I’d like to continue my summary of Jewish history. Here’s what I’ve discussed so far:
Cecil Roth says that, when Jews were expelled from Spain, many took refuge in the East. “From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Isthmus of Suez, and from the Atlas Mountains to the Balkans, fresh communities sprang up, or the old ones were quickened into a new life.” The refugees preserved their customs and language. Roth writes,
| All along the Mediterranean coast there was a series of islands of Iberian culture, maintained by the Jewish exiles in the midst of a strange land.... They preserved their language. It was written in Hebrew characters, intermingled with Hebrew, Arabic, and other elements, and called “Ladino.” But it remained fundamentally the old Castilian.... Generations after the expulsion, Spanish travelers were amazed to meet in the Levant little Jewish children who had never seen Spain, but who spoke a purer Castilian than they did themselves.... Spanish was the lingua franca of the Jews throughout the Near East, being adopted even by the indigenous [Jews], in place of the Greek which they had previously used. |
Roth says that the Muslim territories in the Levant weren’t backward. Until around 1650, Arabic culture was as advanced as Christian. Ottoman armies were a match for Christian armies. Muslim lands “displayed a wise tolerance” toward the Jews, unlike Christian lands.
After a long struggle, Ottoman armies finally captured Constantinople in 1453. In Christendom, this seemed like a calamity, but for the Jews in the East, it meant “a new lease on life.” Roth says that the Ottomans treated Jews fairly well, while the Byzantine Empire was sometimes harshly anti-Semitic.
On the other hand, Jews in Muslim lands weren’t emancipated, weren’t treated as equals. Roth writes,
| The benevolence of the government was sporadic.... The Jews were fleeced frequently, arbitrarily, and unmercifully by the Moslem rulers — in this, at least, true counterparts of the monarchs of civilized Europe. Occasionally there were ghastly mob outbreaks.... [Jews] had to remove their shoes when they passed in front of a mosque or a school where the Koran was being recited. If they met one of the faithful in the street, they had to give him the right of way. The use of the horse, as a noble beast, was forbidden to them, so that they could only ride mules or asses.... As in medieval Europe it was they who had to act as executioners, so as to save true believers from the sin of putting a fellow-being to death. |
But at least Jews could settle down in Muslim lands — unlike Christian lands, from which they were often expelled. In Turkey, trading was done by Jews, Armenians, and Greeks; the Turks themselves were “a military and agricultural people.” So the Jewish merchant wasn’t competing with Ottoman merchants. “International trade... lay very largely in Jewish hands.”
Roth says that, after the influx from Spain, the Jewish population of Constantinople grew to 30,000; it was the largest Jewish community in Europe. But before long, the largest community was in the Greek city of Salonica; Jews made up the majority of Salonica’s population.
In the Ottoman Empire, Jews sometimes became diplomats, since they knew European languages. One of the most powerful Jews in the Ottoman realm was Joseph Nasi, who lived in the 1500s. He was related to a prominent Jewish banking family, Mendes/Benveniste. His family had left Spain and gone to Portugal, then wandered through several European countries, before settling in the Ottoman realm. As a powerful “court Jew” in Constantinople, he took revenge on the European countries that had mistreated him. He tried to start a Jewish community in Palestine, in the town of Tiberias, but the project failed.
Another “court Jew” in Turkey was Solomon Aben-Ayish, who lived in the latter 1500s. His agents talked to Queen Elizabeth and Lord Burleigh, and arranged an “alliance between England and Turkey against Spain.”
Around 1600, the Ottoman Empire began declining. Persecution of Jews became more common. Northern Europe was becoming more tolerant toward Jews, so the Ottoman domain wasn’t as attractive as it once was.
Roth says that, around 1475, the Jewish community in Palestine was small and disorganized. It had never recovered from the assaults of the Crusaders and the Mongols. “Cultural and moral life were at a low ebb; and there was complete lack of communal organization.”
