Sephardism

Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination

Yael Halevi-Wise, Yael Halevi-Wise

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804781718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología judía

In this book, Sephardism is defined not as an expression of Sephardic identity but as a politicized literary metaphor. Since the nineteenth century, this metaphor has occurred with extraordinary frequency in works by authors from a variety of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and even India.

Sephardism asks why Gentile and Jewish writers and cultural figures have chosen to draw upon the medieval Sephardic experience to express their concerns about dissidents and minorities in modern nations? To what extent does their use of Sephardism overlap with other politicized discourses such as orientalism, hispanism, and medievalism, which also emerged from a clash between authoritarian, progressive, and romantic ideologies? This book brings a new approach to Sephardic Studies by situating it at a crossroads between Jewish Studies and Hispanic Studies in ways that enhance our appreciation of how historical fiction and political history have shaped, and were shaped by, historical attitudes toward Jews and their representation.

Part I
The Problem of National Particularism in German, English, and French Literature on the Jews of Spain

One
The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Ismar Schorsch

With the advent of emancipation in Central Europe, German-speaking Jewry gradually unhinged itself from the house of Ashkenazic Judaism. Inclusion in the body politic sundered a religious unity born of common patrimony. Historians have tended to focus on the institutional expressions of this rupture—the repudiation of the educational system, the mode of worship, and the rabbinic leadership intrinsic to Ashkenazic Judaism—with special emphasis on the Western tastes and values that propelled the transformation of all areas of Jewish life. What has been singularly overlooked is the simultaneous quest for a Jewish paradigm that would ground institutional rebellion in Jewish soil. With surprising speed, German Jews came to cultivate a lively bias for the religious legacy of Sephardic Jewry forged centuries before on the Iberian Peninsula. Without this bias, they would have cut loose from Judaism altogether. The embrace of what had previously hovered on the liminal level of Ashkenazic consciousness enabled them to redefine their identity in a Jewish mode. The critique of Ashkenazic Judaism was leveled from the vantage point of a usable past. During the next two centuries, modern Jewish history would replay this dialectic of rebellion and renewal by recourse to the periphery of group consciousness, but not beyond, with some degree of regularity. Counterhistory fed both the impulse for rejuvenation and the desire for continuity.

As construed by Ashkenazic intellectuals, the Sephardic image facilitated a religious posture marked by cultural openness, philosophic thinking, and an appreciation for the aesthetic. Like many a historical myth, it evoked a partial glimpse of a bygone age determined and colored by social need. Eventually, as we shall see, the Sephardic mystique came to operate in four distinct areas of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Germany—liturgy, synagogue architecture, literature, and scholarship. The romance with Spain offers yet another perspective on the degree to which German Jewry distanced itself from its eastern European origins.

The multifaceted interaction between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism in the centuries following the Spanish expulsion has yet to be studied comprehensively. Still there is little doubt that beyond the worldwide influence of Lurianic Kabbalah, the religious culture of Spanish Jewry held little allure for a self-sufficient and self-confident Ashkenazic Judaism in its age of spiritual ascendancy. Ashkenazic religious leadership in the second half of the sixteenth century began to turn its back on the rich rationalistic legacy of Spain—its biblical exegesis, grammatical research, and philosophic enterprise.¹ Typical of the growing assertiveness was the public attack delivered in 1559 by the chief rabbinic figure of Poznań in the synagogue on the sabbath before Passover, in which he defended the Talmud as the sole and infallible source of all knowledge required by Jews and depicted the burning of the Talmud in Rome in 1553 by order of the papacy as an expression of divine displeasure at the publication of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in Venice two years before.² Similarly the Prague polymath David Gans in his historical chronicle Zemah David (The Shoot of David) of 1592 betrayed an unmistakable sense of Ashkenazic superiority by dryly juxtaposing the Sephardic tendency to convert in times of persecution with the supposed Ashkenazic resolve to embrace martyrdom.³

Throughout this period of cultural estrangement, however, there are traces of self-criticism within Ashkenazic Judaism inspired by Sephardic example. The fascination with Spain that came to characterize the German Jewish scene of the nineteenth century was a discontinuity with its historical roots. The criticism is most often directed at the insular, ungraded, and adult-oriented educational system of the Ashkenazic world. While it is not clear whether the educational reforms of Jehuda Löw ben Bezalel (better known as the Maharal of Prague) in the sixteenth century were inspired by a Spanish model, the comments and proposals made by Shabbatai Sheftel Horowitz, Shabbatai Bass, and Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi in the following two centuries were certainly informed by direct contact with the Sephardic Diaspora.⁴

