Chapter 3
Cultures
In making their way through history, Jews frequently lived out a form of God’s self-description in the Book of Zechariah (4:6). “ ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.” For only a small portion of their history did they possess an army of their own to defend themselves; neither military force nor political power, in the form of a state, was a prominent feature of their existence or a key to their survival.
The traditional Jewish explanation was that God’s “spirit” protected the people Israel as part of an inviolable covenant between them. But it was a more mundane factor that allowed Jews to survive as a small and often powerless minority. And herein lies one of the most curious and ironic features of Jewish history. Even in the face of Gentile hostility, Jews engaged in a constant process of cultural interaction with the societies in which they lived. They drew from and reshaped the habits and values of the surrounding world. And they did so by balancing this engagement with preservation of the distinctive traditions of their group.
The result of this balancing effort was an evolving series of Jewish cultures (plural) rather than a single unified culture. Together these cultures constitute a richly marbled admixture of local customs and shared global practices. It is important to emphasize that this mosaic was not a product of the modern era alone, which one might assume given the rapid pace of Jewish assimilation from the nineteenth century on. On the contrary, “assimilation” has been a constant feature of Jewish life insofar as Jews have continually adapted to new circumstances and environments they encountered in their dispersion. Rather than resist the cultural markers of these new settings, as their religious leaders implored them to do, Jews repeatedly absorbed the languages, names, dress, and social customs of their host societies. This work of absorption operated at all levels of cultural production, from rarefied philosophical and legal scholarship to daily habits found in the home. The large body of Jewish customs known as minhagim drew from surrounding cultures, whether it be the medieval Ashkenazi practice of interrupting public prayer to air a grievance or the Middle Eastern practice of striking your neighbor with scallions at the Passover table while singing the song “Dayenu.”
Given their rootedness in the daily practices of the home, women played an especially significant role in transmitting minhagim. One notable and poignant site of transmission was the Iberian Peninsula during the time of the Inquisition. A minority of Jews who had become Catholics in the waves of forced conversion that began in 1391 chose to preserve what vestiges of Jewish ritual that they could in secret. The burden of responsibility for these “crypto-Jews” fell on women, who cultivated Jewish practices in the only safe space they had, the privacy of the home.
In general, minhagim, which varied widely by locale, lent diversity and vibrancy to Jewish culture. At times, the cultural differences produced pitched rivalries among communities. The prototypical cultural competition, based on differing scholarly and cultural traditions, was between Babylonia and Palestine in the first centuries of the Common Era. The two communities had distinct political, legal, and scholarly authorities, and each produced its own monumental bodies of rabbinic literature, culminating in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. So prominent and self-assured was the Babylonian community toward its rival that one Babylonian sage is recorded as saying: “All lands are dough to Palestine, and Palestine is dough to Babylonia.”
The tradition of rivalry based on differences in culture and customs continued in the medieval and modern periods, principally between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. Each fostered a feeling of cultural superiority over the other, reflecting the proclivities of their native environments. For centuries, Ashkenazic Jews believed that they were more stringent and pious in observance than Sephardim, who deemed themselves more culturally enlightened and sophisticated. Disdain toward the other could reach such a point that the Dutch Sephardic philosopher Isaac de Pinto cautioned in 1762 that “if a Portuguese Jew in England or Holland married a German Jewess, he would of course lose all his prerogatives, be no longer reckoned a member of their Synagogue, forfeit all civil and ecclesiastical preferments, be absolutely divorced from the body of the nation and not even be buried with his Portuguese brethren.”
This sense of cultural superiority was carried forward in a number of different ways in the modern era. In the nineteenth century, German Jews looked on with a measure of admiration and longing at medieval Sephardic Jews, who represented in their eyes a successful model of cultural integration. By contrast, in the next century, the eastern European Jews in Israel, especially the political elite associated with the Labor Party, often regarded Sephardic and Mizrachi Jews as culturally inferior, and placed them upon arrival in transit camps to be reeducated for participation in the new society. The Mizrachim resented the bias they faced, leading to substantial friction in the social fabric of Israel from the 1950s onward. In the early 1970s, a group of second-generation Mizrachim, borrowing from oppositional politics in the United States, formed an Israeli Black Panther Party. And in 1977, Mizrachim played an important role in propelling the long-time opposition Likud Party to victory over the ruling Labor Party. Since that time, social interaction between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, including the once taboo practice of intermarriage, has become more common, thereby mitigating, but not eliminating, the tension.
The monotheistic revolution and ancient Jewish culture
The capacity to adapt to new cultural settings while retaining a good measure of their distinctiveness is one of the most impressive of the Jews’ talents. Constantly confronted by change, they navigated the shifting currents of history with a high degree of equipoise and instinct for survival. They also managed to recalibrate their cultural identity in the wake of major outbursts of revolutionary energy, three of which have altered the complexion of Jewish history.
