What the post does well is map a small scholarly territory. It groups the material by question. Etymology gets one cluster: Mitchell First on the spelling and meaning of Chashmonai and Maccabee, with Dan Rabinowitz on the same. The miracle gets another: Zerachya Licht and Marc Shapiro on the 19th-century fight over Chaim Zelig Slonimsky and whether the candles burning eight days counts as the real miracle or a later gloss. Dreidel and cards get a third. Greek wisdom gets a fourth through Eliyahu Krakowski. Nitel, the Jewish night-of-Christmas customs, closes it out. The shape tells you what kind of readership this blog serves. These are men who want sources, provenance, and the textual history of a custom, not sermons about light overcoming darkness.
The most revealing thread runs through the Slonimsky controversy. A 19th-century maskil questioning the candle miracle, and the polemic that followed, sits at the center of the blog’s interests because it stages the collision the Seforim Blog returns to again and again: traditional piety against historical-critical scholarship, fought inside the Orthodox world rather than from outside it. The blog’s whole posture lives in that seam. It wants to be learned and honest about textual difficulty while staying inside the community of practice. That tension explains the contempt quotes around “famous” that the first commenter objects to, and explains why the comments section turns into its own scholarly exchange about whether the Birnbaum siddur smuggled in Krochmal’s Maccabean dating of Psalm 149.
One thing worth flagging. The comment by “DF” is better than the post. He takes a single claim, that Birnbaum was alluding to a heterodox dating of a Psalm, and works it against the Soncino edition and the publication dates, and lands on honest uncertainty rather than a verdict. That is the move the post itself never makes. The post points; the commenter argues. If I ever write about this blog as an institution, the gap between the curatorial register of the posts and the combative register of the comments is the thing to watch.
DF posts:
In the above-linked post about a possible Maccabean Psalm, Dr. Shapiro cites a blog post from the legendary “S.” (Mississippi Fred), regarding a possible allusion in the Birnbaum siddur to Psalm 149 (one of the daily “hallelukos”). V6 reads רוממות אל בגרונם וחרב פיפיות בידם and Birnbaum says in a footnote, referring to a description found in II Maccabees, “the Maccabean warriors were described as ‘fighting with their hands and praying with their hearts”. Fred seems to say that Birnbaum was thus alluding to Krochmal’s opinion that the Psalm was written in Maccabean times, to celebrate the Chanukah victory.
However, the Soncino edition of Psalms says that the Psalm was occasioned by the triumph of Nehemiah over the unfriendly neighbors who schemed to thwart his plans. On the specific verse in question, Soncino writes “this verse was IN THE MINDS of the Maccabean warriors who are described as fighting with their hands and praying unto God with their hearts.” Soncino to Psalms was published in 1945, so it would almost certainly have been used by Birnbaum, whose siddur only came out in 1949. Thus, Birnbaum might only have intended to say nothing more than Soncino, that the Maccabean fighters were acutely conscious of their historical forebears (a point made clear in the books of the Maccabees.)
Now, is it possible that by his shorthand editing (which omits the words I clumsily emphasized by caps bc I dont know how to bold) Birnbaum tried to slip one past the five hole? Yes, it is. Fred himself was kind of vague in his post, too, and doesn’t say definitively that Birnbaum intended this, only that the reference itself was unorthodox. But it is not certain. In the final analysis, it is not clear if Birnbaum intended only what Soncino wrote or more, and it is also not clear if Fred intended to say that Birnbaum intended to say more than Soncino, or that he simply alluded to it subtly. (What Dr. Shapiro intended, by referencing this, is anybody’s guess.)