Bass, who was born in 1641 in Poland and educated in Prague, spent five years in the quickening ambience of Amsterdam’s Sephardic community, completing his Sefer Sifte yeshenim (The Lips of the Sleeping), the first bibliography of Hebraica prepared by a Jew, in 1680. The significance of this work, for our purpose, goes well beyond his praise in the introduction of the graded and efficient Sephardic educational system he came to admire in Amsterdam. As an instrument of scholarship, the bibliography, with its 2,200 titles, provided the Hebrew reader with a sense that Jewish literary creativity transcended the writing of legal codes, commentaries, and responsa. With autodidacts in mind, Bass stressed in his introduction the centrality of method and system in the mastery of any discipline. The ability to arrive at reliable conclusions, and not the mechanical assimilation of factual knowledge, was the mark of the true scholar.⁵

No less unusual for his time was Zevi Ashkenazi, the devout yet worldly father of Jacob Emden. Known by the Sephardic title Hakham (sage), Ashkenazi was born in Moravia in 1660, educated in Salonika, and for the rest of his life moved easily between the Ashkenazic and Sephardic orbits. His intellectual horizons, though, were distinctly Se­phardic, and he possessed a good command of European languages, secular learning, Jewish philosophy, and Hebrew grammar, all of which made him a lifelong critic of the educational curriculum that prevailed in Central Europe.⁶

That same critique was substantially amplified in the middle of the eighteenth century by Isaac Wetzlar, a native of Lower Saxony and successful merchant with a solid rabbinic education, in his unpublished Yiddish ethical tract “Liebes Brief.” Whatever else his use of Yiddish may have betokened, it signaled a desire to deliver his indictment of Ashkenazic society to the largest possible audience. Wetzlar was discomfited by gentile ridicule of Judaism, angered by the low quality of lay and rabbinic leadership, and envious of the orderliness and emphases of the Sephardic educational system. He extolled the study of Jewish philosophy, the decorum of the Sephardic synagogue, and its willingness to employ Spanish or Portuguese in communal worship. Consciousness of Sephardic practice, nurtured by at least one visit to Hamburg, with its still bustling Sephardic community, and perhaps elsewhere, had sensitized Wetzlar to shortcomings in his own Jewish world.⁷ In fact, as the autobiography of Glückel of Hameln illustrates, frequent travel by Ashkenazic merchants and entrepreneurs to the emporiums of Amsterdam and Hamburg and to international fairs in this age of mercantilism constituted an infectious source of exposure to the contrasting religious style of the Sephardic Diaspora.⁸ In sum, then, it is possible to identify an unbroken if modest tradition of Ashkenazic self-criticism informed by a selective admiration for Spanish Judaism long before the emergence of a veritable Sephardic mystique in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

The full-blown cultural critique of the Haskalah (German Jewry’s ephemeral Hebraic version of the European Enlightenment) drew much of its validation, if not inspiration, directly from Spain. The advocacy of secular education; the curbing of talmudic exclusivity and the resumption of studies in Hebrew grammar, biblical exegesis, and Jewish philosophy; and the search for historical exemplars led to a quick rediscovery of Spanish models and achievements. Given the deep Ashkenazic aversion to any serious study of the Bible, Moses Mendelsohn’s extensive Hebrew commentary on the Pentateuch was no less of a revolutionary break than his German translation, and it relied heavily on the grammatical and exegetical spadework of Spanish forerunners. The combined result of commentary and translation at least partially warranted Heine’s arresting comparison of Mendelsohn to Luther by virtue of their common endeavor to restore the centrality of the biblical text to their respective religious cultures.⁹

A quintessential expression of the Haskalah’s repudiation of Poland for Spain may be found in a withering satire by Aaron Wolfsohn, a teacher in the modern Jewish school of Breslau (now Wrocław) and one of the editors of the movement’s ailing Hebrew periodical Hame’asef. Serialized in its pages during 1794–95, “Siha be-eretz haHayim” (A Conversation in Paradise) takes place in the heavenly abode on the day of Mendelsohn’s death. Prior to Mendelsohn’s arrival, we are treated to a delicious exchange between a reluctant Maimonides and an uncouth Polish rabbi, whose two-year residence on a lower level of paradise has improved his Hebrew enough to discourse with the Sephardic sage. The rabbi is overjoyed at the chance to display his immense knowledge of Maimonides’ twelfth-century codification of all Jewish law to the author himself. After much badgering, Maimonides unhappily agrees to test his learning, but when he begins by asking whether God might be corporeal—a subject on which Maimonides’ own rationalistic view had already given rise to bitter controversy—his Polish tormentor protests that he never wasted his time studying trivia, but only matters of import: the laws governing sacrifices, family purity, and financial affairs. In regard to the realm of theology, he firmly believed that lightning was created to punish the wicked and personally warded it off by placing salt on the four corners of his table and opening the book of Genesis.

