People & Places

Yehuda Halevi

How golden was the Jewish "Golden Age" of Spain: roughly, the 10th–11th centuries C.E.? In the era's once-popular reputation for Muslim-Christian-Jewish tolerance and coexistence (convivencia), it is increasingly easy to see an overused and overstated fiction; more and more, scholarship reveals just how conflicted a time it was, and how conditional was the "tolerance" extended to minority communities. Still, for Jews as for others it truly was a period of amazing cultural creativity and accomplishment, all the more astonishing in light of convivencia's constraints. Under Muslim rule, the most innovative Jewish achievements lay in the realms of poetry and philosophy. Standing at the summit of both,...

Libels and Politics

Here we go again. Baroness Jenny Tonge of Britian's Liberal Democratic party called recently for a serious investigation of charges that Israeli rescue teams were in Haiti to harvest organs. In the ensuing firestorm, she has been removed from her role as "health spokesman" for her party in the House of Lords. What is going on here? It is one thing for Hamas to fling about heinous lies. Among Western elites, "Israel-bashing" seems too thin an explanation for the mounting eruptions of lunatic forms of anti-Semitism, unhinged from even the most severe criticisms reasonable people might make of Israeli policies. Are we...

A Dead Issue?

Since the electrifying discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the late 1940's, the scholarly consensus has been that they were produced by the Essenes, a small Second Temple-era Jewish sect known to us from Josephus. Last year, a book by Rachel Elior, Memory and Oblivion: The Secret of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Hebrew), upended this seemingly settled issue by contending that, in fact, the Essenes never existed. Elior's revolutionary thesis, argued with force and stridency, has been discussed in major mainstream publications from Israeli newspapers to Time magazine. But the controversy, and clashing assessments of her achievement as a historian, have...

Eastern Europe

The rediscovery—and recovery—of Eastern Europe are central elements in contemporary Jewish culture. Ultra-Orthodoxy tries to maintain versions of Eastern European dress, speech, and mores. The theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel, the melodies of Shlomo Carlebach, the sound of klezmer, the literary productions of authors as disparate as S.Y. Agnon and Jonathan Safran Foer: all in their distinct ways seek to find, in the murdered world of Eastern Europe, a source of living energy for the present.  Not all succeed, and only the best display a grasp of the sheer complexity of the civilization they mean to retrieve and/or to reconstruct. In one impressive recent study, large swathes of...

Master of the Book

"Of making many books there is no end." In the hands of the master bibliographer Moritz Steinschneider, a phenomenon that induced despair in the author of Ecclesiastes was converted into great science and even greater art.  Steinschneider (1816–1907) lived through the 19th century and into the early decades of the 20th.  One of the founders of the academic study of Judaism before there were typewriters, let alone departments of Jewish studies, he took upon himself the gargantuan task of cataloguing the vast numbers of Hebrew and Judaic treasures, in print and manuscript, scattered throughout state, municipal, and university libraries of Europe. His output was as staggering as it was painstakingly...

China

Quite apart from the implications of China's growing influence in the global economy, China's politics, both domestic and foreign, clash directly with Western concerns in areas from democracy to the rights of individuals and minorities to (especially when it comes to Iran's race to acquire nuclear weapons) the security of Europe and the Middle East.   China is also interested in the Jews. It has had diplomatic relations with Israel since 1992, and Jerusalem has risked Washington's displeasure to maintain its military ties with Beijing. And China's interest extends beyond Israel, to Jewish civilization as a whole. Chinese scholars and academics seek to...

Goldstone, Again and Beyond

The UN's Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead has taken on a life of its own. Late last week, Israel submitted its own official version of its military operations in Gaza, to which UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon is expected to respond today.  Within Israel, calls for an independent commission of inquiry have found a prominent ally in the state's outgoing attorney general. Meanwhile, Alan Dershowitz, alongside his substantive criticisms of the Goldstone Report, has denounced its author as a Jewish traitor. Intentionally or not, the Report has become a powerful element in the mounting international campaign—warfare conducted as "lawfare"—to delegitimize Israel's very existence as...

Mediterranean Maimonides

Civilizations come and go. Their greatest surviving creations remain. Such is the case with the work of Maimonides (1135–1204), a towering thinker, known to Jewish tradition as "the Great Eagle," who continues to defy easy characterization. Two new biographies depart from past treatments to situate the thought of this master philosopher within the Arabic civilization of his time, and more generally in the prism of the Mediterranean world. To the late scholar Shlomo Dov Goitein, the Mediterranean was a gracious, cross-cultural society that reached its apotheosis in the person of Maimonides' son Abraham, a Jewish devotee of Sufism. To Maimonides' more recent biographers, it...

Dona Nobis Pacem

On Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to Rome's synagogue.  Clouding the occasion was the feeling among many that the Vatican has yet to make an honest reckoning with its conduct in World War II, a failure epitomized in the process under way to beatify Pius XII. Despite a papal visit to Israel and meetings with Jewish leaders, Benedict has seemed surprisingly maladroit in his dealings with the Jewish community.  More is at work here than manners. For the Pope, a serious philosopher and intellectual, the truths of faith and the truths of reason are mutually reinforcing gifts of...

Ezekiel’s Tomb

Twenty-five centuries have passed since exiled Jews first wept for Zion by the waters of Babylon. Today only eight Jews are left in Iraq. Their story is not as well known as that of their European brethren, but in the Babylonian Talmud, for starters, Babylon-Iraq was home to the most influential post-biblical book in Jewish history. That it would become so was due to the Geonim, another extraordinary set of Iraqi rabbis who flourished in early Islamic times and whose most significant figure was Saadya ben Joseph (882/892–942). After the Middle Ages, creativity extended outward as well, with Iraqi Jews founding other...