Evolution of Torah: Journeys in Torah Study
Establishing Torah Culture (Season 2, Episode 1)
How did geographic diversity and separation impact rabbinic culture? In the season opener, we begin with the story of the four captives, the story that ended season one. This narrative offers an example of how rabbinic learning spread. We introduce the challenges and opportunities that faced Jewish communities which connect our four regions: Muslim Spain and North Africa, France, Germany, and Christian Spain. The season also includes a stand-alone episode about the monumental figure of Maimonides.
Show Notes
- Further Reading
- The Story of the Four Captives. Jewish Virtual Library
- “Medieval Commentary, Responsa, and Codes Literature” by Dr. Jonathan Milgram from Die Religionem der Menschheit: Judaism II (2021).
- Bios
- Rabbi Hushiel – president of the Bet Hamidrash in Kairwan (modern day Tunisia) in the 10th century. According to Ibn Daud’s legend of the four captives, he was sold into slavery in North Africa, but a letter to the chief rabbi of Cairo indicates that he was retained by the Kairwan community after a visit
- Rabbi Shamaryahu – head of the yeshiva in Cairo at the end of the 10th century and was considered an authority in rabbinics
- Rabbi Moses – took over the Cordoba Academy from Rabbi Nathan after demonstrating his skill in Talmudic interpretation
Transcript
[Music]
Announcer Welcome to season two of the “Evolution of Torah,” a podcast with Professor Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz. In this season, Establishing Rabbinic Culture, Professor Schwartz traces the development of medieval Jewish legal literature through a journey to four key centers of learning across North Africa and Europe. This is Episode One: An Introduction to the Jewish Geography of the Middle Ages.
Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz In season one of this podcast, we explored the first thousand years of rabbinic history from the perspective of the rabbis who codified and explained the oral law primarily in the Holy Land and in Babylonia. If you missed last season, you can find it at jts.org/podcasts or anywhere that you get your podcasts. We ended the season with the Geonim, the first rabbis to interpret the Talmud and to create rabbinic texts outside the Talmud. This season, we’re shortening our timespan to roughly 500 years, but expanding our geographic range, mirroring the increased dispersion of the Jewish people. Despite the dispersion, the rabbis of this period, known as Rishonim, are interconnected. We can define the Rishonim by their expanded geography. They all flourished before the information revolution of the 15th century with the invention of the printing press. They expanded on the work of the Geonim, creating new systems for engaging Torah, study and practice. Our time period is from about 800 C.E. until the Spanish Expulsion in 1492.
We often think of this period as one of darkness, but it was also a period of great cultural and intellectual achievement. Within each of the regions, we focus on, the communities that we will talk about all faced significant challenges. There’s also more integration, economic power and intellectual sharing than people often talk about. This season will focus on both the tribulations these communities faced, but also on their communal triumphs. Most of what we are going to talk about happened before the widespread availability of printed books so every piece of information that we are relying on had to be written out by hand. There are things that we just don’t have. For instance, we do not have an autographed copy of Rashi’s commentary on the Talmud. His commentary comes to us only through the writing of later scribes. Throughout the series, we’ll encounter towering figures, but there are limits on what we can know, given what was preserved.
Our throughline this season is four geographic regions Muslim, North Africa and Spain, France, Germany and Christian Spain. These four regions produce four distinct Torah cultures. We give each rabbinic culture its label for good reasons. First, there is simply its location. But also there’s the issue of the non-Jewish governing, religious and political bodies in that place. Second, the common academies that the sages of that place attended. And the student-teacher relationships that allowed tradition to pass from hand to hand in those locations. And sometimes, as we’ll see, there were really different legal methods in these different locations. Sometimes we’ll see that conflict arises between these groups. For instance, the Jews in Spain had a very different learning culture than those in France, which sometimes created conflict. Now, we don’t know exactly how the Jews ended up in these different regions, but we do know that rabbinic learning culture followed quickly on the heels of the Jews wherever they went. The rabbinic historian Ibn Daud relates a very complicated story about Jewish dispersion, which I first introduced at the end of season one. It includes pirates, ransom, intensive study and memorization.
I will paraphrase it here. Four rabbis were on a fundraising mission when their ship was overtaken by a pirate off the coast of Italy. Ibn Daud names three of the four rabbis and describes their treacherous journey as captives. The wife of one of the rabbis martyrs herself, by casting herself into the sea rather than be subjected to the cruelty of her captors. One important element of the story is that all four rabbis carry the Talmud with them, not physically, but in a memorized form. But they kept their wisdom secret. The four captives were ransomed off and dispersed. The first Rabbi Shamaria was sold in Alexandria and made his way to Fostat, or Cairo, where he became the head of an academy. Right next we have Rabbi Hushiel, the father of Rabbi Hananel, who was sold on the coast of Africa and established himself in the city of Kairouan, a mighty city which is in present day Tunisia. We will follow the span of Rabbi Hanianel’s career in our second episode. The third Rabbi Moses became the head of the academy in Cordoba, after proving his scholarship to the community by answering questions that the existing Rav could not. The fourth rabbi is unnamed, but for the sake of this podcast we can imagine him establishing himself in a local Jewish community as well. The story seems to be a romantic folk tale, but it could be based on a real event. Whether the story is true or not, it reflects the rise of new centers of Torah.
