“Zachary Braiterman teaches modern Jewish thought and philosophy in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University.” He writes:
About a year ago, I penned online at Zeek Magazine a vicious attack on the Tikvah Fund and the Jewish Review of Books, which is funded by the Fund. In it, I attempted to expose the Tikvah Fund as a neoconservative organization that attempts to press conservative cultural content into the liberal American Jewish bloodstream, and that they do so by stealth, hiding ideological hash behind academic formats and content. The piece received a lot of negative attention from some colleagues, mostly from those who have participated, for pay, at Tikvah Fund centers and who argue that the program is on the up and up. But at last year’s conference of the Association of Jewish Studies (2011), I received almost only positive feedback from colleagues, who are concerned about the kinds of distortions introduced into the academic study of Judaism by the Tikvah Fund and its many, subsidized platforms it sponsors.
Some of my colleagues were persuaded by the article, some not. For evidence, I culled two sources: [1] the first 7 runs of the Jewish Review of Books, all of which, I argued, display a conservative orientation and an anti-liberal animus as regards Judaism and Jewish culture, and [2] remarks found online in in-house materials explicating the donor strategy as developed by Roger Hertog, who is the big Wall Street money behind the Tikvah Fund. (For some reason, these were posted on obscure parts of the internet which I dug up on the twentieth or thirtieth page of multiple Google searches.)
This time, however, the Jewish Review of Books, and by extension the Tikvah Fund, might have bitten off more than it can chew by publishing the very caustic review of Talya Fishman’s award winning Becoming the People of the Talmud. The review was written by renowned historian Haym Soloveitchik, who has a reputation. The review was about as nasty as it comes.
All of this was the very big gossip at the Association of Jewish Studies conference this year (2012). Most of my colleagues at were upset by the tone of Soloveitchik’s review. Many have speculated that the invective is fueled by a long feud between Soloveitchik and Fishman’s mentor at Harvard, the late, legendary Isadore Twersky. Certainly, there was blood in the water, but I’m not sure whose. I know for a fact that the editor in chief of the Jewish Review of Books took a lot of heat for publishing a review which was actually rejected by numerous scholarly journals. That being the case, lots of people wanted to know why this piece was published. There was a lot of anger about it, not because the review was critical, but because of the invective. Maybe gender had something to do with why Haym Soloveitchik chose to attack Talya Fishman, something that might have passed notice at the the Jewish Review of Book, where gender is not an operative category. Who knows?
When the Jewish Review of Books pushes an over-the-top attack piece, there’s usually an ideological agenda behind it. There’s a pattern –the rip-downs of books on independent minyanim, Jewish secularism, contemporary spirituality, the New American Haggadah. The attack mode is supposed to hearken back to the founding ethos of and mimic the intellectual blood sport at Commentary Magazine back in its heyday, right before it went neo-conservative. But here, the point is to push a conservative viewpoint against a more liberal one.
Previously, the Jewish Review of Books, when they decided to publish destructive, acrimonious reviews, chose relatively easy-moving targets. Not this time. Fishman is a respected historian at the University of Pennsylvania, and it seems that this time, something wicked has been allowed to scutter into the close-knit of the Association of Jewish Studies. Since I never subscribed to and no longer read the Jewish Review of Books, I picked up a free copy of the offending article at the conference. I tried to read it charitably. Maybe Soloveitchik had a point if you could sift a main line of substantive argument; none of my friends were having it, and I gave up.
For me, the critical upshot is this. It might be the case that prior to the modern period Jewish society was not universally “orthodox,” as we understand the term today as meaning “dedicated to rabbinic law and rabbinic authority,” that these forms of authority came relatively late as a cultural, historical, social, and textual set of constructs. While proof has been tendered by Soloveitchik that Fishman may have made this or that mistake, no proof has been offered to prove that her thesis is not true in some basic ways. It seems to me that Soloveitchik sought to score points in order to knock down Fishman’s thesis without himself providing any evidence for the standard, traditional view regarding the social history of Jewish law and authority, i.e. the traditional version that he himself not only supports, but which is also the version that his storied family embodies in the world of modern orthodox Judaism.
