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I first met Elie Wiesel in the summer of 1965. Wiesel’s book Night had been translated into English five years earlier. Night was just beginning to be recognized in English-speaking countries. Wiesel was not yet then the impressive speaker he was soon to become. As he addressed the audience that summer about the horrors of the Holocaust, Wiesel was diffident to the point of shyness.

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Many people assume that repentance is and always has been a substantial part of the Bible, but that was not always the case. In the following interview between Luke Drake, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Lambert, an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture, the two discuss how repentance came to be seen as a part of the Bible and the early history of repentance as a concept.

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The OUP Philosophy team has selected Baruch Spinoza as their December Philosopher of the Month. Born in Amsterdam, Spinoza has been called the “Prince of Philosophy” due to his revelatory work in ethics, epistemology, and other fields of philosophy. His works include 'The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy', 'Theologico-Political Treatise', and his magnum opus, 'Ethics'.

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At its root, Islam is as much a Western religion as are Judaism and Christianity, having emerged from the same geographic and cultural milieu as its predecessors. For centuries we lived at a more or less comfortable distance from one another. Post-colonialism and economic globalization, and the strategic concerns that attended them, have drawn us into an ever-tighter web of inter-relations.

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Anglo-Saxon England may seem like a solidly monochrome Christian society from a modern perspective. And in many respects it was. The only substantial religious minority in early medieval Western Europe, the Jews, was entirely absent from England before the Norman Conquest.

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Together with Ulysses, Abraham is the earliest culture hero in the Western world. More precisely, as Kierkegaard, who called him ‘the knight of faith,’ reminds us, he has remained, throughout the centuries, the prototype of the religious man, of the man of faith. The wandering Aramean from the Book of Genesis, who rejected his parents’ idols and native Mesopotamia to follow the call of the One God to the land of Canaan, started a saga reverberated not only in early Jewish literature, but also in the New Testament (Galatians 3: 6-8), and in early Christian literature.

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I remember the Passover Seder as a very special time. My brothers and I got new clothes that we had to save specially until that evening; this heightened our sense of anticipation and symbolized the special nature of this holiday. I can still envision preparing for Passover in the Orthodox home of my childhood: I remember the frenzied work of emptying out all our cabinets, packing up the food we ate for the other 357 days of the year and lining all the cabinets, the stove, and the refrigerator with extra thick aluminum foil.

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Grove Music Online presents this multi-part series by Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the life of Jewish musician Salamone Rossi on the anniversary of his birth in 1570. Professor Harrán considers three major questions: Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews; Rossi as a Jew among Christians; and the conclusions to be drawn from both. Previous installments include “Salamone Rossi, Jewish musician in Renaissance Mantua”; “Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews”; and “Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Gentiles”.

Near to Salamone Rossi’s time, and working at the Mantuan court, is the harpist Abramino dall’Arpa. His story illustrates the unrelenting pressure brought on Jews to convert and, at the same time, Abramino’s refusal to do so. One reads, for example, that in 1582 Abramino and his son were convened to meet with a “master of theology,” but they didn’t show up, escaping to Ferrara. The authorities intensified their efforts. In June 1587 the singer Giovanni Andrea Robbiato, on the way back to Mantua with Abramino as his travel companion, is said to have explained to him that the “Christian religion … was the best and the only one to be practiced, superseding what Jews profess,” but Abramino “did not agree, even though he appeared to listen.” After arriving in Mantua, Robbiato took Abramino to the church of Santa Barbara to see the baptism of the duke’s grandson, and “Abramino appeared to be pleased with the ceremonies.” A monk clarified to him “the substance of the said sacrament of the Holy Baptism, explaining it by comparison with circumcision,” yet Abramino remained silent. Rumors of the incident immediately spread to the Jewish community, and in the evening Abramino’s uncle together with the rabbi Judah Moscato came to talk sense into him (Robbiato “approached to hear what they were saying, but they spoke Hebrew to keep him from understanding them”).

The Christians kept up their coercive endeavor, while at the same time the Jews urged Abramino to “continue in the Hebrew faith and not give ear to words spoken to him about becoming a Christian.” Infuriated, Duke Guglielmo ordered Abramino and the interfering Jews to be arrested and separately examined to determine once and for all what the musician’s intentions were. Did Abramino yield to the pressure? Apparently not, for five years later (1593, the last date we have for him) he is addressed as ebreo.

Similar pressure was probably brought on Rossi. He too resisted. But he didn’t resist the secularization of his music; his Italian vocal and his instrumental works follow the conventions of late Renaissance composition as practiced by Christians. Or do they? Is there anything about his works that, despite their otherwise Renaissance appearance, might be described as “Jewish”? Indeed, what is musically “Jewish”?

If anything “Jewish” can be detected in his vocal music, it is in the way Rossi fits his music to the words. For Rossi, music was subservient to the structural and affective demands of the text. But Rossi’s way of having the text dominate the music is by highlighting words through a plain, unobtrusive setting, as familiar perhaps from music in the synagogue, in particular the cantillation of Scriptures in which melodies don’t compete with the text. So what is Italian? What is Jewish? Only once, toward the end of his career, did Rossi allow the music to “compete” with the text in importance, in his Madrigaletti for two voices and basso continuo from 1628.