The first and most formative of these was the monotheistic revolution that transformed a band of desert-dwelling idol worshippers into a cohesive people with an iron-clad faith in a single God—and a religious culture molded in its image. Modern scholars have not forged a consensus on how this revolution came about. Some build on traditional accounts by pointing to a sudden theological breakthrough that led the Israelites in the time of Moses (fourteenth century bce) to pledge allegiance to an omnipotent deity who would come to be known by the four-letter Hebrew name YHWH. Others speak of a more gradual evolution from the regnant form of polytheism in the ancient Near East to the belief in a single god, perhaps through an intermediate phase known as “monolatry” that recognized the existence of multiple gods but permitted the worship of only one.
We do not know for sure. The more gradual approach would seem to dilute the drama and force of a revolution, at least in terms of origins. On the other hand, the logic of that approach lies in the recognition that Israelite monotheism, including some of its characteristic features, such as animal sacrifice, priests, agricultural festivals, and the centrality of a major flood story, emerged out of an indigenous Near Eastern culture that recognized many gods.
Yet the importance of monotheism resides less in its origins than in its effects. It not only introduced the idea of the Israelites as the “chosen people” with whom God had a unique relationship, but also brought forward a rigorous moral code rooted in the Ten Commandments that was subsequently adopted by Christianity and Islam and has become a foundation for much of Western civilization.
This new belief system was accompanied by a set of ritual practices intended to set the Israelites apart from others. In fact, these ritual practices came to be regarded over time by traditional Jews as originating at Revelation at Mt. Sinai and thereby possessing divine status. The provenance of the Oral Law, as it was known, is laid out in the opening passage from Pirke Avot, one of the tractates of the third-century Mishnah: “Moses received the Torah and handed it down to Joshua; Joshua to the Elders; the Elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly.” For rabbinic Judaism, the Oral Law was a full companion to the Written Law, each of which complemented the other to form the Dual Torah. For many modern Jews, though, including early advocates of Reform Judaism, the rituals associated with the Oral Law were man-made, not divine, having evolved over time; as a result, they lost their status as obligatory to practice.
That said, adherence to the Oral Law provided almost all premodern Jews—and continues to provide observant Jews today—with a detailed regimen to maintain their distinctive way of life. Some of the most stringently observant today hold to an ancient rabbinic legend that the survival of the Jews was predicated on their unwillingness to adopt foreign names, languages, or dress. To this day, haredim proudly announce their resistance to Gentile culture by forming an acronym from the Hebrew words for name (shem), language (lashon), and dress (malbush): ShaLeM, a word that connotes wholeness or completeness.
This kind of resistance seems plausible as an explanation of Jewish cultural distinctiveness except that it is altogether wrong. Jews constantly adopted the names, languages, and dress of their hosts. According to some scholars, they even adopted monotheism from the Egyptians in the fourteenth century bce. Far more solid as evidence are the traces of indigenous culture—for example, the local deity Baal or the pagan prophet Balaam—that surfaced in the Hebrew Bible. The persistence of such elements in early Israelite religion was a telling indication of the open borders of early Israelite culture, but only one indication. The architecture, pottery, and tools of ancient Israelites also reveal the imprint of the surrounding society, and they point to a broader dynamic that would mark subsequent forms of Jewish culture: a conscious tendency toward marking clear boundaries and an unconscious process of absorbing cultural values from the host or neighboring society.
After being exiled in Babylonia in the sixth century bce, Jews acquired the language of the empire, Aramaic, as they would in so many other new diaspora communities. And yet, the flow of cultural exchange was not one way. Just as Jews picked up new habits and norms in their transplanted home, so too they brought their own practices with them from Palestine, which they shared with their new neighbors. The marketplace, where commercial goods were hawked and social interaction proceeded, was a key site for this unspoken exchange of cultural values. It was where Jews and non-Jews met, and where the ceaseless work of mimesis—cultural imitation—proceeded.
Meanwhile, in the regions of the Middle East that, from the fourth century bce, came under the control of the Greeks, Hellenistic culture proved to be an exceptionally powerful and irresistible allure, including and especially to Jews. It has already been noted that Philo established a reputation as a leading Jewish interpreter of Greek philosophy in Alexandria. The Jewish philosophers of Alexandria included a cohort of women associated with a band of ascetic scholars who combined intense study and trance-like meditation practices. At a less rarefied level, Jews readily adopted Greek attire, leisure, and educational practices. Alexandrian Jews of a certain status sent their children to a Jewish gymnasium, where they received instruction intended to nurture their bodies and minds. The absorption of Greek culture occurred without explicit declaration—and can be noticed even today. For example, when Jews recline at a Passover seder while drinking the prescribed four cups of wine, they are reenacting an ancient Greek practice.
Even the most “native” of Jewish sources, the Holy Scripture, was reframed in a Hellenistic idiom. According to the widely disseminated account in the legendary text known as the Letter of Aristeas, King Ptolemy invited seventy-two scholars, six from each of the twelve Israelite tribes, to draft a translation of the Pentateuch from Hebrew into Greek in the early third century bce. The scholars spent seventy-two days on their work, the Letter claims, and produced a perfect translation. Building on this legend, the translated version that was included in the Library of Alexandria came to be known as the Septuagint, the translation of the “Seventy.” It was deemed authoritative by many contemporary Jews, and it would serve later as the main Old Testament source for the early Christian movement.
