Introduction
This article—based extensively on the research by Professor Bernard Dov Cooperman[1]—explores how the Italian rabbinic world dealt with their dynamic differences in theological expression during the early Modern period. This was about the same time as R. Yosef Karo was producing his Shulchan Aruch in Safed. If one of the rabbis stepped out of the perceived appropriate theological boundaries, they were officially placed under a ban of cherem, or excommunication. However, what they referred to as cherem differs dramatically from the way we understand and implement the concept of cherem today. The earlier forms of excommunication and even charges of heresy were not as severe or even as binding as they are considered nowadays.
Excommunication and heresy in the Christian world
What makes a study like this somewhat confusing is that the terms, ‘heresy’ and ‘excommunication,’ are often taken from a historically non-Jewish setting and applied to a rabbinic context. In earlier Christianity, any deviation from a strict and accepted form of dogma, was considered a heresy. This became complicated by the political shifts between Orthodox Christianity and the Protestant reforms. Historically, in the Christian world, three factors went hand in hand with dealing with bans of ex-communication and charges of heresy:
“First, heresy presumes some dogmatic truth from which it deviates. Second, a formalized institution (a Church, an inquisition, etc.) defines, investigates, and labels the deviance. And finally, some political power enforces the categorization of deviance” (Cooperman 2017:1).
Cherem in the Jewish world
Cherem has long existed in the Jewish world but has been variously understood and interpreted. Cooperman asks whether:
“internal criticism of Jewish tradition and authority in that period can be labeled heresy in the same way that we speak of such things in the Christian environment. Can we ignore the basic fact that for at least two millennia Jews were a far flung set of religious communities usually lacking a centralized organizational structure or enforcement powers? Could there be heresy without Church and State?” (Cooperman 2017:2).
The problem is that, over time, cherem has been confused with the concept of heresy in the Christian world and regarded as a Jewish equivalent of that practice. This became particularly acute during the time of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Haskalah or Enlightenment movement. Many Maskilim (members of the Enlightenment) began to reinterpret centuries-old rabbinic debates in light of their contemporaneous understanding of cherem. Many important rabbis throughout history were indeed placed in cherem, but it was considered to have been similar in form and severity to the excommunication ordered by the Church. Cooperman points out that this was not the case, and notes that the Maskilim:
“inevitably (mis-)read their own struggle back into the past” (Cooperman 2017:2).
Perhaps the Maskilim were reflecting some of their own experiences of being alienated from the mainstream religious community (although many rabbis embraced the Enlightenment. See: Kotzk Blog: 095) TALMUDIC COMMENTATORS WHO EMBRACED THE ENLIGHTENMENT:). The Maskilim often associated intellectually with the classical rabbis, like Maimonides, who they understood as being excommunicated from, and persecuted by, the religious establishment.
We are not discussing Maimonides here, instead, we shall examine cherem in rabbinic sixteenth-century Italy where, certainly, cherem had a very different connotation from the more modern interpretation built from the persecutory implication of the term. Cooperman argues that:
“only rarely were opponents actually able to impose even quite limited ‘bans’ – and even then with little or no lasting impact… [T]he Jewish ban itself was quite limited as a tool of social control. Historians have presented the ban…as diaspora Jews’ substitute for other societies’ enforcement instruments of self governance, tools that were unavailable to Jews in exile. But in their eagerness to find evidence of Jewish autonomy, these historians seem to overstate the effectiveness of excommunication, confusing threatening rhetoric with real efficacy” (Cooperman 2017:3).
In fact, the rabbis had little real authority over their communities beyond the spoken or studied word. Cooperman explains:
“For one thing, the [internal Jewish] ban was always dependent, to one degree or another, on the approval of the outside government. The latter was by no means always willing to countenance or support this arrogation of power and could certainly serve as a court of appeals for any excommunicated Jew. But even more important, halakha (Jewish law) itself did not readily recognize the jurisdiction of the medieval or early modern community beyond city walls; bans could therefore not easily be enforced widely. Finally, rabbis often hesitated at issuing or enforcing a ban, if only because they could not agree to subject the family of the excommunicant to its draconian implications” (Cooperman 2017:3).