As a parallel question, one might ask: is there anything particularly Jewish about his instrumental works? Instrumental music didn’t win the approval of the rabbis, for it escaped the control of words and was often used in banqueting. The rabbis maintained that with the destruction of the Temple it was wrong to play instruments until the Messiah reinstated them by returning the Jews to Zion. Even so, instrumental music was recognized by the Jews as an expedient for spiritual elevation. Elisha, the prophet, is said to have requested a minstrel to come and awaken his powers of prophecy (in 2 Kings 3:15 one reads that when the minstrel played the power of the Lord came upon him).

For Rossi instrumental music was a natural vehicle of expression. In his instrumental works he wasn’t hampered by the semantic restrictions of words, rather he could forge his works as he desired. Not only that, but through his instrumental music he established his reputation at the court. Rossi was the only composer of instrumental music in Mantua, publishing four collections of instrumental works.

It was in his third collection of instrumental music, from 1613, that Rossi developed a more demanding, indeed virtuoso mode of expression. Rossi opened his third book of instrumental works with a sonata in a “modern” style (“Sonata prima detta la moderna”) and continues in this style with the remaining items in the collection, as in “Sonata terza sopra l’Aria della Romanesca”.

Rossi’s new approach to instrumental writing in this book directed him to try a new approach to vocal writing, as is clear from his last collection, the madrigaletti, which, in their style of writing, are truly “modern”. Whether these novel instrumental and vocal works improved Rossi’s situation in the court cannot be said. Perhaps they did, though as evidence to the contrary it might be recalled that in the years after 1613 Rossi turned his attention to composing Hebrew works. There he was under no pressure to be “modern”. The very notion of writing music to Hebrew according to the conventions of art music was, for a Jewish audience, itself “modern”. Here is another work from the “Songs by Solomon,” no. 29, “Adon ‘olam” (for eight voices).

 

Headline image credit: Opening of Salomone de Rossi’s Madrigaletti, Venice, 1628. Photo of Exhibit at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Wiseman, Eva. 2012. The Last Song. Plattsburgh, NY: Tundra.

Some locations and eras appear regularly in historical fiction  - the US during the Civil War, the Midwest during the Dust Bowl Era, the British Isles in the medieval period, Europe during the Holocaust, the list goes on ... but seldom does it include Spain during the Inquisition.

In this first-person, chronological account, teenager Doña Isabel learns her family's deepest secret - her parents are not devout Catholics as she was raised to be.  Secretly, they practice the Jewish faith - a practice punishable by death under the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella, and their Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada.  Set in Toledo, Spain, 1491, Isabel is the daughter of the King's physician, a position that has always kept the family in wealth and privilege.  As the Inquisition grows more brutal, suspected heretics are forced to wear sambenitos (sackcloth), they are beaten, tortured, murdered, and burned alive at autos-da-fé.

I looked around to keep awake.  The church's walls were festooned with the sambenitos of the heretics who had been burned alive at the stake during different autos-de-fé. 

"So many sambenitos," I whispered to Mama.  "They should take them off the wall."

She rolled her eyes. "They are supposed to be reminders to the families of the condemned heretics.  They are warnings to them not to follow in the footsteps of their relatives," she whispered.  "They are a warning to us all."

 Her words filled me with fear.

Her parents decide that to keep Isabel safe from the Inquisition, they will promise her in marriage to the son of the King and Queen's most trusted advisor. Luis is loathsome, however, and instead of Luis, Isabel falls in love with Yonah, a young Jewish silversmith, Soon the lives of the entire family are in danger.

If Isabel abandons her lifelong faith a little too easily and if Eva Wiseman paints Isabel's future a little too brightly, this is a small price to pay for a book suits an older, middle-grade audience and draws attention to a terrible period of religious persecution that is not often covered for this age group, grades 6 and up.



Spoiler:
Ironically (in light of today's current political, social and religious climate), Isabel and her family leave Spain counting Moorish refugees as their friends.  Together they head to Morocco in search of freedom and a better life. How much has changed; and yet, how much remains the same.  We learn so little.


Note:
My copy of The Last Song was provided by LibraryThing Early Reviewers. I'm sorry that I did not get to it sooner.

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The story that most Jewish children learn about the holiday of Chanukah is that it commemorates the Jews’ victory over foreign invaders and their sullying cultural influences. Around 200 B.C.E., Judea was the rope in a tug of war between two stronger powers: the Ptolemic dynasty of Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of Syria. The Seleucids, led by the kings Antiochus III & IV, won when Antiochus invaded Judea in 175 B.C.E. But in 170 B.C.E. the Jews who favored Egypt took control from the camp that favored Syria. According to the Roman historian Flavius Josephus, Antiochus IV invaded Judea a second time, and not only slaughtered many Jews but also defiled the Temple in Jerusalem, offering swine as sacrifice to pagan gods on its altar.

