Marc Shapiro: ‘Franciscans and More; “Repulsive” Practices; Saul Lieberman, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’

The post has the same tripartite structure Shapiro often uses, but the load-bearing section is the one in the middle on “repulsive” practices. Read carefully, that section does something the Kook book argues theoretically: it documents the operation of natural moral intuition against received practice across centuries.
The R. Moshe Mordechai Epstein argument on metzitzah ba-peh is the most revealing passage. Epstein concedes that if the practice were not a mitzvah, no one in any other circumstance might advocate it, and the act in itself is utterly repulsive. He then uses the very intensity of the disgust as evidence that the practice must be a basic part of the mitzvah. The argument has a strange recursive shape: only because the act would be repulsive otherwise can we infer that it must be commanded. The reasoning concedes the porous reality. The disgust response exists prior to the legal frame. The legal frame can override the disgust, but the disgust is the ground. Charles Taylor’s porous self is admitted by the very Lithuanian rabbi who wants to insist on the buffered legal frame. The disagreement Epstein has with the rest of his Lithuanian context is not over whether disgust is real. It is over whether disgust counts as evidence.
The Modena exchange with Uriel da Costa carries the same structure into the seventeenth century. Da Costa, writing from outside, attacks metzitzah ba-peh as disgusting because the mouth speaks the word of God while the organ is impure. Modena, defending from inside, does not deny that the practice produces revulsion. He argues for sanctification of mouth and organ both. The same documentary fact appears: a Jewish defender of a Jewish practice acknowledges that the practice produces disgust in a Jewish observer. The sanctifying frame is the override. Whether the override holds depends on the strength of the framing community. Da Costa’s frame did not hold and he killed himself after multiple excommunications. Epstein’s frame held in his community for as long as the community could maintain it, and is now contested inside Orthodoxy itself. Raymond Martini, the medieval anti-Jewish polemicist, and Johann Buxtorf, the Christian Hebraist who described the practice without expressing revulsion, frame the historical range. The data Shapiro assembles shows that the disgust response is not modern. The disgust response is documented across communities and centuries. The override has varied in strength. That is the empirical finding.
The Vital recommendation for epileptics involving the seminal emission of a young boy who has never had a seminal emission is the most extreme case. Shapiro flags it as doubly shocking given how the wasted seminal emission is treated in Lurianic Kabbalah, and suggests the comment might not be authentic for that reason. The suggestion is a coalition-protective move. The text is in Sefer ha-Peulot. The provenance is Vital. The doubt about authenticity is convenient. Whether or not it is authentic, the fact that defenders need to call its authenticity into question is itself a finding. The same source-criticism reflex Shapiro exposed in Bloch’s Haggadah forgery operates here on a passage attributed to a major Lurianic figure: the modern Orthodox reader cannot easily harbor the practice in his picture of the tradition, so the passage might be inauthentic. The same selective skepticism produces opposite results in different cases. Bloch’s apologetic forgery survived because it flattered modern Orthodox sensibility. The Vital passage is suspected because it offends modern Orthodox sensibility. Source criticism is doing real work in both cases, and the work is being done in service of a coalition-acceptable picture of the past.
The bubonic plague remedy involving the first urine of the morning and dried human feces dissolved in wine, taken while fasting, is the kind of artifact a cultural-evolutionary frame digests easily. Plague kills. People have no real treatment. They reach for any remedy that the framing community endorses. Disgust thresholds drop in proportion to mortal fear. The remedy circulates because it offers something to do, not because it works. The same logic explains the practices around foreskins, placentas, and ground non-Jewish skull. The community frames each as licit and beneficial because the alternative is helplessness in the face of suffering. None of this is unique to Jewish communities. All of it is found across pre-modern medical traditions. Shapiro lets the data sit. The structural point is implicit: the framing community decides what is repulsive and what is sacred, and that determination shifts over time as conditions change.
The Franciscans-and-more section is a different kind of documentary work, but it shares the structural finding with the Arius error in the other recent post. R. Aharon Yehoshua Pessin, working in 2009, identifies יקופש as Capuchin without checking that the Capuchin order was founded in the sixteenth century, far too late for the Tosafists to have referenced it. Shapiro identifies the term as Jacobin, the medieval French name for Dominicans. The same editorial pattern shows up: contemporary Orthodox text-editors do not have basic familiarity with non-Jewish religious history, and produce errors about the very orders the medieval Hebrew sources are responding to. The Hebrew naming of Catholic orders (צעירים for Franciscans, דורשים for Dominicans, חובלים for Cordeliers) preserves polemical-disputational history that the text-editors no longer recognize. The texts know more than their editors do. Shapiro has spent a career documenting that asymmetry.
