Newsletter Special: The Meldola Family and Sephardic Jewish Humanism
David Shasha
The Missing Context: Hakham Raphael Meldola and Moses Mendelssohn
It is not simply that we have seen in recent years the ongoing erasure of the Sephardic heritage, but what little work is currently being done in the area is presented exclusively through the distorting Ashkenazi lens.
I have just read the following article on the great Sephardic sage Raphael Meldola (1685-1748):
Before I discuss the article, here is the entry on the Meldola family from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia:
https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10603-meldola#anchor12
It is important to read the entry prior to looking at the article, because it provides a macro view of a dominant Sephardic rabbinical dynasty that exemplified the values of Jewish Humanism which are not referred to in the article.
I wanted to highlight the following fact from Raphael Meldola’s entry in the family history:
Meldola was the author of a large number of theological and ethical works, the most important being "Mayim Rabbim" (Amsterdam, 1737), and his responsa, in several volumes, which gained for him a European reputation, and which were afterward published by his son David in Amsterdam. He wrote also a poem in honor of Mendelssohn's "Jerusalem."
Bernard Dov Cooperman’s article refers to the legal responsa collection, but makes no mention of the Mendelssohn poem.
The article provides a lens into the way Ashkenazim deal with Sephardim, as the discussion is framed exclusively through the work of Jacob Katz and his Eurocentric understanding of Jewish Modernity.
I would like to point to the following extended passage from the article which mentions Joseph Attias and the worldliness of the Sephardim:
What conclusions can we draw about Meldola’s education and his intellectual world from this dense and allusive text, from his facility with such an ornate Hebrew style, and from his deep familiarity with its sources? The language of our text is, of course, a claim to status and authority within the learned rabbinic hierarchy. But perhaps its unabashedly erudite Hebrew intellectualism is not as straightforward a claim as we might think. Remember that Hebrew was not this society’s, or Meldola’s, only literary language. The community in which he was raised spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. When he preached in Livorno (and most likely in Pisa and Bayonne as well), he would have been required to use Spanish. He and his contemporaries also knew and used Latin; for instance, in a Spanish letter to the parnassim of Bayonne he quotes Seneca, De vita beata, in Latin. Meldola’s slightly older contemporary, Joseph Attias, is famous in Livornese history for his broad secular scholarship, wide circle of non-Jewish intellectual friends, and enormous scholarly library in European languages. Attias’s secular knowledge was no doubt influenced, his protests to the contrary notwithstanding, by the fact that his father had grown up as a Christian in Iberia, had practiced law in Salamanca, and had Spanish plays and literature on the bookshelves of their home in Livorno. But we should not assume that there was any sharp division between Hispanic and Hebrew cultures in the Tuscan city. Attias would be appointed one of Livorno’s five rabbis in 1733, while Meldola would be commissioned by the community to translate into Hebrew a volume of Spanish hymns commemorating the earthquake of 1742 (Shever Metzarim). There are, in other words, two competing literary languages in this community. We should not even take it for granted that Hebrew was the language of rabbinics while Spanish was reserved for recent converso immigrants or the community’s lay leadership. Halakhic communication was, surprisingly, not exclusively in Hebrew. As we have already mentioned, Meldola’s son David reports that his father wrote many of his responsa in Spanish or Italian, from which languages he—that is, David—had to translate them into Hebrew for the publication of Mayim Rabim. Whatever the circumstances that determined language choice, it is clear that Hebrew faced real competition as the language of religious self-expression and piety, and that cultural literacy and prestige were a complex affair in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne, just as in other centers of the Western Sephardic diaspora.
Because Cooperman resolutely ignores the work of Jose Faur, he makes no mention of Attias’ connection to the great Italian thinker Giambattista Vico:
In the article “Vico, Religious Humanism, and the Sephardic Tradition,” Faur links Attias to Vico’s 18th century opus New Science, and forward in time to the great Hakhamim Elijah Benamozegh and Israel Moses Hazzan.
Indeed, the two passages I have just cited on Meldola bring us to better understand not only the family’s religio-intellectual history, but larger trends in Sephardic Humanism; as embodied in a sermon from 1851 by Hakham David Meldola, delivered In Bevis Marks and published by Isaac Leeser’s Occident:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14XGCHYEJk75hOAZlBf2hSEiyd8G5Rrg3Z9RM2NR43KA/edit
I have prepared an extensive reading list that places this Sephardic Modernity into its wider historical context:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKBTQSn0dytn4AefatM1wTgG22DTMaz3sVCuYIxiJEY/edit
In the list I included works by Hakham David Nieto, Grace Aguilar, Moses Angel, and Elijah Benamozegh; exponents of Sephardic Jewish Humanism which are further clarified and contextualized by academic books from Faur, Stephen Schwartz, Victor Perera, Manuel Da Costa Fontes, Arthur Kiron, and many others who have presented this tradition in its dynamic context.
One of the branches of the Meldola family came to the New World and ministered here in New York:
Eldest daughter of Raphael Meldola (No.15); born at Leghorn 1799; married (May 20, 1819) David Aaron de Sola, senior minister and preacher of Bevis Marks Synagogue, London, and became the mother of a large family. Of her sons, Abraham de Sola was professor of Semitic languages and literature in McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and rabbi of the Sephardic congregation in that city. He was the father of the Rev. A. D. Meldola de Sola and of Clarence I. de Sola of Montreal. One of Rica's daughters, Eliza, married the Rev. Abraham P. Mendes of Birmingham and London, England, and afterward of Newport, R. I. She was the mother of the Revs. F. de Sola Mendes and H. Pereira Mendes of New York.
