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  • Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi
  • Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Joseph M. Davis . Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Rabbi. Oxford and Portland: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004. xv + 302. index. illus. map. bibl. $49.50. ISBN: 1–874774–86–2.

This is the first biography of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1578–1654), who was the chief rabbi in major European cities — Vienna, Prague, and Cracow — and who served as a rabbi in smaller Jewish communities of Ukraine and Poland, Nemirov and Volodymyr. Does this person merit a biography? The answer is a resounding yes. First, Heller represents the rabbinic aristocracy in Ashkenazi Jewry just before the destruction of Jewish life in 1648 and the subsequent corrosion of rabbinic authority due to Sabbateanism. Analysis of Heller's extant Talmudic commentaries, legal decisions, sermons, poetry, and autobiography in relation to the works of his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors provides us with an insight into the richness of Ashkenazi culture in the early modern period. Second, Heller had an interesting life, with more than the usual share of tragedy due to the death of family members in outbreaks of the plague and the general insecurity of Jewish life. In 1629 he was imprisoned on no specific charges and eventually was forced to give up his rabbinic post in Prague. Davis's astute analysis of this dramatic incident sheds light both on the precarious status of Jews in Habsburg Empire and on internal factionalism and social tensions within the Jewish community. Heller's autobiographical memoir, Megilat Eivah, documented this event and provides a unique entry into the mindset of a traditional Jew. Third, Heller exemplifies the relatively brief flourishing of rationalism in Prague during the late sixteenth century initiated by the Maharal of Prague (1525–1609) and his circle [End Page 962] that perpetuated medieval rationalism while being open to kabbalah. Davis's discussion of the curriculum sheds new light on the place of philosophy and the natural sciences among Ashkenazi Jews and the relationship between Ashkenazi and Sephardi subcultures. Fourth, on crucial issues — the attitude toward Joseph Caro's legal code, the Shulhan Arukh, the printing of Lurianic kabbalah, and the new astronomy of Tycho Brahe — Heller changed his mind over time. Exploring these changes enables Davis to trace not only the personal views of Heller but the cultural transformation of Ashkenazi Jewry.

The book is organized chronologically and thematically. Part 1 covers 1578–1618, documenting Heller's family, education, and the flowering of philosophical study among the Jews of Prague. Part 2 covers the years from 1618 (the beginning of the Thirty Years' War) to 1630, the year when Heller was forced to leave Prague after this arrest and imprisonment. And part 3 covers 1631–54, the years of Heller's rabbinate in Ukraine and Poland that involved a reversal of Heller's earlier positions in the regard to the Shulhan Arukh and to kabbalah. Within this chronological structure, Davis explores the social makeup of the rabbinate, the status of philosophy and the natural sciences in relationship to the study of Talmud and kabbalah, class stratification and social tensions mostly related to taxation, the educational system, relationships (personal and intellectual) among the leadership of Ashkenazi Jewry, and relations between Jews and non-Jews. Davis's scholarship is careful, judicious, and erudite, based on mastery of the entire gamut of premodern Judaism and modern Jewish historiography.

The narrative style is very vivid, paying close attention to particulars of time, place, personality traits, and interpersonal relations that bring the story to life. While the primary audience of this book is other Jewish historians, the work will also be useful to the Europeanist who is not familiar with the details of Jewish life. Davis situates Heller in the larger European context and highlights many interesting points of comparison between Jews and their Christian contemporaries, despite relative isolation, marginalization, and exclusion. For example, Heller's awareness of the new astronomy is situated in the context of scholarly life at the court of Rudolph II, in which other Jews were active (e.g., David Gans and Abraham Colorni). Heller's study of the biblical text is...

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