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When we were young we were treated as men, now that we have grown old we are looked upon as babies.1

Pioneers

The origins of the Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina date back to 1695. It is the oldest in North America. In the early nineteenth century it was also the largest, the most sophisticated and the most comfortable. Its members lived alongside their neighbours in a state of happy emancipation. The Talmud had never been much on their minds, most of them had probably never even seen a copy. There were no rabbis, as far as anyone knows, in America at this time; it was a country of pioneers, attracting only the most adventurous souls. Traditionalists tended to stay back in Europe, where they were used to the way things were done.2

But although they weren’t thinking about the Talmud, the inhabitants of Charleston were by no means cut off from their co-religionists in Europe. They had heard about reforming currents that were beginning to circulate in Germany. Continuing emancipation and the new ways of thinking which Moses Mendelssohn had encouraged were bringing fresh ideas to the fore. Traditionalism was under threat in Europe, and post-revolutionary America was certainly no place for musty conservatism, particularly if it stood in the way of social and economic advancement. The old ways were changing and, even though in Charleston the connection to the old ways was already tenuous, a formal commitment to progress felt like a good thing.

In 1824 a group of Charleston Jews established the Reformed Society of Israelites. Their aim was to reform the synagogue service, to make it more intelligible to the English speaker and to expunge ‘the erroneous doctrines of the Rabbins’.3 They weren’t particularly motivated by a disregard for, or a dislike of, the Talmud; it’s just that they felt that their prayer service was in need of modernization. But their desire to change the prayer service was the practical consequence of an ideological struggle that was taking place back in Europe, particularly in Hamburg, where the seeds of the Charleston campaign had been sown.4 And in Hamburg, indeed across most of Germany, the Talmud sat at the heart of the conflict.

A time to change

The Reform movement began, as these things do, not as a formal enterprise but as a result of a small number of innovations, largely uncoordinated but all heading in the same general direction. The French and American revolutions of the eighteenth century had created the conditions for the political emancipation of the Jews, a gradual process which unfolded throughout the latter part of the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth. As part of this process Moses Mendlessohn, despite his steadfast commitment to traditional Jewish practice, had unbarred the gates which had kept the Jews far from world culture and learning. His translation of the Bible into German was a deliberate strategy to encourage the people of the Talmud to learn the language of those amongst whom they lived. It gave them the tools to explore the great literary heritage of Germany, and that in turn had a stirring effect upon their outlook.

From the late eighteenth century there was a growing feeling amongst more worldly, socially accultured Jewish circles that their religious practices were archaic, out of step with the spirit of the age. This was most immediately noticeable in the synagogue service, which was unintelligible to those without a grasp of Hebrew, and which lacked the decorum and musical solemnity of the great churches. Here and there, in Amsterdam, in Seesen and Cassel in northern Germany, and ultimately in Hamburg, congregations were established which did things differently. The practices they instituted did not conform to the traditions of the Talmud, but nor were they, in the early days, intended as anti-Talmud. Indeed the Reformers aspired to demonstrate the Talmud’s support for their innovations. They even engaged a Talmudic scholar to champion their cause.5

The Reform movement grew quickly. By the 1840s congregations across Germany, France, Hungary and Austria were experimenting with innovation. They introduced prayers in German into the synagogue service, brought in organs and instituted sermons. They modified stringencies around Sabbath observation and the dietary laws. They appointed a different type of rabbi, men with secular education who had spent little or no time in the yeshivot.

At a conference at Brunswick in 1844, Samuel Holdheim, one of the leading intellectual lights of the movement, poured scorn on the earlier attempts in Hamburg to use the Talmud to justify their innovations. The Talmud, he argued, had only enjoyed legitimacy in its own time, these days it was no longer authoritative. A schism was in the making.

A time to refrain from changing

Traditional Talmudists did not sit idly by as the Reform movement grew in popularity. The rabbinic council in Hamburg, traditionalists to a man, wrote to the leading light of their generation, Moses Sofer, asking for his support in their campaign against the innovations in the Hamburg Temple.

