{"id":185573,"date":"2026-05-01T13:41:36","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T21:41:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=185573"},"modified":"2026-05-02T18:33:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T02:33:56","slug":"changing-the-immutable-how-orthodox-judaism-rewrites-its-history-2015-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=185573","title":{"rendered":"Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marc Shapiro’s book<\/a> documents the pattern: rabbinic authorities censoring, altering, or rewriting earlier sources to bring them into line with current Orthodox norms. Maimonides loses his Aristotle. The Hatam Sofer<\/a> loses his contact with maskilim. Photos lose their women. Biographies of gedolim lose the failed marriages, the secular reading, the years of struggle. The Vilna Gaon loses positions later Haredim find embarrassing.
\nShapiro’s claim that no other religion does this at this scale is overstated. Catholicism edited Origen, and continues to police what counts as authentic Aquinas. Sunni Islam built an entire science of hadith criticism because so much got fabricated and reattributed. Protestant denominations groom their founders’ biographies. Buddhism passed through multiple recensions that erased earlier doctrinal positions.
\nBut Shapiro is onto something. The frequency, openness, and continuing vigor of textual grooming in Orthodox Judaism does look distinctive. Alliance Theory<\/a> offers a clean account of why.
\nCoalition<\/a> size sets the floor. Orthodox Jews are a minority within a minority. The Haredi world might number two million globally. Modern Orthodoxy adds another half million. At that scale, internal deviance threatens coalition<\/a> survival in a way it never does for Sunni Islam or Catholicism. A billion Catholics absorb Hans K\u00fcng. A billion Sunnis absorb Tariq Ramadan. Two million Haredim cannot absorb a Maimonides who reads Aristotle as a primary teacher, or a Vilna Gaon who held positions later Haredim reject. Smaller coalitions police harder.
\nText-centeredness raises the stakes. Catholicism manages doctrinal continuity through a magisterium that filters the texts before laity see them. The average Catholic does not read Aquinas. The average Sunni Muslim does not read al-Ghazali in Arabic with commentary. But the average yeshiva bochur reads Maimonides directly, in the original, with classical commentaries open beside him. He reads the Shulchan Aruch, the responsa literature, the Talmud itself. The texts are accessible surfaces. Any embarrassment in them shows up in his eyes within months. So the texts get groomed before they reach him. ArtScroll publishes the Talmud with passages softened. Mussar works appear with the rationalist sections quietly removed. Biographies of gedolim arrive pre-cleansed.
\nLack of central authority compounds the pressure. Catholicism has a Pope. Sunni Islam has consensus across four schools. Orthodox Judaism has no equivalent. Authority is performed rather than declared. It rests on the chain of mesorah and on the gedolim who embody it. If the chain shows visible gaps, or if the gedolim turn out to have held heterodox positions, the authority structure cracks. The grooming substitutes for a magisterium. It performs the continuity that a more centralized religion can simply assert.
\nDaas Torah<\/a> makes the grooming non-negotiable. The doctrine that the great rabbis transmit divine wisdom beyond halakhic technicalities requires that those rabbis never erred in matters of substance. A Hatam Sofer<\/a> who corresponded warmly with maskilim, a Rav Kook who wrote with sympathy about secular Zionists, a Soloveitchik who read Kierkegaard. Each of these threatens the doctrine. The texts must be groomed to protect Daas Torah, and Daas Torah must be protected to keep the coalition<\/a> cohering around current rabbinic authority.
\nThe Haskalah trauma sits underneath all of this. Orthodoxy as a self-conscious category came into existence in the 19th century in response to Reform. Boundary maintenance has been the central task ever since. The boundary is performed by showing that current Haredi practice maps cleanly onto ancestral practice. Anything in the historical record showing that pre-modern Jews shaved, studied philosophy, mixed with women, sang in choirs, or read secular books has to be contained. Reform won the argument that Judaism develops historically. Orthodoxy responded by denying historical development. The textual grooming enforces the denial.
\nHagiography is institutionalized in a way other religions have largely abandoned. ArtScroll biographies of gedolim are explicit about their idealizing intent. The genre treats kavod for the rabbi as a higher value than historical accuracy. Catholic hagiography functioned this way through the 18th century, but the Bollandists eventually subjected it to historical criticism. Orthodox hagiography has never had its Bollandist moment. The genre still works the way medieval Catholic hagiography worked, and for the same coalition<\/a> reasons.