When Mendelsohn finally arrives on the scene, he is affectionately embraced as an equal by a weary and perturbed Maimonides. In response to his urgent inquiry as to the reasons for the benighted condition of Ashkenazic Jews, Mendelsohn offers three: oppression, which brought them to despise gentile learning; the absence of legal consensus; and an abstruse and casuistic mode of learning. Wolfsohn concludes his satirical foray by having Moses himself come out to welcome Mendelsohn to paradise, thereby uniting in symbolic religious accord the three towering Moses figures of Jewish history. The scene graphically exemplified the deeper meaning of the Haskalah’s famous bon mot that “from Moses to Moses there was no one like Moses.” Collapsing the Moses of Egypt and Moses Mendelsohn, the Moses of Dessau, into the Moses of Córdoba rendered the philosophic strain of Spanish Judaism both pristine and normative.¹⁰

A modicum of personal experience helped to fuel this flight of historical imagination. At one point, Wolfsohn has Mendelsohn confess that it was only his discovery of Maimonides’ Guide that extracted him from the ignorance and confusion of the talmudic world, and indeed the Guide served as the great intellectual emancipator for an entire generation of autodidacts, as Isaak Euchel stressed in his 1788 biography of Mendelsohn.¹¹ It provided their first taste of secular knowledge and remained a model for a rational exposition of Judaism. There was nothing exceptional about the pious Jews of the city of Poznań forbidding the itinerant Salomon Maimon, whose very name testifies to his indebtedness to Maimonides, to introduce their children to the Guide.¹² If, in fact, the Haskalah is unthinkable without the Guide, then its republication in 1742 in Jessnitz, just a few miles from Dessau, after a hiatus of nearly two centuries, amounted to a major breach in the intellectual defenses of Ashkenazic society. The glaring lack of even a single introductory rabbinic approbation underscores the official hostility to the venture, though Mendelsohn’s own teacher of Talmud, David Fränkel, seems covertly to have favored it. Without question, however, the new edition of the Guide, with several commentaries and a glossary of foreign words, opened up a road for many an inquiring mind that would eventually terminate in the alluring vistas of the Enlightenment.¹³

Political considerations tended to reinforce the cultural attraction to Spain. The far more privileged, prosperous, and assimilated Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam, London, and Bordeaux served as the cutting edge of the campaign for emancipation. The respected Amsterdam philosophe Isaac de Pinto had defended his co-religionists against Voltaire’s scurrilous article on the Jews in 1762, chiding the latter for his blanket indictment of all Jews, which entirely ignored the vast economic, social, and cultural differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, implying that the latter by virtue of their noteworthy accomplishments enjoyed a greater claim to admission into the body politic than their oppressed brethren.¹⁴ And, indeed, the resistance in revolutionary circles in 1790 to emancipating the Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux and southern France proved much less severe than that which forced a delay of yet another twenty months in granting emancipation to the larger number of far more alien Ashkenazim in Alsace and Lorraine.¹⁵

The import of events in France was not lost on young German Jewish intellectuals engaged in their own struggle for equality, and they often cast their argument in de Pinto’s terms. Thus, for example, Eduard Gans, the staunch and acute young Hegelian president of the ephemeral Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Jewish Culture and Science), submitted a lengthy petition to the Prussian government in the spring of 1820 seeking official approval for the name and activities of his society. To enforce his contention that Judaism posed no threat to meeting the demands of good citizenship, Gans pointed to the enduring record of Spanish Jewry:

These Jews, resembling all others both physically and mentally, but granted equality with Muslims by the Arabs, proceeded to plumb in concert all the known sciences of the day. . . . And they employed (in their writings) not Hebrew but Arabic. Indeed, those Jews expelled from this land to France, Holland, Italy, and England, to the detriment of Spanish economic life, and their still living progeny have never formed the contrast to Christian society so striking in the other family of Jews, kept intentionally apart. They are marked by less discrepancy in morality, purer speech, greater order in the synagogue, and in fact better taste.¹⁶

But a few years later the more prosaic Isaak Markus Jost, who had distanced himself from the messianic fervor of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft and who bore little affection for his own Ashkenazic culture, wrote in a late chapter of his multivolume Geschichte der Israeliten that Spanish and German Jews, for all their agreement in matters of religion, “constitute practically distinct national groups” (verschiedene Völkerstämme).¹⁷

Napoleon’s willingness in 1806 to reopen the issue within France of whether adherents of Judaism were even capable of citizenship augmented Sephardic prestige still further. His famous twelve questions and the rhetoric of his officials imposed a far-reaching distinction on Judaism that would become basic to the protracted emancipation debate in Central Europe. As formulated by the Sanhedrin in February 1807 in the preamble to its nine-point doctrinal and halakhic pronouncement, that distinction divided the provisions of Jewish law into two kinds—religious provisions, which are eternal, and political ones obtained only for the period of Jewish statehood. In his invaluable transactions of the preceding Assembly of Notables, Diogene Tama, the secretary of the deputy from Bouches du Rhône, astutely linked this novel distinction in a general way to the figures of Don Isaac Abravanel and Maimonides. The former, he contended,

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