Moses Sofer believed passionately in the intrinsic worth of every aspect of Talmudic life. His conservatism was not driven by fear of change. Rather it was a deep commitment to the values of tradition, encapsulated in his motto ‘innovation is forbidden by the Torah’; a pun on the Talmudic injunction that the ‘new [grain harvest] is forbidden by the Torah’, before an offering is brought to the Temple.6

Sofer applauded the ban that the traditionalists had imposed upon the use of Reform prayer books and musical instruments in the synagogue.7 He then embarked on an unrelenting, strategic campaign against the Reform movement and the religious enlightenment. He mustered rabbis of every temperament, not just the most conservative rabbis, to contribute to a collection of letters arguing against Reform.8 He appealed to the nationalist aspirations of the masses in condemning the Reform movement’s abolition of Hebrew as the language of prayer.9 He strengthened the traditionalists’ ties with the Hapsburg authorities, established the largest yeshiva in Europe in his adopted home town of Pressburg, and whenever a prestigious rabbinic post fell vacant he tried to install one of his best and brightest pupils. In his ethical will he condemned Mendlessohn’s work and warned his students never to yield to the pressure to change their traditional language, clothes or names.

Sofer’s defence of the old Talmudic ways was unyielding. But it didn’t suit everyone in the traditional camp. There were many who were receptive to the changing world, but not to the same extent as the Reformers. They didn’t want to be part of a movement heading towards a rejection of the Talmud. Reform was too radical for them, and Moses Sofer’s traditional Orthodoxy was too unyielding. They didn’t know it yet, but they were waiting for a new champion to come along.

Duelling friends

In 1829 two young men met at the University of Bonn. They’d previously been introduced to each other in Frankfurt. Now they began to strike up a close friendship through their university activities.10

Both men shared a passion for igniting the religious commitment of those German Jews who were drifting away from their faith, seduced by a new and exciting, modern world. But each man would set about it in a fundamentally different way. The older of the two, Samson Raphael Hirsch dreamed of inspiring new ways of approaching the Talmud that would draw on all the benefits that a secular education could offer. The younger, Abraham Geiger, was convinced that the Talmud simply reflected a moment in history. It was part of the ongoing development of Jewish law and practice, not an unchanging expression of the will of Heaven.11

In 1835 Hirsch laid out plans for a book which would interpret the Bible’s teaching on human destiny, and explain the underlying, moral purpose of Talmudic law. One of his friends showed the book’s outline to a German publisher who said that he wasn’t sure there would be a market for such a lofty volume; perhaps the author could try out his ideas in something smaller first. If that sold well then he was sure that he would be able to find a publisher to take on the whole project.

So Hirsch wrote a book in the shape of a fictional correspondence between a student and young rabbi, in which the student set out the religious issues that were troubling him, and the rabbi responded. He wrote it under a pseudonym and called it the Nineteen Letters. It was an instant hit. Hirsch had put his finger on exactly the questions that were bothering people, not just religious questions, but social and national issues too. The book struck a chord because Hirsch provided modern, ethical reasons for the things the Talmud expected them to do. He didn’t treat the laws as the outcomes of faded discussions in ancient, oriental academies, but as a means of making sense of life in modern, nineteenth-century Europe.12

The success of the Nineteen Letters enabled Hirsch to write the book that he had originally planned, and over the course of his life, many more besides. By explaining what he saw as the reasons that underpinned religious practice he was able to remove the artificial barriers that time had erected between the Talmud and the wider world. In Hirsch’s system the fully rounded student of Talmud is a student of life, willing and able to investigate and respond to all branches of human knowledge.

Hirsch was not just driven by an ideological passion. He was deliberately trying to stem the tide of reform. His slogan, ‘Torah with worldly involvement’13 became the motto for generations of secularly educated, culturally assimilated, religiously observant Talmud students.

Hirsch didn’t achieve his goal of eliminating the Reform movement. But he did provide a platform for those who wished to integrate a traditional lifestyle with the modern world. The reason he didn’t halt the Reform movement in its tracks is due in no small part to Abraham Geiger, the friend of his youth, with whom he was to fall out so badly.