Cherem bans were harsher on the ear and psyche than on the individuals themselves. Their force was only regional. According to R. Shlomo ibn Aderet (Rashba):
“When anyone comes into a holy community with a cudgel [that is, an excommunication decree issued elsewhere], those holy ones pay it no mind whatsoever” (Rashba, Minchat Kena’ot, chapter 32: letter to Don Crescas Vital).
Sixteenth-century Italy becomes an interesting backdrop to explore this phenomenon further. It is an interesting place to study the consequences of radical rabbinic thought suppressed by cherem. What was meant by this form of cherem, and how was it to be understood and implemented? What follows are two test cases that I selected out of the three that Cooperman cites:
1) R. Azaria de’ Rossi (1511-1578)
The Italian rabbis were outraged by a daring work on Jewish history by R. Azaria de’ Rossi of Mantua, Italy, titled, Meor Eneyim (Light to the Eyes).[2] Meor Enayim was first published in 1573. The last major work to be produced on Jewish history was by the first-century chronicler, Flavius Josephus. Since then, Jewish history was written by rabbis who were not historians. Maimonides even declared the study of history to be meaningless. But Azariah de’ Rossi had a different approach. He was prepared to rely on:
“non-Jewish sources in his investigation of Jewish history. He was bold, challenging the historical accuracy of rabbinic texts and citing the historians of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the Christian scriptures and many great figures of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He carefully weighed the evidence in his probe into Jewish history and he understood that many Talmudic legends that dealt with events in the Jewish past were precisely that—they were legends. For his time, Azariah was a rebel. Although he never abandoned Jewish faith and practice, he set the stage for a new understanding of Jewish history that broke with the past. The rabbinic texts that cited historical events and figures were legends that attempted to teach a theological lesson. Most of the time, these texts were not historically accurate…It is impossible to think of the modern writing of the history of the Jews without acknowledging this pioneer of Mantua” (Kavon 2016).[3]
According to Cooperman:
“[Azariah de’ Rossi] insisted that slavish defense of the literal meanings of such [rabbinic] texts was not a defense of Judaism but in fact a type of falseness that exposed Judaism to mockery” (Cooperman 2017:6).
It is worthwhile to quote from the writing of Azariah de’ Rossi himself:
“In general, wherever we can take our sages at face value, we [should do so] to the [maximum] limit of our understanding…. [This is so] even in places where the sages are speaking speculatively and in which their opinion is based on human reasoning… Where we cannot [take their words literally] on the grounds that our own experience and reason do not agree with it, we should try to find a way to defend them… The rabbis of blessed memory would, as lovers of the truth, agree with us and be honored by having been honored in a just and correct manner. But […] we must stay far away from any falsehood or hypocrisy. Let nobody deceive himself into forcing [a meaning into] their statements in order to make them conform to his own idea. He must understand that this never occurred to them. By upholding falsehood [...] God forbid, you will make them [the sages] an object of derision for those who rise up against them” (Me’or Enayim, ed. David Cassel, Vilna, 1866, 179).
Cooperman notes:
“Paradoxically Judaism’s truth lies in rejecting an involuted and overly literalist approach” (Cooperman 2017:7).
Azaria de’ Rossi went even further and corrected the text of the Vulgate—the main Latin translation of the Bible, by the fourth-century St Jerome, which later became the official text for the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote another work—also intended for a Christian audience—in which he made some corrections to the Greek text of the New Testament.