Cue the heroes: the Maccabees (whose name means “Hammer”), the original Mattisyahu, and his seven sons, including Judah. Together they defeated the forces of King Antiochus and cleansed the Temple in Jerusalem of all of its Seleucid-introduced impurities. A small amount of oil that was enough to last for a single day lasted for eight instead, and with this somewhat pedestrian miracle the festival of Chanukah was born.

It was a miracle whose veracity has been questioned since the Middle Ages, and contemporary scholars have complicated the story quite a bit. The real struggle, they tell us, was not so much between Jews and foreign invaders, but a civil war between the Jews who followed Greek ways and those Maccabean Jews who opposed them.

In other words, the story of Chanukah at its heart is a story of a struggle of a small people torn between stronger nations with powerful cultures. We focus on the symbolic act of purification and cleansing, but we tend to obfuscate the larger cultural terrain. Ancient Jews were fighting not just against foreigners but amongst themselves over whose culture to adapt and to what degree. Cultural adaptations came from within, not just from without.

There may have been a military victory over Syria’s army and the Hellenizing Jews, but the Jews of ancient Palestine were already deeply and inextricably linked to the nations and the cultures of their region. That is, they were not just multicultural (of many discrete cultures) or transcultural (crossing cultural borders); they were polycultural. Their cultural diversity already was internalized and they patched their cultures together based on overlapping similarities, not just warring differences.

So too with today’s Black Israelites, people who believe that the ancient Israelites were Black and that contemporary Black people are their descendants. People of many different faiths have been Black Israelites. In the 1890s there was a wave of Black Israelite churches that came out of the Holiness movement. At the turn of the twentieth century, Anglo-Israelite beliefs helped inspire the Pentecostal movement, the most numerous new religious movement of the twentieth century. During the Harlem Renaissance, Black Israelite beliefs became popular among some who practiced forms of rabbinic Judaism, and the following decade the belief took root in Black Islam and in Jamaican Rastafarianism. During the organizing and militancy of the long 1960s the ideology found supporters among patriarchal and macho advocates of Hebrew Israelite faiths. A tiny fragment of the Hebrew Israelites will yell at passersby on New York street corners to this day, and yell at each other in attempts to purify their practice from any of the contamination of rabbinic Judaism.

But what goes unnoticed is that each of these religions continue to this day. Moreover, each of them change, just as the individuals within them change in their religious practice, growing more or less observant, or moving from one group to the other. It helps to think of these religious waves not as groups or sects but as movements — constantly in the process of becoming. Religious changes also happen inter-generationally, not just within the life of individuals. Many of the children of Black Jews have become more, not less religious. Gradually, over time, Black Jews have become more, not less halachic. The followers of the biggest portion of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, one of the original Holiness groups, now believe that their founding prophet only used the word “Christ” as a necessary expedient, and practice their own unique form of Judaism. Their music has been passed down “mouth to ear” for over a  century, and is some of the most beautiful choral music not just among American Jews, but in American music, period.

Black Israelites teach us that cultures are really polycultural. They are formed not by heated battles between warring binaries, but by acts of collage that emphasize overlapping similarities between dozens of inputs, many of which are already internalized within. This is a more helpful view than picturing cultural formation as the resolution of antagonism between holistic and hostile camps coming from without.

Returning to the story of Chanukah, we can understand history better by focusing not on the moment of conquest and purification but on all the cultures that Jews of Josephus’ day shared with their neighbors, just as we can understand American culture today and in the past by understanding how continuous cultural flows have created polycultures and defied efforts to categorize, rank, or purify. I like it that way.

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Everyone talks about the Bible, though few have read it cover to cover. This is not surprising—some sections of the Bible are difficult to understand without a commentary, others are tedious, and still others are boring. That is why annotated Bibles were created—to help orient readers as they read through the Bible or look into what parts of it mean. For those who have not read the Bible cover-to-cover—and even for many who have—here are some common misconceptions about the Hebrew Bible.

1. The Ten Commandments are the most important part of the Bible.

No biblical text calls them the Bible’s most important part. Various prophetic texts such as Ezekiel 18 summarize righteous behavior, but most of these do not refer to the Ten Commandments. In fact, the English term “Ten Commandments” is a misnomer from a Jewish perspective, since in the Jewish enumeration, “I am the LORD your God…” is the first divine utterance in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, and it is not a commandment at all. Thus, Jews prefer to call these the Decalogue, “the ten sayings,” which reflects the Hebrew aseret hadevarim (Exodus 24:38; Deuteronomy 4:13; 10:4).

2. We know what the original text of the Bible is.

Like all texts transmitted in antiquity, the Bible in its earliest stages of transmission was fluid. Scribes changed books that became part of the Bible accidentally and on purpose; this is now clear from evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

3. The Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament are different names for the same books.

The Jewish Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament contain the same books, but in a different order—and order matters. The Catholic Old Testament is larger than the Jewish Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament. It contains the Apocrypha—select Jewish Hellenistic [Greek] Writings such as Sirach, Tobit, and Maccabees—and in two cases, Esther and Daniel, the Catholic book is larger than the Hebrew book, containing material found in the Greek texts of these works, but not in the Hebrew.

