From SHU 801: The New Sephardic Jewish Binary: Between Meir Kahane and Moshe Feinstein
David Shasha
The New Sephardic Jewish Binary: Between Meir Kahane and Moshe Feinstein
Sephardic Jews today find themselves silenced by the Ashkenazi dominated Jewish institutions and media outlets.
It has become rather clear that the subservient Sephardim have adopted Ashkenazi ways of seeing, understanding, and processing Judaism within the context of Orthodoxy and Zionism, losing their traditional identity in the process.
An excellent example of how this works can be seen in the deeply divergent approaches of two prominent rabbis in the American Sephardic community on the matter of the commemoration of the Destruction of the Temple that takes the form of Fast Days and various other customary prohibitions.
Rabbi Haim Ovadia, currently serving the Sephardic community in Silver Springs, Maryland, has posted two items on the Fast Day of 17 Tammuz:
http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Fast-Forward-1.html?soid=1108300139590&aid=K0BwPmIXySk
http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Fast-Forward-2.html?soid=1108300139590&aid=6UUcInn6XTk
Ovadia claims that the Fast Day is now “optional”:
In the current state of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad, the Talmudic rule demands that fasting on the minor fast days should be optional, and according to Ha'Meiri, fasting would even be forbidden, maybe because it shows lack of gratitude to God. For that reason, one who chooses not to fast on these days cannot be considered one who breaches the law, and can definitely rely on the ruling of Rashba. Hopefully, in the coming years, more and more individuals will choose to acknowledge the fact that we leave in better times and develop a more positive worldview, and as a result maybe persuade the rabbinic leadership to reassess the situation and leave us with only two fast days, Tisha Be'Av and Yom Kippur, thus making those two much more meaningful.
Not unexpectedly, the Haredi Rabbi Eli Mansour takes the opposite tack:
http://www.dailyhalacha.com/Display.asp?ClipDate=7/10/2017
Where Ovadia points to the “redemption” of Zionism as a sign that the Minor Fast Days are to be abrogated, Mansour doubles-down on the restrictions of the “Three Weeks” period, demanding that they be extended to the evening that precedes the 17 Tammuz Fast.
Ovadia and Mansour both deploy classical Sephardic rabbinical sources to bolster their points, but lurking behind both of their legal rulings is a very obvious PILPUL which has already pre-determined what their position is before they even look at the sources.
Ovadia presents a militant Religious Zionism which establishes the legal religious significance of the contemporary State of Israel, a matter that I have discussed in some detail in my essay “The ‘Three Weeks,’ the Gaza Disengagement, and Religious Zionism”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/l2OIigQMaI0
In the aftermath of the great trauma engendered by the loss of the national center in 70 CE, the Sages set out to transform Judaism.
As I have written:
At the very core of the Rabbinical legislation was the commemoration of the defining moment of their history: The loss of the Temple. The loss of the Temple was both a tragedy and liberation for the Sages. With the Temple gone they were able to completely take the reins of Jewish culture and history, and yet they were deeply sensitive to the depth of this tragedy and marked their calendar accordingly. The Temple was to be remembered each and every year with a three week period of mourning that, as we will see, created a solid sense of coherence within the labyrinth of Jewish history.
By setting the three week period from 17 Tammuz to 9 Ab the Sages, wittingly or unwittingly, did something that was hitherto unknown in the annals of civilization: They turned a crushing and nation-ending defeat into a complete triumph for their own ideology and way of life. The “Three Weeks” held out the hope that Jewish political life would be restored in the Holy Land along the lines of the Rabbinic system.
With the establishment of the “Three Weeks” and the two Fasts which bracketed them, the Sages were marking the separation between the old world of the Temple and the Priests and the new age of the Rabbinical culture that had now triumphed among Jews everywhere and formed a civilization that ceased to be variable; the Mishna and Talmud now served as the foundational texts of the Jewish people. Along with the exegetical modes that the Sages had highlighted, what we know as Midrash, a non-literal interpretation of Scripture whose aim was to recreate philosophical and rhetorical understanding of the ancient texts which could easily have succumbed to the death throes of historical irrelevance, the emergence of Rabbinic Halakha, an extension of the Mosaic and Prophetic modalities, created a new world of Judaism that had formed a whole with the ancient culture.
