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םותח ומשש ה״יבאר אל ףא ,ורסאל שיא תעד לע הלע אלשו םינשב תואמ רבכ זנכשאב לבוקמ .הנקתה לע
רחסה לש ומוקמ דקפנ המל׳ תרכזנה הלאשל שי םוקמ המ ,ךכ םאש אלא .קפס ילב רבחמה קדצ הזבו רחסמה תא עונמל ולכי אלש ינפמ אלו וב ורחסש ינפמ אל דקפנ ומוקמ ירהו ?׳הלא תונקתב םנייב
הנקתה ןושל .׳הנקתה לע םותח ומשש ה״יבאר אל ףא ,ורסאל שיא תעד לע הלע אלש׳ ינפמ אלא ,וב ,וב רכתשהל ידכ ןייה תא תוהשהל אלו ,ובוח תא ליצהל אלא י״שר ריתה אל ירהש ,רתויב תקיודמ
Haym Soloveitchik. "Yeinam ": sahar be-yeinam shel goyim 'al gilgulah shel ha- lakhah be-olam ha-ma'aseh. (Principles and Pressure: Jewish Trade in Gentile Wine in the Middle Ages.) Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003. 184 pp.
Among the stranger assertions made by Werner Sombart in The Jews and Modern Capitalism was that "it can be proved with great certainty that the Jew's freedom from the evil effects of alcohol (as also from syphilis) is due to his reli- gion."' Yet, the Jewish religion, unlike Islam, never prohibited alcohol per se,2 and even when "kosher" wine-untouched by gentiles-was in short supply, beer or more potent beverages could be found by those so inclined. More to the point is S. D. Goitein's trenchant remark in the final (and posthumously published) volume of his A Mediterranean Society that "the proverbial sobriety of East European im- migrants to the United States should not be taken as inherent to the genes of the race."3 Although Maimonides in his Guide memorably described "gatherings with a view to drinking intoxicants" as "more shameful than gatherings of naked peo- ple ... who excrete in daylight sitting together," he was clearly speaking there more as philosopher than halakhist.4 In the medieval "Geniza society" in which he lived, as we learn from Goitein, all "important matters, such as sending a son overseas or promising a bequest, would be arranged at a drinking bout."5
Unfortunately, we have no Geniza for the Jews of medieval Europe, but through his stethoscope-like sensitivity to the nuances of halakhic discourse, Haym Soloveitchik brings alive for us, in his recent monograph (rooted in his 1967 mas- ter's thesis at the Hebrew University), the complex realities of a Jewish world in which the production, consumption, and especially trade of wine were central fea-
1. Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, trans. M. Epstein (Transaction Books: New Brunswick, 1982 [German original, 1911]).
2. See, for example, A. Z. Itzkovitz, Shetiyah ve-shikhrut ba-halakhah (Mazkeret Batya, 1982). 3. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Por-
trayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 5, The Individual (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1988), 38.
4. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, III, 8. 5. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, 38-39.