4. We know the order of the biblical books.

Different religious groups have different orders to the Bible. Christians typically divide the Old Testament into four sections (Law [=Torah], historical books, wisdom and poetic books, prophetic books), while Jews divide the Hebrew Bible into three sections: Torah, Nevi’im [prophets] and Ketuvim [writings]. Both of these ways of ordering biblical texts probably reflect different ancient Jewish orders that ultimately helped to define Jewish versus Christian identity. In addition, Jewish manuscripts show many different orders of the final section, Ketuvim, and the Babylonian Talmud notes an order of Nevi’im that is different than the more commonly used.

5. Everything in a prophetic book is by that prophet.

Many prophetic books contain titles or superscriptions, as in Jeremiah 1:1-3: “The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests at Anathoth in the territory of Benjamin. The word of the LORD came to him in the days of King Josiah son of Amon of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign, and throughout the days of King Jehoiakim son of Josiah of Judah, and until the end of the eleventh year of King Zedekiah son of Josiah of Judah, when Jerusalem went into exile in the fifth month.” However, we never have the autographs of individual prophets, and often their disciples and others added material to early forms of prophetic books, in the names of the prophet himself!

6. The Bible is history.

The modern concept of history, judged by whether or not it gets the facts right, is by and large a modern conception. In the past, all peoples told stories set in the past for a variety of reasons, e.g. to entertain, to enlighten, but rarely to recreate what actually happened. Archaeologists have uncovered many cases where the biblical account disagrees with the archaeological account, or with what we might know from other ancient Near Eastern texts.

7. All of the Psalms are by King David.

About half of the psalms in Psalms contain the word ledavid, “to/of David,” in their first sentence. But many do not. Some are anonymous, while others are explicitly attributed to other figures such as Asaph (50, 73-81). We are not even sure how ledavid should be translated—does it mean to attribute authorship to David, or might it mean “in the style of David”? Furthermore, none of the psalms reflects tenth century Hebrew, the Hebrew of the period in which David was purported to have lived, and several psalms refer to events long after that period (see e.g. Psalm 126:1). In fact, scholars do not attribute any of Psalms to King David. And at least in Jewish tradition, attributing all of the Psalter to David is not dogma, and several medieval scholars acknowledge the existence of later psalms.

Headline image credit: By Alexander Smolianitski CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Grove Music Online presents this multi-part series by Don Harrán, Artur Rubinstein Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on the life of Jewish musician Salamone Rossi on the anniversary of his birth in 1570. Professor Harrán considers three major questions: Salamone Rossi as a Jew among Jews; Rossi as a Jew among Christians; and the conclusions to be drawn from both. The following is the second installment, continued from part one.

By introducing “art music” into the synagogue Rossi was asking for trouble. He is said by Leon Modena (d. 1648), the person who encouraged him to write his Hebrew songs, to have “worked and labored to add from his secular to his sacred works” (“secular” meaning Gentile compositions). As happened when Modena tried to introduce art music into the synagogue in 1605, he and Rossi feared the composer’s works would awaken hostility. To answer prospective objections, Modena added to Rossi’s collection of “songs” the same responsum he wrote, many years before, on the legitimacy of performing art music in the synagogue. He said:

It could be that among the exiled there are sanctimonious persons who try to eliminate anything new in the synagogue or would prohibit a collection of Hebrew “songs.” To avoid this, I decided to reproduce here in print what I wrote in my responsum eighteen years ago with the intention of closing the mouth of anyone speaking nonsense about art music.

To quiet these same “sanctimonious persons” Rossi was in need of a patron. He found him in Moses Sullam, whom he described as a “courageous, versatile man, in whom all learning and greatness are contained.” Sullam encouraged Rossi to overcome the obstacles in the way of composing Hebrew songs, as it was not easy to write to Hebrew words with their accentual and syntactic demands so different from those in Italian. “How many times did I toil, at your command,” so Rossi declares, “until I was satisfied, ordering my songs with joyful lips.” Sullam had his own private synagogue, and it was there that Rossi probably first tried out the songs to gauge the reaction of singers and listeners. His efforts were favorably received. “When people sang them,” Modena reports, “they were delighted with their many good qualities. The listeners too were radiant, each of them finding it pleasant to hear them and wishing to hear more.” Rossi must have taken heart from these and other “friends”—thus they are called in the preface to the collection.

But it was not enough to have the influential Sullam, “highly successful and well known in Mantua,” behind him. Rossi needed rabbinical support, and here Modena, who followed the progress of the collection from its inception, rushed to his defense. For Modena the collection marked the resuscitation of Hebrew art music after its being forgotten with the destruction of the Second Temple. Modena exalted the composer, noting his importance in what he described as a Jewish musical renascence. He wrote that “the events of our foreign dwellings and of our restless running are dispersed over the lands, and the vicissitudes of life abroad were enough to make them [the Jews] forget all knowledge and lose all intellect.” Yet what was lost has now been recovered. “Let them praise the name of the Lord, for Solomon [= Salamone, in reference to King Solomon] alone is exalted nowadays in this wisdom. Not only is he wiser in music than any man of our nation” but he restored the once glorious music heard in the Temple.

