Communication in the Diaspora: Two Thousand Years of Saying Goodbye Without Leaving, M. Blondheim and H. Rosenberg, eds., Israeli Academic Press, New York ©2020, ISBN 978-1-885881-57-1, p. 362 including footnotes and bibliographies, $19.99.
WINCHESTER, California – For nearly two millennia, the Jewish people dispersed throughout the world—lacking a homeland, temple, Sanhedrin, and king—enduring many strange cultures, conducting their lives under control of foreign governments and alien cultures as slaves, outsiders, and self-rulers, did not abandon their God, their religion, or their dreams. Blondheim and Rosenberg are the editors of Communication in the Diaspora, a compendium of eleven essays, describing little-explored pieces of a puzzle explaining how Jews maintain a shared and cohesive identity.
Communication in the Diaspora holds essays written by a wide variety of intellectuals and scholars who explore communication, both intentional and incidental, among Jews from the first diaspora in Babylonia to modern-day America. To these authors, communication is more than the spoken word, it is messaging in its broadest sense— transmission of social, cultural and historical traditions through art, music, legend, history, and even participatory reenactments.
Chapter 1 looks at five books of the Writings, the Five Megillot—Song of Songs (Passover), Book of Ruth (Shavuot), Lamentations (Tisha B’Av), Ecclesiastes (Sukkot), and Book of Esther (Purim)—ordained by the rabbis to be read on certain Jewish holidays for inspiration, arguing these books were intentionally selected to transmit one of four intellectual/political positions Jews living in a diaspora can assume in order to survive and feel part of a larger Jewish community.
For Judaism, there is only one written “Book,” the Torah, so the rabbis transmitted the Oral Law, the Mishna, by word-of-mouth for hundreds of years through Tannaim and Amoraim who memorized everything. Beginning around the fifth century CE, Jewish scholarship met wanton oppression, forcing abandonment of the oral tradition, codifying the Mishna in written form, and thereby saving its knowledge from oblivion. Chapter 2 presents an insightful history of the rabbinic struggles to maintain accuracy and their anguish having to reverse this long-held oral tradition.
Experiences are also communication. To this end, Chapter 3 examines the history of the Haggadah and explains why the rabbis avoided scripting out details of the Exodus, preferring the Passover story and its embellishments left to participants at the Seder table. They understood seder-table comments about the Haggadah’s quotes and answers to its questions must be fluid—each generation finding meaning differently.
Chapters 4 and 5 examine two sides of the same coin, the coin being why did Jews in the western diaspora—Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and the Mediterranean Islands –succumb to Christian proselytizing, but those in Babylonia and the Land of Israel did not? Chapter 4 argues language is the primary cause. Western diaspora Jews did not know Aramaic, the rabbis did not put the Mishna into written form, so “two very different communities on either side of the Mediterranean Sea, [were] serviced by two diverse bodies of literature.” In the east, “the Bible and rabbinic literature… and on the other side, the Greek translation of the Bible and part of the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha;” resulting in “two distinct universes of discourse, two different systems of communication, and the different ideologies that developed.” Chapter 5 asserts the two diasporas are philosophically different: Pharisees ruled in the east and Sadducees in the west. No amount of rabbinic interpretation would satisfy this cohort. Early Christians knew Hebrew, the Bible, and the Greek language. By crafting their polemics carefully and choosing whom to debate, they brought western diaspora Jews into the Christian fold.
Trade routes are also communication highways. In addition to shuffling goods back and forth, they transmit such things as pilgrims, ideas, relics, scrolls and manuscripts. Chapter 6 explores communications between Ashkenazi and Sephardi, showing how messaging along trade routes affected crossover linkages in Jewish prayer, laws, and interpretations, as well as theology and practice.
Chapter 7 looks into the legal rulings of Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz (c. 960 – 1080), known as the “light of the exile,” and how his rulings against polygamy and divorce, among others, took unexpected routes across Europe, creating a community able to separate itself from the Babylonian rabbis.
Printing of Jewish books began in the late fifteenth century. Chapter 8 details how the availability of the printed word—in the broadest sense, including pictures, maps, and diagrams—in Eastern Europe altered the focus and reading of classical texts, particularly the Babylonian Talmud, from one of introspection and pilpul to reinterpretation with extra-textual, and often secular, material.
Chapter 9 looks at Theodor Herzl as a master publicist, a promotor of Zionism who created compelling articles and books, drawing on the latest technology of his era – including, photos and phonographs. The chapter describes how he used the technology in different ways for different audiences and called on his insights to create captivating “productions,” like the Zionist congresses, to garnering the enthusiasm and support for his vision.
Rabbinic responsa, answers delivered to individuals or Jewish communities to practical problems of Jewish life, date back more than 1700 years. Chapter 10 focuses on responsa about America and between American Jewry and European rabbis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapter finds any hypothesis linking the amount of responsa to the proportion of the number of Jews in a particular area is wrong, and presents an interesting counter-intuitive answer.
The last chapter, bringing us to the twentieth century, argues that works of gifted Jewish writers, such as Heine, Kafka, and Bellow, who show deep understanding and mastery of their native tongues, together with immersion in their ambient cultures, also tend to be assimilated and alienated from Judaism.
Communication in the Diaspora, scrutinizing the role of media in the survival of the Jewish people living in the Diaspora for nearly two millennia, demonstrates that many of the beliefs we hold about Jewish contact and interaction is wrong, and at the same time, is deeper and richer than one could have ever imagined.
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Fred Reiss, Ed.D. is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His newest book is A Deep Dive into the Jewish Calendar for the Mathematically Challenged. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.