\nApply the four diagnostic questions<\/a> to the rabbis, publishers, and educators who do the grooming. Their status, income, and protection come from Orthodox institutions: yeshivas, kashrus agencies, publishing houses, rabbinical organizations, the Israeli rabbinate. The allies they must retain include donors, rosh yeshivas, dayanim, baalei batim, and the parents who choose schools for their children. The beliefs that mark their coalition<\/a> membership include mesorah continuity, gedolim as paragons, Daas Torah, and the historicity of current Haredi practice. What they lose by publishing an uncensored Hatam Sofer<\/a> or an honest Rambam<\/a> biography includes their job, their place in the community, their children’s marriage prospects, their school enrollments, and their seat at the daf yomi shiur. The grooming is rational under those constraints.
\nChristianity and Islam do less of this in the present because they have other coalition<\/a> technologies. Catholicism has the magisterium. Sunni Islam has the consensus of the schools. Protestantism has sola scriptura, which makes the rabbis irrelevant by design. Each of these reduces the load on textual grooming. Orthodox Judaism has no such fallback. The texts are the authority. So the texts must be kept clean.
\nShapiro’s framing is moral. He reads the grooming as a betrayal of the truth-seeking ethos he attributes to the tradition. Alliance Theory<\/a> reframes it. The grooming is what the coalition<\/a> needs to survive at its current size, with its current authority structure, against its current external pressures. It is not a deviation from the tradition’s purpose. It is the tradition’s purpose, performed under modern conditions.
\nThat does not let Shapiro’s documentation off the hook. The book is a piece of coalition<\/a> technology in its own right, recruiting for a smaller coalition<\/a> that prefers historical accuracy over hagiographic continuity. Modern Orthodoxy at its more academic end, plus the heterodox movements, plus secular Jewish scholarship, plus the small population of formerly Orthodox readers. Those are the coalitions Shapiro’s book serves. Each of them has its own grooming practices. They are just less visible because Shapiro stands on the inside of them.<\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, Shapiro’s book becomes a different kind of artifact than it presents itself as.
\nChanging the Immutable operates on three assumptions Mearsheimer denies. First, that an individual scholar can stand outside the tradition and evaluate its texts against an unconditioned standard of historical accuracy. Second, that this standpoint reflects what humans are: rational truth-seekers whose coalition<\/a> attachments are accidents to be transcended. Third, that grooming the texts betrays a higher norm the tradition itself acknowledges.
\nMearsheimer dissolves the first assumption. There is no view from nowhere. The scholar evaluating the Hatam Sofer’s letters arrives at the archive already shaped by his own socialization, his own coalition, his own innate sentiments. Shapiro reads the textual record from inside the modern academic coalition<\/a>, with its commitments to source criticism, archival fidelity, and historical contextualization. Those commitments are not floating in air. They were socialized into him at Harvard, at Bar-Ilan, in conversation with Jacob Katz and Haym Soloveitchik, through the publication norms of academic Jewish studies. His critique of Haredi grooming is itself a coalition performance, oriented toward the academy and its allied audiences.
\nMearsheimer dissolves the second assumption more deeply. Reason is third behind socialization and innate sentiments in shaping how anyone thinks about right and wrong. The Haredi reader who accepts a sanitized Vilna Gaon biography is not making a cognitive error a more rational person could correct. He is doing what humans do. He receives his picture of the Gaon from his rebbeim, his parents, his chevrusa. He has no independent epistemic relationship to early modern Lithuanian Jewish history. Neither does Shapiro, in any direct sense. Shapiro has a different set of teachers, a different chevrusa of academic colleagues, a different community whose approval he seeks. Both men think with the tools their coalitions gave them.
\nMearsheimer dissolves the third assumption by relocating the relevant norm. The grooming does not betray the tradition. It is the tradition operating as traditions operate. Pre-modern communities edited their texts as a matter of course. The Masoretic scribes corrected what they took to be errors. The Talmudic redactors smoothed out their inherited material. The medieval commentators read their predecessors charitably toward current practice. The expectation that texts should remain pristine across centuries is a 19th century academic invention, tied to the rise of historicism and source criticism. That invention is parochial. It belongs to a specific coalition<\/a> of European scholars who built their authority on archival access and philological method. Imposing it backward onto the tradition is anachronism dressed as piety toward truth.
