shivto), built among seven hills (referred to as ‘crannies among the rocks’) and you say: ‘who can bring me down to earth?’‘ But Isaiah replies:

‘Ah! You destroyer, yourself undestroyed, betrayer still unbetrayed, when you cease to destroy, you will be destroyed; after your betrayals you will yourself be betrayed (Is. 33:1)’.

Let us proceed to verse 3:

‘You shall give it to Eleazar the priest that he may take it outside the camp and slaughter it before his face.’

El’azar ha-kohen (Eleazar the priest) is a code name for the Lord, de- fender of Israel: El azar ha-kohen = God helps the priest, the priest being Israel, who are the true priests of the Lord, as we read:

‘You shall be for me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation’ (Ex. 9:16).

and

‘You shall be called priests of the Lord’ (Is. 6: 6).

This means that the cow, i.e., the Edomite monarchy, will be handed over to God, who protects us in our captivity and travails, and taken outside the camp, i.e. [deprived of] its kingdom and provinces, as Ezek- iel prophesies [Ezek. 39:2] ‘and there sacriﬁ ced before Him’ [Ezek. 39:17-20].

On to verse 4:

‘Eleazar the Priest shall take of its blood on his ﬁ nger and sprinkle of its blood towards the front of the Tent of Presence seven times.’

This means that the Lord will infl ict on Edom seven kinds of wounds, because in Scripture the word fi nger denotes punishment. As Phar- aoh’s magicians said about the plague of the maggots: ‘it is the fi nger of God’ (Ex. 8:19). ‘The front of the tent’ is Jerusalem, where the whole

223 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222323 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 world will gather to witness the manifest and horrible vengeance. Ezek- iel describes the seven wounds:

‘I will summon universal terror against him’ says the Lord, ‘and his men shall turn their swords against one another. I will bring him to judgement with pestilence, bloodshed, teeming rain, hailstones hard as rock, ﬁ re and brimstone’ (Ezek. 38:21-22).

Verse 5:

‘The cow shall be burnt in his sight, its skin (et orah), ﬂ esh and blood to- gether with its dung shall be burnt.’

Since orah (‘its skin’) is practically the same as irah (‘its city’), this means that nothing shall remain of the red cow or, rather, the full-grown Ed- omite empire (Obad. 1:19; Dan. 7:11). The ‘skin-city’ is Rome, capital of the Empire, for just as leather surrounds the whole body, the essential elements of its religion are to be found in that city, which is to be put to the ﬁ re, as Isaiah predicts:

‘Edom’s torrents shall be turned into pitch and its land into brimstone; and the land shall become blazing pitch, which night and day shall never be quenched and its smoke shall go up forever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste and no man shall pass through it ever again’ (Is. 34:9-10).

‘Its fl esh’ signifi es the people that fi ll the skin and ‘its blood’ denotes the princes who are the soul of this monarchy. ‘Its dung’ consigned to the fl ames are all the idols, described as foul and abominable in Scripture.

Verse 6:

‘The priest shall take cedar-wood, hyssop and scarlet thread and cast it into the midst of the burning cow.’

The cedar-wood, which denotes height, signiﬁ es the degree of eminence attained by the rulers of this monarchy, as in Amos 2:9: ‘though they were as tall as cedars’. Some of them cover up their high rank by a show of humility, symbolised by hyssop or marjoram and scarlet thread: as it were, humility dressed in purple, all to be thrown into the cow’s conﬂ agration.

Finally:

‘The one who burns it shall wash his clothes in water [...] and the Israelite congregation shall keep it for use.’

224 Herman Prins Salomon

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222424 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 [Is. 63: 1, 3, 7] Thus the Jews will always have present in their memory the enormity of these marvels and the huge effects of this cow’s burning and how, by means of its ashes, the world will be fi nally cleansed of defi lement and the spirit of defi lement will disappear from the earth. For the defi lement caused by the cult of the corpse can only be removed by reducing the cow to ashes. But, we must still ask, why did the Lord not include in chapter 21 of Leviticus, where He speaks of cleansing, the manner of cleansing the defi lement caused by the corpse? And why did He not respond to Moses’ request for an explanation of this silence?