Religious Zionism has had to reject this cataclysmic transformation effected by the Jewish Diaspora that is enshrined in the Talmudic Law, as it now proclaims a new Messianic Age of Redemption which supersedes the prior strictures and their historical-conceptual underpinnings.
It is critical to note that the two deeply transformative Ashkenazi Jewish movements of the 19th century, Reform Judaism and Zionism, both set out a new Jewish Redemption which sought to abrogate the traditional Jewish Law, but in radically different ways.
Reform Judaism believed that European Emancipation pointed to the Messianic Age as it conferred civil rights on the Jewish people and removed the restrictions to which they were previously held.
The following article from a Christian website explains the history of this process and how the Reform leaders transformed the traditional Jewish idea of the Messiah:
http://www.j-e-s-u-s.org/translator/messianicAge.htm
The traditional idea was to be replaced by a post-Messianic belief that would serve to completely reconfigure the Jewish Law as it destroyed the traditional hopes for Redemption at some future point in time:
In 1845 at Frankfurt-on-the-Main during a conference of rabbis and other Jewish thinkers, it became necessary to tone down the political side of messianism. Although messianism was part of the essence of Judaism it was no longer meaningful politically under the circumstances of integration. Only its universal aspect remained relevant. The majority at the conference decided, "The messianic idea deserves a significant role in our prayers, but the petitions for our return to the land of our fathers and the establishment of a Jewish state should be eliminated from them." The mission of Israel now replaced the messianic return. David Einhorn said in Frankfurt:
"The collapse of Israel`s political independence was once regarded as a misfortune, but it really represented progress, not atrophy but an elevation of religion. Henceforth Israel came closer to its destiny. Holy devotion replaced sacrifices. Israel was to bear the word of God to all the corners of the earth."
By 1881, in America, Isaac M. Wise had written in a series of sermons on The Origin and History of the Messianic Idea that both Jews and Christians have completely distorted messianic ideals. According to James G. Heller, Wise thought the idea of "a personal Messiah had no warrant in Mosaic writings." According to Heller, the following year Wise wrote that "the concept of a personal Messiah did not become an official Jewish teaching until the time of Rabbi Akiba ...", and, that "the suffering Messiah was never adopted among Jews as a religious belief ...", and, that "both, Christians and Jews, had lost sight of the Messianic idea ..." For Wise, the original meaning of messianism had been corrupted by contact with Christianity. Wise thought it had always been about a universal age for all peoples. For him, the idea did not evolve, but had suffered devolution.
On the other hand, Zionism sought to reject the Jewish Diaspora and effect a “secular” messianism that would also serve to reject the traditional Jewish legal system, putting in its place a nation-state modeled on the European model as articulated by philosophers like Hegel.
In the end, Orthodox Judaism was left with an agonizing choice over whether to accept these post-Halakhic forms of Judaism, or to maintain the Talmudic understanding of Diaspora and its demand for patience.
Under the pressures of Zionism a group of Orthodox Jewish thinkers, foremost among them Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, sought to fuse the ancient messianic idea with the current political reality.
Kook asserted the absolute religious value of Zionism, which ultimately led to the radical extremism embodied in the Settler movement.
The Lithuanian Yeshiva world, exemplified by close-knit religious enclaves in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, Monsey, New York, and Bnei Brak in Israel, has maintained a largely antagonistic attitude towards Zionism and the State of Israel.
The value of legal stringency, Humra, is paramount in the Haredi Jewish world.
The Ultra-Orthodox community lives by the deeply rigid and circumscribed rules of rabbinic authoritarian Da’as Torah; values that can be seen in the Halakhic writings of figures like Mansour.
Religious Zionism has been adopted by other Sephardim as a means to assimilate into the Modern Orthodox community, whose center has long been Yeshiva University and whose singular leader is the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
I have presented the views of Soloveitchik in some detail in the following special newsletter:
For some time now I have been examining the contentious relationship between Modern Orthodox Ashkenazim and the Sephardim:
In a series of articles on the “Idiot Sephardim” I have picked apart the various pretenses of those in our community who continue to promote the foolish idea that Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy is compatible with our traditions and the values of Jewish Humanism.