The acquisition by Jews of Greek language and culture was restricted neither to the diaspora nor to the age of Greek hegemony over the Middle East. Even after the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 bce, Greek continued to assert an active presence in Palestine—the very name of which appears for the first time in Greek in the fifth century. Herod, the Jewish vassal king under the Romans during the first century bce, was a cunning and reviled ruler; however, he was also a master builder who made extensive use of Greek architectural features in the palaces, fortresses, and aqueducts that he built—and even in the reconstructed Holy Temple that was the main site of Jewish ritual devotion. Meanwhile, Josephus, the prominent Jewish general and historian of the first century ce, boasts of his ability to speak Greek, which he used to write some of his most important works. Even more surprisingly, Greek was prominently represented in the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud, offering up thousands of loan words that often provided conceptual clarity for this major foundation of rabbinic Judaism.
These examples suggest that it was not merely a matter of Jews assimilating to Greek. Greek itself became a vital ingredient in the formation—or better, transformation—of Jewish culture from its early monotheistic roots. And by no means was Greek unique as a cultural tonic. From antiquity, Jews encountered languages and cultures at every turn, mobilizing them to reinforce their ever-evolving traditions. Aramaic, which had become the most popular tongue used in Palestine by the time of Jesus in the first century ce, was another example. It was the language in which the bulk of the Talmuds—the Babylonian as well as the Palestinian—was written. A quick glance at a page of Talmud reminds us that Aramaic was so deeply accepted by Jews that they rendered it sacred by writing it in Hebrew characters. Aramaic thus became an oft-replicated prototype for the adaptation of vernacular languages that yielded local Jewish tongues in Persia, the Arab-speaking world, Italy, Germany and eastern Europe, and Spain and the Sephardi diaspora, among others. This process of linguistic adaptation, it bears reiterating, constituted a fitting reflection of the way in which Jewish culture absorbed and assimilated, while still preserving its own clearly demarcated identity.
The universalizing revolution and medieval Jewish cultures
The monotheistic revolution affected every aspect of Israelite and later Jewish culture, beginning with the new theological foundation it spawned and extending to a broad range of ritual and social practices. The next revolutionary moment occurred with the rise of Christianity in the first century of the Common Era. The theological and cultural direction of Christianity moved from the particular to the universal, as articulated by Paul of Tarsus in Galatians (3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” According to this view, Jews were corrupted by their fastidious adherence to the letter rather than to the spirit of the Law.
Of course, one must recall that Christianity emerged in the last stages of the Second Temple period in which groups such as the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the ascetic breakaways at the desert haven of Qumran competed with one another for the mantle of Jewish authenticity. An aura of apocalyptic change hovered over the populace in first-century Palestine, as social protest, religious innovation, and political rebellion combined to form a combustible mix. Out of the ashes of the Second Temple, destroyed by Roman forces in 70 ce, a new world began to take rise. And yet, it would be a mistake to assume a total dichotomy between old and new. Not only were there currents within first-century Judaism agitating for a more inclusive outreach to Gentiles. There were also Jews drawn to Jesus and his message who were not prepared to leave behind Judaism altogether. Those so-called Jewish-Christians were an intriguing reminder that the boundaries of religious identity remained porous in this highly consequential era.
In the coming centuries, we see the emerging contours of two new entities: Christianity and its estranged sibling, rabbinic Judaism. Born of the same parent, but separated at birth, the two regarded each other warily at first before grounding their mutual enmity in deep theological roots. Between the second and fourth centuries, Christianity becoming increasingly settled in the view that Jews were guilty of what early Church Father John Chrysostom called deicide, that is, the murder of the Christian God, Jesus Christ. This would become a theological touchstone for all subsequent Christian anti-Judaism.
Moreover, that theological principle assumed new significance in the fourth century, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. At that point, a new era of formal restrictions on Judaism commenced. Jews, for their part, lacked sovereign political power of any sort, but they institutionalized their animosity toward Christians in religious texts and liturgy, including a prayer recited daily that inveighed against apostates and praised God for “humbling the arrogant.”
And yet, Jewish-Christian relations cannot be reduced to declared theological animus. The currents of cultural exchange never stopped flowing between early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. The two coexisted, it has been said, in “a single circulatory system” in which social and ritual practices were shared, albeit in unspoken ways. The close affinities between the holidays of Easter and Passover, both spring renewal festivals, illustrate this important process.
In more self-conscious terms, rabbinic Judaism expressly sought, after the collapse of the Great Revolt in 70, to reorganize Jewish life around the Oral Law. A story is told of Yohanan ben Zakkai, a first-century sage who was said to have predicted the ascent of the Roman general Vespasian to the position of emperor in the waning days of the revolt. In appreciation for the realization of this prediction, Vespasian granted Yohanan a wish, which the sage tersely formulated: “Give me Yavneh and her sages.” He was, in essence, asking for a new site of Jewish religious culture in a world lacking the physical edifice of the Holy Temple, the service of priests, or the practice of animal sacrifice. It was in that very era that the new leaders of Judaism—who would be known as “rabbis,” or teachers—sought to organize the ritual laws and practices that had circulated for centuries and present them to Jews as a program for ongoing religious commitment. The rabbis were guides in the ways of the law, as well as tireless interpreters who bore a powerful intellectual disposition to turn texts “over and over again,” finding new angles and insights to understand them.
