How Jewish-Christian Dialogue Revolutionized Bible Study in Medieval France

In the latter part of the 11th century, Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known by the acronym Rashi, wrote a commentary on the Hebrew Bible that would forever change how Jews approached the sacred text: explaining its meaning line-by-line and focusing on what he called the p’shat, or plain meaning, while drawing on the vast body of exegetical (and often nonliteral) works that preceded him. Likewise, the 12th century saw a similar shift in Christian Bible study, centered in northern France, where Rashi also made his home. Robert Harris explores the reasons for this parallel:

This surge in commentary among Christian and Jewish exegetes . . . suggests that we should be looking for intellectual and cultural developments in 11th-century Christian Europe to understand how this change in approach to Bible came about. But to get the full picture, we need to look even earlier, to the 8th-century period under Charlemagne, and to the subsequent cultural revival that took place in the Carolingian period (that is, in the 8th and 9th centuries).

In an effort to establish and legitimize their new dynasty, Charlemagne, himself a faithful Christian, endeavored to co-opt the Roman Church and its institutions. Part of his strategy was creating a learned and literary caste that could serve as the clerks, administrators, diplomats, and magistrates who held his far-flung empire together. To accomplish this, he instituted schools that would teach far greater numbers of people how to read. For scribal training, Charlemagne used ancient Greco-Roman learning in the service of the Church.

The resulting “Carolingian renaissance,” Harris explains, would give rise to new institutions of higher learning that would eventually lead to the intellectual ferment of the 12th century:

While the Carolingian revolution may explain how Christian interpretation developed in this direction, how did intellectual developments in the Christian world influence rabbinic exegetes? While some rabbis could converse about Latin scriptures when in the presence of learned Christians, no rabbi could likely have sat down and read a Latin book any more than a 12th-century churchman could have read a Hebrew book without help from a Jewish scholar.

[However], Jews and Christians conducted a lively discourse about biblical interpretation during this period, in a wide variety of social circumstances, certainly in the 12th century, but probably in the 11th as well, and the Christian turn to contextual reading was likely influential in the thinking of their Jewish colleagues.

Of course, influence went in both directions. The great 12th-century Christian Bible commentator Andrew of St. Victor, whose mentor Hugh of St. Victor was the leading figure in the Christian turn to literal interpretation, studied Hebrew so he could draw on the commentaries of Rashi and others. He was one of the very first Christian scholars since antiquity to do so.

Read more at theTorah.com

More about: Biblical commentary, Hebrew Bible, Jewish-Christian relations, Rashi

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society