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Elliott Horowitz
tures. In his careful treatment of the reciprocal relations between halakhah and so- cioeconomic realties, Soloveitchik follows in the pioneering footsteps of his late teacher, Jacob Katz, to whom this book, like its predecessor, is dedicated.6 He has also made excellent use of recent studies by such contemporary German scholars as Alfred Haverkamp, Annegret Holtmann, Franz Irsigler, Gerd Mentgen, and Franz- Josef Ziwes, not to mention Roger Dion's classic Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France des origines au XIXe siecle (1959). Thus, like the Jewish wine trade in the high Middle Ages, Soloveitchik's book reflects the combined efforts-sometimes cooperatively and sometimes independently-of Jews and gentiles. And, like some of the best wines of all ages, it is complex and bold, with subtle traces of acidity.7
Its complexity stems from the fact that it combines economic and agricul- tural history with the history of halakhah, and even throws in, for good measure, some homespun anthropological theorizing. And the history of medieval halakhah, as Soloveitchik has already demonstrated in previous studies, can be meaningful- ly pursued only by meticulously comparing both printed editions and manuscripts, and by seeking what he has called "the crucial angle of deflection that is necessary for any demonstration that extraneous factors were impinging on the course of im- manent developments."8 At first, in the eleventh century, the rabbis of the Rhine- land, which was famous for its wines, reluctantly permitted the acceptance of gentile wine as payment in kind, but prohibited entrepreneurial trade in what was for them (according to Soloveitchik) not only a ritually prohibited but abhorrent commodity. Abstention from such lucrative trade by Jews who lived in proximity not only to the best vineyards but to the largest river in the region was no simple matter. (Imagine modern Swiss Jews abstaining from working in the banking in- dustry on account of the biblical prohibition of taking interest on loans!) Medieval European rabbis, some of whom figure prominently in the book under review, found ways, as Soloveitchik masterfully demonstrated in an earlier study, of over- coming halakhic obstacles that stood in the way of Jews engaging in loan-bank- ing.9 When it came to trade in gentile wine, however, he now shows us that Franco-German scholars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries almost willfully ig- nored intellectual solutions that virtually beckoned, and that were later "discov- ered" by rabbis of no greater intellectual distinction. Through what he calls "the law of unintended consequences," Soloveitchik argues, the earlier reluctance of ha- lakhists to permit trade in gentile wine caused their coreligionists to became in-
7. Note, for example, the absence from the bibliography of Abraham Grossman's Hakhmei zar- fat ha-ri'shonim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995) although that work contains an enormous chapter, of more than a hundred pages, devoted to Rashi and his writings. It is only fair to note, however, that
Grossman's discussion of Rashi's position regarding "wine of the gentiles" (155-56) omits any refer- ence to Soloveitchik's seminal article on the subject (see next note).
8. Haym Soloveitchik, "Can Halakhic Texts Talk History?" AJS Review 3 (1978): 176. 9. Idem, Halakhah, kalkalah, ve-dimui 'azmi (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1985). For an English
summary of the book under review see now idem, "Halakhah, Taboo, and the Origin of Moneylend- ing in Germany," in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), ed. C. Cluse
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 295-303.
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Review Essay
volved in this lucrative business through the "back door"-by lending money, as savvy investment bankers, to those involved in the wine trade, and effectively shar- ing their considerable profits (68-90).
The boldness of the book lies not only in its broad theses on the interrelations between halakhah and economic history, but in its attempt to reveal-and take am- ple cognizance of-the distinct personalities of its dramatis personae, especially those who were members of the northern French dynasty originating with Rashi, the Jewish commentator par excellence. These include Rashi's "tempestuous" grandson, Rabbenu Tam of Ramerupt-a dazzling dialectician with a crippling writing block-and the latter's nephew (and Boswell), R. Isaac of Dampierre, whose unassuming introversion Soloveitchik, who knows a thing or two about dy- nasties, compares to that of Ri's great-grandfather (24-25). In an earlier study Soloveitchik described Rashi as resembling "more than any other figure of the [Jewish] Middle Ages ... Keats' poet, in that he seems 'to have no self, to have no identity, but to be constantly informing and filling another body.' " Rabbenu Tam, through whom flowed, according to Soloveitchik, "the imperious sense of bringing a freshly wrested vision of truth to the world," was also colorfully described there as having a "leonine personality."' Some readers of the present study may also feel that through its author flows "the imperious sense of bringing a freshly wrested vi- sion of truth to the world." This often makes for stimulating reading, but it may also be responsible for some unfortunate omissions, which will hopefully be rectified in the larger study to which this book is a prolegomenon (13, 63, 67).
Soloveitchik argues, as he did already in 1978,11 that those rabbis who avoid- ed finding halakhic solutions for Jewish trade in gentile wine were influenced by such psychological factors as disgust and revulsion (32, 43, 61, 65, 80, 95, 98- 100, 102, 113-15, 118-19), especially, he now asserts, during the decades after 1096 when, following Gavin Langmuir, he sees European anti-Judaism as having become less "rational" and more "pathological" (115-18).12 He does not explain, however, why these same mental barriers did not prevent leading medieval Euro- pean rabbis (including R. Eliezer b. Nathan, who took a highly conservative stand on the question of trading in wine) from permitting not only the acceptance as pawns, but actual trade in, a range of ritual objects closely related to the "idola- trous" Christian religion-chalices, ecclesiastical garments, and candles for light- ing in church.'13 Would these objects not have aroused no less disgust than wine produced (or touched) by gentiles?
Moreover, in his new book he goes a step further to assert that the Jews (or at least rabbis) of medieval Germany and northern France regarded wine touched by gentiles as virtually "taboo" (see 16, 59, 61, 63, 74-75, and especially 113-
11. Ibid., 188. 12. See Gavin Langmuir, Towards a Definition ofAntisemitism (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1990), 13-15, 305-306. 13. See, for example, Teshuvot Rabbenu Gershom Me'or ha-Golah, ed. Shlomo Eidelberg (New
York, 1955), 75-77; Eliezer b. Nathan, Sefer Raban (Warsaw, 1904), 131 (no. 229); Sefer ha-'eshkol, ed. H. Albeck (Jerusalem, 1938), 134; E. E. Urbach, Bahalei ha-tosafot (4th enlarged edition; Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1980), 177, 235.
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15)-a Polynesian word (sometimes spelled "tabu") introduced into Western par- lance by Captain James Cook late in the eighteenth century, which subsequently became quite popular in anthropological and psychoanalytic writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 When William Robertson Smith, in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (first published in 1889), made use of the word "taboo," he immediately cited the entry on the subject by his Cambridge col- league James Frazer in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And Sig- mund Freud, in Totem and Taboo (first published in 1913), prior to setting out his own powerful theory linking taboo with emotional ambivalence, summarized the recent discussions of N. W. Thomas (in the eleventh edition of the Britannica) and the German scholar Wilhelm Wundt, who regarded the essence of taboo as the fear of demons. Soloveitchik, however, who mentions none of these worthy predeces- sors, offers his own "scientific" definition: "Separation from or aversion to some- thing beyond the degree required by a society's own rational postulates," that is, by those postulates a particular society accepts as rational (16).
By this definition using a timer to listen to the radio or watch television on the Sabbath (as opposed to merely turning on the lights) would be considered taboo among modem Orthodox Jews, because the logic of using the timer to circumvent the prohibition should apply (at least in the Diaspora) to radio and television as well. Yet, the early twentieth-century scholars have stressed "the immanence of the sanction" normally attributed to the taboo. As Margaret Mead put it: "If the term is to be employed effectively in comparative discussions," it must be restricted to situations of where the prohibition implies "such inherent danger that the very act of participation will recoil upon the violator." The recoil, in Mead's view, can also be psychological, so that the term would also apply to "those aspects of behavior which are rooted in the individual personality to such a degree that they are so au- tomatic and emotionally charged that the personality suffers inevitably from their infringement."'15
Applying this to the Middle Ages we might say that a Jew who discovered that a piece of meat he ate was actually pork (or even rabbit) rather than beef might indeed have recoiled in horror, just as-to move closer in the Freudian direction- he would upon discovering that the somnolent woman with whom he had sexual relations on returning home late one night after a long trip was his sister rather than his wife. But would this have also been the reaction of a medieval French Jew on
discovering that the excellent Burgundy he had just sipped had been taken from the wrong barrel, or had been poured by his new Christian servant? I think not, and I suspect that Soloveitchik would agree. If so, why the great reluctance on the part of halakhists to permit trade in gentile wine side by side with trade in chalices and ecclesiastical garments?
14. See R. R. Marett, "Tabu," in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics v. 12 (1921), 181- 82. On Soloveitchik's problematic use of the term "taboo," see also Yisrael Yuval's review in Haaretz, 15 September, 2004.
15. Marett, "Tabu," 183; Margaret Mead, "Tabu," in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences v.14 (1934), 501-5. On the connection between taboo and the "likelihood of some minor or major misfor- tune" befalling the transgressor see also A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, "Taboo," in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952), 134-35.
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Review Essay
Perhaps Freud can be helpful. In his view taboos are "prohibitions of primeval antiquity, which were at some time externally imposed upon a generation of primitive men," and which "concerned activities towards which there was a strong inclination." The persistence of a taboo, he argued, indicates that "the orig- inal desire to do the prohibited thing must also persist among the tribes concerned. They must therefore have an ambivalent attitude towards their taboos." At the un- conscious level "there is nothing they would like to do more than violate them, but they are afraid to do so; they are afraid precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire."16 The triumph of fear over desire, and the am- bivalence which often yokes them uncomfortably together provide, I would argue, a useful perspective from which to observe developments in the history of ha- lakhah-both in the Middle Ages and more recent centuries.
Jacob Katz, in his classic Exclusiveness and Tolerance, argued that the rela- tive leniency of Rabbenu Tam regarding the permissibility of trading in gentile wine in contrast to his instinctively stricter position against drinking it derived from the fear, buttressed by Talmudic sources, that drinking wine with Christians would lead to closer social and sexual ties than were desirable.17 Although Soloveitchik now takes issue with his late teacher on this matter, arguing that Rabbenu Tam and his nephew R. Isaac were simply concerned with the danger that a time-honored stricture would collapse (108-12), the question is not so much what these rabbis had reason to fear, as what the logic of taboo (as understood by Freud) would cause them to fear-namely, what they and their coreligionists most desired. Soloveit- chik has aptly quoted Keats on the elusive poet behind the poem, but there is room also to quote Shelley, who in Epipsychidion (1821) described his heart as "wrecked in that convulsion / Alternating attraction and repulsion."'8
Medieval European Jews, like their Christian neighbors, consumed, as we learn from Soloveitchik, large-and sometimes enormous-quantities of wine (37-39), which like coffee in modern times was not merely a popular beverage, but a conduit of sociability. Wine symbolized, then, the narrow line that ultimate- ly separated Jews from Christians, even if and when ties of friendship developed between them-a line, paraphrasing Freud, that there was nothing they would like to do more than cross, but which they were afraid to cross, and they were afraid "precisely because they would like to." Chalices and ecclesiastical garments, pre- cisely because they were so closely associated with an abhorrently alien religion, did not give rise to the same level of ambivalence, and therefore did not need to be
16. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points ofAgreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London, 1950), 31.
17. Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Mod-
ern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 46-47. For an incisive analysis of the book in both its English and Hebrew (1960) versions see David Berger, "Jacob Katz on Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages," in The Pride of Jacob ed. J. M. Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 41-63. Regarding Katz's discussion of Rabbenu Tam's position on gentile wine, see esp. 59- 60.
18. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley ed. T. Hutchinson (London, 1947), 419. See also Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures ofa Romantic Biographer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), 161.
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Elliott Horowitz
distanced by means of a taboo on trade. But the simple sociability of sharing a bot- tle of wine with a Christian neighbor-and perhaps also his wife-was in some ways more seductive (despite, I would argue, the rise of pathological anti-Judaism), and therefore, following Freud, more frightening. By denying themselves, at great expense, more than a marginal role in the lucrative wine trade,19 the Jews of France and Germany-and especially their rabbis-allowed, Freud might say, their deep fear of intimacy with the Christian world to triumph over the dangerous desire to achieve such intimacy.
I mention this only as an alternative thesis to the one Soloveitchik has ad- vanced so eloquently in his scintillating book. Perhaps in his forthcoming study he will reconsider or amplify some of the arguments he has made in this briefer one. We have reason to look forward to a work that will be not only bold and complex, but also full-bodied. Whether it will be certifiably kosher, however, is less certain.
Elliott Horowitz
Bar-Ilan University Ramat-Gan, Israel
19. To the many sources Soloveitchik cites on the profitability of the wine trade may be added the comments of the Franciscan friar Salimbene de Adam in the mid-thirteenth century. Passing through
Auxerre, in the northern reaches of Burgundy, Salimbene, who was a native of Parma, was surprised to find that "the men of this land do not sow or reap, nor do they store anything in barns, but they send
wine to Paris, because they have a river right at hand ... and they sell it for a good price, which pays entirely for their food and clothing." These comments, from Salibene's Cronica, are quoted in both George Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. C. Postan (London: Ed- ward Arnold, 1968), 140, and L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Eu- rope (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), two books that Soloveitchik might have added to his bibliography, which also contains, as is inevitably the case, some typographical errors. The English ti- tle of Ariel Toaff's Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria is garbled, and on the same page (171) the title of the German journal Aschkenas is misspelled. "Jews' College" is the correct punc-
tuation of the London institution referred to on pp. 103, 173. Finally, the Oxford college referred to on
p. 14 is Christ Church rather than Christ College, as fans of Brideshead Revisited might recall.
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276 Ivan G Marcus JSQ 17
ology moved Yuval to posit an earlier German case in W?rzburg, actu ally a murder, not a ritual murder, in 1146, just prior to William of Norwich written up in the 1150s.67
But the inventor of the first ritual murder accusation, Thomas of Monmouth, explicitly says that the Jews did to William of Norwich what no Jew would do to their own children and no Christian would do
it to their own children. Jews would do it only to a Christian child: "for it will not seem probable that Christians would have wished to do this kind of thing to a Christian, or Jews to do it to a Jew" ("Non enim verisimile videtur quod aut christiani de christiano, aut iudei talia fieri aliquatenus voluissent de iudeo.")68
Nor is there any evidence that Thomas was aware of the Jewish par ents' behavior in 1096 when he sat down in the 1150s to write the Wil
liam account. Thus Yuval's thesis is not supported by any hard textual evidence, and it is actually contradicted by the text in which Thomas of
Monmouth invented the first ritual murder accusation.69
Yuval agrees with the founding nationalist historians that Jewish re ligious behavior, by its very existence as collective Jewish behavior, pro voked Christian anti-Jewish resentment and behavior. But the link he
proposes between Jewish martyrdom in 1096 and the ritual murder ac cusation reflects the scholar's own attitude that Jewish fanatical reli
gious behavior under duress stimulated even more Christian fanatical religious behavior. The formerly positive function of Jewish religious "national" solidarity expressed in the martyrs' collective Jewish behavior is now gone. Yuval finds nothing praiseworthy in their acts of sacrifice. For him, the Jewish response to the Christian persecution in the 1096 riots was not heroic but cruel and even criminal.
Unlike the positive assessment of the 1096 martyrs in the writings of Baer, Dinur, Ben-Sasson, and Katz, Yuval posits a tragic link between
67 Another weakness in the argument is that no episode in the anti-Jewish attacks by Crusaders or other Christians in connection with the second Crusade, just prior to the invention of the ritual murder accusation, refers to a ritual homicide of Jews killing their own families, and there is only one case of a Jewish woman drowning herself. See Rabbi Ephraim b. Jacob of Bonn, Sefer Zekhirah, in ed. A. M. Habermann, Sefer Ge zeirot Ashkenaz ve-Zarfat (Jerusalem, 1945), 115-123; English translation in Shlomo Eidelberg, ed. and trans., The Jews and the Crusaders (Madison, 1977), 117-133.
68 Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James, eds., The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth (Cambridge, Eng., 1896), 24-25, as pointed out by Willis Johnson, "Before the Blood Libel: Jews in Christian Exegesis After the Massacres of 1096" (Master of Philosophy diss., Cambridge University, Au gust, 1994), 60-61.
69 See Gavin Langmuir, "Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder," in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (1984; reprinted, Berkeley, 1990), 209-36.
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(2010) Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography 277
irrational Jewish behavior followed by irrational Christian behavior. Ga vin Langmuir had distinguished between "rational" anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism, those attacks on Jews for practicing Judaism, and irra tional or chimerical anti-Semitism, such as the ritual murder accusation, that Christians accused Jews of doing that they never actually did. Yu val's thesis falls in between: his is the completely unproven claim that Christian irrational anti-Semitism was stimulated by Jewish irrational acts that Jews actually did to their own children.70
This judgment makes the Jewish martyrs the "unwitting accomplices" of the Christian cleric who invented the ritual murder accusation. Blam
ing the victims takes on a new meaning and understandably enraged some scholars who replied vigorously to the original article. He had clearly touched a nerve.
At the very least, Israel Yuval's thesis represents an anti-religious and anti-nationalist strain in Israeli medieval Jewish historiography. On the other hand, Yuval's work does build on the part of Katz's and the foun ders' candid assessments that north European Jews looked at Christians with a superior and hostile gaze, and for this alone it is important.
Haym Soloveitchik's Expansion of Katz's as Halakhic Historian
An extension of Jacob Katz's focus in medieval Jewish studies on the
history of Jewish law is seen in the work of Haym Soloveitchik. Although he spent recent decades in New York, Soloveitchik makes it a point that he received is Ph. D. from Jacob Katz and dedicated one of two recent books "To the memory of Jacob Katz, my teacher and rabbi in history."71 He also spent the first decades of his teaching career at the
Hebrew University and as such he should be considered among the Israeli medieval Jewish historians.
In Haym Soloveitchik's recent two book-length treatments of how the Tosafot viewed European medieval Jews' attitude to Christian wine, one can see the limitations of Katz's medieval social history.11 Bein Yehudim la-Goyim is basically an argument that economic factors were responsi ble for stimulating rabbinic rationalizations of change in Jewish law. The
70 See Gavin Langmuir, "Toward a Definition of Antisemitism," in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 311-352.
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278 han G. Marcus JSQ 17
detailed focus is in the rabbinical academies, not the Jewish street. This
is also fundamentally true of Soloveitchik's two books, despite his sig nificant additions about medieval viniculture.
Writing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Soloveitchik tells his readers that his two books derived from his Hebrew University
M. A. dissertation written under Jacob Katz in 1967.73As vastly ex panded and brought up to date, the two books deal with two aspects of how the Tosafist Talmud commentaries rationalized the legal anom aly that Katz had pointed out. Even though the medieval rabbis, like the rabbis in the Talmud, generally considered their contemporary Chris tians to be pagans, the Jews of northern Europe refrained from drinking
Christian wine but engaged in aspects of the equally prohibited trade in it. Since both were prohibited in the Talmud as far as pagan wine was concerned, the medieval rabbis needed to explain this historical differ ence casuistically, and Soloveitchik follows Katz in mapping out how the Tosafists tried to explain this anomaly.74
Soloveitchik added in his book, Yeinam, that new medieval German scholarship about Jewish credit in the Christian wine industry in late
medieval German lands raised a new problem. Why was Christian so ciety willing to let Jews invest their money in Christian winemaking, at the very center of their regional economy, even though they hated Jews and otherwise drove them to the economic margins of making small consumer loans? He inferred from the German research that Jews shifted from their early medieval concentration in international trade to credit, at least in Germany, because Christian vintners needed Jewish loans to keep their businesses operational, despite their religious antag onism toward them, an important thesis that relates medieval Jewish and German economic history.
Moreover, even though the Jews refused to drink wine even touched by Christians enraged Christians and provoked anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior, Jews persisted in avoiding it. It would have served Jewish self interest for them to enjoy Gentile wines as well as trade in them, since there was no halakhic difference between the two in the Talmud. But
Jews acted as though there was a fundamental difference, again, some thing Katz had noted. The Tosafists had to explain the theory under lying the fact that Jews lent Christian winemakers money but then acted as though Christian wine was "taboo," a term Soloveitchik introduces, though without anthropological rigor, and apparently equivalent to
73 Soloveitchik, Yeinam, 11-13 and Soloveitchik, Ha-Yayin bi-Meiha-Beinayim, 19 26.
74 Katz, Bein Yehudim la-Goyim, chapter 4.
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(2010) Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography 279
Katz's ideas about Jewish emotional attachment to Jewish tradition de
spite social pressures to assimilate.75 Soloveitchik's two books offer much new manuscript data about the
layers of Tosafist thought as well as comparative Christian economic information that take us beyond Katz's succinct treatment and make important contributions to various aspects of medieval legal and eco nomic history. But for whom were they written and what is their central focus? A clue is offered by the fact that Soloveitchik devotes half of each book to a detailed presentation of the German and French wine indus try, respectively. The abundance of information about wine making is interesting, though known to medievalists and other specialists, but So loveitchik introduces it in detail for a reader who is assumed not to be a
medieval historian but someone very different and one who can read difficult rabbinic Hebrew in legal texts. The abundant secondary Ger man and French sources are background information or "realia" that serves a certain strategic purpose in the two books that are clearly and admittedly about the history of medieval Jewish law.
Katz wrote in English as well as in Hebrew for readers interested in the relations between Christians and Jews in medieval Europe, and a European medieval historian can make sense out of what he writes as part of the history of medieval Jewish-Christian relations, even if the focus is on rabbinic legal activity. The history of Jewish law is part of medieval Jewish history, and others who work in the history of Roman law or Canon law can follow Katz's arguments from their familiarity
with some similar types of sources and arguments. Soloveitchik seems to be writing, only in Hebrew thus far, as though
his reader is a smart yeshiva student or rabbi or student of Jewish law, for learned insiders so that he comments: "Anyone who studies a page of Talmud" or "from the way of thinking that we grew up on" or "accord ing to our halakhic way of thinking."76At the center of his two books are the halakhic texts analyzed clearly and in great detail; on the margins or periphery is the historical context that is meant to shed light on the Talmudic commentators' discussions, humanize them, and explain them in a new way.
Despite his insistence that his studies depart from the traditional yes hiva quest for new textual interpretations, he actually does present his reader with historical hiddushim based on the realia. Like Katz, Solo
75 Compare Katz, Bein Yehudim la-Goyim, chapter 4 ("deveiqutam le-datam") and Soloveitchik, Ha-Yayin bi-Mei ha-Beinayim, 370 ("ha-regesh ha-dati"). On taboo, see Solovietchik, Yeinam,l6-\1 and 113-115.
76 Soloveitchik, Yenam, 10.
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280 Ivan G. Marcus JSQ 17
veitchik argues that the halakhists responded to their own time, but So loveitchik adds that you should also read the manuscript evidence and the Latin economic research, two bodies of evidence Katz had not used.
The result is less a nationalist positivist reading of medieval Jewish history than an historicizing of Talmudic law designed to show reli giously observant Jews today that Talmudic law has a history as well as a human side. It adopts Katz's religious apologetic stance, since at bottom the result is to historicize the interpretation of Jewish law about Christian wine in medieval France and Germany.
Soloveitchik's books also share Katz's conservative assumptions about Jewish law in a functionalist Jewish traditional society. For Solo veitchik, as for Katz, although there may have been regional rabbinic legal cultures in medieval European societies, behind them all is "the halakhah," a uniform system of rules that rabbis use when acting as jurists when they make halakhic decisions today or teach rabbinic jur isprudence. For Soloveitchik, a student of the history of Jewish law must approach it first as a jurist. This is a functional equivalent to Katz's ideal type of the traditional society approached as a sociologist.77
Soloveitchik then assumes a constant jurisprudential system at all times and goes on to argue that historical information can be drawn from halakhic texts only when they "deviate" from how the rules of Jewish jurisprudence are supposed to operate. His method assumes that Jewish law as a historical fact operates only the way it is supposed to. If there are no uniform set of rules and practices in historical fact, there can be no meaning to the term "deviation." Soloveitchik's rule of inferring historical realia in "deviations" from a universal halakhic norm, is an application of Katz's sociological and religious paradigm that Soloveitchik shares and develops. His view is a continuation of
Katz's own debate with Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson about how historians should read halakhic sources. Ben-Sasson's counter-arguments that his torians should read all sources as historians are worth rereading, a point
Moshe Rosman recently made in a different context.78 A good example of this kind of historical reading is the way Jeremy
Cohen analyzes Hebrew narratives about the martyrs of 1096 as texts
Soloveitchik, Shu"t ke-Maqor His tori (Jerusalem, 1990) and compare Haim Hillel Ben Sasson, "Concepts and Reality in Late Medieval Jewish History" (Hebrew) Tarbiz 29 (1960): 297-312 and Jacob Katz, "On Halakhah and Preaching as Historical Sources," (Hebrew) Tarbiz 70 (1961): 62-68 and the reply by Ben-Sasson, ibid., 69-72 as well as Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History? 155-167 for the historian as reader of all kinds of sources (see below).
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(2010) Israeli Medieval Jewish Historiography 281
that are deeply embedded not only in earlier Jewish biblical and rabbinic associations but also as echoes of and responses to contemporary Chris tian motifs and images in twelfth-century Europe. This kind of reading is in part about how the acts were interpreted and constructed in the early twelfth century, not about the motives of the actors themselves. But it seems likely that we will gain better understanding of how the acts themselves were accepted or rejected by consulting the near contem porary Jewish writers, rabbinic and non-rabbinic alike, than from impos ing absolutist juridical standards on the martyrs.79
Toward an Israeli Medieval Cultural History
The rising generation of Israeli medieval historians has moved into new areas of cultural and social history that leave behind nationalist ideolo gies and positivist assumptions or religious apologetics about the chan ging nature of medieval Jewish law. The promise of G?demann and Baron, Baer, Dinur and Ben-Sasson to study the society of Jews inter acting with non-Jews is being realized in new ways in the work of Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, a student of Avraham Grossman, and espe cially that of Elisheva Baumgarten, a student of Reuven Bonfil, whose own work has developed new approaches to Jewish cultural and social history based on historical anthropology. Although Bonfil has written mainly on early modern Jewish history, some of his most important work has been in articles written about Jewish cultural change in early Christian Europe. His applying the approach of the French Annales School medieval historians has been very important in my own work as well as in that of his students at the Hebrew University.80
The new model of some of the younger historians looks at Jews and Christians living in Christian Europe as essentially participating both in the same society but also in different cultural spheres. Shoham-Steiner
79 See Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadephia, 2004), and compare Haym Soloveitchik, "Religious Law and Social Change: the Medieval Ashkenazic Example," AJS Review 12 (1987): 205-220, accepted as an appropriate approach by Israel Yuval, "Vengeance," 74, and compare Avraham Grossman's useful approach in "The Roots of Martyrdom in Early Ashkenaz" (Hebrew) in eds. Isaiah Gafni and Eliezer Ravitzky, Qedushat ha
80 See, for example, Robert Bonfil, "Myth, Rhetoric, History? An Examination of Megillat Ahimaaz" (Hebrew) in eds. Robert Bonfil, Menahem Ben-Sasson, and Joseph Hacker, Tarbut ve-Hevrah be-Toledot Israel be-Mei ha-Beinayim, (Jerusalem, 1989), 99 135.
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Augustus Jessopp and Montague Rhodes James (eds.), The Life and Miracles of St.William of Norwich by Thomas of Monmouth, Cambridge 1896, pp. 24-25. דמע ךכ לע Willis Johnson, 'Before the Blood Libel: Jews in Christian Exegesis :ורקחמב ןוסנו'ג םילד
after the Massacres of 1096', Master of Philosophy diss., Cambridge University, August
1994, pp. 60-61 Gavin Langmuir, 'Thomas ofMonmouth: Detector ofRitual Murder', Toward a Definition
of Antisemitism, Berkeley 1990, pp. 209-236
idem, 'Toward a Definition of Antisemitism', ibid., pp. 311-352
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