Indeed, the attempt to integrate the Sephardic community into the YU orbit has not only been a practical failure as the Haredi faction, led by figures like Mansour, continues to make headway in our institutions, but it has been a conceptual-moral failure that has brought Zionist radicalism into our precincts.
But this has not stopped the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox from embracing Sephardic rabbis like Meir Mazuz:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Rabbi-Meir-Mazuz-and-the-battle-for-Orthodox-Judaism-341771
A recent post from the Ashkenazi-centric Lehrhaus website praising Rabbi Haim Sabato made the point quite clear:
http://www.thelehrhaus.com/culture/2017/6/24/the-simple-judaism-of-a-rosh-yeshiva-novelist
The Israeli Mizrahim Mazuz and Sabato are both devoted Religious Zionists who have embraced critical tenets of the Modern Orthodox worldview and have in turn been warmly accepted by the YU community and the Settler faction.
And so it is that we now see Sephardim replicating this Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish binary between the YU system and the Lithuanian Yeshiva world.
A 2016 article by University of Maryland Professor Joseph Ringel published by the academic journal Israel Studies presents this binary through the figures of Eliyahou Zini and Ovadia Yosef, two rabbis of Middle Eastern origin who represent deeply divergent viewpoints on contemporary Judaism and the Sephardic heritage:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeXNEeXRZb0Z2aEU/view?ths=true
Buried in note 46 is the following critical nugget:
Zini’s understanding of Nahmanides as a Sephardic authority interested in synthesis parallels that of Bernard Septimus, “‘Open Rebuke and Concealed Love’: Nahmanides and the Andalusian Tradition,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA:, 1983), 11–34. Just as Septimus explicitly disagrees with the more traditional historians, who see Nahmanides as anti-rationalist and as straying from the Sephardic philosophical tradition, Zini implicitly disagrees with the Sephardic Rabbi José Faur, who regards Nahmanides as anti-rationalist and as primarily influenced by Ashkenaz. See Faur’s The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism, I (Brighton, MA, 2008), 375–85.
As we read through Professor Ringel’s presentation it is essential to keep this point in mind, as it reflects the author’s antipathy for the classical Sephardic tradition and the heritage of Religious Humanism presented in the Maimonidean system.
Nahmanides is of course one of the primary representatives of the Ashkenazi Tosafist tradition in Christian Spain and was a central figure in the Maimonidean Controversy:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/killing-off-rational-juda_b_498846.html
It is critical to understand that the use of the term Jewish Humanism is anathema to Ashkenazim like Ringel, and that Sephardim in both the YU and Haredi worlds have long abandoned the classical Andalusian Jewish heritage.
We have seen this in the life and work of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef:
Over time we have seen the SHAS party, which was formed out of the tension between the Iraqi-born Yosef and Rabbi Elazar Shach, leader of the Ponovitch school, has gravitated towards the Lithuanian Yeshiva world, at the expense of the Sephardic heritage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elazar_Shach#Political_life
http://www.haaretz.com/news/rabbi-schach-a-man-of-wars-and-battles-1.73738
Yosef was once seen as a liberal, moderating force, but in the long run can be understood as solidifying the connection between the reactionary Haredi community and the Israeli Mizrahim.
