Difficult as it is to distill the essence of what constitutes the critique of rabbinic culture from the diverse essays in Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish's collection, one element clearly emerges: Whatever the critique, it confronts by definition a rabbinic authority that not only claims but also exercises power over the Jews within its reach. Critique therefore has to be understood as calling into question a certain way of being governed, justifying the principle and means of its execution. This is why, to the disappointment of Talmudists and others, Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics leaves out a discussion of rabbinic authority in its formative period, when presumably the rabbinic sages were more in the business of claiming authority than actually exercising it.Footnote 1 It is only later, when the legal and cultural primacy of the Babylonian Talmud was nearly universally accepted, that rabbinic Judaism, or, as Frank and Goldish succinctly define it in their introduction, “Talmudism” became powerful enough to fill the role of such an all-encompassing authority. By their standards, there can be no critique of rabbinic authority, as such, until the rabbis are triumphant. This is to say, triumphant so far as the rabbis could be.
There are always cracks in the edifice of power, and the three divisions of Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics serve to trace a few of the major fissures, conceived—it seems to me, though the editors do not make this explicit—thematically as much as historically. The first, and longest, section is devoted to the challenge of rationalism in the early medieval period. The second section addresses the repercussions of the trauma of the Spanish expulsion and forced conversion among conversos and their descendants in Spain, the Netherlands, and the New World. The last section deals with the challenge of mysticism, in the form of the response to Sabbateanism in Early Modern Europe.
This book is not, nor does it aim to be, a comprehensive history of all manifestations of rabbinic authority and resistance to it. These three sections are better seen as laboratories in which the reader can observe and compare the mechanisms of power and dissent as they functioned among rabbinic Jews. Simultaneously, the contributors demonstrate how these phenomena should be studied: The essays take into account not only the rabbis and their critics, but also the embeddedness of both within the wider non-Jewish society.
The challenge of rationalism to rabbinic culture was posed both internally (within the discursive boundaries of Jewish culture) and externally. The essays in the first section reflect both sides of that divide. Adena Tanenbaum, Menachem Kellner, and Ephraim Kanarfogel trace points of tension between the acculturated Jewish intellectual elite and what Kellner, in connection with Maimonides, calls “proto-kabbalistic” Jewish culture. As Tanenbaum discusses in her contribution, Samuel ha-Nagid, Moses ibn Ezra, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and others, in their satires of Jewish boorishness, are responding to the perceived lack of sophistication and suspicion of philosophical inquiry among those only concerned with a parochial curriculum of Talmudic studies. In a similar vein, Kellner considers Maimonides' radical dehypostatization of the Hebrew language, the Divine name, holiness, ritual purity, and angels as a critique of the magical and mystical Judaism regnant in his day. Kellner frames his essay as a support for Moshe Idel's thesis that Maimonides' critique of mystical Judaism only served to strengthen and even call forth this same mysticism in its later, more crystallized, kabbalistic form. Kanarfogel's contribution, in turn, demonstrates the variety and sophistication of twelfth- and thirteenth-century rabbinic opinions regarding anthropomorphic beliefs in God, flying in the face of the general and generalizing criticism by rabbinic scholars in the Maimonidean camp that the majority of Ashkenazic rabbis believed uncritically that God has a human form.
Regarding external challenges, two essays in the first section concern Karaite–Rabbanite relations. Both Marina Rustow—whose essay I will discuss in more detail below—and Daniel Frank disrupt the model of the Karaites as the Rabbanites' relentless critics. For his part, Frank demonstrates the complexity of the Karaite evaluation of Rabbanite literature, particularly in the works of the seventeenth-century Karaite scholar Elijah ben Baruch Yerushalmi. Unlike early, more strident Karaite authors, Elijah strikes a balance between appreciating the wealth of rabbinic literature, especially those opinions that agree with Karaite principles, and the greatness of Rabbanite scholars such as Maimonides and the polemical demonstration of how these scholars willfully conceal Karaite interpretation.
Joseph Davis considers the genealogy of the conceptualization of heresy among Ashkenazic Jews up to early modernity. He traces the development of the concept from the Maimonidean controversy in the thirteenth century to Mendelssohn and the early Haskalah, and demonstrates how deeply any definition of heresy and heretical shifts are dependent on prevailing orthodoxies. In this he agrees with more recent developments in the study of late ancient Judaism that have shifted to study the phenomenon of heresiology and heresiography rather than heresy as a descriptive term.
A different kind of challenge arose in the aftermath of the Spanish expulsion. For former Jews who remained in Iberia as well as for those conversos and their descendants who fled the peninsula to reestablish their Jewish lives elsewhere, the passage through crypto-Judaism left an indelible stamp on their conceptions of authority, freedom, and individual conscience. The contributors in this section succeed in shedding light on how both the critics' objections and the rabbinic authorities' responses are grounded in the trauma of the forced conversion and its aftermath.