A key textual anchor for the interpretive project of the rabbis was the Mishnah, the first written compendium of the Oral Law that was compiled in Palestine around 200 ce. It served as the foundation for the two Talmuds; in fact, mishnaic passages anchored subsequent rabbinic discussion, and they would come to be placed at the center of the page in printed versions. Circles of scholars working in the two major intellectual centers of Palestine and Babylonia between the fourth and sixth centuries parsed these texts and then recorded their respective debates in Aramaic, placing them around the Hebrew-language Mishnah sources on the Talmudic page. They went about this work in a new set of institutions of learning, Talmudic academies, where they addressed a wide range of topics, from matters of ritual purity to agricultural practice to legal ethics to messianism. The most prominent academies in which this work ensued, the Babylonian centers of Sura and Pumbedita, were the Harvard and Yale of late antiquity; their leading scholars gained renown throughout the Jewish world, issuing opinions that traversed borders in what became an early transnational legal system.
From this point forward, rabbis throughout the world produced a thick body of opinions in thousands of book-length compendia. So too, they added layer upon layer of commentary on the Talmud, generating an intricate and dense system of law that covered virtually every aspect of Jewish life. Alongside Babylonia, Ashkenaz was also an active site of this work in the Middle Ages. From the tenth century, scholars created there one of the most important centers of rabbinic legal activity. The most significant of the Ashkenazic rabbinic figures was Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitshaki), who was born in Troyes, France, in the mid-eleventh century. Rashi’s commentaries were so widely read and admired that when the Talmud was first printed in the late fifteenth century, they were placed on the margins of the page with the Talmudic text in in the center.
Rashi had no sons to continue in his path, but his grandsons were distinguished rabbinic scholars in their own right who attempted to complete and elaborate on their grandfather’s work of commentary. The work of rabbinic commentary and legal decision making was a male preserve, which makes striking the legends that surrounded Rashi’s daughters, mothers of the grandsons, to the effect that they studied and were learned in Torah. It was even said that one or more of the daughters wore tefillin, the black square prayer boxes placed by Jewish men (though now also some women) on the arm and head while reciting the morning prayers. Despite this legend, women did not play a leadership role in rabbinic Judaism. Indeed, it was not until the twentieth century that the Berlin-born Regina Jonas became the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in 1935.
At one level, the dense legal world of the rabbis, both in the ancient Middle East and in medieval Europe, was an exclusive and insular fraternity. At the same time, the grand exegetical tradition of which Rashi was a master proceeded alongside and, in some sense, was in unarticulated dialogue with Christian scriptural exegesis. Rabbinic and Catholic canon law developed in similar locations and eras. And Jewish and Christian commentators alike recorded their words in lavishly adorned illuminated manuscripts that bespoke a shared material culture.
The overlap of cultures helps explain why Rashi, who wrote in a crisply lucid Hebrew style, was also a master of medieval French, elements of which he incorporated into his commentaries. An even clearer sign of linguistic adoption was the emergence of Yiddish in the broader Ashkenazic culture of which Rashi was part. Most researchers maintain that Yiddish has a strong Germanic base and arose in the formative German heartland of Ashkenazic culture, perhaps by the twelfth century. Yiddish then migrated eastward to eastern Europe, which would become the largest site of Yiddish proliferation. Indeed, it is there that one could find, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, millions of Yiddish speakers who conducted their daily lives, wrote fine literature, and developed a robust political culture in the language. Estimates are that there were between 11 and 13 million Yiddish speakers in the world on the eve of the Holocaust. Today, Yiddish lives on as a spoken tongue almost exclusively in haredi or strictly Orthodox communities, where it is regarded as a vital tool of insulation against assimilation into mainstream culture.
3. A Jewish teacher instructs his student, reflecting the attention placed on learning and literacy, especially for boys, in medieval Jewish life. It is drawn from the Coburg Pentateuch, a colorful fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Five Books of Moses.
Several centuries before Yiddish emerged as a dominant cultural force in Germanic lands, another group of Jews was adapting a major regional language to their needs in the Middle East. Similar to the rendering of Aramaic or later a version of German into Hebrew characters, Jews began to recraft Arabic into a Jewish language by writing it in Hebrew letters and importing Hebrew loan words. This effort commenced after Arabic became the language of the new Islamic empire in the seventh century.
As a general matter, Jews of Islamic lands both adopted the Arabic language and participated in the favored cultural pursuits of the host society. Most notably, Muslim scholars recovered and revived the study of philosophy from the ancient Greeks and made it a central preoccupation. Jewish scholars shared in that interest and produced the most important works of Jewish philosophy since the time of Philo. Saadya Gaon, head of a major Babylonian academy in the tenth century, was not only a master of Jewish law, but also an outstanding philosopher whose Book of Beliefs and Opinions (933) was the first major work in medieval Jewish philosophy. This book was surpassed in significance two centuries later when Maimonides published his monumental Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190). Like Saadya Gaon’s book, the Guide sought to reconcile Judaism with regnant philosophical understandings of the origins of the world, the nature of good and evil, and the quest for knowledge of God.
