Manna as a "Detox Diet": On Rav Mendel of Rymanov's Segulah for Parnassah (original) (raw)
2023
This article studies kabbalistic interpretation of a ritual of unknown origin: the daily recitation of the manna episode (Exod 16:1-36). This episode foregrounds a major theme in the writings of R. Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa (13th-14th centuries) and many other medieval kabbalists: the cyclical nature of sustaining existence. Bahya's interpretation builds on two primary sources: R. Jacob ben Sheshet Gerondi's commentary on Ps 145 in his kabbalistic polemic Meshiv Devarim Nekhoḥim, and a hermeneutic tradition derived from Hasidic-Ashkenazi biblical exegesis. The article also examines roughly analogous works that illuminate Bahya's hermeneutical outlook.
In 1870 the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz published Volume Eleven of his Geschichte der Juden, which brought his magnum opus down to the most recent period of Jewish history. Well over half of its nearly 600 pages were devoted to the Jews of Germany, though at the time they made up little more than a tenth of the world Jewish population. Nine years later, in the summer of 1879, the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke read Graetz's work in preparing Volume Two of his own multi-volume opus, Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1878-1894). He was appalled and angered by what he found: Graetz's writing represented in the form of historical narrative just those attributes which explained, and almost justified, the virulent antisemitism then appearing in Berlin. Only a few weeks after reading Graetz, Treitschke lent his own voice to the chorus of protest against an allegedly ruinous Jewish influence in Germany and held Graetz up as the best example of Jewish adherence to anti-German and anti-Christian attitudes. The dispute which ensued drew in leading German Jews as well as Theodor Mommsen, Treitschke's colleague at the University of Berlin. In recent years the public debate of 1879-1881 has received ample scholarly discussion.1 Much less attention, however, has been given to analyzing Graetz's historiography with the intent of explaining why it should so have provoked Treitschke. And no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to compare Graetz's historical image of modern German Jews with the quite extensive historical treatment Treitschke himself accorded to the same figures in the volumes of his history.
Harvard Theological Review 116:4, 2023
This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 24, 2024
This essay begins by conceptualizing a “kabbalistic masculinity” characterized by pious discipline and a presumption to cosmic influence. This ideal was embodied in the kabbalistic discourse about the sin of “wasted seed,” or improper emission of semen. Kabbalists developed theories and practices intended to prevent the wasting of seed, atone for its spiritual consequences, and neutralize its demonic effects. I then trace these themes in texts from seventeenth-century Poland, beginning with Meir Poppers’ ethical text Or Tzadiqim, which wove theoretical Lurianic kabbalah into everyday routines and embodied practices. Finally, I turn to Poppers’ relative and student Joseph b. Solomon Calahora, the darshan (preacher) of Poznań. Calahora composed and published the first Hebrew book devoted exclusively to the causes, consequences, and cures for wasted seed: Yesod Yosef (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1679). These texts and their contexts show how the kabbalistic discourse on wasted seed played out, both individually and communally, in the bodies of early modern Jewish men in East-Central Europe.
Leo Baeck Institute Year Book
This article analyzes Volume 11 of the History of the Jews, entitled Geschichte der Juden vom Beginn der Mendelsohn’schen Zeit (1750) bis in die neuste Zeit (1848) (‘History of the Jews from the beginning the Mendelssohnian age (1750) until the present times (1848)’), which appeared in 1870. Specifically, it examines Graetz’s discussions of the generation of Jewish scholars and communal leaders that immediately preceded his own, comparing Graetz’s youthful diary entries concerning his early meetings or thoughts about these men with his descriptions of their lives and works in Volume 11. Making such a comparison, I argue, can reveal important shifts in Graetz’s values and compassions, as well provide some new insights into the opinions toward reform and modernism held by lesser-known figures in nineteenth-century German Jewry. The Graetz who wrote about the leading German Jews of the 1830s and 1840s from the vantage of the 1860s was not always the same man as the one who had met those figures twenty or thirty years earlier. My aim in this article is, therefore, to use Graetz’s diary, letters, and Volume 11 as the basis for an analysis of Graetz’s developing intellectual personae within the broader context of his interactions with other leading German Jews, and to reveal thereby not only the growth of his personal identity as an historian but also to uncover the evolving set of values that he and his contemporaries were instantiating in their modernization of Jewish religious practice and scholarship.
Hakirah, 2019
Which names survive the test of time? Who merits inclusion in the eternal archives of history and who is relegated to its trash bin? Today, virtually all of us leave a footprint of varying size on the Internet, such that those in the future will at least know of our existence. Such was not the case in the past. If you were not deemed worthy of inclusion in history books, and family records did not survive, it is quite possible that we today would never know of your existence. What is the fate of those already included in the history books of centuries gone by? If they are fortunate enough to be included in a volume uploaded to the Internet by Google Books or the like, their legacy is safe. However, if their hardcopy book entry literally or figuratively falls between the cracks, and somehow evades scanning and uploading, they too may vanish from our collective memories. In this essay, I extend my hand to one who has fallen between the proverbial cracks and pull him from obscurity into the light, where, as we shall see, he clearly belongs. Dr. Menachem Mendel Yehudah Leib Sergei is not a familiar name to our generation. To wit, he entirely escapes mention in Koren's comprehensive biographical index of Jewish physicians. 1 Dr. David Margalit does include him in an essay on the history of Jewish physicians who were also Torah scholars, but devotes precisely one sentence. 2 A biographical entry during his lifetime, however, indicates the extent to which he was respected and revered: