European Judaism

Libraries reflect the spirit of their times and places. On the intellectual map of modern Europe many Judaica Libraries are to be found, far too many to take into account in this brief presentation. This issue will focus on ten libraries, sorted in alphabetical order according to their authors. We tried to get a representative picture of different kinds of libraries to be found in Europe, from large State collections and University libraries via rabbinical seminaries, congregational libraries, bigger and smaller institutional libraries and private collections.

Leo Baeck College Library is an international meeting place. It may happen that suddenly a rabbi from France or South Africa, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Russia or the United States pops into the main room of the library to look something up during the break in a meeting at the college or somewhere else in the Sternberg Centre for Judaism. It is here that Leo Baeck College Library is located in interim rooms since 1982, waiting to move into purpose-made library rooms. The international visitor is very likely to be one of the over 150 alumni from Leo Baeck College. He or she may have come to use the books or to donate some: for example the first Progressive Haggadah printed in Russia, the latest books by a rabbi in France, the latest book about Dutch Jewry, and others. The books of the library mirror the international flair of its users. The books are in German, English, Hebrew, French, Russian, Dutch and other languages and deal not only with the main areas of academic Jewish Studies or traditional Rabbinics, but with the history and present situation in all its diversity of Jewish congregations in all European countries, Israel and the United States.

With the founding of the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (HfJS) in 1979 the library of the institution, which currently contains some 50,000 volumes, was also established. Corresponding to the subjects taught at the HfJS, the library contains books on the Bible and Biblical exegesis, Talmud and rabbinic literature, Jewish history, philosophy, literature and art, as well as the several languages that are taught in relationship to these subjects.

On the first page of the seventy-seventh report, the president of the committee of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich (the main Jewish community of Zurich, Switzerland) writes: ‘During the first regular assembly of the 12th March 1939, President Saly Braunschweig gave a detailed lecture about the situation of the Jews in Switzerland and beyond its frontiers. The speaker anxiously raised the question whether peace would be preserved in Europe or not. On the 1st September 1939 the answer followed: The [Second World] War with all its unforeseeable consequences broke out.’ Despite this horrifying statement, it was only three months after the beginning of the war which brought death and deportation to all European Jews that the new building of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich was inaugurated. Interestingly, the library of the Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich was founded in those days and was – as opposed to most other European Jewish libraries – never closed down during the Second World War; on the contrary, during the war the ICZ Library was a place for refugees, where they could read the daily press and keep themselves informed about important Jewish questions.

The Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage (Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz) holds one of the most important collections of Hebraica in Germany, on par with the collections in Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main.

The Judaica division of the Frankfurt University Library is in the process of digitizing its outstanding Jewish collections and thus transferring the Jewish sources from the paper-based information of the past into the electronic version of the future. The project eventually will allow any Internet user anywhere in the world to search inside three million pages of Jewish sources within thousands of volumes, seeing the pages exactly as they appear in the originals, complete with illustrations, photos and dedications.

‘Habent sua fata libelli’– books have their own destiny. This is true for all Jewish books but particularly for those which were brought together to form the ‘Hyams Collection’. These books have a threefold destiny.

‘When I witnessed thousands of children being sent to gas, I swore that if I ever escape this hell alive one day I will devote my future life to the education of Jewish youth when such injustice exists.’ These were the words of Honza Brammer, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a former tutor of young prisoners in these camps and a colleague of the well-known Fredy Hirsch. This young man, originally from Uherský Brod in Moravia, left Czechoslovakia in 1949 for Israel and there accomplished his war decision. He became an organizer of schools in the Israeli desert and besides the work he loved, his life-long passion was photography. Honza Brammer or Dov Barnea as he called himself in the Eretz took hundreds of pictures of people, places and the nature of Israel throughout the post-war decades and his photographs present an interesting mosaic of everyday life there.

In the event of a fire or some other catastrophe in the library, which items from your collection would you save? With flames racing around you or the flood waters rising, the correct answer would probably be ‘whatever’s closest’, but as part of a coldly-considered risk assessment exercise, I am sure it is a question that has been pondered by all librarians with collection responsibilities at one time or another.

The growth of the Hebraica/Judaica collections, which form part of the Ancient Near East Semitics and Judaica Section, reflect to a large extent the policies and resources of the library over the years, with the addition of some significant donations. The establishment of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1917 came as a response to the long-felt need for a separate institution, as a constituent college of the University of London, for the study of the languages and cultures of Asia and Africa, in view of Britain’s worldwide interests. The nucleus of the Hebrew collection of the library was formed by transfers from University College, London. For a number of years, however, growth was slow, as the library’s budget and staff complement was very small, particularly until after the Second World War.

Among the great world libraries, the British Library stands out as one of the major repositories of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books. The Hebrew collection comprises the library’s holdings of material written and printed in Hebrew characters, ranging from manuscripts copied over a millennium ago to the most recent monographs and serials. It consists of over 3,000 manuscript volumes and some 10,000 Genizah fragments, around 70,000 printed book titles and nearly 1,000 serial titles. Although Hebrew is the predominant language, other Jewish languages that utilize the Hebrew script are also represented in the collection. These include Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo- Italian, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino and various others.

The Bodleian Library of Oxford University – one of the oldest and largest in Europe – is among the most celebrated libraries in the world. Its unrivalled collections of manuscripts and books have served generations of students, thus making Oxford a meeting place of international learning and the capital of the Republic of scholars. With its beginnings in the fourteenth century the library owes the first phase of its reputation to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of King Henry IV, who donated his priceless collection of more than 280 manuscripts, including several important classical texts, to Oxford University. In order to accommodate this major donation the library was moved from its original location – a room above the Old Congregation House, erected next to St Mary’s church – to the Divinity School, which was enlarged with a second storey that was completed in 1470.

The Library of the Leo Baeck College has been immeasurably enriched by the arrival of three rare and precious volumes. The books are of great importance to Jewish cultural and religious heritage and will provide scholars with rich research material.

There are many religious people in Britain at the moment who feel they have been stabbed in the back, then turned around and punched in the face. The attack from behind is because they feel they are pursuing a religious lifestyle that is largely caring and considerate, yet they have become associated with religious extremists whose murderous fanaticism has tainted all people of faith.

After the terrorist attacks on the London transport network on 7 July 2005 some academics and journalists announced the ‘death of multiculturalism’ in Europe. Multiculturalism, however, cannot be dead because it is a social reality for millions of Europeans. Not only these who live in the global cities like London, Paris, Rome, and others, but also those who live in small ones like the Italian City of Peace, Rovereto. All the European societies from east to west and from north to south have become increasingly diverse, multicultural, multiracial and multi-religious. This diversity is producing not only high levels of uncertainty, but also lack of social cohesion. As Putnam notices in his latest large-scale study of social solidarity in American society, in the ethnically diverse areas there is less trust and civic engagement.2 Such areas lack, above all, meaningful social encounters.

One of the keys to understanding the Book of Leviticus is Genesis 1, the account of the creation of the world. The world that God creates comes into being through a series of separations: between light and darkness, between the waters above and below the firmament, between the sea and the dry land. In the end there are three major divisions, the heavens, the earth and the waters beneath the earth, each with its own distinctive features and inhabitants. As the Psalmist explains, the heavens are the domain of God, but the earth has been given to human beings to inhabit. However, because of God’s experience with human beings there will be one further act of separation, the choosing of Israel from amongst all the peoples of the world to be a ‘kingdom of priests and a holy nation’. The Book of Leviticus is about how the collective life of Israel is to be regulated so as to fulfil this task as a kingdom of priests.

We can characterize the different degrees of importance given to the Book of Leviticus in Judaism and Christianity with the words of G.J. Wenham: ‘Leviticus used to be the first book that Jewish children studied in the synagogue. In the modern Church it tends to be the last part of the Bible anyone looks at seriously.’2 In the Encyclopaedia Judaica,3 J. Milgrom also highlights the great significance of the Book of Leviticus as the first object of instruction in school, which Midrash LevR VII.3 explains as follows: ‘Rabbi Assi: Why do the small children begin (to learn) with Leviticus (Torah Kohanim) and not with Genesis? Because the small children are pure and the sacrifices are pure; so the pure come and occupy themselves with the pure.’