Significantly, these two major works were written in Judeo-Arabic. Both authors were fully at home in Arabic, as well as deeply versed in the major schools of philosophy in the Islamic world. They tailored Arabic, the language of philosophy in this period, to their specific purposes: to reach a philosophically sophisticated Jewish audience in an idiom that delineated an identifiable cultural boundary. Judeo-Arabic, written in Hebrew letters, offered an exclusive means for Jewish readers to enter into the world of Islamic philosophy.
It is significant to note the places of origin of the two major medieval Jewish philosophers to gain a sense of the geographic range of the Islamic world, as well as of the Jewish subculture within it. Saadya Gaon was born in Egypt and spent time in Palestine and Syria before being called to Babylonia to head the prestigious academy of Sura. He lived the last years of his life in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbassid Empire. In a very short period of time, the city became a major demographic and cultural center noted for its artistic, intellectual, and scientific innovation and marked by open interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Maimonides, meanwhile, spent the last thirty-five years of his life in Saadya’s home country of Egypt, though he was born and raised in Córdoba, Spain. From the early eighth century, Córdoba—and more generally, southern Spain, or Al-Andalus as it was known—had fallen under the control of the competing Umayyad Empire, which sought to match Baghdad as a cultural center. The Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman II promoted intellectual, scientific, and artistic activity among Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Córdoba. The study of philosophy flourished there, along with a diverse array of fields ranging from astronomy to poetry. Jews were active participants in this vibrant cultural world of Umayyad Spain. Figures such as Samuel ibn Nagrela, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Abraham ibn Ezra excelled in multiple areas, combining Torah knowledge, philosophy, and poetic creativity. Their patronymics—the use of the Arabic “ibn” to connote “son of”—revealed the extent to which they and their names were part of a broader Arab-Muslim world. In fact, ibn Nagrela, otherwise known as Shmuel Ha-Nagid, was not just a member of the Andalusian cultural elite; he was also a leading Jewish courtier who ascended to the positions of general and vizier, or chief political advisor, to the king. And he was not the first Jew to attain a high position in a Muslim regime. Earlier in the tenth century, a Jewish scholar and physician named Hasdai ibn Shaprut served as chief diplomat to the caliph, while maintaining close relations with Jews throughout the world. In this sense, he was doubly loyal—to the Muslim regime he served and to his fellow Jews. Likewise, he was fully at home in both Arabic and Hebrew, with Judeo-Arabic as a key mediating tool.
Of course, a small percentage of Jews belonged to the elite intellectual and social classes. But most regarded Torah study with great reverence. Fathers instilled in their sons respect for Torah study as a key to performing religious commandments. Girls, who were not obligated to fulfill all of the religious obligations as boys, typically did not receive the same degree of Torah education as boys nor were they welcomed in schools. But they often did receive some form of informal education from their mothers.
Part of what we know about Jewish education in the medieval world emerges out of the materials collected in the Cairo Geniza. The Geniza was the repository of discarded texts kept in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo that, since its modern “discovery” by English-based researcher Solomon Schechter, has yielded an extraordinary portrait of medieval life in the Mediterranean world.
The hundreds of thousands of Geniza fragments have allowed scholars to reconstruct the far-reaching commercial ties of Jewish—and, for that matter, Muslim—merchants throughout North Africa and Europe. They also help detail the daily existence of Jews, the clothes and jewelry they wore, the design of their homes, the modes of hospitality practiced, and the food and wine they drank. The Geniza documents reveal, for example, that despite the considerable commercial acumen of Jews, perhaps a quarter of the community’s population in medieval Egypt lived in poverty. The Jewish community ran an extensive network of institutions to serve the poor, animated by a deep commitment to tsedakah, charity, as a religious duty. Moreover, the Geniza fragments affirm how ubiquitous religion was in the lives of medieval Jews, who sought God’s intercession, through prayer, in virtually all aspects of their lives, both great and small. In sum, they offer up a textured sense of Jewish life under medieval Islam.
If the great monotheistic revolution instilled in Jews an abiding belief in Divine Providence (and in their own election), it was the universalizing revolution triggered by the rise of Christianity that set in motion a new competition among monotheistic faiths in which Jews were the weakest party. But that competition did not entail the collapse and disappearance of Judaism. Rather, it impelled Jews to develop adaptive skills in order to survive, as they learned to engage in regular but selective participation in the Gentile world with a constant eye on fortifying their own religiously based culture. Simply put, medieval Jews did not live in isolation from their non-Jewish neighbors, but rather in a state of ongoing and at times tense interaction that yielded a wide variety of local cultural forms.
The secular revolution and modern Jewish cultures
By the end of the fifteenth century, a major demographic and social shift occurred in the Jewish world that had profound geographic and cultural consequences. Up to that point, the Jewish community of Spain had been the most populous, affluent, and influential in the Jewish world. During the three and a half centuries after Maimonides and his family were forced off the Iberian Peninsula in 1148, Spain was in the throes of a relentless campaign by Christians in the north of the country to capture control of southern parts from the hands of the Muslims. In the midst of this drive to create an all-Christian peninsula, Jews too came under pressure. They were subject to violent waves of forced conversions in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that generated thousands of conversos, some of whom maintained Jewish rituals secretly in their homes. In fact, it was in response to the “Judaizing” activity of conversos that the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, introduced the Inquisition in Spain in 1478. Fourteen years later, they decided to complete the ethnic cleansing of Spain by expelling the Jews in 1492. Among other effects, the Edict of Expulsion marked the birth of the great Sephardic Jewish diaspora, in both its eastern (Ottoman) and its western (European) sectors.