\nThe gedolim, on Mearsheimer’s account, do exactly what authority figures do in social animals. They embody the coalition<\/a>. They model its values. They police its boundaries. The biographies that present them as paragons are not lies. They are the standard output of a tribal species honoring its leadership. Catholic hagiography did the same for centuries. Roman senators got the same treatment. The dishonesty Shapiro detects is detectable only from inside a coalition that has decided, recently and for its own reasons, that this kind of honoring no longer counts as legitimate.
\nThe hero system angle matters here. Becker argued that every culture supplies its members with a way to feel they participate in something that does not die. Orthodox Judaism gives its members the mesorah: a chain reaching back to Sinai through unbroken transmission, embodied in living rabbis who carry the same wisdom Moses carried. The grooming protects the hero system. A Hatam Sofer who corresponded warmly with maskilim makes the chain look discontinuous. A Rav Kook who read Nietzsche makes the gedolim look like ordinary intellectuals shaped by their century. The grooming keeps the hero system intact for the people who need it to live. Shapiro, embedded in an academic hero system that rewards demystification, does not feel the cost of what he is doing.
\nThe porous self framework adds another layer. Orthodox Jews live in a world where God acts in history, where the soul of the Vilna Gaon might still be present in his texts, where reading Maimonides puts the reader into contact with Maimonides. The grooming protects the porous experience. Cleaning up the Rambam’s biography keeps him available as a living teacher rather than a dead historical figure with awkward Aristotelian commitments. Shapiro’s critique presupposes a buffered self that can step outside the porous world and treat the texts as inert historical artifacts. On Mearsheimer’s account, the buffered self is itself a culturally produced fiction, dominant in a thin slice of Western academic life and almost nowhere else.
\nThe implication for the book is that its moral charge dissipates. Shapiro documents the grooming accurately. His scholarship is careful. His examples hold up. But the framing of the documentation as exposure of a betrayal depends on premises Mearsheimer rejects. Strip those premises away and the book becomes a description of how a small religious coalition maintains itself under pressure, written by a scholar whose own coalition has different needs and different conventions. The Haredim do what humans do. The academics do what humans do. Neither stands above the other on a ladder of rationality.
\nThis does not make the book worthless. It makes the book legible as coalition technology. Shapiro’s intended readers are people for whom the grooming is already a problem: Modern Orthodox academics, formerly Orthodox readers, secular Jewish scholars, Conservative and Reform Jews looking for ammunition. The book recruits for those coalitions and against the Haredi one. It does so by mobilizing a value, historical accuracy, that the recruiting coalitions hold and the target coalition does not. From inside the recruiting coalitions, this looks like truth-telling. From inside the target coalition, it looks like a hostile act. Mearsheimer’s framework lets us see both descriptions as accurate at the same time.
\nThe deeper point is that Shapiro’s project assumes liberal premises about individuals, texts, and reason that Mearsheimer’s anthropology denies. If men are tribal first and rational third, then the grooming is the default and the critique of grooming is the deviation. The interesting question is not why Orthodox Judaism does this. The interesting question is why a small academic coalition, in a brief window of Western intellectual history, came to expect that traditions should not. That expectation is the historical anomaly. The grooming is the human baseline.
\nOne more move follows. Shapiro’s book is itself becoming a coalition document in Modern Orthodox circles, cited and re-cited as evidence for a particular reading of Jewish history. Within a generation it will have been groomed in turn. Some claims will get softened. Some examples will drop out. The reception history will favor passages useful to the receiving coalition and quietly forget the rest. That is what happens to books. Mearsheimer would expect nothing else.<\/p>\n

Stephen Turner’s essentialism critique<\/a> cuts at the title itself. Changing the Immutable presupposes an immutable thing being changed. Turner denies that the immutable thing exists. There is no essence of the tradition, no Platonic Judaism hovering above the practitioners, no authentic mesorah whose contours can be specified apart from what current rabbis and their predecessors have done. The title is a category mistake, and the book inherits the mistake.
\nShapiro and the Haredim disagree about which version of Judaism is authentic. They agree that authenticity is the right frame. Both are essentialists. The Haredim locate the essence in the unbroken chain of transmission embodied in the gedolim. Shapiro locates the essence in the documentary record before the grooming touched it. Each side reads the other as distorting a real thing. Turner’s move is to deny that the real thing exists in either location. There is no Judaism apart from Jews doing Judaism, and what Jews are doing changes constantly, and the changes are the practice, not deviations from it.
