Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History
By Marc B. Shapiro
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 360 pages, $39.95
Orthodox Jews — especially Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox Jews — like
to think of their religious practice as the most authentic form of
Judaism. “We traditionally observant Jews… seek to observe the Torah’s
mandate, as it has been preserved by the traditional Jewish transmitters
over the ages” wrote Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for the
Orthodox umbrella group Agudath Israel of America, in a
2012 article
for the Forward. “Our differentness reflects only our fealty to the Judaism of the Ages,” he wrote in
another piece
last year. That was a public relations professional in the Forward;
similar and stronger language is ubiquitous in Orthodox media.
In fact, historians and sociologists have long debunked the
changelessness of Haredi life; differences in dress, lifestyle and
ritual practice between contemporary and historical orthodoxies are well
documented. Like other forms of fundamentalist religion, Haredi Judaism
isn’t a strict continuation of the past, but a reaction against
modernity. Its belief in its own authenticity is a theological
self-conception, not a historical reality.
But there is a good reason that observant Jews feel so deeply
connected to historical Judaism. As Marc Shapiro writes in his new book,
“Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History,”
the Orthodox community is a “
community of scholars” for whom “the
written word is central.” Familiarity with traditional texts fosters an
intimacy with tradition; the study of rabbinic literature creates a
feeling of continuity with the Jewish past, whatever caveats might
apply.
But what if those texts are not the unchanging repositories of
wisdom their readers assume them to be? What if they have been changed —
censored, even — in order to reflect the needs of the present? This is
the question underlying “Changing the Immutable.” And Shapiro shows,
through an impressive accumulation of evidence, that Orthodox censorship
is not an exception, but a rule.
Shapiro, chair of the Judaic studies department at The University
of Scranton, has long been a thorn in the side of the ultra-Orthodox
establishment. His first book, “Between the Yeshiva World and Modern
Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg,
1884–1966,” published in 1999, examined a complex rabbinic figure whose
acceptance as a halachic authority belied his more idiosyncratic views
and associations. Even more significantly, Shapiro’s 2004 book “The
Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles
Reappraised,” argued that Maimonides’s principles of faith, commonly
understood to be the underlying dogmas of traditional Judaism, were
never universally accepted. Rather, Shapiro contended, different
versions of Jewish belief have always been possible, even within a
traditional framework.
Shapiro’s
scholarship has been so important, in part because of Orthodoxy’s own
success at covering up inconvenient aspects of its past. And in his
latest book, Shapiro shows how far Orthodoxy has gone to make its
textual legacy consistent with its present culture. Granted, the number
of texts that have been overtly censored is relatively small in
comparison with the overall corpus of rabbinic writing. But even a
relatively small number turns out, on the whole, to be rather large. And
what Shapiro demonstrates is that this kind of censorship is
programmatic, intentional and has a history going back to the Bible
itself.
Consider, for example, a change made to the
Shulhan Arukh
, Yosef Karo’s authoritative 16th-century code of Jewish law. In discussing the pre-Yom Kippur ritual of
kaparot
, in which one’s sins are symbolically transferred to a chicken, Karo
refers to the practice as a “foolish custom.” (Other authorities went
further, calling it a pagan practice.) Although that comment appeared in
the first 18 printings of the work, it disappeared in the 18th century
and is still generally omitted — a decision based on the fact that
kaparot
is now a normative Jewish observance. But should this change in practice justify distorting the historical text of the
Shulhan Arukh
? The goal, seemingly, is to give the false impression that one of the
most important legal authorities in Jewish history had no problem with a
now-commonplace ceremony. And “If Karo is not safe from censorship,”
Shapiro writes, ”I daresay that no text is safe.”
This observation was borne out a few months ago, when Shapiro
pointed out
on The Seforim Blog that the Orthodox publisher ArtScroll had deleted a
passage from the 12th-century commentator Shmuel ben Meir, or Rashbam,
in a new printing of the
Mikraot Gedolot
Bible. The problem? The Rashbam had interpreted Genesis 1:5 — “And
there was evening and there was morning, the first day” — to mean that
the day ends (and thus begins) in the morning, rather than according to
the talmudic interpretation that the day begins (and also ends) at
night.
In its
defense,
ArtScroll argued that those passages of the Rashbam were of dubious
authorship and had been condemned as the work of heretics by Abraham ibn
Ezra, another medieval commentator. Yet ArtScroll’s failure to alert
readers to the omission (whose justification was not as clear-cut as
they claimed) made it seem as though 21st-century editors had censored a
medieval rabbi for arguing with the Talmud. In an even more egregious
example, raised by Shapiro in “Changing the Immutable,” ArtScroll
removed a comment by Rashi, one implying that the talmudic rabbis had
themselves engaged in editing of the Bible — another verboten belief
according to contemporary Orthodoxy.