Geiger’s response to the Nineteen Letters was severe. He attacked the ‘doglike obedience’ of those who observe the Talmudic commandments, likening it to idolatry.14 It was the end of his friendship with Hirsch.

Small, with long, straight, shoulder-length hair tucked behind his ears, two-inch sideburns and wire-framed glasses, Abraham Geiger cut a striking pose. He had grown up in a strictly observant household and had delivered a Talmudic discourse at the age of thirteen but, according to one of his biographers, shortly after his father’s death he became ‘utterly disgusted with the Talmud’.15 Unfortunately the biographer does not speculate on why this may have been and whether it was connected with his father’s passing.

Hirsch was interested in the thought and philosophy that underpinned his faith. Geiger was concerned with its development and history. Intellectually he should have been destined for a university chair but such positions were not open to Jews in nineteenth-century Germany and he was left with little choice other than to become a rabbi. This decision cast him straight into the bear pit of religious conflict; his first application for a rabbinic post was vetoed by traditionalists in Breslau who, aware of his anti-Talmudic leanings, accused him of being a Karaite or Sadducee. His early rabbinic career was dogged by lack of advancement due to the efforts of more traditional colleagues.16

The Reform movement that Geiger conceived was more than a reaction to overlong, unintelligible synagogue services and seemingly petty restrictions. He strove to develop a coherent theology of Reform. He argued that centuries of studying the Talmud in enclosed, monastic, ghetto communities had led to an excessive legalism in Jewish practice. The only way to rediscover the ethical underpinnings of the faith was to return to a time before the Talmud, to the liberalizing, democratic spirit of the early Pharisees.

But, at this stage in his life Geiger worked as a rabbi, not an as academic. And like all men of the cloth, he wasn’t able to spend enough time on intellectual pursuits. Real life gets in the way. In Abraham Geiger’s case real life was an event half a world away, in a city he had never visited. It threw him off his guard, just as he was taking up his first rabbinic post.

The Damascus Affair

In 1840 Padre Tommaso, an elderly Italian monk and his servant disappeared in Damascus. He had visited the Jewish quarter of the city on the day he vanished. Rumours began to spread in the Christian district that he had been ritually murdered by the Jews.

The authorities arrested twelve Jews and tortured them to gain a confession. Four suspects died as a result of the torture, one converted to Islam and the remainder were incarcerated, awaiting execution.

The case was unusual for several reasons. Accusations of ritual murder against the Jews in Muslim countries were relatively rare. Even on those few occasions when Christians in the Ottoman Empire had stirred up the old blood libel charge against the Jews, the authorities refused to pursue it.17 But Syria was no ordinary Ottoman country. Its government was in revolt against the Empire and was manoeuvring to win European allies, particularly France, through the support of its Christian subjects.

The French consul got involved and the affair was picked up by the European media. It became something of a cause célèbre. It dominated the headlines in Europe for weeks. In a show of solidarity with the captives, the Jewish communities of England and France sent Sir Moses Montefiore and Adolphe Crémieux, two high-profile, well-connected, community leaders to Syria. Meetings were held and within a month the surviving Jewish prisoners were released. Neither Padre Tommaso, his servant, nor their abductors were ever found.

The incident was the catalyst for an outpouring of anti-Jewish feeling in the European media. The influential Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung dramatically announced that three rabbis had been imprisoned with orders to translate the Talmud so that the secrets of the Jewish religion could be discovered.18 The Times in London devoted large amounts of space to discussions of whether the Talmud prescribed ritual murder.19 A pernicious but unsigned piece in The Times, purporting to be written by a convert from Judaism, repeated the old charges of ritual murder and laid the blame squarely at the feet of the Talmud.20 It was not tolerant, post-enlightenment Europe’s finest hour.