Rossi, who was scared to death over how his Hebrew works would be received, asked Modena to prepare them for the printer; in Rossi’s words, “I asked him to prevent any mishap from coming to the composition, to prepare it [for typesetting], embellish it, proofread it, and look out for typographical errors and defects.” Modena composed a foreword to the collection and three dedicatory poems; he included, as already said, the early responsum from 1605 together with its approval by five Venetian rabbis. The collection went out into the world with as much rabbinical support as any composer could hope to receive.

The major problem for Rossi and Modena was how to narrow the gap between contemporary art music practiced by the Christians and Hebrew music practiced in the synagogue. To do this, Modena resorted to a clever remark of Immanuel Haromi, who wrote around 1335: “What will the science of music [niggun] say to others? ‘I was stolen, yes stolen from the land of the Hebrews’ [Genesis 40:15: gunnov gunnavti mi-eretz ha-‘ivrim].” If the Christians “stole” their music from the Hebrews, who, in their wanderings, forgot their former musical knowledge, then by cultivating art music in the early seventeenth century the Jews in a sense recuperated what was theirs to start with. In short, the only thing that separates the art music of the Jews from that of the Christians is its language: Hebrew.

When he composed his Hebrew works Rossi seems to have had one thing in mind: he was interested in their beautiful performance. Christians, who were familiar with Jewish sacred music from their visits to the synagogues, were usually shocked by what they heard. Here is how Gregorio Leti described Jewish prayer services in Rome in 1675:

No sooner do they [the Jews] enter their sanctuary than they begin to shout with angry voices, shaking their heads back and forth, making certain terribly ridiculous gestures, only to continue, sitting down, with these same shouts, which “beautiful” music lasts until their rabbi begins his sermon.

Even Leon Modena, who was a cantor at the Italian synagogue in Venice, was disappointed with the way music was performed in the synagogue. He rebuked the cantors for being so negligent as “to bray like asses” or “shout to the God of our fathers as a dog and a crow.” Oh, how the Jews are fallen, for “we were once masters of music in our prayers and our praises now become a laughingstock to the nations, for them to say that no longer is science in our midst.”

Both Modena and Rossi were concerned over how Christians would respond to Jewish music. They wanted to prove that whatever the Christians do, the Jews can do equally well. They may not be physically strong, Modena explains, but, in the “sciences,” they are outstanding:

No more will bitter words about the Hebrew people
be uttered, in a voice of scorn, by the haughty.

They will see that full understanding is as much a portion
of theirs [the people’s] as of others who flaunt it.

Though weak in [dealing] blows, in sciences
they [the people] are a hero, as strong as oaks.

[Third dedicatory poem by Leon Modena to Rossi’s “Songs by Solomon.”]

Headline image credit: Esther Scroll by Salom Italia, circa 1641. The Jewish Museum (New York City). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The twofold brilliance of Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking, autobiographical Maus is the graphic novel's lack of sentimentality and Spiegelman's self-portrait as a secondhand Holocaust survivor. The Holocaust is a widely used trope in Jewish American writing and although Spiegelman treats the subject with the compassion and historical sensitivity it merits, Maus avoids the themes of victimization [...]

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By Andrew Rabin

On a shelf by my desk rests a pale, cloth-bound octavo volume entitled Leges Anglo-Saxonum, 601-925, published in 1958 by the German philologist Karl August Eckhardt. Inside, the volume’s dedication reads, “Dem andenken Felix Liebermanns” (“In memory of Felix Liebermann”). On its face, this seems perfectly innocuous: what could be more natural than one scholar paying tribute to another, especially someone generally considered among Germany’s greatest medievalists? Yet the dedication conceals a disturbing history, for Liebermann had been a member of one of Berlin’s foremost Jewish families, one nearly wiped out in the Holocaust, and Eckhardt was a dedicated Nazi, a Sturbannführer in the SS, and a close friend to Heinrich Himmler, the leading architect of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

Why did Eckhardt dedicate his book to Liebermann, and how should this shape our understanding of his work? To answer these questions, it’s necessary to learn a bit about the individuals themselves, starting with Felix Liebermann.

Liebermann was born in 1851 to a family of wealthy German-Jewish textile merchants. Against his father’s wishes, he pursued a degree in philology at the University of Göttingen and subsequently joined the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a project editing the major records of early Germanic culture. In 1883, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Munich invited him to produce a new edition of Anglo-Saxon law. The result, published in three volumes between 1903 and 1916, was the Gesetze der Angelsachsen, a monumental accomplishment numbered among the greatest achievements in the history of scholarly editing. Its reception was summed up by the historian Frederic William Maitland, who described Liebermann as “a Sherlock Holmes of today” and the Gesetze as “the best work that has hitherto been done on historical materials of a similar kind.”

