How did this website get its name? And when and where did the word “mosaic” get the double meaning that lies behind this name? Recently, I took the time to find out.

It turns out that there are no mysteries here. Both meanings of “mosaic” go back to antiquity: that of having to do with the figure or promulgations of Moses (in which case the word is usually capitalized), and that of a decorative or pictorial work of art composed of small colored squares of stone, glass, or ceramic. In its latter sense, “mosaic” can be traced to hē Mousa, “the Muse,” Greek mythology’s divine source of artistic inspiration, originally conceived of as a single female deity and later divided into nine goddesses (mousai) of song, music, poetry, dance, and the fine arts. Thus, whereas Homer begins his Odyssey, composed about 700 BCE, with the invocation Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polytropon, “Of the man sing to me, Muse, him of many devices,” Virgil, seven centuries later in his Aeneid, turns to the goddess of epic poetry in appealing, Vos, o Calliope, precor, adspirate canenti—“You [muses], [and you,] O Calliope, pray aid my singing.”

In time, Mousa spun off a large number of Greek derivatives, such as musikē, music or poetry sung to it, museion, a temple of the muses (from which comes “museum”), and mousikos, a work of art. The latter term was borrowed by Latin as mosaicus, and when, in the early centuries of the Christian era, walls and floors of tesserae (as the little stone, glass, or ceramic squares were known) grew common in the Roman empire, mosaicus came to refer specifically to them. In time the word jumped from Latin to Italian as mosaico, passed from Italian into French as mosaïque, and entered English by the late 16th century. It then had to wait another long period to be given the additional metaphorical meaning of any unified assemblage of diverse parts. An early example of such usage in English is the art critic John Ruskin’s writing in his The Stones of Venice (1851–53) of “that variegated mosaic of the earth’s surface that a bird sees in its migrations.”

As for upper-case “Mosaic,” it is the adjectival form of “of Moses,” as in the Bible’s torat Moshe, “the law of Moses,” and the rabbinic dat Moshe, “the religion of Moses.” The formation of such an adjective is not possible in Hebrew itself, and the oldest instance of it that I was able to come across is the anonymously authored 4th-century Latin work Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum (“A Comparison of Mosaic and Roman Laws”). The word persisted in medieval Latin, from which it entered various European languages at about the same time as did lower-case “mosaic,” first appearing in English in 1662.

Although it long was Christian, not Jewish, writers who used this Latin adjective, “Mosaic” assumed, starting with the early 19th century, a special significance for Jews. This happened with the movement for the political emancipation of European Jewry that commenced at the time of the French Revolution and gathered momentum under Napoleon—a  time in which growing numbers of European Jews seeking to assimilate into their surroundings took to referring to themselves as persons of “the Mosaic faith,” “Mosaic confession,” or “Mosaic persuasion” as a way of emphasizing that their Jewish identity was solely a religious one devoid of any sense of Jewish ethnicity or peoplehood.

The first Jewish writer to resort to “Mosaic,” in the form of Mosaische, seems to have been Moses Mendelssohn in his German work Jerusalem (1782). Yet the “of Moses” construction continued to prevail for a while. We see this, for example, when, in 1806, a Napoleonic commission created to consider Jewish emancipation addressed a list of twelve questions to a conclave of French Jewish leaders. (These questions included such items as “May a Jewish woman marry a Christian man or a Christian woman a Jewish one?” and “In the eyes of Jews, are Frenchmen their brothers or are they strangers?”) In a preamble to its reply, the conclave declared that it spoke “in the name of Frenchmen who profess the religion of Moses” (la religion de Moïse) and who had no transnational allegiances.

Napoleon soon soured on his plans for Jewish emancipation, which set its cause back in much of French-dominated Europe, including Poland, where representatives of the Jewish community of Warsaw sent a petition to the Polish minister of justice in 1809 stating that, “Thousands of members of the Polish nation of the Mosaic [Mojżeszowy] persuasion . . . have acquired, by virtue of having dwelt in this country for many centuries, the same right to consider it their fatherland as its other inhabitants.” This may be earliest case of Jews using the “Mosaic” adjective in the public realm. By 1831, though, when the German-Jewish intellectual and Jewish-rights campaigner Gabriel Riesser published his widely read “On the Situation of Professers of the Mosaic Faith [Bekenner des Mosaischen Glaubungs] in Germany,” “Mosaic” had become the self-descriptive epithet of choice of assimilationist Jews in practically every country of Europe and remained so throughout the 19th century.

The era of the “Mosaic” Jew has long since passed, though not the ideology that made the term so popular. When, however, in 1960, a group of Jewish students at Harvard sought a name for a Jewish intellectual publication that they wished to start (their model is said to have been the Commentary of the 1950s), the play of words on upper-case and lower-case “mosaic,” despite the former’s historical associations, proved irresistible. (In obvious defense of upper-case “Mosaic” it can be said that the torat Moshe and dat Moshe of Judaism predate the 19th century by no small amount of history.) A magazine called Mosaic would, so its name proclaimed, be committed to serious Jewish discourse open to a wide variety of views and voices—and, as if to emphasize the pun, the first issue of the Harvard Mosaic listed articles in its table of contents as “tesserae” (as the current Mosaic once did as well).

Who came up with the name Mosaic is not entirely clear. When asked by me, Andrew Koss, the senior editor of this site, attributed it to the legendary Neal Kozodoy, a Harvard undergraduate at the time and, according to Koss, the magazine’s founder. Kozodoy, on the other hand, has written me, “I didn’t single-handedly found Mosaic at Harvard, . . . but was one of the early participants in/contributors to the project. About the inspired choice of the name Mosaic, my guess is that the credit goes mainly if not entirely to one Josiah Lee Auspitz.” Auspitz, a Google check reveals, went on from Harvard to a non-academic career as a scholar of American political procedures, one who, as he has said of himself, has been “inflicting for over four decades on friends, family, airplane seatmates, straphangers on the subway, and other random acquaintances my stupefying knowledge of [Democratic and Republican] party rules.”

For as long as it appeared, in any case, the Harvard Mosaic seems to have met its goals. Another Harvard undergraduate at the time, Joseph Featherstone, later an editor at the New Republic, writer, and educator, wrote in a review of the magazine’s Autumn 1961 issue: “Mosaic is a confident and unpretentious little magazine put out by the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel Foundation. . . . [It] has a clear idea of what it is about, a definite community for whom it writes, and a comfortable (perhaps too comfortable) sense that it possesses what most people at Harvard lack—a cultural heritage.”

Neal Kozodoy was not only active in the creation of the original Mosaic. He also, in 2010, after an illustrious career at Commentary, whose editor-in-chief he was for many years, helped start an online publication called Jewish Ideas Daily. Put out in conjunction with the Jewish Review of Books and with the support of the Tikvah Fund, Jewish Ideas Daily actually sought to publish something new of Jewish intellectual content every day—a difficult task that may have been one reason that Tikvah decided, in 2013, to give the site a new format. It asked Kozodoy to head the venture, and he chose to revive the name Mosaic for it. I don’t think this was a matter of mere nostalgia. Half-a-century later, the goals of the Harvard Mosaic were still his: to create a Jewish intellectual conversation of the highest order in which as many voices as possible could take part. In this he once again succeeded.