Michael L. Satlow

Tonight begins Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that usually leaves me both unsettled and confused.

Watching my children learn about the Holocaust from slick, well-designed and age-appropriate curricula has made me aware of just how raw and scattershot my own Holocaust education was.  Holocaust education was a battering experience.  I remember being constantly exposed to artifacts of the horror of it all with, it seems to me in retrospect, the primary goal of causing horror and pain.  There were live and (a little later) videotaped survivor testimonies and lampshades made of flesh, endless pictures of doomed children and corpses.  First-person literary accounts and art and music composed by the doomed.  Having recently revisited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem I was reminded of the old complex, before it was remodeled in a kinder, gentler, way that gave thought to developing a story and educating.  The old Yad Vashem was just a blindly thrown roundhouse punch.

The thing was, it connected.  The Holocaust pains me.  It evokes in me a diffuse emotional horror.  I feel for my people, and those grotesque images play through my mind.  I feel compelled to seek a connection.

And there’s the problem.  I never had an organic, real connection to the Holocaust.  My family, on both sides, came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and did not stay in close contact with relatives in Europe.  My family, I was always told, knew of no relatives who actually suffered.  We were unscathed.  I feel a need to connect, but that is perhaps only because I lack an immediate connection.  It leave me with a fissure somewhere in my emotional response.

But it is not just this lack of personal connection that causes a certain sense of distance.  For many, the Holocaust has been profitable.  Politically, some have tried to use it to justify the unjustifiable.  Many others have achieved fame or made good livings off it.  While my children’s curricula are well-done (I wish that they existed when I was young), they leave me cynically wondering how many people must have profited through them.  I sometimes feel that the pain that was so carefully created is now being exploited for the personal benefit of others, even as the last Holocaust survivors sometimes struggle to put food on their tables.  My point here is not to condemn but just to note that I struggle with balancing my appreciation of this work with that of its material reality.

The other day I received an email from my mother.  She was doing some genealogical research and stumbled on a “page of testimony” in the online Yad Vashem database.  The page concerned a woman who bore her (Yiddish) name.  Feige, according to the unsteady, block Hebrew script of her sister-in-law, was simply “exterminated by the Nazis.”  It happened in Poland in 1943, the year my mother was born, and it dovetailed with a family memory that her name was changed at the last minute in response to a recent death.

Feige was a 26 year old single seamstress.  That much is clear.  Most everything else about the page of testimony, though, is odd.  She bears her mother’s last name (my grandfather’s), but her father appears to have a different last name.  Her sister-in-law, a survivor who must have been married to her brother, bears yet another set of names.  Each of these anomalies, of course, can be explained.  Most puzzling to me, however, is how word of the death of yet another obscure, poor Jew in Poland would have made it back to the U.S. so quickly.

When the Yom Hashoah siren sounds here in Jerusalem-commencing a moment of national silence-I will try to put aside the mind-numbing data and larger abstract and theological issues raised by the Shoah.  I will try to ignore the voices around me that will use the Holocaust to score points and I will try to suppress what I know will be my cynical response to them.  I will, instead, try to focus on Feige, this simple, almost forgotten seamstress, my distant relative, who died for no good reason.

This month, for the first time in a while, the group Women of the Wall managed to pray at the Western Wall without any serious incidents (here is a news report of the gathering).  The group’s goal, in addition to simply conducting a meaningful prayer service at the Western Wall, is to advocate for equal treatment of men and women at the site.  While there are many issues in play here (e.g., currently women are discouraged from singing “too loudly” at the Wall and prohibited from reading from a Torah scroll), one of the real hot-button issues has been the right for women to wear a tallit, or prayer-shawl, particularly those that look “manly.”

According to the rabbi who sets the rules at the Wall (and whose decisions are enforced by the regular Israel police force), one of the primary reasons why women are not allowed to wear masculine-looking prayer shawls at the Wall is that women are not allowed to wear any “man’s garment” (e.g., pants) from the Torah:

A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 22:5)

The reason behind this stricture is hardly obvious.  Why should such an activity be forbidden?  The Bible itself doesn’t tell us and it mystified Jews even in antiquity.  In the first century BCE-CE, the Jewish philosopher Philo wrote:

So earnestly and carefully does the law desire to train and exercise the soul to manly courage that it lays down rules even about the kind of garment which should be worn.  It strictly forbids a man to assume a woman’s garb, in order that no trace, no merest shadow of the female, should attach to him to spoil his masculinity….  In the same way he trained the woman to decency of adornment and forbade her to assume the dress of a man, with the further object of guarding against the mannish-woman as much as the womanish-man.  He knew that as in buildings, if one of the foundation stones is removed, the rest will not remain as they were. (Philo, On the Virtues, 18, 21, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Philo, then, the purpose of the law is to instill in its followers a sense of gender difference.  Dress is one of a complex of behaviors that define the “natural” gender roles decreed by God.

