One of the better-known episodes in the history of medieval Spanish Jewry is the public disputation staged in the summer of 1263 in Barcelona between the venerated rabbi Moses Naḥmanides of Girona and Pablo Christiani, a Jewish convert to Christianity. Christiani, like many other medieval Jewish converts who marshaled their knowledge of Judaism in their anti-Jewish polemics, made use of the nonlegal, or aggadic, material in the Talmud. Naḥmanides felt compelled to qualify the importance of aggadic texts as mere “stories” that “people tell to one another,” and “he who believes in [them], well and good; but he who does not believe in [them] does no harm” (62). Indeed, in medieval Iberian Jewish culture, the emphasis on Halakhah and philosophy, as exemplified by Maimonides, meant that Aggadah did not elicit a great deal of interest. Philosophers made only selective use of aggadot, understanding them as metaphors expressing some deeper meaning and rejecting their literal meaning as in any way authoritative. Meanwhile, the legal codes of the medieval period—for example Isaac Alfasi's Hilkhot ha-Rif—focused entirely on the halakhic core of the talmudic corpus, relegating Aggadah to the sidelines of rabbinic scholarship.

Jacob ibn Ḥabib, born in the Spanish city of Zamora sometime between 1440 and 1450, and finding a new home in the Ottoman port city of Salonika by 1501, set out to restore the aggadic materials from the Talmud to a central place in Jewish learning. For Ibn Ḥabib, aggadot—in particular, those of the Talmud—were an expression of Jewish faith, the most authoritative source for developing what Lehman calls a Jewish dogmatics. Ibn Ḥabib's great contribution to Jewish literature was an anthology of aggadic texts drawn from the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud, the ‘Ein Ya‘akov, the first volume of which was printed in Salonika in 1516. This tome included an extensive introduction by Ibn Ḥabib, as well as his anthology and commentary on aggadot from the talmudic orders of Zera‘im and Mo‘ed. Jacob ibn Ḥabib did not live to complete his ambitious project (he died in 1516), though his son, Levi ibn Ḥabib, continued his work and published a second volume, titled Bet Ya‘akov, which included a somewhat less ambitious aggadic anthology and commentary on the remaining orders of the Talmud, published in Salonika in 1522.

In her wonderful new book, The En Yaaqov: Jacob Ibn Habib's Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus, Marjorie Lehman explores the literary and historical significance of Jacob ibn Ḥabib's anthology. Building on talmudic aggadot, Ibn Ḥabib's commentary explores matters such as the power of prayer, the question of reward and punishment, messianism, the meaning of the world to come, immortality, and the return to the Land of Israel. Compiling his anthology, Ibn Ḥabib chose to preserve the original order in which the texts appear in the Talmud, rather than organizing them into thematic units, though he also took full advantage of the possibilities opened up by the new technology of printing and provided two indices to guide his readers, one divided into twelve broader themes, the other organizing the material in relation to the weekly Torah reading.

Lehman argues that Ibn Ḥabib's anthology was a response to what had emerged as the dominant modes of Jewish thought in pre-expulsion Iberia, philosophy and Kabbalah. More specifically, Lehman suggests, ‘Ein ya‘akov responded to a mode of studying Talmud developed by Isaac Canpanton (d. 1463), who sought to synthesize Aristotelian logic and talmudic analysis. By contrast, Ibn Ḥabib understood the study of the Talmud, and especially the aggadot, quite differently—as the foundation of Jewish theology, reassuring a broader audience of post-1492 Jews in the fundamentals of their religious faith. For him, Aggadah was the key to unlocking the Talmud as a theological (or metahalakhic), rather than halakhic, text.

Marjorie Lehman places Ibn Ḥabib and his ‘Ein Ya‘akov convincingly within a series of different contexts: the first chapter focuses on Ibn Ḥabib's biography and his trajectory from Zamora and Salamanca to Lisbon and finally Salonika. She discusses the communal crisis that resulted from the mass conversions, the onslaught of religious disputations, and the expulsions of the 1490s, in order to locate Ibn Ḥabib's literary project in a wider context. Somewhat weaker is the contextualization within the Ottoman Empire, which remains a bit cursory. Lehman suggests that the encounter between Sephardic and local, Romaniot traditions in the Ottoman Empire was an important factor for Ibn Ḥabib, but she seems to apply conditions in Istanbul to the city where Ibn Ḥabib established himself, Salonika, where the circumstances of Sephardic settlement were entirely different (the city's Romaniot Jews had been transferred to Istanbul in the wake of the Ottoman conquest of that city in 1453).

Chapters 2 and 3, in turn, contextualize the ‘EinYa‘akov within the literary history of medieval Jewish scholarship: a new approach to the study of Aggadah, which Lehman sees as a direct response to the way Spanish Jews had dealt with aggadic texts in the fifteenth century; and a new way of studying the Talmud, which was emerging in the generation after the expulsion from Spain in Ottoman lands. One of the interesting implications of Lehman's argument is how Ibn Ḥabib's work demonstrates both the continuity of broader cultural developments across the divide of 1492, and emerging responses to the enormous transformation wrought by the expulsion. While Lehman cites Moshe Idel's warning against the assumption that “historical events automatically condition spiritual development” (119), she suggests that Ibn Ḥabib did respond to 1492 as a turning point and that he was motivated by that experience. It also becomes clear, however, that he continued to engage in a debate about the place of Aggadah, philosophy, and (to a lesser extent) Kabbalah, as well as about the proper methods of studying Talmud, a debate he had already entered into while in Spain prior to the expulsion.

Chapter 4 of Lehman's book turns to the text of the ‘Ein Ya‘akov itself to illustrate how Ibn Ḥabib developed a set of theological ideas about Judaism from his understanding of Talmudic aggadot. Ibn Ḥabib himself never explicitly referred to the importance of the historical context in which he wrote—he does not address the trauma of expulsion or the experience of the conversos head-on, nor does he address Canpanton or other intellectual interlocutors by name. The contextualization offered by Lehman therefore rests on her close reading of the ‘Ein Ya‘akov, and chapter 4 shows quite successfully what Ibn Ḥabib was trying to do. Just as important as understanding Ibn Ḥabib in the context of his time, however, is the reception of the book. This is what Lehman turns to in the concluding chapter. Though we do not know much about actual reading practices, the print history of the book itself provides a fascinating coda to Lehman's study. What we encounter is a text that remained remarkably fluid, as the editors and printers of subsequent versions—more than one hundred!—continued to look for meaning in the aggadic materials of the Talmud in ever-changing contexts. Some changed Ibn Ḥabib's anthology itself and added new passages to his selection; other editions omitted his commentary, only to reinsert it in a subsequent printing, and new commentaries written by later scholars continued to appear on the margins of the printed page.

Lehman's study on the ‘Ein Ya‘akov is an important book, not only for those interested in the history of Aggadah and its place in medieval and early modern Jewish culture, but also for scholars interested in the broader history of Spanish and Sephardic Jewry before and after 1492, and the cultural responses that these events engendered among the Spanish-Jewish exiles.