Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Jewish Self-Fashioning

2. In the Culture of the Rabbis: Asher of Reichshofen and Glikl of Hameln

2 / In the Culture of the Rabbis ASHER OF REICHSHOFEN AND GLIKL OF HAMELN Despite his abundantly fertile imagination, Josephus could not possibly have imagined the shape Judaism would take in the centuries, not to speak of millennia, after his death. Although he remains our best, if extraordinarily problematic, source about the Pharisees and the response of the rabbis of his day to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, he could not have foreseen the phenomenon we call rabbinic Judaism, the all-encompassing civilization invented and refined from the second century c.e. to our days. To be sure, from the start of that enterprise to this moment, those committed to its principles and modus operandi believe in its utter, indeed ineffable, seamlessness and its unimpeached and unimpeachable continuity with biblical Judaism and indeed with the Sinaitic revelation itself. Historians’ insistence on the novelty and discontinuities of the rabbinic system, its dependence on Greek and Roman hermeneutical, legal, and social categories, and hence its defining departures from pre-Mishnaic Judaism are fundamentally and profoundly irrelevant to its adherents, who revel precisely in the fact that wherever they live, whatever language they speak, whatever trade they ply, they engage in an ontologically and epistemologically timeless and context-neutral conversation with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; Moses, Joshua and Isaiah; and Rabbi Akiva and Rashi. But, as discussed above, it does not follow from the above that we can presume to know exactly what went on in the hearts and minds of millions of actual, living and breathing Jews, male and female, from late antiquity to the present, or how they reacted to the vicissitudes of daily life while adhering to one extent or another to the rabbinic system and its categories of thought and exegesis. We must be exceedingly 32 careful not to confuse prescriptive texts with lived lives, or the writings of a highly articulate minority with the feelings and experiences of the largely voiceless majority. But this axiom, if not cliché, of late-twentieth-century historiography does not mean, as is often assumed, that the voiceless necessarily dissented from the strictures of the vocal elites, or that they created a culture separate from, and in conscious opposition to, that elite. On the contrary, we are better off thinking of rabbinic Judaism in terms borrowed from the historian of medieval Christianity John Van Engen, as a continuous—if gendered—spectrum of religious culture, shared both by the voiceless majority and the articulate minority.1 As Peter Brown, the preeminent historian of late-antique Christianity, put it in his The Cult of the Saints: We must set aside the “two-tiered” model. Rather than present [popular Christianity] in terms of a dialogue between two parties, the few and the many, let us attempt to see it as part of a greater whole—the lurching forward of an increasing proportion of late-antique society toward radically new forms of reverence, shown to new objects in new places, orchestrated by new leaders, and deriving its momentum from the need to play out the common preoccupation of all, the few and the “vulgar” alike, with new forms of the exercise of power, new bonds of human dependence, new, intimate hopes for protection and justice in a changing world.2 And, I might add, new genres of literary and spiritual creativity, which in the case of Judaism were primarily legal, exegetical, homiletic, and liturgical and not, as in the case of Christianity, autobiographical as well. Thus, not only do we not have a Jewish parallel to Augustine’s Confessions or Teresa de Avila’s Libro de la Vida, we do not have any extant autobiographies or memoirs written by Jews in the medieval period except for the one German-Jewish autobiography discussed by Yuval. Why selfstanding autobiographies written by Jews begin to appear in the early modern period we do not yet fully comprehend, though it stands to reason that this must have something to do with the efflorescence of autobiographical writing in Christian Europe, itself a function of the newfound centrality of individualism in Renaissance, and especially humanist, cul33 in the culture of the rabbis ture, and the concomitant new emphasis on the self, and hence on selffashioning , in these centuries, “an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful, process.”3 Vi es kristlt zikh, azoy yidlt zikh, says the Yiddish proverb, which...