A few Jews came to Palestine as pilgrims. One of these pilgrims, Obadiah of Bertinoro, was a scholar from Italy who spent a couple years traveling to Palestine. “In this leisurely progress, he had ample time to observe conditions in the places through which he passed; and his letters to his father describing his experiences are among the classics of Hebrew literature.”1
He arrived in Jerusalem in 1488, and soon became the leader of the Jewish community. He delivered a sermon every two weeks, arranged a tax-reduction with the Muslim authorities, and opened schools for the study of Jewish literature. “His reputation spread widely... the Muslim population frequently asked him to decide judicial cases.” He scolded the Rabbis for “exacting fees for services at weddings and divorces, believing it their duty to perform religious ceremonies without monetary compensation.”
Four years after his arrival, in 1492, Jews were expelled from Spain, and some settled in Palestine. Jewish communities flourished at Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, as well as Jerusalem; these cities were known as the Four Holy Cities. Palestine now had many leading Jewish scholars. Some scholars neglected worldly concerns, and lived off donations from the Diaspora. Roth writes,
| Year by year there sallied out to all the four corners of the earth the so-called “Emissaries of the Merciful,” collecting funds on behalf of the four Holy Cities of Palestine. The record of their vicissitudes and trials, of the unlikely spots to which they penetrated and of the unflinching courage which they showed, constitutes a remarkable page in the history of travel. Everywhere, from India to the New World, [they] were received with deference, enjoying unlimited hospitality, preaching in the synagogues, and going away burdened with the oblations of the faithful. They constituted over many centuries an important element in the life of the Jewish people, bringing the latest currents of thought and scholarship into the most remote communities, keeping alive the memory of the Holy Land, and maintaining personal contact between the far-flung offshoots of the Jewish world. |
By 1600, Safed had 18 Talmud colleges, and 21 synagogues. Safed became a center of Kabbalah studies; Roth calls Safed “a revivalist camp in perpetual being.” In Safed, “The traditional Jewish life was lived with an intensity rarely equaled, coupled with a mystical fervor which was all its own.”
One of the chief works of Kabbalism was the Zohar (also known as The Book of Splendor). The Zohar was a commentary on the Pentateuch, i.e., on the first five books of the Old Testament. But it was no ordinary commentary, it contained “exotic speculations upon the origin of the Universe, the nature of the Godhead, the allegories contained in the Scriptures and the hidden sense of each episode and precept.”
One might compare the Zohar to the Hermetica; both had a mystical bent, both claimed to have been created earlier than they were. The Zohar is ascribed to Shimon bar Yochai, a scholar who lived around 150 AD, and is buried in Meron, near Safed. Safed was the center of Kabbalism partly because of its link with Shimon bar Yochai, though modern scholars believe that the Zohar was written, not in Palestine, but rather in Spain in the 1200s.
The most famous figure in Safed Kabbalism is Isaac Luria, who was born in 1534. His family was from Germany, and had settled in Jerusalem, where Isaac was born. He went to Egypt for schooling.
| Becoming engrossed in the study of the Zohar [Roth writes], he adopted the life of a hermit. For seven years he lived in isolated meditation in a hut on the banks of the Nile, visiting his family only on the Sabbath and speaking no language but Hebrew. The ascetic life had its natural result. He became a visionary.... In the end he removed to the ‘Holy City’ of Safed.... he became known by the name of ‘Ari’ or Lion, being the initial letters of the words ‘Ashkenazi, Rabbi Isaac.’ In this environment he lived until his death in 1572, at the early age of thirty-eight. |
Luria had a lasting impact on Judaism:
| His personal fascination must have been extraordinary, to judge from the extent of his influence and the wealth of legend which gathered round his memory. Though he himself prepared nothing for publication, the notes of his discourses, collected by his disciples... soon circulated throughout the Diaspora and had an enormous effect upon Jewish practice and the theory which inspired it. All the minutiae of religious observance, every letter of the liturgy, every action of daily life, became infused with an esoteric significance, frequently bordering on superstition, but often beautiful and sometimes profound. New prayers and meditations were composed, sometimes of remarkable charm, accentuating the spiritual significance of observances which had tended to become mechanical. The Zohar acquired a sanctity in Jewish life second only to that of the Bible. The dicta of the Ari were copied and studied more universally and with greater devotion than those of Maimonides. |
Luria is buried in Safed. His grave, like that of Shimon bar Yochai, still attracts pilgrims today.
Roth says that, in 1567, a Jewish scholar named Joseph Karo (or “Caro”) published a summary of Jewish law; the summary was called The Prepared Table (Shulhan Arukh). Wikipedia calls it, “the most widely consulted of the various legal codes in Judaism.” Karo had been a disciple of Luria, but Karo wasn’t a mystic. Karo’s summary was eagerly studied by Jews who found the Talmud daunting. “The study of the Talmud and the allied literature now fell into rapid decline. All that was needed as a guide to Jewish observance was Karo’s code, and upon it (together with the Zohar and the neo-mystical literature) their studies were now centered.”
The Khazars were a Turkic/Mongolian people who lived between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Azov. Their kingdom arose around 650 AD, and lasted until around 950. During that time, they expanded northwest into what is now Ukraine, north into what is now Russia, and south into what is now Georgia and Azerbaijan. Around 965 AD, the Khazars were defeated by Kievan Rus'.2
The Khazars converted to Judaism around 750 AD. Spanish Jews heard about this Jewish kingdom in the East, and corresponded with the Khazars around 950. The Jewish poet Judah Halevi wrote a dialogue called Kuzari (Sefer ha-Kuzari). The dialogue is between a rabbi and the king of the Khazars, who has invited the rabbi “to instruct him in the tenets of Judaism in comparison with those of... Christianity and Islam.” Wikipedia calls it “one of the most important apologetic works of Jewish philosophy.”
After their defeat by Kievan Rus', what happened to the Khazars? Some scholars argued, in the 1800s, that the Khazars drifted westward to what is now Germany and France, and became the original Ashkenazi Jews. In 1883, Ernest Renan said, “This conversion of the kingdom of the Khazars has a considerable importance regarding the origin of those Jews who dwell in the countries along the Danube and southern Russia.” Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), in which he defended the Khazar-Ashkenazi theory, and said that “the Jews could not have reached 8 million in Eastern Europe without the contribution of the Khazars.”
Roth is somewhat receptive to the Khazar-Ashkenazi theory; he says, “Descendants of the Khazars, men noteworthy for their learning and piety, were known long after in Toledo.” Roth says that “the Mongoloid features common amongst the Jews of eastern Europe” are probably a Khazar-inheritance.
Most scholars reject the Khazar-Ashkenazi theory. I find the theory improbable; I suspect that, after the Khazars were defeated, they merged with Asiatic peoples, and gradually lost their Judaism. While the Khazar king and his court may have embraced Judaism, I suspect that the average Khazar had his own ancient religion.
Roth says that, about 1240 AD, the Mongols/Tartars stormed into eastern Europe. “Russia itself was conquered by the barbarians, who subsequently accepted the religion of Islam. For centuries, [Russia] was outside the bounds of civilized Europe.” Poland wasn’t conquered and occupied, but the Mongol invasion “devastated the whole country, and reduced the principal towns into heaps of smoking ruins.”
To restore the country, the Poles invited “merchants and craftsmen” from Germany. German Jews also came to Poland, partly to escape the anti-Semitism that had reared its head in Germany around 1100 AD, with the First Crusade. In 1264, the King of Poland “issued a model charter of protection and liberties” to Jews in Poland.
As Jews migrated eastward into Poland and Russia, they brought their language with them. Their language was Yiddish, i.e., German “interspersed with Hebrew and Slavonic elements... written in Hebrew characters.” One might suppose that Jews living in Poland and Russia would pick up Polish/Russian, and drop Yiddish. If this didn’t happen, it indicates that Jews were, to a considerable degree, isolated from the society around them.
While Polish Jews were protected by a royal charter, some Polish merchants were jealous of them, some Polish priests were hostile to them, and some Polish mobs attacked them. There were attacks on Jews at the time of the Black Death (1348), and there were attacks after accusations of child-murder (Blood Libel).
But the migration of Jews into Poland continued. Compared to neighboring countries, Poland was hospitable. In 1354, the royal charter was reaffirmed and extended by Casimir the Great, “the most energetic of all Polish sovereigns.” To make sure that Jews were treated fairly in Polish courts, Casimir brought Jewish disputes under the jurisdiction of the king.
In 1388, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania followed Poland’s lead, and granted Jews a charter of protection and liberties. The situation of Jews in the Grand Duchy was similar to that of Polish Jews. In 1501, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was united with Poland, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was born.3 It was big — three times as big as Germany today; it could support a large Jewish population.
