ON THE ABSENCE OF A BOOK FROM A LIBRARY: GERSHOM SCHOLEM AND THE SHULHAN ARUKH

Avriel Bar-Levav The Open University of Israel and Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem

In a moving section of his memoir, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction, certainly one of the strongest parts of this work, David Weiss Halivni describes his emotions when, at work for the Akerman company in Wolfsberg as a slave-labouring teenager in Nazi Germany, he sees a German guard having a sandwich wrapped in a page from the Shulhan Arukh: His sandwich was wrapped in a page of Orach Chaim, a volume of the Shulcan Aruch, Pesil Balaban’s edition. The Balabans began publishing the Shulchan Aruch, the Jewish code of law, in Lemberg in 1839. The first publisher was Abraham Balaban, and after his death he was succeeded by his widow, Pesil. Pesil’s edition of the Shulchan Aruch was the best; it had all the commentaries, including that of Rabbi Shlomo Kluger. As a child of a poor but scholarly home, I had always wanted to have her edition. We had a Shulchan Aruch, but it wasn’t Pesil’s. Ours was also old and torn . . . Here, of all places, in the shadows of the tunnel, under the threatening gaze of the German, a page of the Shulchan Aruch, with fatty spots all over it, met my eyes . . . Upon seeing this wrapper, I instinctively fell at the feet of the guard, without even realizing why; the mere letters propelled me. With tears in my eyes, I implored him to give me this bletl, this page. For a while he didn’t know what was happening; he thought I was suffering from epilepsy. He immediately put his hand to his revolver, the usual reaction to an unknown situation. But then he understood. This was, I explained to him, a page from a book I have studied at home. Please, I sobbed, give it to me as a souvenir. He gave me the bletl and I took it back to the camp. On the Sundays we had off, we now had not only oral Torah but Written Torah as well. The bletl became a visible symbol of a connection between the camp and the activities of Jews throughout history.1

1 D. Weiss Halivni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning in the Shadow of Destruction (New York 1996) 68–69. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 ZUTOT 6.1 Also available online – brill.nl/zuto 72 avriel bar-levav

While writing a review on the catalogue of the Scholem library,2 I have noticed an interesting fact: Gershom Scholem owned sixteen editions of Shulhan Arukh Ha-Ari, a kabbalistic book of customs, but had no copy of Shulhan Arukh, the basic halakhic codification of R. Moshe Karo. To make sure that this observation was correct I made a visit to the Scholem apartment in 28 Abrabanel Street, together with Esther Liebes, who has been manager of the Scholem collection since its first stages at the National library of Israel. Fania Scholem was still living there, and I inspected the books that remained in the apartment and had not been transferred to Givat Ram. I did not find a Shulhan Arukh there. I mentioned this absence in the first version of my review, but omitted it in the final version. When I told this story to the late Rivka Horowitz, who was once a neighbour of Scholem, she told me that when Agnon was living in the Scholem apartments (it was when Scholem was visiting the United States, in 1949),3 he used to say that he had all the books in the world, but no Shulhan Arukh. Scholem was a book collector, and after his death he donated his magnificent collection of books to the Jewish National and University library in Jerusalem. It is now kept in the Scholem reading room, where the readers can use the books and also the notes that Scholem wrote inside them. The collection is kept up-to-date by the staff of the library and new relevant material is constantly being added. Although focused on Kabbalah, the collection also has other points of interest, such as religion, magic and aspects of Jewish history. Scholem read more than the collection in his apartment shows. He was selective about what he put on his shelves. His interest in Jewish culture was stronger in certain aspects than in others. The books that he read and was not interested in keeping he used to give to his students. As Dan Laor describes it: ‘[Agnon] didn’t stop from admiring the rich library of Scholem—one of the best private libraries in the world in the realm of Jewish studies.’4 Scholem was the greatest figure in scholarly Jewish studies in the twentieth century. He grew up in a secular, even assimilated home in Berlin, and his turn towards Jewish culture and towards Zionism when he was young was a sign of rebellion against his birth context.

2 A. Bar-Levav, ‘The Catalogue of the Scholem Library: A Major Contribution to the Study of Jewish Mysticism,’ Jewish Studies 39 (1999) 201–209. 3 See D. Laor, S.Y. Agnon: A Biography ( Jerusalem 1993) 418–423. 4 Laor, Agnon, 421; M. Beit Arié, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Attitude towards the Book and the Library,’ Gershom Scholem: The Man and his Work ( Jerusalem 1993) 63–70.