Here is the explanation of this great mystery. All the defi lement discussed earlier is in two categories, namely that which derives from the body itself, such as seminal or uterine fl ux, leprosy or childbirth and another which derives from objects such as a carcass, house or textile leprosy. These two categories signify the two exiles suffered by Israel before the present one, namely the Egyptian and the Babylonian cap- tivities. The Egyptian was meant to clean defi lement intrinsic to the Is- raelite body politic and was called ‘the iron crucible’ (Deut. 4: 20). The Babylonian captivity, on the other hand, was itself the defi lement, caused by the various images, which the Israelites introduced into the House of the Lord. For both the Lord manifested the manner of their cleansing directly, to indicate that Israel would escape from them in a relatively brief time-span. But when He came to the defi lement caused by the cult of the corpse, which is coextensive with our present captivity, He did not indicate its manner of cleansing, thereby demonstrating the extremely long duration of this defi lement. Upon realising this, Moses was disheartened. But when He arrived at the parasha of the red cow, a long while after fi rst mentioning defi lement through a corpse, He explained how this cleansed a person: namely the reduction of the red cow to ashes. May it take place in our own days!

The early Talmudic sages held that ‘Edom’ was a synonym of imperial Rome and that Scripture predicts its ultimate destruction.20 In the Mid- dle Ages it was taken by the Jews to refer to Christendom and, speciﬁ cally, to the home of the papacy. Similarly, the Talmudic opinion that the Ro- mans were the descendants of the Edomites (Idumeans) became popular in the Middle Ages and was even accepted by Nicolas de Lyra. Isaac Abra- vanel offers what he calls decisive proof to this effect and insists that all the prophecies of doom which Isaiah, Jermiah and Obadiah announced for Edom referred to Rome, Christendom and Christianity. Abravanel attributes to Nahmanides the opinion that the Edomites forcibly circum- cised by Yohanan Hyrcanus were the ﬁ rst to accept Christianity and that they are therefore responsible for this blight on history. Mortera picked up from Abravanel the idea that Isaiah had Catholicism in mind when he

225 Hakham Saul Levi Mortera and the Red Cow

99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222525 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1513:17:15 spoke of the slaughter in the land of Edom, whose capital city was to be put to the torch. Abravanel explicitly speaks of the palaces of the pope and of cardinals, and names the Tiber and the Ticinus as the rivers to be turned into pitch. The Eternal City will become the eternal dwelling place of wild dogs, satyrs and evil spirits.21 Mortera, however, was the fi rst and perhaps only Jewish preacher to identify the burning of the red cow in Numbers 19 with the destruction of the Catholic Church of Rome. For this he used a method of scriptural interpretation known as typology, which has both a Christian and a Jewish history.22 Mortera distinguishes between the fi rst two and the last of Israel’s three exiles. His message to his fl ock - the majority of whom were Portu- guese former New Christians who had experienced the Inquisition - was that the redemption from the fi rst two exiles depended on the Jews themselves, on their improvement and contrition. Redemption from the present exile, on the other hand, depends solely on destruction by divine intervention of their oppressor and arch-enemy: the Catholic Church of Rome. To contextualise Mortera’s fanciful conceits forced on biblical texts, they should perhaps be compared with the homiletics of contempo- rary Portugal, typifi ed by the auto-da-fé sermons or those commemorat- ing the sacrilege of Santa Engrácia, ‘which distorted the biblical message into a diatribe against the Synagogue’.23

