Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism: An Analysis of Ma'aseh Markavah (review)

Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 227 Reviews (The Ashkenazic Jews, p. 116). What would Spolsky and Cooper say about Yiddish Hebraisms that denote non-Jewish versions of a general concept , like !eygec (Christian boy), which comes from the Hebrew seqec (abomination)? At one point Spolsky and Cooper offer a choice of two unfelicitous formulations : "Judaeo-Greek...was...replaced by Judaeo-Romance and later Yiddish" (p. 30) and "Judaeo-Romance...developed from [Judaeo-Greek)" (p. 32). The first implies that Greek-speaking Jews switched directly to Yiddish (when, where?), while the second calls for the genetic reclassification of "Judeo-Romance"! The topic of Hebrew "revitalization" has no place in this volume, since it took place largely outside of Jerusalem in the newly founded agricultural settlements. Moreover, Modem Hebrew is not a revitalized form of Old Semitic Hebrew, since unspoken languages cannot be resurrected in the total absence of native speakers; in reality Modem Hebrew is a form of Yiddish which was relexified to Biblical Hebrew (see my "Yiddish-the Fifteenth Slavic language," The Ashkenazic Jews, and The Schizoid Nature ofModern Hebrew, A Slavic Language in Search ofa Semitic Past [Wiesbaden, 1990]). Some interesting remarks are offered only in passing, for example, that North African Jews "adapted" (how, when?) their native language to local Jerusalem Arabic (p. 35). The authors say a discussion of Jewish multilingualism in Jerusalem at the time of Christ is a prerequisite to understanding the contemporary scene (p. 18). Possibly, but why? The specialist will find nothing new in this book, while the uninitiated reader will be left in a daze. Its only value is to show how not to do sociolinguistics . Paul Wexler Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978 ISRAEL MYSTICAL PRAYER IN ANCIENT JUDAISM: AN ANALYSIS OF MA'ASEH MARKAVAH. By Michael D. Swartz. Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 28. pp. x + 268. TUbingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1992. Cloth. Michael Swartz' Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism translates and analyzes Ma'aseh Merkavah, one of the loosely-defined corpus of hekhalot Hebrew Studies 35 (1994) 228 Reviews (palace) or merkavah (chariot) texts once championed by Scholem and now the focus of a flurry of scholarship. This dense and often mystifying text includes both ascent hymns and rituals for summoning angels presented in reported dialogue between Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Akiba, and Rabbi Nehuniah ben HaQannah. Swartz explains that the study's purpose is "to illuminate the historical question of the development of Merkavah mysticism as a system of apprehension of and communication with the Divine in Judaism of Late Antiquity...and] also an assessment of the role of prayer in this process of development" (pp. 4-5). The method he uses is a version of form criticism, breaking the dialogic frames and the embedded prayers into individual lines and then looking for evidence of the methods of composition. This is very difficult material to work with, and Swartz has produced a careful and thoughtful study. He argues that the text has four main sections, the first and last consisting of ascent material while the middle two contain angel-summoning rituals. He is able to correlate these divisions with variations in the manuscript tradition (for example, Section 3 is lacking in some versions). His analysis reveals the "seams" in this composite text and shows the strategy of the editor who tried to give some semblance of order to the liturgical material by means of the narrative frame. Some of the most convincing points he makes are based on his observations about composition. For example, he can point to the lack of agreement between some narrative frames and the prayers they introduce, arguing that these disjunctions are evidence that the prayers and frames were not composed simultaneously. Thus, the frames in Section 1 do not appear to have been written specifically for the prayers they introduce, while in Section 2 Swartz finds closer coordination between the frames and the prayers. He explains, ''The passages which frame these names...explicitly mention that a name is to be recited, and that the practitioner is to receive protection or benefit from this recitation," and the material framed fits with this description. Here he strengthens Scholem's struggle to see this abstruse text as...