Here is how Ringel characterizes Yosef’s view:
In Yosef’s perspective, he was engaged in an act of restoration. When discussing his insistence that Sephardim in the Land of Israel must follow Maran’s rulings, he often used the clause “to return the crown to its former place”. While this clause has become the political slogan of the Shas Party, and in that context functions as a call for the restoration of Sephardic political power, in the case of Yosef it has a halakhic meaning: because Maran is the “master of the locale” of the Land of Israel, the “crown”/authority (‘atarah) belongs to him, and therefore must be returned/restored to him, just as it was in days of old. In this way, Yosef was able to ignore centuries of practice and still claim Sephardic authenticity. In fact, his use of the clause functions as a polemic against Sephardic rabbis whom he accuses of deviating from what Sephardic practice should have been. One of his original polemics was directed against Rabbi Joseph Hayyim of Baghdad (1835–1909), author of the halakhic work Ben Ish Hay, whom he accuses of imposing Lurianic and Ashkenazi stringencies on his followers; similarly, Yosef accused Rabbi Benzion Meir Hai Uziel (1880–1953), former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, of making himself subservient to the wishes of the Ashkenazi rabbinate. For Yosef, these widely-observed rulings violated true Sephardic values, because they defy the decisions of Caro that Sephardic communities had previously accepted. While many academics and rabbis have criticized Yosef’s positions as an invention, he based his claim on his own interpretation of rabbinic responsa from Turkish, Aleppan, and Jerusalemite rabbis.
The first thing to notice is that Ringel’s article is strictly limited to legal discussion and to the complex history of Sephardic rabbinical rulings.
We have already noted that this history is refracted through the prism of the later Sephardi authorities from Christian Spain, known in rabbinic studies as the Rishonim, who came in the wake of the Maimonidean Controversy as they represented a fatal embrace of the Ashkenazi system that was so critical of Jewish Humanism.
It is thus logical to see how Ringel formulates the matter in ways familiar to the Modern Orthodox way of seeing:
Yosef’s/Shas’ ambivalent attitudes towards modernity have also been criticized by those who feel that such views do not represent continuity with the Sephardic past. Yosef ’s ambivalence toward modern developments is reflected in his expressing both positive and negative attitudes toward the religious significance of Zionism, a movement that encompasses secularism and the potential fulfillment of the prophetic visions; Yosef ’s differing halakhic positions on national issues likewise lend themselves to differing interpretations. While, taken in isolation, these positions can be reconciled with a conservative Zionistic rabbinic perspective, there are voices within Shas that are overtly hostile towards Zionism and narrate Sephardic rabbinic history as being opposed to it, ignoring the ample documentation that demonstrates that most traditional rabbis throughout the Middle East were supportive of Zionism. What polemicists on both sides ignore is that Zionism in Islamic lands was more traditional and often traditionalist in terms of its opposition to Alliancist/assimilationist forces, and focused on the practicalities of the revival of Hebrew language and settling the land rather than on creating a secular national culture—in contrast to the dominant secular Zionist ethos in Europe and Israel.
Similarly, while Yosef allowed general/secular studies for practical purposes, he preferred that yeshiva students study Torah only, and therefore re-casted previous extensive Sephardic rabbinic involvement in the arts and sciences as a necessity of the times rather than as an ideal. Yet historically, classical Sephardic and Eastern rabbis were idealistic about such involvement. All of these issues serve as grist for Zini’s critique.
Rather than deploying the model of Jewish Humanism that has been articulated by Jose Faur in his many studies of the Sephardic heritage, Ringel remains tied to the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox process as seen in the work of Soloveitchik and his school.
Ringel then contrasts Yosef’s Halakhic project with that of the North African Rabbi Eliyahou Zini:
Zini, head of Yeshivat Or Vishua in Haifa, and professor of mathematics at, and rabbi of, the Technion, grew up in French-occupied Algeria and received a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Paris. Zini’s father, Meir, was a colleague of Rabbi Léon Yéhouda Askénazi, otherwise known as “Manitou” (Algeria, France, and Israel; 1922–96), and both Eliyahou Zini and Manitou were members of l’école de pensée juive de Paris or “The Paris School of Jewish Thought” that included thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95) and André Neher (1914–88). The “Paris School” was founded by Robert Gamzon (1905–61) as part of a physical school that he established in the Parisian suburbs in 1946.
Gamzon’s goal was to train the future leaders of the Jewish community of France, which had been decimated in the Holocaust. The school attracted Jewish students at the Sorbonne and functioned as a think tank. The curriculum included Jewish pedagogy, Hebrew, drama, Tanakh (Bible), poetry, prayer, and Jewish thought.