Writing several decades later, though, the Jewish historian Josephus understood the intention behind the law quite differently.  As he pithily relates it:

Beware, above all in battle,, that no woman assume the accoutrements of a man nor a man the apparel of a woman” (Josephus Antiquities 4.301, translation Loeb Classical Library)

For Josephus, the purpose of the law appears to be practical: it is so that in battle men and women would not be confused with each other.  Thus confusion might lead especially to the killing of women, but also for men would serve as a kind of unfair disguise.

The rabbis, though, have yet another interpretation:

Here is the heart of the matter:  A woman should not dress like a man and then go among the men, and a man should not ornament himself like a woman and then go among the women.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov says: How do we know that a woman a woman should not put on battle clothes and go forth to war?  Because it is written, “a woman shall not wear a man’s clothing…” (Sifre Deuteronomy 226)

For the anonymous writers, the reason for the prohibition is the fear of promiscuity. Were it not for this prohibition we could expect women to sneak into places where men congregate and vice-versa, a situation that would inevitably lead to illicit relations.

I suspect that the rabbi of the Western Wall is not seriously concerned that women who wear tallitot will use them to slip into the men’s section undectected so that they can cavort with them.  Nor, of course, is there any concern for battle.  So that, curiously, leave Philo’s rationale that improper dress can destroy personal virtue.  (A side thought: I wonder how the authorities would respond to a man who attempts to pray there in a “feminine” tallit.)

However the prohibition is justified today, though, it is intriguing to note that our puzzlement over it is nothing new.

I am delighted to announce the publication of my new edited volume, The Gift in Antiquity, published by Wiley-Blackwell.  The official description:

“You shall not bring the fee of a whore or the pay of a dog into the house of the Lord your God in fulfillment of an vow, for both are abhorrent to the Lord your God,” the Bible declares (Deuteronomy 23:19; translation NJPS).   This cryptic verse, like many such other biblical commands, raises a large number of exegetical problems.  How does one define a “whore” and, more problematically, “the pay of a dog”?  What is the situation that the verse envisions?  What precisely is abhorrent to the Lord, and why?

Leaving aside here the clause “the pay of a dog,” one traditional way to understand this is to envision a situation in which a prostitute vows to give something to God.  Perhaps she does this because she feels that God has shown favor to her (e.g., healed her or her children from an illness; helped her business flourish); perhaps just because she wants to give.  God, though, will not accept such a gift because it the means by which it was acquired were “abhorrent.”

This interpretation is certainly not impossible, but it is also not without its difficulties.  There are many ways to acquire money that one would think that God would find “abhorrent.”  Why is this particular act singled out?

An alternative scenario, though, is suggested by a passage in Herodotus.  In it, Herodotus discusses the gift of a prostitute, Rhodopis, to a temple:

For Rhodopis desired to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, making an offering such as nobody else had thought of and placed in a temple…. With a tenth of her money she had made many iron roasting-spits, as many as the tithe would provide, and sent them to Delphi; and they are still here now, piled up behind the altar that the Chians dedicated.  (2.135)

The problem suggested in this passage is not the way that the prostitute acquired her money, but the way that she used her money to “clean” her reputation by giving a gift (usually made as a fulfillment of a vow) to the temple.  This, then, is what may also be behind Deuteronomy 23:19: what is abhorrent is not the money itself but the use of the money to create a permanent  “memorial” to a prostitute within the Jerusalem temple.

In antiquity, as today, money could buy respectability.

Yesterday and today Israeli news has been abuzz with a story that dare not speak its name.  In 2010 a mysterious prisoner committed suicide in an Israeli prison.  The Australian press is reporting that this prisoner was actually an Australian citizen who moved to Israel and was involved in ways unspecified with the Mossad before being detained and “disappeared.”  The circumstances of his detention and death remain murky, as does the reasoning behind the Israeli government’s insistence that Israeli news outlets do not actually report on this affair, although it is now all over the world press.

Quite incidentally, I stumbled this morning on a much older spy case.  In 1963, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that an Egyptian spy named Kabarik Jacobian had been arrested in Israel.  JTA reported only the bare outline of the story, in which Jacobian was given a cover identity as a Jew and then joined the Israeli army, in which he served briefly.  It is unclear if he actually harmed Israeli security.

Whatever happened to Jacobian?  Here, the internet trail runs dry – I have not looked particularly hard, but I have been unable to find any mention of him apart from this brief report.  If anybody has any ideas how I might learn more about Jacobian, please let me know!

P.S.  After posting this I received this link from a friend, for those who read Hebrew.  It would still be interesting to know what happened to him after he returned to Egypt.

The Bible is an incoherent document.

This is not news.  It was noticed long ago and has spawned some two centuries of biblical criticism that has focused on answering the very simple question of how the biblical texts came to be incoherent – that is, if we reject the religious assumption that the biblical text is in fact perfect and that all seeming problems can be solved with creative interpretation, how do we account for the many contradictions, tensions, and repetitions in even short narrative passages?

Biblical scholars have proposed several different models for explaining how the biblical texts reached their present, sometimes peculiar, form, but I think that four explanations are particularly popular:

1. Interpolation.  A scribe in antiquity, reading a scroll with the text, makes a marginal note on the side.  The note might reflect his knowledge of a similar story but with some different details or might be his own suggestion.  The next scribe, though, when copying the text over, simply incorporated these marginal notes into the new copy.
2. Rewriting.  Some sections of the Bible clearly rewrite other sections.  The author (or authors) of 1 and 2 Chronicles, for example, simply rewrote earlier historical books in order to emphasize what he/they found important.
3. Additions.  Scribes would add blocks of material – sometimes just words, verses, or whole sections – because something about the original text bothered the scribe.  Sometimes these additions clarified the text, at other times they dramatically changed its message.
4. The Documentary Hypothesis.  This is what most well-known fruit of biblical criticism.  According to this model, scribes had different sources that they wove together into a single semi-coherent narrative.

Rationally, I understand how scholars have arrived at each of these explanations.  They often offer a nice and elegant solution to problems in specific passages. But when I stand back to consider the assumptions behind these explanations, I am left somewhat puzzled.

If we take the perspective of the scribe, I understand (1) and (2).  We have many documented cases through the Middle Ages of (1) occurring in texts, and there is little reason to think that in the biblical period something similar didn’t happen on occasion with these texts.  (2) makes the most sense: if I am confronted with a semi-coherent text, it would be easier to simply rewrite it than to edit it heavily.

But what about (3) and (4)?  The assumption that seems to be behind them both is that the scribe thinks that the base text in front of him is considered so holy or sacred that he can’t actually change it or delete anything from it.  He can only add to it.  Now think about this for a second – how would this work?  Would the same people whom I, as a scribe, are afraid of annoying by deleting or changing pieces of their text not also be annoyed if I inserted passages that might change the basic meaning of the text?  Do I think that nobody is going to catch the problems that I just created?

I don’t have an answer to this.  Explanations (1) and (2) might account for some of the problems in the biblical text, but not all.  (3) and (4) don’t fully work for me, but I don’t have any better explanation to offer.  If you do, please let me know.

As is well-known, the Jews of Palestine largely refrained from using figural art from around the 2nd century BCE (or a bit earlier) to the third or fourth century CE, including the creation of statues.  There were, of course, exceptions to this general phenomenon – some figures show up in grave graffiti and on some municipal coins from cities like Sepphoris, that had a strong Jewish population – but when seen against the archaeological record of the Greek and Roman worlds the absence is striking.  Equally striking is the virtual explosion of such art beginning in the third and fourth centuries CE.  While we still lack identifiably “Jewish” statues, representations of figures begin appearing routinely on synagogue floors, among other places.  What happened?

The predominant scholarly explanation for the absence of such art in the earlier period is that Jews interpreted “the second commandment” strictly.  This, more or less, follows the explanation of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus.  Yet in a recent essay, Jason Ehrenkrook suggested that Josephus may have had ulterior motives for offering this explanation: it makes it easier to convince his Roman patrons that the Jews refused to erect statues of the Roman emperors due to religious rather than political scruples.

At the other end, scholars have suggested that the explosion of such art in the third century is due to a combination of (1) influence from non-Jewish art and (2) a deliberate reinterpretation of the second commandment or reinterpretation of the art so that it is not covered by this commandment.  There are unquestionable parallels between Jewish and Christian (and Roman) art at this time, but that does not really explain why it began when it did.  There is also some rabbinic evidence for (2), but it is rather thin and in any case probably was not of much concern to the actual patrons of this artwork.

The question of why Jews avoided figural art for centuries and then took it up with a passion has, undoubtedly, a complex answer. What I would like simply to suggest here, though, is an angle that I am not sure has been sufficiently appreciated.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Jewish knowledge of the Bible through the first century CE may have been far less comprehensive than we sometimes think.  It expands, certainly in the Galilee, beginning in the second century CE.  This might, I think, help us to understand the changing art.

In antiquity, almost all art was based on myths.  If the art – whether from the ancient Near East or the Greek or Roman worlds – did not actually representat such myths, it modeled contemporary scenes on them (e.g., an athlete or monarch portrayed as a mythic hero).

The Jews, though, had no divine or semi-divine figures to represent and, just as importantly, most did not really have easy access to or know the myths that could be represented.  Later, as knowledge of the Bible spread, so did the art, which was almost entirely modeled on biblical stories such as the sacrifice of Isaac and the Exodus from Egypt.  The increased knowledge of the Bible not only increased access to these myths, but also helped to authorize them for use.  It was less the second commandment per se that stopped Jews from figural representation before then than an inability to frame a Jewish myth that would be appropriate for artistic representation.  The same, incidentally, applies to Christian art, which also begins to develop around the third century as their sacred texts begin to circulate more widely.

Just an idea.

Reading the twitter feed of the Al Qassam Brigades during this ongoing crisis is a bit surreal.  Many of the tweets are dry, simple facts: how many “projectiles” have been fired where.  These tweets appear (from cross-checking with those coming from Israeli officials and new outlets) more or less accurate. Sometimes the tweets are downright lies. Occasionally, though, they seem to go off the rails.  The feed reports with what seems like glee when Palestinian civilians – especially families and children – are killed in the fighting creating a posture of the victimized.  Other tweets, however, try to project strength with apocalyptic predictions of doom, such as the now famous phrase that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” or this, from 7:29 AM on November 20:

@IDFSpokesperson Al Qassam Brigades is always ready to smash your arrogant heads. #GazaUnderattack #Gaza #Resistance #Shalestones

I’m sure that had a powerful impact on the IDF.

Even with the welter of emotions that I have now, it is hard to suppress the text scholar in me.  These tweets make me wonder if everybody in the Al Qassam tweeting office is on the same page.  Do these tweets, and the dissonance they sometimes exhibit, reflect the personalities and emotions of the tweeters more than any unified strategic goal?  This thought occurred to me especially on reading two tweets that came out shortly after the bus bombing in Tel Aviv.  At 3:46 PM today, they tweeted:

Oh, Zionists, #Netanyahu‘s government dragging you for hell, you have the choice whether to stay in hell or escape, go back home in Germany.

The evocation of the Holocaust here might have gone a little too far, even for Hamas – and thus we get a “revised” tweet five minutes later:

Oh, Zionists You have to drag yourselves out of hell, go back home now, go back to Garmany, Poland, Russia, America and anywhere else. #Gaza

It’s as if the dispassionate guy – the one tweeting the number of projectiles, etc. – turned to his office mate after his excited tweet and told him to tone it down; this hurts our credibility.  Really, Hamas is not interested in causing another Holocaust, only that they control the territory.  This would play slightly better among some audiences.

Of course, I don’t know if this reconstruction is correct.  When it all ends and settles down (as I pray it does sooner rather than later), though, I would be interested in knowing – as I never will -which of the tweeters gets the better promotions and raises.

“Regular public reading of the Torah,” Wikipedia (as of today) reports, “was introduced by Ezra the Scribe after the return of the Judean exiles from the Babylonian captivity.”  The original source for this claim was certainly not the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which report a public reading of the Torah (so we think) but make no mention that the practice did or should continue, whether on a regular or irregular basis.  Rather, the Wikipedia article repeats a claim popular today – whose origin I have not tracked down – that conflates at least two rabbinic traditions.  One of these traditions, in the Palestinian Talmud, Megilla 4:1, attributes the regular reading of the Torah on Shabbat mornings to Moses.  Another, in the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Qama 82a, ascribes to Ezra the beginning of regular Torah readings on Shabbat afternoon and Monday and Thursday mornings.  I suspect that earlier scholars were uncomfortable with ascribing any part of the practice to Moses, so simply assimilated that claim to the Ezra tradition.

The more interesting question, though, is whether it is true.  It turns out that there is no – none – evidence for the regular public reading of the Torah until the first century BCE to first century CE, and even then our information is very fragmentary.  A single inscription from a synagogue in Jerusalem seems to mention the reading of the Torah, but how often, how much, and in what form is not stated.  In the New Testament, the synagogue is portrayed as a place of teaching, although in very few cases is it explicit that what is taught is the Bible, and in even fewer that it was read aloud.  Our evidence instead seems to point more toward the second or even third centuries, CE, when regular Torah reading (especially in Palestine) may have started in some form.

This, then, leads to another question: If Jews were not hearing the Torah (or any other part of our Bible) read regularly, and if they were highly illiterate and in any case would have had limited access to biblical scrolls, did they know the Bible at all?  If so, how and how much?

Outside of Judea/Palestine, at least in the first century CE, the Bible was probably better known than inside.  The Torah had been translated into Greek centuries earlier and several other books were translated over the course of time.  These books all became the inspiration for a rich cultural production that drew upon them.  Even if someone never heard or read the Bible itself, they may have read Philo or Artapanus, and thus learned parts of it in an ad hoc fashion.

But in Jerusalem that was not the case.  The priests and other ritual experts largely controlled access to it, and they would have disseminated knowledge through (1) the teaching of short selected passages; (2) the deployment of certain oracular or prophetic passages to prove a point; or (3) practical use of passages, e.g., to heal a child or write an amulet.  Surely people would have known some stories that can be found in the Bible, but their knowledge of them would have been secondary or tertiary and learned orally.  Knowledge of the Bible would have been spotty at best and almost never sequential.  This would change for many in late antiquity with the institution of regular readings in the synagogue, but that change was yet to come.

So now, would anyone like to make the appropriate changes to Wikipedia?

In the year between graduating from college and beginning graduate school, I stumbled on a book that profoundly changed the way that I thought.  Gerd Theissen’s Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Fortress, 1978) presented a way of reading New Testament texts that thoroughly rooted them in their historical contexts.  Theissen read these texts in a way that was less attuned to their surface arguments than to their social function.  Behind every text there is a community, and attentive reading of opaque ancient texts can bring this community into light.  This technique, I would soon learn in graduate school, is in one form or another basic to much of the study of early Judaism and Christianity.  While later I would better recognize the weaknesses of this approach, at the time it opened to me an intellectual vista.  It was exciting.

Last week I finally got to meet Gerd Theissen and tell him personally how much his work had meant to me.  I also had the opportunity to hear his keynote lecture at the conference that I was attending.  (More accurately, since the lecture was in German I followed along with a written English translation that had been prepared.)  The lecture was a tour de force, a history of how New Testament scholars had engaged with social theory.  In Theissen’s telling, New Testament scholars, particularly in Germany, were well attuned to sociological questions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but then they stopped.  They would not regain interest in these questions until the 1970s.  In effect, Theissen argued (and I did clarify this with him afterward to make sure that I understood this), German NT scholarship stood still for some 50-60 years, only to pick up with questions that came primarily from the United States.

Now this brought me up short.  If Theissen is correct, it would mean that the two world wars and the Shoah had no impact on German NT scholarship.  This is disturbing for all kinds of reasons.  What got my attention was one of the less important of these reasons, and that is the implications that this could have for the very kind of scholarship to which Theissen has been devoted.

Let me explain.  One of the standard ways of interpreting much ancient literature is to correlate it with the historical context in which it was produced.  This makes intuitive sense: Could Jews and Christians in the first two centuries actually fail, for example, to respond to Roman power and domination?  The important historical conditions of antiquity anchor these texts and provide a context to interpret them.  The texts do not float around abstractly.

Now the problem:  If I were a historian far in the future reading 1950s German NT scholarship as scholars like Theissen today read the NT, I would have to account for these texts in the context of German’s wrenching material and moral scars at that time.  How could the wars and their aftermath have had no impact on New Testament scholarship, of all things?

If the wars and the Shoah really had little or no impact on German New Testament scholarship, perhaps the great events of antiquity had little impact on some or many contemporary texts.  Maybe the relative silence in many of these texts to contemporary events that strike us as having great import is to be understood not as a veiled response to historical conditions, but as indifference.  Unless there are explicit statements in the texts, this would mean pulling back from attempting to explain texts as “responses to” great historical events.

I have learned a great deal from Gerd Theissen, but I hope that in this case he is wrong.