Miriam Bodian's contribution artfully illustrates this point. Through an examination of the testimony of crypto-Jews and, interestingly, Judaizers of apparently non-Jewish origins interrogated by the Inquisition, she demonstrates how their rejection of the Church's exclusive right to interpret scripture served to undermine the authority of both Catholic clerics and Jewish rabbis. Turning to the most famous critic of rabbinic hermeneutics and authority, Steven Nadler's essay situates Baruch Spinoza's denial of the immortality of the soul in the context of the Amsterdam Jewish community's heated debates about life and punishment in the next world. As Nadler demonstrates, the question of the fate of those souls who had lived and died as Catholic apostates was debated both by the community's prominent rabbis and by Spinoza's predecessor Uriel da Costa. With regard to the response of Amsterdam's rabbinic authorities, Marc Saperstein's article on the sermons of Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira discusses how radical critiques like those of da Costa and Spinoza were defused by being classed under traditional categories of heresy.
Finally, Allan Nadler's delightful contribution demonstrates the long shadow Spinoza cast over debates about rabbinic authority and dissent. Nadler analyzes and translates Abraham Krochmal's preface to Krochmal's book of biblical text criticism, Ha-ktav ve-ha-mikhtav (1874). Krochmal asserts that he is not the author of this work but that it represents Spinoza's secret doctrines that, transmitted by his students, were studied by the Baal Shem Tov. Nadler's article demonstrates how Krochmal draws on certain themes already present in early Haskalah, especially the ultimate agreement of Spinozism and Hasidism, to ground his own extensive critique of the received biblical text.
The third section, which focuses on the challenge to rabbinic culture posed by Sabbatean mysticism, is conceptually the weakest of the three. While the articles are impressive scholarly contributions in their own right, it is hard to see how, together, they constitute an analysis of the Sabbatean critique of rabbinic culture. Matt Goldish's essay argues for a reevaluation of Gershom Scholem's emphasis on the importance of Sabbatean Kabbalah in contemporary assessments of the movement's heresy. Turning to the writings of Jacob Sasportas, one of the movement's most important detractors, Goldish discusses how he is more concerned with the challenges Sabbateanism posed to rabbinic authority than with their actual theology. Taking up the perspective of the rabbinic authorities, Sid Z. Leiman considers the work of Rabbi Jacob Joshua Falk, one of the leading lights of eighteenth-century Ashkenazic Jewry in the controversy over the accusations of covert Sabbateanism leveled against Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz. Leiman's study details how rabbinic authority responded to this significant challenge to its power, coming as it did from within the highest echelon of the rabbinic elite. Harris Lenowitz's essay on Jacob Frank is the book's best analysis of the structure of a critic's thought on its own terms. Through a subtle and persuasive reading of Frank's dicta, Lenowitz argues that the motif of fashioning a golem, understood as the radical and anarchic transformation of the self, was central for Frank's understanding of his messianic role.
Two essays stand out for special consideration. Adam Sutcliffe's contribution brilliantly sets the internal dynamics of seventeenth-century Amsterdam's Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community against the backdrop of the cosmopolitan city. As Sutcliffe points out, Jews were only one of many groups attracted by Amsterdam's tolerance and free flow of commerce—material, intellectual, and sexual. While the city's liberal ethic made the reconstitution of the community possible, at the same time it hampered the rabbinic authority's attempts at policing these porous boundaries; just as there was freedom for former conversos to return to “normative” Jewish practice, skeptics and critics, Jewish or not, could meet and communicate their doubts and critiques. For the larger project of a critique of rabbinic Judaism as a whole, Sutcliffe's essay makes clear how much the dialectic between rabbis and their critics is defined by the larger culture in which they lived. To a certain extent, Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza were only possible because of Amsterdam and its particular cosmopolitanism.
The second piece in this section is Marina Rustow's essay on the ritual of rabbinic excommunication of the Karaites by the gaon of the Palestinian yeshiva. Rustow demonstrates how literary accounts of this ritual, notably in Abraham ibn Dāwūd's Sefer ha-Qabbalah, which portrays the event as a demonstration of rabbinic superiority, obscure the more nuanced relations between Rabbanites and Karaites in the eleventh century that can be gleaned from the epistolary testimony of the Cairo Geniza. Rabbanites were dependent on highly placed Karaite patrons for financial and political support as well as for intercession with the Fatamid government. There were also serious divisions between the Rabbanite elite and laity surrounding this dependence on Karaites. The only two times the ban was actually invoked, in 1029 and 1038, as Rustow demonstrates, occurred at the instigation of disgruntled members of the Rabbanite public unhappy with the political and communal, though not necessarily religious, order. Rustow's article calls into question any static constructs of identity and allegiance. Internal Rabbanite divisions, in this instance, were much more important than the Rabbanite–Karaite divide.
All in all, this volume presents an important collection of essays by leading scholars that offers a significant contribution to the study of medieval and early modern Jewish intellectual culture, and as such deserves attention from anyone interested in considering the nature not only of Jewish authority, but of leadership of minority cultures in general.