Needless to say, such ideas and more, correcting Christian texts and promoting a historical-critical approach to Jewish history, evoked the wrath of the mainstream rabbinate. It is interesting to note that rabbinic opposition to Azaria de’ Rossi—which spread from Mantua to as far as Prague and even Safed—came from a relatively small number of rabbis and not particularly prominent ones at that. Nonetheless, probably because of the enormous expenditure to produce a printed book in those times, Azaria de’ Rossi responded to the criticism and made some minor changes to his work. The the next edition came out with some replacement pages ‘correcting’ his ‘mistakes,’ and responding to some criticism by his opponent, R. Moshe Provencal. The ban against Azaria de’ Rossi was not overwhelming because it came with the suggestion—not instruction—that “purchasers obtain written permission from a local rabbi” (Cooperman 2017:6). Nevertheless, despite all this, Meor Enayim became extremely popular.
2) R. Leon of Modena
(1571–1648)
R. Leon (Yehuda Aryeh) of Modena was another Italian rabbi to face bans of excommunication. He too engaged extensively with Christians and became the master interpreter of Judaism to Christianity. He was an extremely anti-mystical rabbi, with his work, Ari Nohem (The Lion’s Roar) dealing with his rejection of R. Shimon bar Yochai as its author. He claimed that the term ‘Chochmat haKabbalah’ (Wisdom of the Kabbalah) is both misleading and inaccurate as it was neither a ‘wisdom’ nor a ‘tradition’ (Kabbalah means a transmitted tradition), but a fabrication.
On the emergence of the Zohar in 1290, R. Leon of Modena writes:
“If R. Simeon bar Yohai or his
student had written the Zohar [...] thus writing oral or secret things, they
would certainly not have written them in anything but Hebrew, both because of
their inherent sacredness […] and the esotericism appropriate to them. Thus […]
they should not be in a language understandable by women and ignorant people
[as Aramaic was at the time of the ostensible composition of the book] […]. If
someone today wrote a book of kabbalah concerning the mysteries of the Torah,
would he write it in a Christian language – Spanish or German, etc. […]?”
Another proof that the book was written recently and merely attributed to an ancient great figure is that [the author] interwove colored embroidery in an artistic way. I mean by this that the author cleverly prevented the reader from racing through riddles and weighty secrets […] by interweaving simple interpretations of verses, easy to understand and sweeter than honey, like the ‘cute interpretations’ by the rabbis of Castille […] as well as stories of miracles and wonders […]. They are really sweet to those who hear them, how pretty and pleasant they are. I praise the book for its style over any others written over the last 300 years, but this itself proves and shows that they were not written by [talmudic] authors” (R. Leon of Modena, Ari Nohem, ed. Nehemia Shmuel Liebowitz, 1929, 68f).
He writes that he loves the content and literary style of the Zohar and even quotes from it in his teachings, but, he says, he uses it only to entertain the less educated members of his congregation.
Besides this very vocal condemnation of Zohar, regarded by most rabbis as a sacred primary work, it is significant that R. Leon of Modena was still able to express himself by writing in the confines of the ghetto of Venice surrounded by so many who opposed his views. Even in such an environment and notwithstanding the bans issued against him:
“it was [still] possible to argue that only reasoned historical analysis was an acceptably firm foundation for Judaism” (Cooperman 2017:7).
How were such radically challenging approaches like those of R. Azaria de’ Rossi and R. Leon of Modena, amongst others, tolerated by the mainstream conservative rabbinate despite the bans issued against them?
Cherem in sixteenth- and seventh-century Italy
Contrary to popular perception—and perhaps as opposed to current times—these earlier communities were “hardly a straightjacketed cultural environment” (Cooperman 2017:8). From a practical point of view, Jewish communities simply did not have the power to legislate effectively even internally. Nor could they effectively “suppress deviance” (ibid.), no matter how harshly they worded their bans of excommunication and charges of heresy.