Such instances of censorship are not limited to obscure legal or
theological matters, either. Recent years have seen bans, censorship,
and suppression of books and other documents that have challenged an
increasingly extreme status quo. Shapiro points to the now-notorious
practice of Photoshopping women out of news photos, as well as to the
censoring of historical pictures of prominent religious women who are
not dressed according to present-day standards of “modesty.” “That
perhaps these ‘
chosheve’
[important] people had different views of
tseniut
[modesty] matters is not even considered,” he notes dryly.
Shapiro pays particular attention to shifts in religious
politics, and to the treatment of figures like Joseph B. Soloveitchik
and Abraham Isaac Kook, who, though widely admired in their lifetimes,
have fallen out of favor since their deaths. In the case of Kook, who is
considered to be the ideological father of religious Zionism, hundreds
of books have been censored in order to remove his approbations from the
books’ front pages, despite the fact that the authors of those works
desired to include them. “The fear of associating with Kook… is a
reflection of the extremism that has taken root in Haredi Judaism,”
Shapiro writes. As a result, he argues, Kook “has been the victim of
more censorship and simple omission of facts for the sake of Haredi
ideology than any other figure.”
All this could make for a hearty polemic against the Orthodox
scholars, publishers and editors who are more concerned with enforcing
ideological conformity than with dealing with historical truth. Yet for
all his provocative material, Shapiro is no polemicist. Although he
compares Orthodox censorship with the Soviet kind — “what was accepted
as fact one day could be entirely rewritten the next” — he also shows
how its practice is consistent with classical and medieval conceptions
of historical truth that predate contemporary notions of academic
scholarship.
So, too, Shapiro goes out of his way to show that censorship of
Jewish texts isn’t just an Orthodox practice. In many cases, non-Haredi
publishers have been guilty of similar distortions, sometimes out of
concern for what liberal readers might think. Finally, in the last
chapter of the book, Shapiro examines the concept of lying in Jewish
law, and shows how some authorities believed it permissible to lie in
order to encourage obedience to rabbinic leadership. Shapiro warns us
that these examples might be shocking, but he often seems to be
defending Orthodox censorship by showing its consistency with
traditional practice. Maimonides himself warns, in the introduction to
his “The Guide for the Perplexed,” that not everything he wrote was the
pure truth, but was still a “necessary belief” for the masses.
Shapiro’s evenhanded, evidence-heavy approach will perhaps make
the book more convincing to its detractors. But his argument could also
have benefited from a more critical thrust. Although he claims that
censorship has increased in recent decades, he does little to analyze
the causes or consequences of this phenomenon. In a
recent interview
with radio host Zev Brenner, he noted that part of the rise in
censorship is due to so many more books being published and to older
books being reset, and in “Changing the Immutable” he notes the rise in
Orthodox publishing for a nonscholarly readership, including many works
of biography and history.
But he doesn’t go far enough in examining what role Haredi
fundamentalism may have to play, and whether current Orthodoxy is more
or less inclined to censor texts than Jewish communities of the past
were. The phrase “
da’as Torah
” — an arguably contemporary notion that implies obedience to rabbinic
authority independent of halachic justification — appears just once in
the book, and is explained only in a footnote. And although Shapiro does
address the particular role translation plays in censorship, he does
little to address the phenomenon of increased Haredi literacy, whether
through access to yeshiva education, English translations by publishers
like ArtScroll or the return of Hebrew as a vernacular language in the
State of Israel. Most noticeably lacking is any consideration of the
effect that censorship has had on the Orthodox community itself. If
Orthodox censorship is comparable to the Soviet variety, what does that
say about the intellectual conditions of Orthodox life?
Still, if Shapiro is not himself a polemicist, polemics can be
written based on his research. This is especially true when it comes to
the Orthodox tendency of presenting itself as historically authentic,
and of appealing to that authenticity as a source of authority, while
simultaneously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Indeed, this
approach was explicitly recommended by Shimon Schwab, a prominent
20th-century German Jewish rabbi who argued that “a realistic historic
picture” is good for “nothing but the satisfaction of curiosity.”
Rather, he claimed, “every generation has to put a veil over the human
failings of its elders and glorify all the rest which is great and
beautiful.” If that means doing without factually accurate knowledge, he
continued, “We can do without.”
It’s not hard to draw a line between this view and the tens of
thousands of young men and women in Israel and the United States who are
living lives of desperation and poverty in order to fulfill an ideal of
piety and scholarship that is presented as an age-old ideal but is in
fact a recent invention. Covering up some minor deviation from
theological dogma may not be of interest to more than a few academics,
but the wholesale rewriting of history is a basic social concern. And as
Shapiro writes in his introduction, “The acts of censorship… and
telling a story which one knows to be false are simply different stops
along the same continuum….” Here we have not just isolated examples of
textual tampering or censorship, but also an entire ideology built on
historical misrepresentations and half-truths. The consequences are
already devastating.