1. See H.P. Salomon, ‘O Hakam Saul Levi Mortera e 4. The microfi lms and printouts of these were presented a Vaca Vermelha: um contra-ataque em português ao by me to the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana to mark the catolicismo, ano 1619’, Cadernos de Estudos Sefarditas, library’s 125th anniversary. vol. 3 (2003), p. 82-101, the original Portuguese version of 5. See Saperstein, op. cit. this study, delivered as a lecture at the Faculty of Letters 6. UCLA Special Collections 170/107. The same sermons of the University of Lisbon in 2002, introducing a full are also found in a slightly less decorative late 17th-century critical edition of Mortera’s Red Cow sermon. The manuscript at Ets Haim Library in Amsterdam (48 C 7). English version was delivered as a lecture at K.K. Mikveh 7. Although he mentions them, Saperstein does not Israel, Philadelphia, on Shabbat Para, 2003. I am indebted discuss the six Portuguese sermons, which do not appear to Hakham Isaac S.D. Sassoon for his suggestions, all of in the Budapest Hebrew drafts. which have been incorporated. 8 . See Saperstein, op. cit., p. 37, 74. I am preparing a 2. See M. Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam, Saul Levi comparison of the Portuguese text and the Hebrew draft, Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of ‘New Jews’ of which Prof. Saperstein has kindly provided a transcript, (Cincinnati 2005); Saul Levi Mortera, Tratado da Verdade with his own English translation. da Lei de Moisés, Escrito pelo seu próprio punho em 9 . See Saperstein, op. cit., p. 70 ff. Português em Amesterdão 1659-1660, Edição facsimilada 10. Since the transitional fi rst verse (‘And the Lord spoke e leitura do autógrafo (1659), Introdução e Comentário, por to Moses and Aaron, saying’) is unlikely to have been the H.P. Salomon (Coimbra 1988), also published the same basis for a text, 1619 is more probable. year as a Nijmegen University doctoral dissertation with 11. ‘Sabbath of the Cow’ is the third of four special a Dutch title and different introduction in Dutch. Sabbaths, when Num. 19:1-22 is read as an additional 3. Still awaiting publication in the original Portuguese. portion from a second Torah scroll. See now P. van Rooden, ‘A Dutch Adaptation of Elias 12. Translations of quotations from the Bible are based Montalto’s Tractado sobre o Princípio do Capítulo 53 on The New English Bible: The Old Testament (Oxford 1970) de Jesaias, Text, Introduction and Commentary’, - which prefers ‘cow’ to ‘heifer’ - with some modifi cations. Lias, 16, 2 (1989), p. 189-238.

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99502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd502-06_01-11-06_ROS_D2.indd 222626 008-12-20068-12-2006 13:17:1613:17:16 13. Omissions are indicated by three dots and omitted scriptural verses are indicated between square brackets. 14. The complete Portuguese text can be found as an appendix to Salomon, op. cit., (2003). 15. For these terms, see Saperstein, op. cit, p. 126, 382. 16. This is an interpretation of the Scriptural word hatat (sin offering). 17. Cf. Koran, Sura 2, entitled ‘The Cow’ which also describes the red cow ritual as being revealed piecemeal and in response to the Prophet Mohammed’s question. 18. According to the Talmudic rabbis the periods of forty days and forty nights mentioned in Exodus 34:28 and Deut. 9:18, 10:10 are cumulative. 19. The verse has Edom, not adom, so the ‘proof’ here is circular. 20. See L.H. Feldman, ‘Remember Amalek!’ Vengeance, Zealotry and Group Destruction in the Bible According to Philo, Pseudo-Philo and Josephus (Cincinnati 2004), p. 76-83. 21. For precise source references, see S. Zeitlin, ‘The Origin of the Application of the term Edom for Rome and the Roman Church,’ Jewish Quarterly Review, 60 (1970), p. 262-263. 22. See M. Saperstein, ‘Jewish Typological Exegesis After Nahmanides,’ Jewish Studies Quarterly, 1 (1993/94), p. 158-170 (repr. in idem, ‘Your Voice Like a Ram’s Horn’: Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish Preaching [Cincinnati 1996], p. 23-35). 23. See E. Glaser, ‘Invitation to Intolerance, a Study of Portuguese Sermons Preached at Autos-da-Fé,’ Hebrew Union College Annual, 27 (1956), p. 327-385; H. Bauer, ‘Der Predigt als Spiegel politischer und sozialer Ereignisse in Portugal’, Aufsätze sur portugiesischen Kulturgeschichte, 2 (1974), p. 26-67.

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