Jewish themes surface only occasionally in Liebermann’s writings, yet their appearance suggests that he saw his religious and professional identities as complementary. For instance, in a lecture to the Jewish Historical Society of England, he suggested that Jews should take pride in the fact that “the gem so honored by [England's] greatest king, the founder of the English constitution, as Alfred was called in the twelfth century, was the Mosaic law.” More pointedly, he did not hesitate to harshly and publicly criticize those who concealed anti-Jewish sentiments behind a facade of disinterested scholarship, such as the historian J. M. Rigg, who suggested a factual basis for the medieval “blood libel” legend. Though Liebermann took pride in his Jewishness, it nonetheless had significant consequences for his career. In Germany, he never received a full university appointment, while in England he was mocked as “Stubbs’s Jew” (a reference to his friendship with Bishop William Stubbs) and denied a Cambridge professorship, ostensibly because of an otherwise-unattested stutter. Though Liebermann himself died in 1925, well before Hitler came to power, others in his family felt the full brunt of Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1938, the Liebermann family, including Felix’s widow Cäcilie, saw their home and possessions confiscated. Five years later, Cäcilie would die just weeks before she was to be deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Shortly afterwards, Martha Liebermann, widow of Felix’s brother, the modernist painter Max Liebermann, committed suicide to avoid the same fate.

The history of Liebermann and his family furnishes part of the backdrop against which to read the dedication in the Leges Anglo-Saxonum; the rest must be filled in from the life of Eckhardt himself. Eckhardt was born in 1901 into a family of lawyers and judges. He completed a doctorate in law at Marburg in 1922 and then went on to study Germanic history at Göttingen. His editions of medieval lawbooks earned him a reputation for both brilliance and productivity that led to faculty positions at Keil, Bonn, and Berlin. At the same time, however, he was also growing more engaged with right-wing politics. He joined the SA in 1931, the Nazi Party in 1932, and the SS in 1933. By 1934, he had become a member of Himmler’s personal staff. In this capacity, Eckhardt oversaw the expulsion of Jewish academics from German universities, developed policies penalizing students who spoke out against the regime, and ghost-wrote speeches on Himmler’s behalf, most notably his 1936 address calling for the extermination of homosexuals. Eckhardt also composed a number of pseudo-scholarly pamphlets on topics of interest to Himmler, including ancient Germanic mysticism and the question of whether Jesus was actually Jewish (Eckhardt concluded that he wasn’t). When war came, he was drafted into the army and posted to Paris, where he spent his time carrying out research in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Though briefly imprisoned in 1944-5, he was deemed too insignificant for prosecution. Eckhardt returned to scholarly life and, over the next twenty-five years, published a series of influential editions — most notably of the Lex Salica and the Schwabenspiegel — that confirmed the promise of his early career. He died in 1979.

Eckhardt has often been spoken of as two people, the scholar and the Nazi, but it can be difficult to separate the two. He frequently twisted his scholarship to support his political views, as when he argued (in an essay titled “Unnatural Sex Deserves Death”) that ancient Germanic law offered legal precedent for the execution of homosexuals. Likewise, even in his serious scholarship, he often sought to emphasize the purity of Germanic law and its freedom from the taint of Jewish influence (a notable contrast to the pride Liebermann took in the Mosaic influence on Alfred’s laws).

In this light, it is difficult to escape the impression that Eckhardt was using Liebermann’s memory to innoculate himself against his own history. Association with Liebermann allowed him to claim a scholarly pedigree while dismissing the implication that his political record reflected anything more than dedicated (if misguided) patriotism. Yet how should Eckhardt’s history — along with his attempts to erase that history — affect our perception of his scholarship? We cannot simply avoid Eckhardt: like it or not, his serious historical work is too important to dismiss out of hand. But Eckhardt’s history still raises uncomfortable questions: how might our research — and indeed, the shape of early medieval legal history as a discipline — have been influenced, albeit unconsciously, by Eckhardt’s noxious ideology? And is our use of his work, however necessary it may be, complicit in his attempt to erase his involvement in one of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities?

If Borges was right and every library is a labyrinth, then inside every library lurks a monster. In my library, the monster is Karl August Eckhardt.

Andrew Rabin is an associate professor of English at the University of Louisville. He has published extensively on early medieval law and literature. His next book, The Political Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York, will be published this fall by Manchester University Press. He is a forthcoming contributor to Oxford Bibliographies in British and Irish Literature.

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The post Monsters in the library: Karl August Eckhardt and Felix Liebermann appeared first on OUPblog.

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Veteran Hollywood film and TV writer Laurice Elehwany Molinari bursts into the children’s book world with an outstanding debut novel, The Ether: Vero Rising—a fantastical middle grade story on good vs. evil.

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My daughter’s name is Lara. It was one of the few female names my wife and I agreed on. I don’t remember who proposed it, but I know it was on the list I started in my early twenties. (Yes, I am that guy.) And I know my wife latched onto it after being swept up by Doctor Zhivago (which I still have not seen).

Though my wife might never believe me, and I can barely believe this myself, in deciding on the name for our baby girl, I did not remember that the name of Superman’s biological mother is Lara. In other words, I didn’t secretly propose/go along with the name because of my fondness for the Man of Steel.