The biographical section on Lieberman, Heschel, and Weinberg has the most documentary power. The detective-fiction motif is the lightest piece, but it is more than a curiosity. Lieberman, the Rav (per Tovah Lichtenstein in the comments), Nehama Leibowitz, Leo Strauss, Louis Jacobs in the Gateshead Kollel: the major Jewish scholarly minds of the twentieth century read detective fiction privately. Tovia Preschel was too discreet to ask Lieberman directly because the question itself was slightly indecorous. The genre rewards the same mental operations as Talmud study: clue-aggregation, hypothesis-testing, inference from textual fragments, the discipline of distinguishing what matters from what does not. The pattern says something about what kind of mind the rabbinic-academic tradition selects for. It also says something about coalition decorum. Reading detective fiction was a private pleasure that the great minds did not advertise, because admitting it would have lowered their standing inside the framing community. The Louis Jacobs anecdote in the comments captures the structural pattern: the Gateshead Rov tells him to read Ketzot and Netivot if he wants to sharpen his mind, registering the implicit reproach that detective fiction is beneath the discipline.
The German Orthodox vs American Modern Orthodox cultural-attachment contrast is the sharpest aside. Shapiro names it in passing: German Orthodox were attached to German high culture and patriotism. American Modern Orthodox are attached to American low culture, television, music, sports. The shift in object of attachment changes what Modern Orthodoxy means as a project. Mayer Schiller’s line in the comments captures it: Mozart and Shakespeare, not rap and sitcoms. The high-culture mode produced Jakobovits naming his son after Kant, Biberfeld naming his son after Hindenburg, Isaac Breuer keeping a picture of Kant on his wall after the Holocaust, Adolf Altmann arranging Hatam Sofer, S.R. Hirsch, Graetz, Herzl, and Mendelssohn on his study wall as the formative influences of his life. The mode was destroyed by the host civilization in which it was embedded. The American Modern Orthodox shift to low culture is partly a response to that destruction. High culture proved no protection. Low culture is at least cheap and unpretentious. But the shift means that the integration on offer in present-day American Modern Orthodoxy carries a different intellectual signature than the integration that produced the great German rabbis of the early twentieth century. The Mordechai Breuer story is the sharpest exhibit: I asked Breuer’s son if the Holocaust changed how he viewed Kant, and the answer was no, and the picture stayed up. That is a coalition statement. The German Orthodox high-cultural attachment outlasted the German project’s destruction of the German Jews. The attachment did not depend on reciprocity. It was a self-respecting decision about what to honor in the world. American Modern Orthodox attachment to sports does not have that structure.
The Hindenburg-naming and Kant-naming cases also document heterosis at the symbolic level. Sinason in the footnote explicitly compares the practice to Hellenistic Jews naming their sons Alexander after Alexander the Great, including adopting Alexander as a Hebrew liturgical name. The pattern is continuous across millennia: high-prestige host-culture names get absorbed, sanctified, and used in the most ritually serious settings. The same family of mechanisms explains why Babylonian month-names survived, why the High Priest’s bells were modeled on Phoenician designs, why the Hellenistic Jewish synagogue absorbed Greek architectural forms. None of this is news to Shapiro. He documents the pattern in another small case and lets the implication sit. The naming pattern continued in Germany into the late 1920s, then was retroactively rendered ironic by what Hindenburg helped enable. Shapiro names the practice and the irony is for the reader to draw.
The Warsaw Ghetto letters are the heaviest documentary find in the post. Weinberg writing from the Ghetto in May and June 1941, in German because of Nazi censorship, asking Heschel for help with the emigration of rabbis. Two letters, four lists, names organized by rabbinic importance. The greater rabbis were to be saved first. The Piaseczno Rebbe appears at number twenty in list one of the second letter. R. Oscar Fasman articulates the principle explicitly in the footnote: we are saving not merely people, but a holy culture which cannot otherwise be preserved; when the U.S. admitted Einstein and not a million other honest and good people, the principle was the same. Shapiro reproduces the quote without comment. The principle Fasman names is the same principle Luke’s prior framework has identified in Shapiro’s coalition analysis. Save the highest-status members of the coalition first because their loss is irreplaceable. The principle has the cleanest possible documentary endorsement: the most senior rabbinic figures of pre-war Eastern Europe, writing under Nazi censorship in the Warsaw Ghetto, organizing rescue by rabbinic seniority. Whether one approves or condemns is a separate question. The historical record is there. The same coalition-protective principle that structures responses to Slifkin and the silence on Neturei Karta has its most morally weighted application in 1941. The principle’s deep wartime precedent makes its present-day applications harder to dismiss as cynical. People who frame coalition behavior as elitist or self-serving have to reckon with the fact that the principle was applied in extremis by people facing annihilation, and the people doing the applying were not cynics. They were trying to preserve what they could of a tradition they treated as more valuable than themselves.
The post’s overall character is what Shapiro does at his best. Bibliographical correction, documentary recovery, biographical archive, all serving the same underlying project: showing the actual operation of Jewish tradition rather than its self-presentation. The repulsive-practices section is the one that connects most directly to the Kook book. The German Orthodox cultural-integration material is the one most worth extending. The Warsaw Ghetto letters are the documentary heart of the post and the place where Shapiro’s archival labor pays its highest moral dividend. He does not add commentary. The documents speak. The implicit method is the same as it has been for thirty years: assemble the evidence, name the asymmetries, and let the reader draw the structural inference. The reader who draws the inference sees what Luke’s prior analysis already named. The tradition is not what it presents itself as being. It is what its practitioners have actually done, including the practices it now finds repulsive, the cultural integrations it now finds embarrassing, and the rescue priorities it has to defend without apology because there were no other options at the time.