To begin with, I would like to ask some questions. Can you understand how someone could think that a war will bring peace? Do you understand the thinking that is behind the decision to deliver weapons to regions where that region’s own people will then fight against other human beings with those same weapons? (Not to mention the question of principle where the thinking behind the production and trade with weapons is concerned …) Do you understand how it is possible to have qualified German people train the military and the police of countries that are officially branded as terrorist or dictatorial?

This paper is divided into three sections illustrating uses of the Book of Leviticus in three different contexts: Internal Jewish Issues, Jewish-Christian Relations and Social Justice.

The phenomenon we call scapegoating seems familiar, and we may think that as intelligent and benign folk we have a fairly secure grasp on our impulses to scapegoat others: that is, on our capacity to project some of the hidden, darker, more unpleasant aspects of ourselves onto other groups or individuals.

The 40-year long tradition of the International Jewish-Christian Bible Week – begun in the Hedwig-Dransfeld-Haus in Bendorf and since 2004 continued at Haus Ohrbeck – is a valid and real reason to express congratulations and thanksgiving. Thanks are due above all to the people who initiated the tradition, and representing them I want to name Anneliese Debray (1911–1985), who will always be remembered, and Rabbi Jonathan Magonet. They helped a vision to come to life and they showed a perseverance that has persisted until today. It is the vision that says: yes, there is a Bible that Jews and Christians have in common, Israel’s Bible. At the same time, this vision does not forget that along with closeness, the relationship of Judaism and Christianity to this shared Bible also includes considerable difference. For some, this difference is so great that they question whether Jews and Christians do have Israel’s Bible in common.

I have a friend who believes that all governments lie – especially about going to war. He believes that people in power advance their own class interests by fomenting hysteria which results in a lust to destroy the enemy. Ordinarily sane people believe propaganda, he says, because they have no alternate information, and they accept the consequences of going to war because they have no idea of war’s realities. While there are other subjects we can discuss dispassionately, the emotions he displays on this topic are uncomfortably intense. The reason for his reaction reveals something important about the relationship between assumptions and reality.

Emerging in the 1980s and flourishing during the 1990s ‘queer’ politics arrived as a reaction to what ‘queer’ activists and theorists identified as the narrow identity politics, rigid categories and separate groupings that had become associated with the lesbian and gay movements. In contrast to these rigid categories ‘queer’ politics proclaimed that all identities – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, even some heterosexual identities – could merge into a general ‘queerness’. The term ‘queer’ was understood then by many ‘queer’ activists and theorists in a very broad sense: referring not only to homosexuality and lesbianism but to everything that diverges from the ‘norm’. It became a response to mainstream hetero- normative/straight thinking of all kinds; its oppositional approach probably being best summed up in the slogan: ‘We’re here, we’re queer - get used to it!’ As sociologist Joshua Gamson wrote: ‘“Queer” does not so much rebel against outsider status, it revels in it’.

Hinges Pillars

Spectral

At the Russian Compound Beit Safafa Sunset Untitled

Simchas Torah Teshuvah A Twentieth Century Landscape

Another Dove Sons of Ram

Abraham Abulafia

Menachem Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism, Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. 343 pp., ISBN 978-1-904113-29-4. £35.00.

Michael Walzer (ed.), Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. 224 pp., ISBN 00-691-12508-2. £35.95 (cloth), £11.95 (paper).

Alena Heitlinger, In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews Since 1945, New Brunswick, USA, and London, UK: Transaction Publishers, 2006. 238 pp., ISBN 0-7658-0331-3. $39.95 US.

Forms of Prayer, I: Daily, Sabbath and Occasional Prayers, Eighth Edition, London: The Movement for Reform Judaism, 2008. 750pp., ISBN 978-0-947884-13-0. Standard hardback edition £24.95.