Two towering figures of Sephardic origin, products of east and west respectively, emerged in the seventeenth century to alter the complexion of medieval Jewish culture. One was Shabtai Zevi, the Turkish-born false messiah who attracted hundreds of thousands of adherents to his movement, before he converted to Islam. The second figure came from the western Sephardi diaspora of Holland. Benedict, or Baruch, Spinoza was the descendent of Portuguese conversos who had moved to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. Like Shabtai Zevi, Spinoza grew up in a traditionally observant setting. His intellectual curiosity as a young man led him to a circle of non-Jewish free thinkers who encouraged his own unconventional thinking about Judaism, religion in general, and the relationship between church and state. Spinoza’s iconoclasm led to confrontations with Jewish communal officials, culminating in his excommunication in 1656 from the Amsterdam community owing to his “horrible heresies.” Spinoza never formally returned to Judaism, but neither did he convert to Christianity. Indeed, it was said of him that he was the first person to leave the confines of the Jewish community without converting.
This statement suggests that there was in Spinoza’s time, and perhaps as a result of his actions, a secular revolution that carved out a space in society that was beyond the reach of religious authorities, where one could think freely and without inhibition about sensitive matters. Spinoza dwelt alone in this new “secular” space after his excommunication, during which time he wrote a number of seminal works of philosophy. In one of them, the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), he gave articulate voice to a host of doubts that may have prompted his exclusion from the Jewish community fourteen years earlier—about the nature of God, Israel’s election, Mosaic authorship of the Bible, and the miracle of the Jewish people’s survival.
The fact that he published this major philosophical work anonymously suggests that there were lingering obstacles to the free expression of radical ideas. But Spinoza did lend his powerful voice, if not always his name, to challenging ideas about God, faith, and politics. In fact, it has been argued that he stood at the center of a “radical Enlightenment” movement that preceded and was far more sweeping than the moderate Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.
If one compares Spinoza to the greatest Jewish philosopher of the eighteenth century, Moses Mendelssohn, this claim makes sense. Spinoza and Mendelssohn did share certain key beliefs—for example, in the liberating power of human reason or in a view of Judaism as rooted in laws and commandments, not eternal philosophical truths. And both men have been called the first modern, or even secular, Jew. But Spinoza went much further than Mendelssohn in challenging the social, as well as theological, foundations of Judaism. Whereas Spinoza surrendered any ongoing affiliation to the Jewish community, Mendelssohn, who was born in Dessau and moved to Berlin as a young man, remained observant throughout his life. He was frequently asked by non-Jewish colleagues why, if he were such a philosophically sophisticated man, he continued to adhere to Judaism. The question deeply frustrated him, for he believed that Judaism and the Enlightenment were thoroughly compatible.
In making this point, Mendelssohn stood at a tenuous turning point. He sought at once to affirm the continuing relevance of the Jewish religion and to invite his co-religionists to enter into the new cultural world of Enlightenment Germany. Toward the latter aim, he produced a Judeo-German translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Biur (1780–1783) to introduce traditional Jews to the German language. He also was the founder of the distinctive Jewish variant of the Enlightenment movement called the Haskalah, which couched its program of educational and cultural reform in the traditional language of Hebrew.
Mendelssohn made use of both German and Hebrew, since his burden was double. He not only had to persuade fellow Jews of the benefits of Enlightenment. He also had to render Judaism understandable in the Enlightenment language of his day. He did so in his major Jewish book, Jerusalem (1783), in which he argued that neither Judaism nor any other religion could use coercive means to compel belief; religion was a decidedly voluntaristic matter, subject to the reason and choice of the individual.
Mendelssohn’ social milieu in eighteenth-century Berlin was one in which Jews and Christians began to know one another not only from the marketplace, but also from their encounter in the city’s literary salons. Many of the leading salons were run by Jewish women, who, seeking relief from the boredom of their marriages, hosted gatherings of authors, philosophers, artists, court officials, nobles, and commoners to engage in serious conversation. Here Jew met non-Jew as seeming equal, both partners in the creation of a “neutral society” in miniature that could serve as a model for a broader Enlightenment society.
And yet, the salon was, in many regards, an illusion. It catered to the upper classes who were not representative of the larger population or social dynamics in Berlin. Nor did it spell the end of anti-Jewish discrimination. Formal and informal obstacles remained in the path of Jews, preventing their entry into political office, academia, and the civil service. One prominent disciple of Mendelssohn, David Friedlander, even proposed to a Protestant cleric in 1799 that he and a group of fellow Jews convert to Christianity to gain social acceptance, but on the condition that they not be required to embrace core Christian dogmas. His offer of a “dry baptism” was rejected.
