The Formation of the Talmud

Scholarship and Politics in Yitzhak Isaac Halevy’s Dorot Harishonim

Ari Bergmann

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783110709452
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110709964
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This book examines the talmudic writings, politics, and ideology of Y.I. Halevy (1847-1914), one of the most influential representatives of the pre-war eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. It analyzes Halevy's historical model of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, which, he argued, was edited by an academy of rabbis beginning in the fourth century and ending by the sixth century. Halevy's model also served as a blueprint for the rabbinic council of Agudath Israel, the Orthodox political body in whose founding he played a leading role.

Foreword by Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the author of How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, among other works.

Chapter 1 Y.I. Halevy: The Traditionalist in a Time of Change

1.1 Introduction

Yitzhak Isaac Halevy’s life exemplifies the multifaceted experiences and challenges of eastern and central European Orthodoxy and traditionalism in the nineteenth century.¹ Born into a prominent traditional rabbinic family, Halevy took up the family’s mantle to become a noted rabbinic scholar and author early in life. Not content to simply fulfill his role as “scion of the renowned Ivenec family in Russia,” he went on to become a defender of traditional Judaism and one of the first and greatest expounders of an Orthodox Wissenschaft aimed primarily at an eastern European audience, authoring the greatest Orthodox historiography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dorot harishonim.² At the same time, Halevy evolved into a master politician, becoming the architect of the first international Orthodox political movement of the twentieth century, Agudath Israel (also known as “the Agudah”). In many ways, Halevy’s experiences as a scholar and politician reflected the upheaval and transformation faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the traditional Jewish community (especially in eastern Europe) that he dedicated his life to defending.

1.2 The ideological, political, and religious turmoil of the nineteenth century: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Reform Movement

Even before Halevy was born in 1847, traditional Judaism in Europe had faced internal threats to its legitimacy for decades. Two related European Jewish movements, both originating in Germany, posed a particular danger to those wishing to preserve traditional Jewish religious practice: Wissenschaft des Judentums (lit., “Science of Judaism”) and the Reform Movement. Wissenschaft des Judentums had emerged out of the German scholarly effort, called by the name Wissenschaft, to study and teach history in a new way in universities.

Although the Jewish people has been deeply concerned with the meaning of its history throughout the ages, the classic position of rabbinic Judaism towards the study of history can best be described as aversion.³ This attitude changed drastically during the nineteenth century, when an ethos of historical consciousness emerged within the Jewish community in central Europe, particularly in Germany, the same country whose scholars pioneered the scientific study of history in western universities.⁴ In 1825, Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), widely considered the father of modern historical scholarship, was appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, where he instituted what he termed “Wissenschaft” (lit., “science”), best described in English as “the scientific study of history.” What he meant by “scientific” history was historiography based on objective research, free from value judgments. The goal was to show the past wie es eingentlich gewesen – as it really was.⁵ Beginning in the late-twentieth century, however, scholars questioned the feasibility of values- and bias-free scholarship. Georg G. Iggers was one historian who pointed out that Ranke’s historiography displayed a specific political and ideological agenda. Although Ranke replaced Hegel’s philosophical approach with an historical one, their worldviews were remarkably similar.⁶ In Ranke’s view, according to Iggers, the historian’s role was to provide valuable insight into the meaning of the world, and history was the ideal science to replace philosophy: “While the philosopher, viewing history from his vantage point, seeks infinity merely in progression, development, and totality, history recognizes something infinite in every existence: in every condition, in every being, something eternal, coming from God; and this is its vital principle.”⁷ For Ranke, history had the power to give meaning and value to human existence, and the role of the historian was to establish that meaning as an extension of historical research. In his view, history was, in many respects, superior to philosophy in its ability to confer meaning. But historical research itself, rather than providing meaning, had to be the primary goal.

Ranke’s authority was often invoked by scholars throughout Europe and beyond to legitimize the consensus practice.⁸ This same ethos penetrated the Jewish community, beginning in Germany, stimulating the development of a modern critical-historical consciousness and the establishment of the scientific-historical study of Judaism known as “Wissenschaft des Judentums.”⁹ Beginning around 1820 as a movement of Jewish academics, Wissenschaft des Judentums was a direct byproduct of the process of secularization that ultimately came to dominate the modern West.¹⁰ Wissenschaft secularized Jewish history by focusing on Judaism as a culture and thus created the possibility that sacred texts could be studied as historical documents.¹¹ Its founders, like Ranke, spoke of the ideal of objectivity in their scholarship, and, like Ranke, few (if any) practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accomplished this goal. Isaak Markus Jost (1793–1860), the early nineteenth-century German Jewish historian, described the lofty goal of objectivity in Wissenschaft des Judentums thus: “No prejudice should blind the historian, no universally held dogma should darken his views; no apprehension should intimidate him from revealing the truth as he sees it.”¹² From its inception, however, Wissenschaft des Judentums was imbued with ideological and political agendas.¹³ As Ismar Schorsch has noted, “Recourse to the study of the past was taken to serve the overwhelming needs of the present, with the inevitable result that ideology dominated the writing of scientific history.”¹⁴