Because this school of thought influenced Zini so powerfully, it is necessary to sketch the broad outlines of the movement and the thought of Manitou. While Gamzon established the physical institution, Jacob Gordin (1897–1947) was the intellectual founder of the Paris School. Intellectuals within the movement regarded themselves as committed to traditional Jewish living and Jewish national identity, as well as to the need to re-assess the proper relationship with modernity by taking the more recent events of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel into account. Thus, critiques of certain facets of modernity that led to the Holocaust were combined with attempts to strike a balance between Jewish particularism/Zionism and the need for a universalism that was respectful of the differences among different peoples. Therefore, thinkers involved in the movement produced syntheses between Judaism and Western thought. Many tried to strike a middle path between “extremes”: they did not regard halakhah as binding but respected it as a relevant system; they strayed from “traditional” rabbinic thought but rejected the critical stance of the nineteenth-century proponents of Wissenschaft to tradition. This desire for a balanced change led many thinkers to focus on what had been neglected texts in traditional Jewish culture in Ashkenazi Europe, namely, all 24 books of the Tanakh, and Midrash.
Manitou’s contribution was his synthesis of historiography and philosophy with kabbala and religious Zionism. He viewed Jewish and world histories as interdependent, interpreting the development of other religions and secular movements as a process in which contradictory elements of Jewish tradition that had been either co-opted or exaggerated by different groups would eventually coalesce, thereby creating a united human race that was respectful of difference. To this end, Manitou was a proponent of inter-religious dialogue.
Major elements of the Paris school have affected Zini’s thought in both form and content. For instance, he makes heavy use of historical criticism but is fully committed to the authority of halakhah. Thus, he is willing to upend what he considers to be mistaken rulings, but does so in the name of commitment to tradition, and opposes what he considers to be the cavalier attitude toward the authority of customs on the part of rabbis such as Yosef. Zini’s creative interpretations of rabbinic homilies reflect the Paris School’s emphasis on the sophisticated interpretation of Midrash. So too, his commitment to Zionism is a reflection of his experiences in France, even as his radical treatment of the ethical indicates a break from the humanistic stances of the Paris School.
Later in the discussion Ringel articulates Zini’s North African Jewish model as an alternative to Yosef’s SHAS program:
For Zini, North African Judaism represents the authentic Sephardic tradition, which, for him, climaxed during the generation of Moses Nahmanides (1194–1270), whose school in Barcelona synthesized the world of Sepharad as reflected in the work of rabbis such as Isaac al-Fasi and Moses Maimonides (Córdoba, Morocco, Land of Israel, and Egypt, 1137–1205) with the world of the medieval French Tosafists and the rabbis of Provence. North African Judaism, according to Zini, continued this “symbiosis” until “the last generation”. Central figures in this world, especially for Jews from Algeria, include Simeon ben-Semah Duran (Majorca, Aragon, and Algiers, 1361–1444) and Isaac ben-Sheshet Perfet (Barcelona and Algiers, 1326–1408); these rabbis expressed worldviews that have nothing to do with the juridical rulings of Yosef, opines Zini.
It is here that we can see precisely how the Nahmanidean synthesis works in its rejection of classical Sephardic Jewish Humanism as it opens the door to a new form of Jewish Convivencia reflecting an Ashkenazi-Sephardi unity.
In the following passage Ringel shows us how closely Zini hews to the Modern Orthodox model:
Because Yosef was the spiritual head of the Shas Party/Movement, Zini assumes that Yosef’s positions match the statements and policies of the party/movement. Zini therefore proceeded to stress the difference between Shas’ form of Judaism and “the Sephardic Judaism” that was traditionally open to the educated world. Zini declares that if the Shasniks reply to this objection by claiming that they are afraid of the effects of such study on one’s faith, then they are no different than the Lithuanians and Galicians!
Essential to Zini’s “Sephardic” model is Religious Zionism:
Zini concluded that the opposition to Zionism on the part of Shasniks results from lack of attention to all of the sources; for instance, the fact that the government of Israel includes non-religious people is not evidence that the state is invalid, since many of the Kings of Biblical Israel and Judea were wicked, but this fact did not delegitimize their kingdoms! Based on the perceived lack of representation of the “true” Sephardic tradition of open-ness to general studies and Zionism, Zini rhetorically asks those Sephardim who identify with Shas, “In what way are you Sephardic?”. Zini thereby endeavors to undermine Yosef’s claim that his movement represents the Sephardic tradition.