This instance makes clear that even in the seemingly secular age of the Enlightenment, religion played a key role as a marker of social identity. It also makes clear that what the Enlightenment offered was a sort of double gesture to the Jews: beckoning them to a gleaming edifice of equality while closing the door to them as they crossed its threshold. This set of conflicting signals had its distinct psychic costs. It produced a sense among Jews in the West that they were either “pariahs” or “parvenus,” outcasts or upstarts, in the words of the twentieth-century thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt herself depicted the devastating impact of this double gesture in her highly autobiographical biography of Rahel Varnhagen (née Levin). Varhnagen was born in 1771 into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, where she became a much sought-after literary salon host. The salon spelled, in a way, her exit from Judaism into a wider non-Jewish world. She married a non-Jew and spent much of her adult life outside of the Jewish community. And yet, she never vanquished her primal allegiances to nor, for that matter, her ambivalences about Judaism. She is said to have uttered on her deathbed: “The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life—having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.”
The perception that Jewishness was a source of shame reflected the complexity of the Jewish condition in modern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Jews were perched at the border of social acceptance, they had great difficulty traversing it. The sense of being an outsider in a society with which one was now natively familiar could induce paralysis or inspire conversion, but it could also become a font of cultural innovation. Franz Kafka, the great early-twentieth-century Jewish author from Prague, captured this sense of being an outsider when he compared the Jew to a horse whose rear legs were stuck in the past and whose front legs had not yet landed in the present. Such a position permitted, even encouraged, one to break the mold of existing convention, as Kafka did by upending the linearity of narrative in fiction, as well as through his darkly introspective vision of the labyrinth of modern—and modern Jewish—life.
Kafka was one in a long string of major Jewish cultural innovators writing in German to emerge out of central Europe in the late nineteenth century. Lacking full acceptance, these figures pushed many fields of European culture into new terrain, often adopting a critical sensibility that has been called “modernist.” For example, Gustav Mahler demolished the composer Richard Wagner’s biased assertion that Jews lacked all forms of musical creativity. Other figures such as Walter Benjamin (social criticism), Robert Musil (fiction), Max Reinhardt (theater), Arnold Schoenberg (music), and Franz Rosenzweig and Gershom Scholem (Jewish studies) broke new ground in their respective domains. Perhaps most significantly, Sigmund Freud defied established scientific views by developing the psychoanalytic method to probe the human subconscious. Freud was characteristic of many of this cohort in that he denied that there was anything distinctly Jewish to his work. At the same time, he did suggest to a colleague that there was a quality that fellow Jews possessed, a sort of “racial kinship,” that allowed them to understand his psychoanalytic method better than non-Jews (specifically, Carl Jung).
Freud’s comment suggests that an unspoken cultural and ethnic code existed among Jews of his day. It was not the religious beliefs and practices of Judaism that forged this code, but rather the social bonds borne of an environment in which Jews looked, spoke, and ate like their non-Jewish neighbors, but were still considered alien and even unwelcome in their home countries. Hannah Arendt juxtaposed the old fate of the Jews to the new by declaring that once they “had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape.” The inescapability of Jewishness pointed to an irony of modern Jewish life, at least in central Europe—that the Enlightenment, with all its promise of liberation, could not deliver true freedom. The condition bred an iconoclastic spirit that had many brilliant cultural effects.
Central Europe was hardly the only or main site of Jewish cultural innovation. Neighboring eastern Europe hosted the largest population of Jews in the world, who created their own distinctive culture. In the more traditional and insular world of eastern Europe, Yiddish remained a dominant presence in the lives of Jews up to the twentieth century, whereas non-Jewish languages had by that time supplanted it as the main spoken tongues of Jews in central and western Europe and the Americas. Yiddish had served as a key language of religious instruction for the traditional-minded Jews of Eastern Europe; one notable example was the long-enduring Tsenah u-renah (Go forth and see) from the sixteenth century, a popular text intended for women that brought together a digest of the weekly Torah portion and various forms of supplications.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, as new political and cultural winds blew in from the West, a vibrant secular Yiddish literature began to emerge in the Russian Empire. Alongside parallel developments in other European literatures, Yiddish letters created new styles and genres, from low-brow fiction (known as shund) to high modernism to academic scholarly prose. Writers such as Mendele Moykher Sforim (Sh. Y. Abramowitch), Sholem Aleichem (Sh. Rabinovitz), and Y. L. Peretz mixed modern techniques, biting satire, and traditional sources to create a new Jewish literary canon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Continuing in that tradition, the Polish-born Isaac Bashevis Singer, who emigrated to New York in 1935, wrote novels and stories in Yiddish marked by great poignancy and humor that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978—the only writer in Yiddish to receive this honor.
The influence of Yiddish has been felt not only in fine literature. It became a multipurpose language of education, politics, economic activity, and a wide range of cultural expressions of which Jews in eastern Europe made extensive use, in addition to the language of the land. Moreover, Yiddish was a prominent linguistic presence in virtually every setting in which large numbers of its speakers resided, from Odessa to Amsterdam to New York to Melbourne. Of special note is its distinctive brand of humor that has informed the timing and locution of several generations of American Jewish comedians, including Sid Caesar, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, and Jon Stewart. Well after Yiddish ceased to be the spoken language of hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it lived and lives on through words and syntax that have entered American culture at large. At the same time, for the hundreds of thousands of strictly Orthodox haredi Jews who continue to speak Yiddish in America, Israel, and elsewhere, Yiddish comedy lives on in the form of the badkhen, the traditional bard-like figure who entertains at weddings and other happy occasions.