My son’s name is Rafael. It was, I believe, the only male name my wife and I agreed on. (One of my first choices—Clark—was nixed even faster than I nixed one of her first choices…Fritz. Cut some slack. She’s German.)

I’m Jewish and because my wife is not, she gave her blessing for our son’s Hebrew name to be “Kal-El”—which is Superman’s Kryptonian name. Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman was not yet out so my life was not yet so linked to Superman, but even then I felt going this route would be too fannish. I did not want our son—who may not care a whit about Superman—to be saddled with a Hebrew name he would not be able to say without a sigh.

So instead, we chose “Emet”—“truth” in Hebrew. (This was inspired by the motto of my alma mater, Brandeis University: “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”)

And just like I had a revelation only after naming our daughter, I had one with our son as well. I recently realized that, perhaps subconsciously, I did saddle him with a Superman name after all:

Rafa-El.

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In 2004, I wrote a picture book manuscript called Everyone is the Only One. (I remember precisely where I was when the idea hit: the guest room in a friend’s house.)

It is about a boy named Ansel who feels uncomfortable for being the only dwarf at his new elementary school. Once his classmates learn this, they remind him one by one that each of them is also the only one in some way…only one with braces, only one allergic to peanuts, only only child, and so on.

I submitted to editors. No takers.

A couple of years later, I learned that the idea actually did get published, and in the year I sent it around…just not by me. Jane Naliboff’s The Only One Club follows a similar premise, except the central character’s distinction is that she is Jewish.

I’m glad this concept saw print, and I like Jane’s spin (not only the Judaism angle, which was what I had considered prior to dwarfism, but also that the first Only One starts a club revolving around it).

Parents and educators: I encourage you to encourage your kids to look at their circle of intimates and determine the ways in which each of them is also the only one. It’s a wonderful and worthy challenge that will get kids thinking about how we are different and how that is good.

“Instead of always telling our children that we are all equal and the same, we should tell them that we are all different. Saying we’re the same naturally makes them look for differences. Conversely, saying we’re all different (in appearance, cultures, etc.) makes them instinctively look for ways we’re alike.” 
—Erica L. Scott, Binghamton, NY, 2009 letter to Newsweek

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My second time in Tennessee took me to two schools in one day and the Knoxville Children’s Festival of Reading the next day.

The first school was a Jewish day school, where the setup enabled me to take this photo of two symbols which, to me, each speak of peace:


The other school was an Episcopal day school, so it was a day of unity.

The festival was the morning after rain, and held on a field, which had turned to grassy muck, which meant the one pair of shoes I brought was the wrong pair of shoes. Luckily, that was the only downside; the crowds were fun, I received a special gift, and I sat on a panel with people whose work I admire.



During that panel, a girl in the audience asked us a question I found profound: how do we as adults relate to the kids we write for? 

I wish I could say my answer was that I stuck out my tongue, but it was not that clever. Whatever I did stammer out was heartfelt, but still a real missed opportunity on that one.


If you have ever wondered what a panel of authors looks like the night before the panel, mystery solved:

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10 p.m.

That's approximately what time I began my hourlong 6/29/13 talk at ILTC, an annual summer event held by the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization (of which I was a proud member) in Pennsylvania.

The attendees are Jewish teens (this year, about 230) from around the world who want to strengthen their own leadership skills—and therefore their regions. In fact, the theme this year was "Strength to Strength," so it was appropriate that I came bearing stories not only of superheroes but also their (Jewish) creators (who were strong in non-physical ways).

It was the latest I have ever started a presentation. But teens—especially teens in summer, and especially teens in summer away from home—are immortal. Time is an endless river. Night is an adrenaline boost.

While in BBYO, I attended two international conventions, but not ILTC. Funny that I finally made it there, at age 41. Both of my ICs were at a camp in Starlight, Pennsylvania...and it turns out that camp was right next to this one, in Lake Como, PA. Or maybe Starlight is now Lake Como? I wasn't clear. 

Beyond the most obvious, like cell phones, I observed several fixtures that weren't present when I was in BBYO, including Purell dispensers and dangling name badges for everyone. The culture has gotten more protective against both germs and strangers. Though all wore a badge, I find only one visible in this photo; you'll have to squint:


And I came across a familiar face:




I gave the talk on the kind of stage I spoke/played on numerous times as a BBYO member. I don't use notes but do have my PowerPoint slides printed out so I don't botch the order of any of the surprise reveals. As you can see, I improvised a podium:
 

During the closing Q&A, the first question was about as humbling as it gets: "Can you come speak to my region?"

My digs for the night:





The lodge included a bookshop, though it looks more like a library:




And there was this great old photo whose caption was even greater:


Thank you again, BBYO, for inviting me back into the fold for a day. It was, and will always be, my honor.

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For the second year in a row, I’m thrilled to be on the author roster of the Jewish Book Council Network.