Even after the royal charters of 1264 and 1354, even after centuries of migration, there were only about 50,000 Jews in Poland in 1500. By 1650, however, that number had risen to 500,000. “The overwhelming mass of the Jews in the world to-day are descended” from the Jews in Poland “and the surrounding Slavonic territories.”
Polish Jews weren’t confined to money-lending, as Jews were in some countries; Polish Jews were innkeepers, tax-collectors, estate-managers, craftsmen, etc.
In 1551, the Polish king formally granted Jews the right to choose their own judges, who would follow Jewish law. “This measure has rightly been described as the Magna Carta of Jewish self-government in Poland.” In addition to managing their own courts, Jews managed their own tax-collection, and their own schools. One might say that Jews were self-governing, a state within a state. “Nowhere, ever since the decay of the Jewish center in Palestine, had so complete an approach to autonomy existed.”
In an earlier issue, I mentioned the importance of fairs in medieval France. Fairs were also important in Poland. All sorts of people went to the fair, including scholars of Jewish law. So the fair was an opportunity for legal scholars to hear cases. It was also an opportunity to apportion taxes among the various Jewish communities.
Thus, the fair gave birth to an important Jewish institution, The Council of the Four Lands, a kind of parliament.4 A representative of the Council would attend the Polish Assembly (known as the Diet or Sejm), to look after Jewish interests.
Such councils of leading Jews could be found “all over the Jewish world.” But only in eastern Europe did the council become “a permanent feature.” At first, the Jewish council managed the Jewish community of the entire Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; after 1623, a separate council managed the Jewish community of Lithuania.
So Jews were doing well in Poland, and were becoming numerous in Poland. Jewish scholarship began to flourish in Poland. Polish-Jewish scholars focused on the Talmud, i.e., traditional Jewish learning, Rabbinic studies, as opposed to poetry, philosophy, and Kabbalah. “Poland became known as the home of the Talmud, just as Safed was that of the Zohar.”
Polish-Jewish scholars developed a scholarly method called pilpul. This approach aimed to find, Roth says,
| an artificial analogy between different themes, to create elaborate distinctions between connected passages, to build up a syllogism between texts which had nothing to do with one another, or to treat the end of one tractate and the beginning of the next (relating to a different subject) as though they constituted a continuous text.... To study the plain text was considered elementary, and only a scholar who had proved his mettle in the intricacies of pilpul now counted for anything. |
Roth is scornful of pilpul: “The method was futile, wasteful, and from certain points of view even pernicious.” But he thinks that pilpul may have been useful as mental exercise, weight-lifting for the mind: “The minds of those trained in it became preternaturally sharpened; and, as the process went on, generation after generation, it produced in Polish Jewry a standard of intelligence, a mental adaptability, and a degree of acumen which has perhaps known no parallel.”
One leading Polish-Jewish scholar, Solomon Luria, spoke out against pilpul, and tried to return to the old way of approaching the Talmud.
Roth says that the leading Polish-Jewish scholars weren’t better than leading scholars elsewhere, but there was a higher average in Poland, a more thorough educational system. “There was nowhere so much Torah as in the land of Poland.” Every congregation had its Yeshiva, or school. “Throughout the year, the head of the Yeshiva did not leave his house, excepting to go from the house of study to the house of prayer. He sat continually, day and night, and studied the Law.”5 He received an “ample salary” from the congregation, so he didn’t need to concern himself with worldly affairs. He taught several young scholars, and the young scholars taught young boys. “Every householder gave hospitality to one of the young scholars with his two boys.... In the whole of the kingdoms of Poland, there was hardly a single house in which they did not study the Torah. Either the householder himself was the scholar, or else his son, or his son-in-law studied perpetually; or, at least, he gave hospitality to some young student. Frequently, one would find all these in one house.” One wonders how the non-scholars managed to support so many scholars, and also pay taxes.
In the last week, Trump’s lead has widened, and Democrats are glum. Trump seems to have “coat-tails,” i.e., he seems to be bringing other Republican candidates with him. Republicans have a commanding lead in the Senate, and they’ve drawn even in the House, raising the possibility of a Republican sweep.