Abraham Geiger was unwilling to get caught up in the reverberations of the Damascus Affair. On 22 May 1840 the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung carried an advertisement signed by ‘prominent Jewish businessmen’ calling on ‘the most dauntless hero of our faith, Dr Geiger’ to respond to the attacks on the Talmud. It was not a friendly call, the sarcastic tone of the advertisement indicated that it had been placed by people who had it in for Geiger, and who wanted to embarrass him. Unfortunately Geiger didn’t let them down. He condemned the charges of murder in Damascus as laughable but he couldn’t help having a go at the Talmud itself. He declared that the views of the Talmud did not carry any divine authority and wondered why the men who had placed the advertisement had appealed to him, rather than the venerable rabbis who saw salvation in the Talmud and yet would not raise their voices to save its honour.21

The academic Talmud

In his final years Abraham Geiger managed to obtain an academic post, as the head of a new rabbinic college in Berlin. It was a fitting appointment. For he wasn’t just the leading theologian of the German Reform movement. He was also one of the leading lights in a new secular enterprise, inspired by the religious enlightenment and the work of men like Moses Mendelssohn. It was known as Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Scientific Study of Judaism. It would lead, a century later, to the establishment of Jewish Studies faculties at universities throughout the world.

The Wissenschaft movement was both the product of the Haskalah, the religious enlightenment movement and a reaction to it. It was the product of the Enlightenment, inasmuch as it treated Judaism as any other cultural phenomenon, using scientific methodology to investigate its history, culture and development. It was a reaction to it, because growing acculturation was creating a new kind of Jew, one with little or no interest in their religious heritage. Wissenschaft, which separated scholarship from belief had, in theory, no religious axe to grind. It provided a means for assimilated Jews to reconnect with their cultural heritage.22

The new science subjected the Talmud to detailed, critical scholarship. As Marc Shapiro points out, traditional Talmud scholars had always tried to resolve difficulties in the Talmud text by referring to, or even proposing alternative readings.23 But the new critical scholars went far further than this; they actively collected and compared as many variant sources as possible, assessed the Talmud’s language against other ancient Semitic tongues, and re-evaluated its understanding of history, medicine and the natural world.

Even its relation with the Mishnah was challenged. It may have been the core text, upon which the Talmud was a commentary, but in 1861 Hirsch Mendel Pineles challenged the fundamental principle that it was the authentic interpretation of the Mishnah. His book claimed to defend the Mishnah, against the many misinterpretations that he sought to demonstrate had been made by the Talmud.24

Even Czar Nicholas I of Russia, who hated the Jews, was caught up in the Wissenschaft endeavour, though not as he had intended. During his reign Nicholas had made life as difficult as possible for his Jewish subjects, expelling them from their homes, forcibly drafting young boys into the army from the age of twelve, keeping them there for a minimum of twenty five years; frequently snatching them from the streets or kidnapping them from their homes. He passed legislation banning them from the major cities and herded them into villages in the Pale of Settlement, a strip of land running from the Baltic to the Black Sea, taking in large chunks of Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine.25 He set up a network of schools with the avowed aim of bringing them ‘nearer to the Christians and to uproot their harmful beliefs which are influenced by the Talmud’.26

In 1841 Nicholas commissioned a report which concluded that the Talmud was the reason the Jews refused to assimilate into Russian society. He decided that the only way to expose the Talmud was to have it translated, so that people could see what it really was. He offered large sums of money to anyone who could translate it.

In Germany, Ephraim Moses Pinner had already drawn up plans to translate the Talmud into German. He wanted to make it accessible to German-speaking Jews, and to counter the accusations of its opponents. He applied to Nicholas for funding for his project, and Nicholas assented, assuming that Pinner would provide the condemnation of the Talmud that he sought.

In 1842 the first volume appeared. Nicholas purchased one hundred copies. The kings of Prussia, Holland, Belgium and Denmark also bought copies. When Nicholas discovered that Pinner had produced a direct translation, which didn’t seek to distort or polemicize against the Talmud, he was furious. He withdrew his funding. No further volumes appeared.27

Hirsch Mendel Pineles’s defence of the Mishnah and Pinner’s desire to make the Talmud accessible to those who couldn’t understand the original were just two of the many endeavours in the growing field of academic Talmud scholarship. Over the course of the nineteenth century new tools appeared, all designed to facilitate critical scholarship. Amongst the most important were Raphael Rabbinowicz’s 1867 comprehensive listing of all the variant readings contained in known Talmudic manuscripts and printed versions, and Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary.