\nThis is Turner’s tacit knowledge point applied to religion. Practices live in practitioners. The Hatam Sofer’s halakhic competence rested in his way of running his beis din, his way of paskening sheilas, his way of reading a sugya with his talmidim. That competence transmitted through master-apprentice contact, not through his letters. The letters document what he wrote down. They are not the practice. When ArtScroll edits the letters to remove his correspondence with maskilim, the edit does not falsify the practice his students received from him. The practice was never in the letters.
\nRead this way, the Haredi grooming starts to look less like fraud and more like protecting a living tradition from documents that might mislead practitioners about what the tradition is. The rebbe in Lakewood is not transmitting the Hatam Sofer’s archive. He is transmitting a way of learning, a way of davening, a way of running a household, a way of relating to the gedolim of his generation. The archive is incidental. If passages in the archive confuse young men about the practice they are entering, removing those passages serves the transmission rather than betraying it. Turner’s framework gives the Haredim a defense Shapiro cannot answer from inside his own premises.
\nThe deeper move is Turner’s critique of good-bad theories<\/a>. A good-bad theory looks like neutral description but smuggles in coalition loyalty as the price of admission. Shapiro’s framework is a good-bad theory. It presents itself as historical scholarship, neutral with respect to the religious commitments of its subjects. But the framework only works if the reader has already accepted that historical accuracy outranks coalition maintenance, that archival fidelity matters more than the protection of the gedolim, that the buffered scholar standing outside the tradition has better epistemic access to the tradition than the practitioner inside it. Each of these is a coalition commitment of modern academic Jewish studies. None is a neutral starting point. The book recruits for one coalition while pretending to describe a property of another.
\nThe same applies to the Haredi side. Daas Torah is also a good-bad theory. It presents itself as a descriptive claim about how rabbinic authority works while actually functioning as a recruitment device for the current Haredi rabbinate. The grooming serves the theory. The theory serves the coalition. Turner would not let either side off the hook. He would say both projects are doing the same thing, and the interesting question is what each coalition needs from its essentializing.
\nOakeshott sits behind this for Turner. Oakeshott argued that tradition is a way of going on, a tacit competence shared among practitioners, not a set of explicit rules or fixed texts. The rules and texts are abstractions from the practice. Treating the abstractions as the essence inverts the relationship. Turner extends Oakeshott by noting that even the tacit competence is not a single shared thing. It is distributed across practitioners, each of whom has slightly different tacit equipment, and what they share is approximate enough to let them coordinate without being identical. There is no master copy. There is no authoritative version. There are only the practitioners, going on as they go on.
\nApply that to Orthodox Judaism. The yeshiva world of 1850 in Volozhin is not the same yeshiva world as 1950 in Lakewood, and neither matches 2020 in Lakewood. The tacit competence shifted. The texts shifted. The biographies shifted. The standards for what counts as a gadol shifted. Each generation transmitted what it had to its students, who absorbed it and altered it in absorbing it. Calling any one of these snapshots “the immutable” is a coalition move dressed as historical observation.
\nTurner gives us something Mearsheimer did not quite reach. Mearsheimer dissolves Shapiro’s standing as a neutral observer by showing that the observer is socialized too. Turner goes further and dissolves the object Shapiro thinks he is observing. There is no immutable Judaism for the Haredim to be changing. There is only a series of coalitions over time, each transmitting practices, each editing texts, each producing hagiographies, each performing continuity with predecessors who themselves performed continuity with their predecessors. The performance is the tradition. The tradition is the performance.
\nWhat survives of Shapiro’s book under Turner’s critique is the documentation. The examples remain useful. We learn things from them about how the current Haredi coalition manages its self-presentation. What does not survive is the framing. The book tells us what the grooming looks like. It does not tell us what the grooming is a deviation from, because there is no fixed thing for the grooming to deviate from. The deviation requires an essence. The essence is not there.
\nThe book ends up demonstrating, against its own intent, exactly what Turner says about traditions. Shapiro shows the practitioners changing what they received. He calls this corruption. Turner would call it transmission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marc Shapiro’s book documents the pattern: rabbinic authorities censoring, altering, or rewriting earlier sources to bring them into line with current Orthodox norms. Maimonides loses his Aristotle. The Hatam Sofer loses his contact with maskilim. Photos lose their women. Biographies … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[592],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t