What I’m about to tell you is based on a publication of my colleague, Professor Jonathan Milgrom, who teaches here at JTS. The publication is called Medieval Commentary Responsa and Codes Literature. During the classical period of the Rishonim, we find four distinctive, separate legal or halachic cultures. We’ll dedicate an episode to each one of these places and cultures.
They were first Muslim Spain and North Africa; also called Sefarad. This episode will span roughly 200 years from the 11th to the 13th centuries. We’ll talk about this center primarily in the next episode of the podcast, and we will focus on two figures who wrote works that were essentially abridgments or shortened rewritings of the Talmud with a practical halachic focus. They are Rabbi Hananel Ben Hushiel. His father was one of the captives we talked about before, and Rabbi Isaac Alfasi known as the Rif. We will see that they were not focused on scholastic or dialectical approaches to the Talmud, not on an ivory tower intellectualism, but much more on the practical realities of life and how to derive the practice of Torah and mitzvot from the text of the Talmud.
The rabbis of our second region, France, known as Tzarfat, were focused on a dialectical or academic approach to the Talmud. We’re going to start our discussion there in the 11th century. Here we’ll meet Rashi and his descendants. We will encounter the dazzling textual interpretations that Jews often associate with the texts of the Tosafot, Rashi’s actual and spiritual grandchildren. Their primary agenda was creating a cohesive, close reading of the Talmud to resolve contradictions between apparently contradictory passages. As we can already see, we’ll be talking about conflicting learning cultures between the regions. We will spend the third episode of this podcast talking about this interesting subject.
Our third region is Germany. Time wise, this period will take us to the end of the 13th century. Our central focus will be two figures who both died tragically. Rabbi Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenburg as a prisoner in the fortress at Ensisheim and Rabbi Mordechai Ben Hillel and the Rintfleisch massacres. We’ll talk about the Torah of the Tosafot and how it spread to Germany and the focus on the events leading up to the death of Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenburg, including the influence he wielded that led to his imprisonment in the first place. In Germany, we’ll also explore how piety merged with practice in this time and in this place.
Our last geographic stop in this season will be in Christian Spain beginning in the early 14th century. This will be our final episode, and in it, we will primarily focus on Rabenu Asher, who’s also known as the Rosh. Rabenu Asher shows the close connections between our regions. He was a student of Rabbi Meir Ben Baruch of Rothenburg in Germany. Then he moved to Spain. Rabbeinu Asher combined the Torah of France and Germany with that of Spain. It was he and his family who were ultimately responsible for a more unified Judaism, a Judaism that Jews today are heirs to. We will end the podcast season with a short discussion of the expulsion from Spain and its impact on rabbinic learning and its ultimate aftermath.
We will also have one episode focused on the extraordinary figure who we call Rambam or Maimonides, Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon. He is a unique and towering figure with a set of unparalleled accomplishments in every area of Jewish learning. We cannot possibly limit his accomplishments to one region because of his outsized and monumental contributions to rabbinic literature.
All four geographies were connected with correspondence and literature traveling between them even over a millennia ago. People traveled to different geographical regions, just as they do today, for all the same reasons, including trade, education, marriage and simply to see something new. It took roughly a month for a ship to go from northern France to Morocco, and about the same amount of time to go across the Mediterranean from Spain to the Levant. Now, it took significantly longer for land travel, but people did embark on incredible journeys as you will see throughout the series. None of the centers of learning that we explore found themselves cut off from the broader world of Jewish thinking. And we will show how rabbis influence the evolution of practice across time and space.
Today I’ve introduced the Rishonim and their geographic spread. As you’ll see, the Middle Ages is not just some undifferentiated mass of piety and pain. There are great distinctions to be made between the different cultures of learning and the different centers during the Middle Ages. The Jews of the Middle Ages were educated and surprisingly economically well off in many of the times and places we’ll explore, especially in comparison to the poverty and ignorance that classified many of their neighbors.
We can see this in the great intellectual achievements that the rabbis of the Middle Ages are associated with and all the different centers in which they lived. At the same time, Jews were vulnerable. They were easy targets of both religious and political elites and the disgruntled folk who were often encouraged to find someone to blame for their difficulties. Despite their wealth and relatively high standard of living, Jews faced constant anxiety about their political and physical insecurities wherever they lived. The Middle Ages were a time of great achievement for the Jews and their leaders, but they were also a difficult time, one of struggle and challenge. Both things are true at the same time. One of the things that I hope to show with this podcast is that it’s true that there are some generalities we can make about Jewish life in the Middle Ages in most places. But to understand the specifics of how Jews lived in this period, we have to explore the local realities that Jews lived in each of the centers we address in this season of the evolution of Torah. Looking at the different cultures of Torah, learning amongst the Rishonim is a window into the lives of Jews. Their tragedies and their celebrations. Please join me next time as we travel to Muslim, North Africa and Spain.
Announcer Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Torah with Professor Mordechai Schwartz. It was recorded at JTS by Christopher Hickey and produced by Ellie Gettinger with editing assistance from Sarah Brown. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig a little deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts where you’ll find sources, archival material and more in the evolution of Torah show notes along with links to all of JTS’s podcasts, exploring Jewish texts, history, culture and experience.