Jastrow wasn’t the first to try his hand at writing a dictionary. The German scholar Wilhelm Gesenius had produced a Latin lexicon in 1815 that was subsequently translated into English. But Jastrow’s work, which gives Talmudic examples for each word, remains the standard study aid for English-speaking Talmud students even today.

Academic Talmudic scholarship wasn’t confined to Jews. It attracted the attention of the missionary Protestant, Franz Delitzsch, and his students. Delitszch was a Lutheran Bible commentator with a profound knowledge of, and a keen interest in rabbinic literature.28 His knowledge proved to be the downfall of August Rohling, a priest and professor of Hebrew Literature at Charles University in Prague.

In 1871 Rohling published The Talmud Jew, an annotated collection of quotations allegedly from the Talmud. Unfortunately he made all the quotations up, and it was quite clear that his intention was nothing other than scurrilous. Rohling compounded his stupidity when, called as a witness in a blood libel trial, he came out with the old calumny that the Talmud instructed Jews to use Christian blood in their rituals. Joseph Bloch, a young rabbi, soon to become a member of the Austrian parliament, called Rohling a fraud and offered to pay him three thousand florins if he could translate a page of the Talmud. Rohling, who wasn’t up to the task, tried to avoid the challenge by suing for libel. Bloch called upon Franz Delitzsch, who comprehensively refuted Rohling’s polemic. Rohling dropped the case before it came to court, was forced to pay costs and was suspended from his university chair.29

In 1878 August Wunsche, a student of Delitszch, translated passages from the Talmud. And in 1887 Hermann Strack, a Protestant missionary and professor of the Old Testament at Berlin University published his Introduction to the Talmud. Strack’s book has been enlarged and reprinted several times. It remains a classic work for academic Talmud scholars today.

Rohling was also indirectly responsible for the first full German translation of the Talmud. Not content with one downfall, August Rohling had sought another by commissioning a converted Jew to write a book proving that the Talmud demanded ritual murder. The author of the book was convicted of defamation. Lazarus Goldschmidt, an expert in Semitic languages living in Leipzig was urged by his non-Jewish landlord to write a translation of the Talmud, to put accusations like this to rest.30

The end of the old ways

The old ways were also changing in Poland and Russia. So much was happening to destabilize the established patterns of life. By the middle of the nineteenth century a three-way, cultural struggle was taking place between the Hasidim, their traditionalist opponents and those committed to the Haskala. At any time and in nearly any place two of the factions would be engaged in joint enterprise against the third, dividing families and communities and causing social upheaval.31

At the same time, gradual emancipation was making people more politically aware, active and organized. Karl Marx’s writings were being discussed, workers’ groups were meeting, and agitating. Zionism was on the agenda, news of pioneers who were rebuilding the homeland was firing imaginations, particularly amongst the young. If that wasn’t distraction enough, there were economic pressures, industrialization, urbanization and ever-growing waves of emigration to the utopias of America and northern Europe. Set against a background of anti-Semitic legislation, persecutions and pogroms, it’s little wonder that the long-established, Talmud-based system of education was crumbling.

In the yeshivot, traditionally and exclusively dedicated to Talmud study, students were becoming politically aware, often without the knowledge and approval of the teachers. Many yeshivot themselves were changing; a new impetus towards ethical education was gaining ground, eating into the long hours that were once dedicated solely to the Talmud. Known as the Musar movement, founded by the saintly Israel Salanter, its goal was moral improvement through introspection and the study of inspirational, ethical literature. The influential, elite yeshiva at Volozhin, and those which had been founded in its image, frowned upon musar. For them the proper study of Talmud, and Talmud alone, provided all the character-building a student would ever need.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the once, seemingly monolithic, eastern European communities were fragmenting into a mosaic of differing sects, movements, parties and factions. Each with their own perspective on the Talmud, or none. Meanwhile the USA was setting a different pace.