Harris continues to struggle with interviews. She seems unwilling, or unable, to discuss the nuts-and-bolts of policy. When she was interviewed by Bret Baier, she had about 8 million viewers, so it was an opportunity to get her message out, and revive her flagging campaign. But she seemed reluctant to take the opportunity; she arrived late to the interview, and tried to shorten the interview.
Bret Baier asked her how many illegals had entered the country while she was Vice President. She wouldn’t answer the question. Democrats can’t admit that they let about 10 million unvetted people enter the country. If 1% of these people are criminals or gang-members or spies, that’s 100,000 criminals or gang-members or spies. This is what the Democratic Party has done to the United States of America.
What the Democratic Party has done is worse than the Vietnam War or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These three wars were bipartisan projects, at least in their early stages. It was widely believed that these wars would help the U.S., help the people of Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan, and help the world as a whole. Our motives were good; if we made mistakes, they were honest mistakes.
But the open border was a partisan scheme. It wasn’t done to help the country or the world, but only to help the Democratic Party (by increasing the number of Democratic voters). It wasn’t an honest mistake, it was a deliberate strategy. If the open border ends up helping the Democratic Party, Democrats will have no regrets about opening the border.
The open border is more damaging to the country than the three wars because it’s directed against Americans, against Republicans; it’s a profoundly divisive policy, even more divisive than the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War had an end, but I don’t see any end to the illegals, they came to stay. If the 10 million illegals become voters, and help the Democrats win in 2028 or 2032, the elections will be tainted, rigged. You can’t say that importing voters from foreign countries is a legitimate tactic, part of a genuine democratic process. Importing voters taints elections and undermines the American political system.
I admit that Democrats have two excuses:
As for the electoral college, the Democrats managed to win two elections with Clinton, two more with Obama, and at least one with Biden-Harris, so Democrats can succeed within the framework of the electoral college, and they can succeed with secret ballots. They control the Senate now, and they controlled the House recently. So they shouldn’t despair, they shouldn’t resort to radical measures, they shouldn’t try to completely crush Republicans, they should accept a sharing of power, an oscillation back and forth (your turn, then my turn, then your turn...).
Democrats are pursuing radical policies in hopes of decisive victory, but they would only enjoy the victory for 24 hours. Then they would start to quarrel among themselves. When we defeated Nazi Germany, we only enjoyed the victory for 24 hours, then we started quarreling with Russia. So the Democrats are damaging the political system, perhaps permanently, in order to enjoy 24 hours of power.
Didn’t Machiavelli say that old laws are preferable to good laws? In other words, a nation needs the stability of old, established laws, laws that everyone knows, laws that seem like they’re embedded in the nature of things. When Democrats broke the filibuster, it ending up hurting them.6 And if Democrats break the electoral college, or the Constitution as a whole, it would end up hurting them.
We should adhere to the electoral college, the secret ballot, and maybe the filibuster; we should adhere to the Constitution, though the Constitution doesn’t fit modern society perfectly. And Trump shouldn’t make numerous changes to taxes/tariffs. We need some stability, some respect for old laws. In the long run, the stability of old laws will benefit both parties.
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | Roth 1948, Ch. 23, #4, p. 280. On page 279, Roth says that Obadiah left Italy in 1286; this is an error that was corrected in later editions. back |
| 2. | Wikipedia says, “The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus' as their cultural ancestor, with Belarus and Russia deriving their names from it, and the name Kievan Rus' derived from what is now the capital of Ukraine.” back |
| 3. | In an earlier issue, I wrote, “beginning around 1385, Lithuania and Poland are united; this union lasts about 400 years (200 years as a ‘personal union,’ then another 200 years as a ‘real union’).” Wikipedia says that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a real union in 1569. back |
| 4. | Poland was divided into four lands or provinces, but there’s no agreement on what the four lands were. Here’s one way to define them:
|
| 5. | Cecil Roth 1948, Ch. 24, p. 296
Roth is quoting a Jewish scholar named Nathan Hanover, who lived in Poland around 1640. back |
| 6. | Democrats eliminated the filibuster for lower-court judges, then Republicans eliminated it for Supreme Court justices, then Republicans were able to confirm three conservatives to the Supreme Court. back |