Wissenschaft des Judentums did not have one single agenda but, rather, many overlapping goals. One of the prominent objectives was external: to improve the standing of Jews and Judaism among non-Jews. Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) was a leader and founder of the field who has been described as relatively non-ideological, in part because he did not act as the rabbi of a large community or as the leader of any particular ideological movement.¹⁵ Zunz believed that Jewish “scientific” scholarship could be used to obtain full civil and religious rights for the Jewish community.¹⁶ Another set of early objectives concerned the scholars’ desires to change attitudes and practices within Judaism. First and foremost, Wissenschaft des Judentums was a form of rebellion against the rabbinic establishment; Zunz wrote, “Our science should first of all emancipate itself from the theologians.”¹⁷ Zunz listed the rejection of rabbinism (the hegemony of the rabbis common in his day) as one of the main tenets of Wissenschaft. He directed his antagonism toward what he saw as the widespread practice of intolerant and capricious study of the Talmud, which, he believed, led to the banalization of Judaism. He thought that the rabbis of the Jewish community should be well-versed in biblical and rabbinic texts but also sensitive to the changes occurring in society.¹⁸

Since the founders and early practitioners of Wissenshchaft des Judentums also aimed at concrete religious reform, it was no coincidence that the Reform Movement in Germany, centered initially around Rabbi Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) and his associates, arose in the 1830s and 1840s, just a few decades after the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums. Geiger, born in Frankfurt, grew up in a religious household and spent his early years receiving a traditional Jewish education, anchored by the study of the Talmud. He first attended the University of Heidelberg, where he concentrated on Classical and Oriental languages, but, soon after, he went to study at the University of Bonn, where he began to pursue philosophy and history. He eventually came to use his scholarship to promote the reform of modern Jewish life by arguing that Judaism had always been a religion open to adopting modifications to its inherited traditions.¹⁹

Geiger’s claims about Judaism’s relative flexibility emerged amidst rapidly changing political circumstances in German politics and society, which presented the Jewish community with a unique set of challenges and opportunities. As legal restrictions on Jews in the German states were gradually lifted, allowing for the community’s deeper assimilation into the larger society, it became imperative to determine which parts of Jewish tradition were essential and which parts, seemingly antiquated and irrelevant to some, could potentially be discarded. These circumstances prompted various individuals to think about how to adapt Judaism to the new emancipated environment. Several thinkers, including Geiger, who were eager to reform traditions, realized that it was important to demonstrate that Jewish law had always evolved over time to adapt to shifting environments. Geiger cleverly employed Wissenschaft des Judentums, and particularly history, to demonstrate this evolution and thus to advance his reform agenda. Geiger also aimed to demonstrate how Jews could faithfully preserve their religious traditions while simultaneously adapting to modern German society. Banned from seeking a university professorship because he was Jewish, he worked both as a rabbi – in Wiesbaden, Breslau, Frankfurt, and Berlin – while also writing prodigiously and speaking to spread his ideas. As Michael Meyer has noted, “Few of his writings can be termed pure Wissenschaft, in the sense of bearing no relationship to the present. Though he felt bound as a scholar not to distort the past, he studied mainly in order to hold it up to the present. Historical knowledge, Geiger’s work tried to show, was the essential prerequisite for reform.”²⁰ In his early years, his writings primarily denigrated existing rabbinic Judaism. He wrote that the rabbis of the Talmud had been influenced by the times in which they lived but could not reveal this fact, so they claimed – often torturously – that all their halakhic rulings had support in the Bible.²¹ Later rabbis failed to realize that the Bible and rabbinic literature bore the marks of their own history, thus exacerbating the problem. However, as Geiger matured, his focus shifted to praising the rabbis and identifying his own reform agenda with the rabbinic attitude of the past. He constructed a development model of rabbinic law that allowed his own reform agenda to be part of mainstream Jewish history. Precisely this later approach led to Geiger’s role as the spokesman and ideologue for German Reform.²²

Geiger’s series of 24 lectures, entitled Das Judentum und seine Geschichte (Judaism and Its History, published 1864–1865) are a clear demonstration of his approach. He attempted to show that his movement for reform was not a break from the past, but, rather, part of a long tradition of reformation and adaptation of Judaism throughout the ages. Hillel the Elder, the great sage of the end of the first century BCE, considered to be the one who laid the foundations for the spiritual and intellectual movement of the early rabbinic period, came to represent the genuine reformer and a model for Geiger’s own approach. As he said, “Hillel conveys to us the image of – and this term will not degrade but ennoble his memory – a true reformer.”²³ Geiger was of the view that the Sadducees were the elite priests who controlled Judean politics from the time of the ret...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Y.I. Halevy: The Traditionalist in a Time of Change
• Chapter 2 Halevy and the Historiography of the Talmud
• Chapter 3 Halevy the Historian of the Talmud
• Chapter 4 Halevy and the Politics of the Talmud
• Conclusion
• Citation Index
• Subject-name Index