This more recent history has been preserved by Rabbi David De Sola Pool in his two classic books on Congregation Shearith Israel:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Portrait-Shearith-Israel-1654-1954/dp/B000OPUID0
https://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Etched-Stone-Jewish-Settlers/dp/B0000CIFA0
Notably, both books are out of print.
Indeed, this is not just a very rich Jewish history that links Iberia, the Mediterranean, Europe, and America; it is repository of intellectual and religious values that Cooperman barely articulates in his article.
Again, it is Raphael Meldola’s poem in honor of the publication of Moses Mendelssohn’s “Jerusalem” that is so intriguing, as it shows us the faulty manner in which Ashkenazi academics like Cooperman do not seek to connect the many dots that inform the Sephardic heritage in its conceptual expansiveness and cosmopolitan sophistication.
The Cooperman article focuses on Jewish identity, an Ashkenazi concern which is then situated in a larger concept of “deviance” that is filtered through the complex configuration of Halakhah, rather than the complex literary ways involved in the Converso intellectual tradition.
In my article on the excellent 2005 book by Da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain, I examine this tradition:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Q5bnDAid8WSNWlf6xftWZnsyQbKrnRXwycu2qL_vYw/edit
Here is what I said there regarding the manner in which Ashkenazim have usually approached the Conversos:
The history of the Conversos has been limited to the two main types of the believing Christian and the crypto-Jew. The scholar Ben Zion Netanyahu has been at the forefront of the school which insists that the Conversos were good Christians and that all this business of crypto-Judaism is a sham. Other scholars like David Gitlitz maintain that the extent of crypto-Judaism is truly vast and far-reaching.
What is generally missing from these conflicting analyses is the point that we find in Faur emanating from Castro and Gilman and now restated by Fontes. In these pioneering works which add multiple layers of complexity to our understanding of Spanish identity in the Middle Ages and early Modernity – an important factor in assessing the Renaissance and the Enlightenment – we see the encoded messages that bespeak a radical interpretation of religion and society that were, as Faur points out, central to the emergence of what we now think of as Modern culture.
Cooperman does not really try to engage the Converso problematic beyond the issues of law and custom in a ritual setting.
He is apparently stymied by the rhetorical complexity of Meldola’s writing:
In the introductory sections in particular, Meldola’s very literary prose assumes that the reader has extensive and intimate familiarity with both the biblical and the rabbinic sources being quoted and intentionally “misquoted” for effect. Investigation of this literary style is still a scholarly desideratum, and I do not claim to have always caught the implications of Meldola’s complex rhetorical conventions and techniques. Still, the story flows with considerable facility, and reveals the individual behind the stylistics. He clearly wanted to be understood.
What we see at multiple levels is that the refusal of Ashkenazi scholars like Cooperman to make use not only of the classical Sephardic literary heritage, but of more recent work such as that of Faur, which leads to a conceptual confusion that marks Jacob Katz as the primary intellectual reference point, and not that of the Sephardic heritage in itself.
The Cooperman article is chock full of valuable information presented in the usual academic model, itself grounded in Wissenschaft Jewish values and 19th century German historical idealism. The novice reader might have difficulty with the context, but the discussions of Jewish Law are replete with much-needed historical and social information.
But the article is designed to ignore the intellectual-literary context that would be mandatory in discussions of Mendelssohn or Hermann Cohen, much less Emmanuel Levinas.
Hakham Raphael Meldola was a central figure in a family history that so perfectly encapsulates the glorious Sephardic heritage. His grappling with the legal issues involving the New Christians as they returned to Judaism is one of many heroic efforts by our sages to reconstruct what was after the Spanish Expulsion a broken world in dire need of aggressive leadership and sensitive application of the Talmudic heritage, tailored to a new context.
It was in this context, as Faur so eloquently taught us, that the values of Jewish Humanism which permeated the Andalusian heritage played such a critical role in delivering this broken community into the Modern world, and which stood in opposition to the Ashkenazi world which, in the wake of Mendelssohn and Haskalah, broke off into bitter factions.
Shmuel Feiner has written brilliantly on the ways in which the Ashkenazi Maskilim sought to deploy this cosmopolitan Jewish tradition:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qRf2_x_zSK8RRQQyvp9SEmCAHQzw07Oa/view?ths=true
In many ways, Jacob Katz occludes this synthesis; returning us to the deep divisions and religious battles that so characterized Ashkenazi Modernity, and which still serves to drive many wedges through Jews and Jewish communities.
So, while Cooperman’s discussion of Meldola presents many important facts and details about the man and his time, the article fails in critical ways to elucidate the larger picture of a complex Sephardic Jewish Humanism that is embedded in the classical Andalusian past, as it integrated those complex values into the march into Modernity on both sides of the Atlantic.
David Shasha
The Missing Context: Hakham Raphael Meldola and Moses Mendelssohn
By: David Shasha
Defining Deviance, Negotiating Norms: Raphael Meldola in Livorno, Pisa, and Bayonne
By: Bernard Dov Cooperman
Meldola Family
By: Richard Gottheil and Clarence I. De Sola
The Divine Judgments Improved, Sermon
By: Rabbi David Meldola
Important Book Resources for Sephardic Studies
By: David Shasha