While I can’t comment on the bona fides of this dispute, I am going to have to trust that the Jewish Studies scholars who awarded Fishman’s book the National Jewish Book Award’s Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award for scholarship knew what they were doing. As to what is right and wrong about the book’s claims, that’s a topic best left to cooler heads, and to publishing venues whose ideological agendas are not, in my opinion, so politically skewed as is the case over at the Jewish Review of Books.
By Haym Soloveitchik | Winter 2013:
“The People of the Book” Muhammad called the Jews, and by the “Book” he meant the Bible. Observant Jews nowadays don’t live by the Bible, but by the Talmud—but how long has that been the case? When did Jews start to live by the complex regulations of the Talmud; when did its regimen achieve its decisive hold? In brief, when did the reign of the Talmud begin?
Talya Fishman’s new study on this central issue has awakened wide interest and received high honors. Last year, the Jewish Book Council gave Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Culture its prestigious Nahum M. Sarna Memorial National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. The book is gracefully written, heavily documented, and advances a revolutionary argument. In fact, it challenges every notion of the past millennium about this fundamental problem and, by implication, overturns many of the most basic assumptions about the history of halakhah.
The standard version of when, where, and how the Talmud attained its normative standing runs like this: Sometime between the years 600 and 725 C.E. a group of mostly anonymous scholars known as savoraim collected and edited a vast number of the halakhic discussions that had taken place in the rabbinic academies of Mesopotamia from 200 until the middle of the 5th century. The result was the Babylonian Talmud (the Bavli). Parallel halakhic discussions had taken place in Palestine that eventuated in a Palestinian Talmud (the Yerushalmi). As Palestine was in the Byzantine Empire and Mesopotamia in the Sassanian one, the two different compendia scarcely competed. But when the Muslim conquest in the 7th century united these two worlds, the authority of the caliphs stretched from Persia to the Pyrenees, and struggles between the heads of the Palestinian academies and those of Babylonia for hegemony took on sudden urgency.”
This winter edition of the Jewish Review of Books reminded me of what a brilliant and forthright man he is. He wrote one of the most scathing reviews of another academic’s work I have ever come across. And believe me the academic world is a hotbed of rivalry, vicious infighting, and cruel nastiness. Still, this review is all the more remarkable because most reviewers pull their punches, offer sycophantic plaudits, and at most damn with faint praise, usually with a view to being asked to contribute again. Publishers and their running dogs do not take kindly to having their stars demolished.
The object of Haym’s scorn is a book written by Talya Fishman, professor of Religious Studies and Modern Intellectual History at the University of Pennsylvania. It is entitled Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures. Her thesis is that, unlike conventional wisdom, neither the text nor the authority of the Talmud we have today were fixed until the Tosaphists, the generations succeeding Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzchaki 1040 – 1105) who wrote analytical and legal commentaries to supplement Rashi’s more textual work. They benefited from the change in European intellectual life from an oral to a written authority around the 12th century. The work is contentious from both sides.
Haym builds his rebuttal on Fishman’s own confession that she is neither a medievalist nor a Talmud scholar and relies almost entirely on secondary scholarship. Had she been able to study the primary texts, she could have avoided the catalogue of basic errors she made that completely undermine her theory. The texts themselves refute her assertions. You have to read the article to get a sense of how comprehensively he demolishes her position.
He also reveals that, having seen an early draft of a crucial chapter, he wrote to Dr. Fishman urging her not to publish the work as it would simply mislead English speaking readers about the historical and textual facts. He goes on to express his amazement that the book won the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial National Jewish Book Award for Scholarship. He concludes that the panel of judges simply could not have read the work, or if they had then they themselves were so ignorant of Jewish texts that they lacked the wit or expertise to judge its merit.