A seafood banquet

In 1883 the Reform movement’s college in Cincinnati held a banquet to celebrate their first-ever graduation ceremony. By this time the number of Jews in the USA had swelled considerably. The Reform movement was still dominant but it now catered for many tastes, from out-and-out rejectionists of the Talmud on one wing, to traditionalists on the other. Neil Gillman describes it as the ‘American Reform coalition’.32

The college invited the movement’s leading lights to the banquet. As the first diners took their seats some could be seen shaking their heads in disbelief, turning and murmuring discontentedly to their neighbours. As more diners filed into the room the murmur turned into a hubbub. Finally a good number of red-faced, furious-looking people stormed out of the room. One man waved the menu card in the air, yelling ‘This is a disgrace’.

The printed menu for the nine-course banquet had been on the tables when they entered the room. On it were clams, crabs and shrimp, all of which are specifically prohibited in the book of Leviticus.33 The main course was beef and the desert, cheese and ice cream, a combination of meat and milk dishes the prohibition of which was so ancient that even the Talmud is aware of it.34

The walkout in Cincinnati was when the Talmud in the USA started to fight back. The fight intensified a few years later when a conference of Reform rabbis in Pittsburgh declared allegiance only to the moral laws of Judaism, rejecting Talmudic legislation as apt ‘to obstruct, rather than further, modern spiritual elevation.’35

In a deliberate secession from the Reform movement, the traditionalists announced the creation of a new rabbinical seminary in New York, based on ‘conservative’ principles. Known as the Jewish Theological Seminary, its constitution declared its commitment to ‘historical Judaism’ as expounded in ‘Biblical and Talmudic writings’.36 The curriculum was to combine traditional Talmud study with Wissenschaft subjects including Jewish philosophy, history and literature.

In 1901 the Seminary’s governors persuaded Solomon Schechter to leave the hallowed tranquillity of Cambridge University in England, to take up the position of president. Born into a Hasidic family in Romania, Shechter had been brought up in a traditional, eastern European yeshiva before moving to Berlin where he was drawn to the Wissenschaft school. Academically orientated and traditional in outlook, he attracted a circle of similarly minded scholars to the Seminary, many of them recent immigrants from Europe. He laid the foundations for the Seminary to become one of the world’s leading centres of Talmudic research and study for most of the twentieth century. But the scene of his greatest achievement was not Romania, Berlin, Cambridge or New York. It was the back alleys of Cairo.

The Cairo Genizah

In 1896 Mrs Agnes Smith Lewis and Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson, twin sisters, now widowed, travelled to Egypt. They’d been there before. Both women were accomplished scholars, able to read Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Hebrew. On a previous visit to the Middle East they had discovered a fifth-century Syriac gospel, the leaves of which were being used as butter dishes in the refectory of St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai.37

On this trip they were in a Cairo market when a vendor offered them some pages from a Hebrew manuscript. On their return to England they showed them to Solomon Schechter. He realized they must have been torn from a Hebrew version of the book of Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sira, which previously had only been known in Syrian or Greek translation.

Ancient Hebrew documents had been circulating in Cairo for a number of years. Several had made their way back to the USA and England. It was known that they were being filched from an ancient storeroom, or genizah, in the old synagogue in Fostat, where worn-out, sacred documents were deposited. Schechter, realizing that there may be many more valuable treasures to be found, organized a trip to Cairo and negotiated with the synagogue authorities to buy the entire contents of the store.

The storeroom had no windows or doors. To enter Schechter had to climb a ladder and crawl through a hole in the wall. He was amazed at what he found. The Cairo Genizah turned out to contain nineteen thousand documents, some sacred, but many just the ordinary ephemera of community life: legal contracts, letters and school books. Amongst them were lost fragments and manuscripts of the Talmud dating back to 870 ce.

Schechter brought the contents of the Genizah back to Cambridge. Over a century later its manuscripts are still being analysed. They have helped to explain many obscure or corrupted Talmudic passages and have thrown light on life and conditions in ancient Egyptian communities.