According to Cooperman, rabbis like Azaria de’ Rossi and Leon of Modena were not trying to overturn the religious order, and this was apparently evident and quite well understood. There seems to have been some tacit understanding that all voices had their place within the larger religious discourse. There was, of course, a culture of sharp debate that often ended up in declarations of cherem, but these were interpreted as statements of opposition, not outright ex-communication as practised by the Church:
“Rather, these authors were engaged in debate within their community, proud of their own learning and able to express forthrightly their admittedly minority views in the hope and expectation of influencing at least some of their fellows. Their passionate words give us a sense of the collective topography of Jewish intellectual and religious life within the Renaissance community… debate, however loud and even personal, could not readily turn into persecutory violence as it did in the surrounding [Christian] society” (Cooperman 2017:8).
Conclusion
If Cooperman is correct, then our contemporary religious society—in its innermost chambers, not expressed in the flashy window dressing of inclusiveness—has differed from some of its earlier models:
“[W]e may have to rethink our historiographical habit of lumping any halakhic laxity, any theological skepticism, any intellectual experimentation, and any communal structural shift under the single rubric of secularization. The pre-modern Jewish community may have been far less rigid, far less uniform, and effectively far more tolerant than we guessed” (Cooperman 2017:8).
From the seventeenth century, we begin to see a shift beginning to take place in the levels of tolerance for diverse views. Jewish society, although culturally diverse, began to adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach. This manifested in dress and thought patterns. We lost the:
“type of critical thinking [that] flourished without either a breakdown of authority or a falling off of halakhic observance. At some point, however, the situation changed. The community’s flexibility eroded, and what were once intellectual debates and scholarly investigations were now perceived as revolutionary… Famously this is what occurred in seventeenth-century Amsterdam where we know that the tool of excommunication began to be used much more aggressively than before, resulting in the tragic suicide of the humiliated Uriel da Costa and the expulsion of Benedict Spinoza” (Cooperman 2017:9).
Analysis
One of the reasons for this shift to a more aggressive, even punitive orthodoxy with a stronger power of cherem, may simply have been a response to Jewish communities all over Europe becoming larger and their leadership structures more formal. The leadership—particularly the rabbinic leadership—became more politically powerful. In this sense, the discussion of ‘who’s in and who’s out’—and the enforcement thereof—may, ironically, have been an innovation of the Modern Period,[4] something that was absent from earlier models of Judaism.
An interesting statistic that may support this hypothesis is a search on the journal database JSTOR which indicates 26,000 articles dealing with “heresy” and “Christian” and over 10,500 that include “heresy” and “Jewish”. Considering the ratio of Jews to Christians, there does seem to be an uneven Jewish preoccupation with who’s theologically ‘in’ and who’s ‘out.’
Even if we don't have effective mechanisms to enforce a cherem today, we still do so sociologically, as it were. We pass silent (if not audible) judgment on externals like someone’s crocheted yarmulka or style of hat. Children at school are acutely aware of their classmates’ smallest and most insignificant deviations from the ‘correct’ religious ‘norms’ or ‘standards.’ These are just different forms of psychological cherem where the ‘other’ is excluded from the ‘foremost’ group.
Whatever happened to the old adage that no matter your Hashkafa
(theological position), as long as you keep Halacha (the
religious laws of the Shulchan Aruch), you're ‘in’?
[1]
Cooperman, B.D., 2017, ‘Legitimizing Rhetorics: Jewish “Heresy” in Early Modern
Italy’, Études Épistémè, no. 31., 1-17.
[2]
Not to be confused with the popular, and two centuries later, Chassidic
work also titled Meor Einayim, by R. Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl, offering
insights into Kabbalah.
[3]
Online source: https://www.jpost.com/blogs/past-imperfect-confronting-jewish-history/rediscovering-azariah-dei-rossi-471847.
[4]
The Middle Ages also known as the Medieval Period is from the fall of the
Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, up to 1500. The Early Modern Period is usually
defined as between 1500 and 1800. This turned into the Modern Period, beginning
from the nineteenth century. Contemporary history is usually defined the period
from the end of the Second World War.
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