…
Zini’s vision is focused on his theoretical/ hermeneutical framework for the application of halakhah. This strategy befits the sensitivities of the religious-Zionist community that Zini leads, as religious Zionism tends to focus on the “big ideas” behind national revival. Indeed, Zini’s critique of Yosef goes beyond the latter’s halakhic methodology and extends to the larger values Yosef represents (whether by default or design) through the politics and educational activities of Shas. It seems Zini is trying to reach those within the religious Zionist community who might be tempted by Yosef’s “Israel-centric” halakhic rulings.
Ringel represents a new element in Zionist scholarship that, as we have seen through initiatives like Naftali Bennett’s Biton Committee, has reframed Israeli Mizrahi identity to conform to the Religious Zionist model and to the radical messianism of the Settler movement.
It is in this way that the classical Andalusian Jewish intellectual-literary tradition has been reconfigured and subsumed in either the Lithuanian-Haredi model presented by SHAS or by the Religious Zionism of figures like Zini, Meir Mazuz, and Chaim Amsallem.
The choice for Sephardim would then appear to be either Meir Kahane and the radical Settlers or Moshe Feinstein and the Haredim.
This binary ignores, as we have seen in the Ringel article, the Sephardic Jewish Humanism presented by Faur; a tradition that rejects the Ashkenazi synthesis of Nahmanides and the Spanish Rishonim espoused by Zini.
More than this, the so-called “Paris School,” which included the great Jewish Humanist Emmanuel Levinas, is more closely aligned with Faur’s presentation of the Maimonidean tradition as part of the current Post-Modern philosophical school than it is with the YU system espoused by Ringel:
We have recently seen how Ashkenazi Religious Zionists like the late Rav Shagar have sought to co-opt the term Post-Modernism for their understanding of Judaism as Faur’s work languishes unread and unappreciated:
While we see a figure like Eliyahou Zini processed in terms of Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism, there is a very different Sephardic reality, a much more contentious reality, presented by Faur who has written caustically of what he calls the “Anti-Maimonidean Demons”:
So while SHAS has firmly solidified the ties between Israeli Mizrahim and the Lithuanian Yeshiva world, figures like Zini, Mazuz, Sabato, and Amsallem have become go-to Sephardim for Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox Jews who view their blend of Zionism and traditionalism as akin to their own view of Judaism.
Missing from the New Sephardic Binary, a product of the New Convivencia, is the classical literary heritage and intellectual value system of Andalusian Judaism which has been lost to the Jewish world under the weight of White Jewish hegemony.
The exclusive fixation on Jewish ritual law and the internecine legal battles that occupy the Orthodox avoids the larger philosophical-cultural implications presented by Faur and by scholars like Maria Rosa Menocal and Ammiel Alcalay in studies that seek to substantiate the deeply resonant culture of Andalusian Convivencia:
Similar to Ringel, Modern Orthodox Sephardim like Rabbi Marc Angel have sought to promote the New Convivencia with the Ashkenazim, while at the same time rejecting the classic model of Convivencia in Andalusian civilization:
There are serious political and religious implications for this rejection of Convivencia and the embrace of Religious Zionism by figures like Zini.
But more than this is the debilitating polemic of scholars like Ringel who reject the classic Maimonidean system in favor of the Tosafist culture of Nahmanides and his school.
Ringel’s article ultimately reflects the ways in which Ashkenazi Zionists see a certain group of Sephardim as fellow travelers in their modernist project.
We should therefore remember that Sephardim continue to be erased from the general Jewish discussion, and are simply being used and manipulated by Ashkenazi ethnocentrists in order to validate factional views which ultimately serve to ensure White Jewish hegemony.
Scholars like Ringel ultimately seek to reframe and reconfigure the Sephardic heritage in order to have it conform to these Ashkenazi Orthodox models in a way that serves to undermine the most important intellectual-literary elements of our classical system and its Religious Humanist values.
David Shasha
From SHU 801, August 2, 2017