When he arrived in New York Schechter would have encountered people who reminded him of the family he had left behind in Romania. Waves of immigration from eastern Europe had brought many strictly observant families to the city. Their style was very different from those with a cultured German or English background. They’d come from rural towns and villages where traditional Talmud study had been the norm, and the new ways of thinking an oddity. In New York they found that the reverse held true. They couldn’t make any sense of Reform at all. Even Schechter’s Jewish Theological Seminary seemed too radical.

But this was America and even the most traditional methods of Talmud study couldn’t completely avoid change. The immigrants set up their own seminary, on the Lower East Side, and adopted the latest method of study, which had been developed in the Lithuanian tradition once pioneered by the Volozhin yeshiva. The method, even more analytical than its predecessors, had met with considerable opposition when first introduced in Europe by Hayyim of Brisk.

Whereas traditionalists were interested in studying the Talmud to determine practical law, the Brisker method was focused purely on analysis of the argument. Students tended only to study those volumes of the Talmud where the keenest argumentation was found. On one occasion Hayyim of Brisk was grappling with a difficult legal problem. He wrote to Isaac Elchanan Spektor, after whom the New York yeshiva would be named, gave him all the facts and asked for his ruling. But he insisted that Spektor was not to tell him his reasons. He was happy to defer to a practical decision but he didn’t want to know the reasoning behind it. In case he was tempted to review it, and reach a different conclusion.38

The Talmud was now well and truly embedded in America. As events unfolded it became clear that it had crossed the Atlantic just in time. Events in Germany were about to put an end to its thousand-year sojourn in Europe. For the next half century America was to be its most important home. But Europe still had one major contribution to make.

A page a day

A young man stood up at a conference of traditional rabbis in Vienna, in 1923. Meir Shapiro was a highly accomplished orator, he sat in the Polish parliament and was the rabbi of a smallish town in south-east Poland. He had won acclaim in parliament for a detailed plan he submitted to reform the Polish economy 39 but his abiding passion was education, particularly its improvement and reform. He would soon found a Talmud academy in Lublin that would become renowned not just for its rigorous curriculum but also for its inspiring physical environment, which he felt was essential for successful study.

Meir Shapiro told the conference that he was concerned about two aspects of contemporary Talmud study. One, that it was accessible only to an elite, who had the opportunity and educational background to enrol in a yeshiva and spend years studying there. The other, that only a small number of volumes were studied, notably those which lent themselves to detailed analytical investigation.

Shapiro’s suggestion was brilliant in its simplicity, and far-reaching in its outlook.40 He proposed setting up study groups for lay people in which one page of Talmud would be studied each day. The two thousand seven hundred pages of Talmud would take nearly seven and half years to complete and would involve a commitment from participants of around an hour a day. It was a significant commitment but it was achievable. It would bring the Talmud to a much wider audience and bind its world together, the same page would be studied on the same day everywhere; travellers would be able to continue their studies wherever they went.

Shapiro’s plan didn’t go down well with everyone. His namesake, the ultra- conservative Hayyim Eleazar Shapira, a Hasidic leader in the Transylvanian town of Munkacz, opposed it on the grounds that it was a deviation from traditional methods of learning, that in any case topics did not end neatly at the bottom of each page and, perhaps most pertinently, it was an initiative of those who supported the Zionist cause, to which the Munkacz Hasidim were firmly opposed.41

But Meir Shapiro’s proposal was agreed by the conference and in 1924 the first cycle of what became known as the daf yomi or ‘daily page’ programme began. It was to become perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most democratising, Talmud initiative of all time. But that wouldn’t happen until long after the rise, and downfall, of Nazi Germany.

Notes

1 Bava Kamma 92b.

2 Tarshish, 1985.

3 Tarshish, 1985.

4 Editor’s preface to The Sabbath Service and Miscellaneous Prayers, adopted by the Reformed Society of Israelites, founded in Charleston, SC, 21 November 1825, ed. Barnett A. Elzas (Bloch Publishing Company, New York, 1916).

5 Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995.

6 Mishnah Orlah 3.9.

7 Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, 1995.

8 Schreiber, 2002–3. The collection, Eleh Divrei HaBrit included praise for Moses Mendelssohn, against whose approach Moses Sofer was firmly opposed.

9 Samet, 1988.

10 Heinemann, 1951.