Last year I got to talk about Batman. This year Superman. And as if on cue, upon arriving in New York City on 6/2/13 to give my two-minute pitch to a roomful of programming directors from 100 Jewish institutions across North America, I see and snap this:


The scene juxtaposes two American icons forged in the same decade: the Empire State Building (completed 1931) and the Man of Steel (conceived 1933, debuted 1938).

The room in which about 50 authors presented back-to-back, and some of the people to whom we presented:



I look forward to coming to as many of your communities as possible over the next year.

Here was my two-minute pitch:

During dangerous times, a baby boy is born. For his own good, his parents give him up, sending him off in a vessel. Another family finds him and raises him as their own, without knowing where he came from. Eventually, he learns his history…and his destiny…and becomes a savior.

Sound familiar?

Yes, Moses…but also Superman. As his planet is about to explode, his parents launch him to safety in a rocket. He lands on Earth an infant, a Kansas couple adopts him, and he grows up to be the world’s greatest superhero.

He was also the world’s first, created during the Depression by two Jewish teens, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster. They were geeks before the word existed.

Was the Moses parallel intentional? Did Hitler himself call Superman a Jew and ban his comics from Nazi Germany? What is the Jewish connection to Superman’s Kryptonian name? And why did Shabbat prevent Joe from drawing Superman? No, not the obvious reason!

Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman answers these questions, debunks myths, and solves mysteries. It’s an all-ages book and the first standalone bio on the men of Cleveland behind the Man of Steel. It’s both inspirational and heartbreaking—even to people who couldn’t care less about superheroes. It reveals a discovery that made the front page of USA Today. It in part led to my TED talk. And it’s an Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book of Jewish Content, the revised edition of which is out this year for the 75th anniversary of Superman.

I’ve been invited to speak to standing-room-only adult audiences at Jewish institutions nationwide, and I’m thrilled to be on the JBC Network for the second year in a row. Let’s celebrate this icon together, along with truth, justice, and the Jewish-American way.

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On 3/31/13, I had the honor of speaking about the mystery behind the majority creator of Batman at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

They hosted the traveling Jews/superheroes exhibit, which includes a Bill Finger script that Jerry Robinson donated. The bio gets a few things wrong (starting with the city in which Bill was born), but the exhibit is fun.

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The fall of 2012, I was in synagogue a lot. I’m talking beyond the High Holy Days.

On 10/21/12, I spoke about Superman at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, MD.

On 10/28/12 (as the hurricane Sandy approached), I spoke about Superman and Batman at Adas Israel in Washington DC.

On 11/11/12, I returned to Beth El in Bethesda, MD. In the spring, I had spoken there on Superman. This time it was Batman.

 


After my Beth Ami talk, a young woman told me she’d recently learned the American Sign Language sign for Superman. It was so cool and something that had never occurred to me. (I also learned that Batman doesn’t have his own.)

My kind host at Adas told me that some of its nursery school kids would wait in front of the electronic bulletin board in the lobby for the Superman/Batman advertisement to come on. Adorkable. (To be clear, I’m the dork. They’re the rest.)

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The Jewish Book Council, whose speaking roster I am on this year, reviewed Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman.

I especially appreciated these observations:

“His identity remains unknown—no longer”

“structured around revealed secrets”

“the content, mood and vocabulary will appeal to readers over age 10”

“Nobleman has made a cottage industry of bittersweet revelations about Jewish comic inventors; if he were a singer, he would do torch songs”

“There is a light touch for targeted readers—Finger used puns writing about Batman, and Nobleman uses puns writing about Finger”

“The concluding author’s note is geared too old for young readers but will fascinate their parents”

“Readers will feel proud of their heritage; Finger is a role model who provides a strong, if not happy, life lesson”

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This Day in World History

November 20, 1977

Egypt’s President Sadat addresses Israeli Knesset

On November 20, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat made an historic speech before Israel’s Knesset, or Parliament, becoming the first leader of an Arab nation to speak there. He was also the first of Israel’s Arab neighbors to publicly say anything like these words: “Today I tell you, and I declare it to the whole world, that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice.”

By 1977, Israel and the nearby Arab states had fought four wars in less than 30 years. Sadat himself had been a principal architect of the most recent conflict, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. That conflict ended when Egypt, Syria, and Israel accepted a United Nations–imposed cease-fire. This time, though, the uneasy peace was not followed by yet another war. Sadat failed in peace talks to regain control of the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel had occupied in 1967. To break the deadlock, on November 9, 1977, he stunned the world by telling Egypt’s Parliament that he was willing to travel to Israel to negotiate peace. No Arab state had ever recognized Israel’s existence, let alone sent a leader to the Jewish state. Israel quickly accepted his offer, and arrangements for the historic visit were made.

Sadat’s bold move set in course discussions that resulted in the Camp David Accords the following September, and a peace treaty in early 1979—the first treaty signed by Israel and an Arab nation. Both Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin received Nobel Peace Prizes for their historic agreement. While Sadat was hailed across the world, he was less well received in the Arab world, however. The Arab League denounced Egypt in September of 1978, and Sadat was assassinated in his homeland by radical Islamists because of his overtures to Israel and the western world.

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