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5 The Success and the Failure of ibn H . abib’s En Yaaqov 175 Shulamit Soloveitchik Meiselman describes how the people of her father’s East European shtetl took pleasure in a nightly group class studying the “tales of ibn H . abib.”1 rayna Batya, the first wife of naftali Tsvi Judah Berlin (netsiv) and the granddaughter of H . ayyim of Volozhin, pored over the En Yaaqov as she sat each day focused entirely on her books, to the exclusion of household matters.2 The Baal Shem Tov would predict people’s futures by assessing the way they read holy books like the En Yaaqov.3 And for many children the En Yaaqov was an integral part of their elementary education.4 remarkably, even the briefest of surveys conveys that not everyone “read” the En Yaaqov in the same way. Ibn H . abib’s work appeared to suit different situations and intentions. Evening synagogue-goers did not approach the En Yaaqov as rayna Batya did in her attempt to live up to her grandfather’s ideal of studying Torah for the sake of study (torah lishmah) and in her desire to reverse gender expectations regarding study and home life. The Baal Shem Tov had a mystical agenda, using the En Yaaqov as a means for “reading” the divine will. And rabbinic teachers viewed the En Yaaqov as a significant component in the early childhood education of males. Like many authors, Jacob ibn H . abib compiled the En Yaaqov intending that it would have an impact on his own society and culture. He hoped that it would be a new vehicle for bringing rabbinic theology to a constituency that had long overlooked its potential for conveying messages about faith. He also anticipated that his work, designed as it was to resemble the Talmudic corpus, would change the way people viewed Talmudic aggadah 01 Text.indd 175 10/19/11 10:13 AM 176 C H A P T E r 5 and transform the manner in which individuals approached the study of the Talmud. The question is: In what ways did he succeed? It does not appear that all the individuals noted in the previous paragraph studied the En Yaaqov as ibn H . abib intended. In this regard, there appears to be no direct relationship between the author’s original intentions and the later history of the En Yaaqov.5 Indeed, the work took on a life of its own. But how and why did this occur? In an era when Hebrew book printing enabled the pages of the Talmud to become increasingly more standardized, the En Yaaqov exhibited a large degree of fluidity that defied this trend. In this regard, the En Yaaqov became a very different kind of book from the Talmud, with an entirely different printing history. Efforts to standardize its contents continuously met with resistance, and so it remained throughout its long history a book that exhibited a great deal of flexibility—that is, a propensity for change. Such resistance may have been due to the nonlegal nature of aggadah; those who studied it thus felt comfortable approaching it with a greater degree of interpretive freedom than they did the halakhic material of the Talmud. Prior to the appearance of the En Yaaqov, the authorship of running commentaries on Talmudic aggadah was not a prominent intellectual interest for Spanish Jewry. But following the printing of this work in cities throughout Europe, interest in Talmudic aggadah grew. different intellectual , social, political, and economic contexts drove individuals to rethink the purpose of Talmudic aggadah and, therefore, of the En Yaaqov. Like ibn H . abib, they used it to reveal new religious agendas. They wrote new essays on aggadah and new commentaries with new introductions explaining their objectives. They even changed ibn H . abib’s anthology of Talmudic aggadah by adding more passages from the Talmud to their new editions. This pushed printers to maintain the En Yaaqov’s fluidity in response to a perceived demand for an adaptable document. Every modification that printers embraced reflected characteristics of the audience they wished to target rather than aspects of the power of the original author to produce a work that would outlive him. While the commitment of printers to the fluidity of the En Yaaqov meant that ibn H . abib undoubtedly lost control over what happened to his collection,6 the En Yaaqov successfully enabled Jews through the ensuing centuries, from damascus7 to new York,8 to think about “what is...

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