Perhaps even more dramatic than the revitalization of Yiddish in the nineteenth century was the appearance of a modern form of Hebrew, which had served to that point as the primary vehicle of Jewish scripture, liturgy, and law. This was not coincidental, since the two languages had a close and competitive relationship with one another. Hebrew played an important role in the Haskalah movement in late-eighteenth-century Berlin. It was both revered as the classic language of scripture and regarded as an essential agent for promoting Enlightenment ideals to the traditionally inclined. As the Haskalah movement expanded into eastern Europe via commercial and epistolary exchange, the function of Hebrew widened; its adepts recast it as a versatile modern language, suitable for the novel, essay form, literary journal, and scholarly monograph.
4. Jewish girls peruse newspapers in both Yiddish and Polish in the reading room of a Jewish trade school. Jews in Poland between the two world wars were well known for speaking multiple languages. In the 1931 Polish census, nearly 80 percent declared Yiddish as their mother tongue, although most also spoke and read Polish, among other languages.
The revival of Hebrew as a modern language was intimately connected, in turn, to the revival of the dormant Jewish nation. In many nationalist movements, the motif of a people being awakened from slumber was common. Notwithstanding their lack of a territory of their own in which they dwelt (with the exception of a small number in Palestine), Jews were no different. In 1866, the Russian Hebrew poet Y. L. Gordon encapsulated the sentiment in a didactic poem:
Awake, my people! How long will you slumber?
The night has passed, the sun shines bright.
Awake, lift up your eyes, look around you—
Acknowledge, I pray you, your time and your place.
Later in the nineteenth century, eastern European Jewish intellectuals associated with the fledgling Zionist movement such as Ahad Ha’am, a leading Russian Jewish writer, transformed Hebrew into a vehicle for modern intellectual activity. In the twentieth century, when Zionism moved from its birthplace in Europe to Palestine, Hebrew became the language of the Jewish community there. Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism, was dubious that people would ever be able to ask for a railway ticket in Hebrew. But, in fact, the Holy Tongue became a living daily language, used to purchase railway tickets, negotiate with shopkeepers, and curse political opponents. In 1948 when the State of Israel was founded, Hebrew became the chief official language of the new country (alongside Arabic), with a state-sponsored language academy to guard its integrity.
With a measure of historical perspective, it can be argued that one of Zionism’s greatest achievements was the transformation of Hebrew into a language spoken by millions and the creation of a world-class literary culture that has boasted outstanding prose writers and poets, including Yosef Hayim Brenner, Chaim Nahman Bialik, Rachel (Bluwstein), Leah Goldberg, S. Yizhar, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Yehuda Amichai, Amos Oz, and David Grossman. Validation of the excellence of Hebrew letters came in 1996 when one of the greatest of Israeli novelists, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
These literary figures were Jews of eastern or central European origin. They have been pillars of Jewish culture in Israel, and they often were closely connected to the Ashkenazi-dominated Labor Party establishment. Occupying a different space are Jews of Spanish and Middle Eastern origin, who have struggled to gain acceptance by the Ashkenazi political and cultural elite in the new state. Writers such as Eli Amir, Sami Michael, A. B. Yehoshua, Orly Castel-Bloom, Ronit Matalon, and Haim Sabato had and have accents, influences, and places of origin different from their Ashkenazi colleagues. They did not come from eastern or western Europe but rather from the Middle East. They grew up not with Yiddish, Russian, or German but rather Ladino (a prominent form of Judeo-Spanish), French, and Arabic. In fact, one of Israel’s most accomplished Jewish authors, Samir Naqqash, won a wide and admiring audience throughout the Middle East for his literary work in the Arabic of his native Baghdad. In the musical realm, performers such as Zohar Argov, Haim Moshe, Yossi Banai, Haim, Ofra Haza, Eyal Golan, and Etty Akri have created an Israeli popular music that draws on the rhythms and tonality of the Arab world as much as on Western music. In the early twenty-first century, a number of well-known singers of Mizrahi origin, especially Kobi Oz and Ehud Banai, have reached back into the repertoire of North African Jewish religious culture to set liturgical poetry (piyut) to new music.
This last development is part of the return to tradition in some Jewish quarters in Israel and elsewhere that serves as a reminder that the secular era does not flow in only one direction—away from religion. Religion has undergone several major transformations in the modern age; initially shunted to the margins, it has reemerged with new force in the public square.
Part of the explanation for this change is that religion, as a cultural form, changes and adapts in response to shifting historical circumstance. So too, Jewish culture, from its early monotheistic roots, has continually changed in response to shifting circumstances and locales. This accounts for the extraordinary range of Jewish religious and cultural practices found in communities from Asia to the Americas. This constant exposure to new settings has strengthened the cultural muscle that Jews built up over centuries. While it has not always led to warm social relations with the non-Jewish population, this exposure has enabled Jews to develop effective tools of adaptation. Along the way, Jews have illustrated through their history how a minority culture can survive in the midst of an often hostile majoritarian society.