Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part I of II)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 77–108 Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part I of II) HAYM SOLOVEITCHIK *AN HISTORIAN HAS NO RIGHT to claim extraneous influences unless he or she can show that the conclusion arrived at by the thinker is so atypical that unless something impinged, consciously or unconsciously, upon his thought he could never have arrived at the conclusion that he did. I have called this elsewhere ‘‘detecting an angle of deflection.’’1 If, however, the line of reasoning is a valid one, and one could envision another jurist without such a parti pris arriving at the same conclusion, the historian has no right to attribute it to outside forces. This is not to say that in such instances the individual was not influenced by an extra- *Much of the analysis contained in this article was presented at a series of seminars on martyrdom sponsored by the Collège de France and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in May and June 1999. I would like to thank Barber Johanssen and Maurice Kriegel for inviting me to give the series. A subsequent presentation at a seminar on Jewish hermeneutics held by the program of Jewish studies of the University of California of Los Angeles in March 2000 helped clarify some issues. My thanks to David Myers for his kind invitation and to Arnold and Ora Band for hosting my stay in Los Angeles. I am further indebted to David Berger, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Amnon Lindner, and Kenneth Stow, who were kind enough to read and comment upon the manuscript. This article was completed and submitted to the JQR before the appearance of Simh .a Goldin’s comprehensive and nuanced study of martyrdom in Ashkenaz in the High Middle Ages, ‘Alamot Ahevukha: ‘Al-mavet Ahevukha (The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom) (Lod, 2002). Had this fine study, which will serve as the point of departure of all subsequent discussions, been available to me when I was composing this essay, I would have added a footnote here and modified a phrasing there but scarcely altered the argument, as we are in general agreement. In one sense, this narrow-gauged, methodological essay on the uses of legal texts for the study of cultural axioms simply buttresses a number of points in Goldin’s broad, empirical study. 1. ‘‘Can Halakhic Texts Talk History,’’ AJS Review 3 (1978): 174–175. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 78 JQR 94:1 (2004) neous force, only that the historian has no basis for claiming that he or she was. The question which next poses itself is: How does one know what a typical mode of reasoning is for a specific jurist or thinker? Often this is a major stumbling block, but not when studying the great set of medieval French glosses known as the Tosafot.2 These dialectical glosses have dominated the study of the Talmud since the time of their promulgation in the early thirteenth century and have been printed alongside of the Talmud since the 1530s. All serious talmudic study begins with the study of these glosses, and the contradictions that they have pointed out and the solutions propounded by them are the staple diet of halakhic thought to this day. Any student of the Talmud lives in daily, intimate contact with the Tosafot. There are few, if any, thinkers whose thought processes are so familiar to us. Indeed, generally the epistemological problem is not whether we can reconstruct their normal train of thinking but whether we can think in a mode other than tosafist, so deeply have they imprinted themselves on our minds, so thoroughly have they shaped our approach to halakhic issues. This is not to say that we understand every gloss, nor that all their arguments are convincing, even to sworn dialecticians. However , the difficulties that we encounter are usually subtle, not gross errors of inference, and certainly not strings of gross errors. When we do encounter an agglomeration of logical leaps...