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This was the purpose of the forced labor (devar ha-mas) which Solomon imposed:  It was to bild the House of the Lord, his own palace, the Millo, and the wall of Jerusalem… (1 Kings 9:15)

According to the Bible, Solomon depended on this forced labor – mas in Hebrew – to realize his many glorious building projects.  The mas, imposed on Israel, was much resented.  When Solomon died, the people are reported to have complained to his son, “Your father made our yoke heavy.  Now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke which your father laid on us, and we will serve you” (1 Kings 12:4).  Given the heavily negative resonance of the word mas in the Bible – so negative that some scholars have suggested that Solomon’s labor conscription was so traumatic that it spawned the story of the Exodus (transforming the oppressor from Solomon to the Egyptians) – I cannot help but think that some playful mischief was behind the choice to update this word, mas, to mean “tax” in modern Hebrew.

This week the Israeli government voted to raise taxes, pretty much across the board.  Income taxes and the VAT will both increase slightly, and taxes on some items were raised dramatically.  I do not know if this tax increase needs formal Knesset approval, but if it does, it will be pro forma.  Since “the government” consists of the ministers who also lead a majority of seats in the Knesset, they effectively make the decision.

As an American, I was struck by how fast and smooth the process was.  I may not have been fully aware of the public discourse here, but it seemed to me that it lasted only a few week and even then occasionally migrated to the inside pages of the paper.  Israelis certainly complained about it, but there was no Tea Party, no public demonstrations, no calls to fire the government.  The government claims that the tax increase, along with budget cuts, are necessary to keep Israel from losing economic ground.  Whether this claim is correct or not, Israelis apparently grudgingly accept their government’s right to make it.

This, of course, makes me reflect on the hysterical public discourse in the U.S. every time the subject of raising taxation is raised.  Taxes, more than any social issue, split the nation.  Nor is it only a matter of public discourse.  What happened in Israel this week would be unthinkable in the U.S., simply because the structure of government does not allow it.  The “division of power”, with issues of taxation entrusted to Congress, has insured from our beginning that every attempt to raise taxes would be an uphill fight.  Our Founders, with their own traumatic encounters with British taxation, were decidedly anti-tax, even as they struggled to figure out a way to pay for government services.

Personally, I find the overblown rhetoric about taxation in the U.S. to be ridiculous.  I don’t like taxes, don’t want to pay more of them, and am often frustrated when I see how my taxes are spent.  I do recognize, though, the need to have an adult conversation about the role of government, priorities, and how we are to pay for them in a responsible way.  This is a discussion that we simply seem incapable of having now, and I very much doubt that the upcoming election, whoever wins, will change that.  So I envy the ability of the Israeli government to act quickly and decisively for the public weal.

Yet, on the other hand, the Founders had a point: giving thirty people, each with their own personal interests and ambitions, the sole right to levy taxes is asking for trouble.  It seemed too easy.  With all of the recent awareness in Israel of the eroding economic position of the middle class (much as in the U.S., but complicated by using the more generous Israeli safety net as a reference point), shouldn’t there have been a much more serious public discourse?

Maybe I am simply by constitution too much of a centrist, but I can’t help believing that there is a middle way.

There comes a time most afternoons when I run out of steam.  Tired and bored or frustrated, I have to get away from what I’ve been working on all day, my “real work”.  This often happens, as it is now, around 3:30-4 PM.  My bus, however, doesn’t come for another 45 minutes or so.  This little block of time I call my “screw around time”, and when I’m not wasting it on Facebook or generally searching the web, I try to use the library to explore some crackpot idea that is unrelated to my current research.  Once in a while, these new explorations actually yield something useful.  Not long ago I published an article on two copies of the first printed Jewish calendar in America, and a longer study of the calendar is due to appear in December.  These came out of some serendipitous explorations during downtime like this.  More often, however, they don’t produce anything productive other than adding to my own knowledge.

Over the last two weeks I’ve been using this time to track down, and ultimately disprove, an idea that I’ve been toying with for a couple of years: that the memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln are a forgery.

The idea came to me while reading the highly-redacted memoir in its most popular English translation.  How could a Jewish merchant woman who lived in the earloy modern period have possibly written such a thing?  It made me curious not only about Gluckel, but more importantly, about her manuscript and its chain of transmission.  So, sitting at my office desk in Providence, I turned to Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia entry contains the following:

The handwritten manuscript of Glückel’s diaries was kept by Glückel’s children and grandchildren. It was created by Glückel’s son Moshe Hamel who copied her original manuscript, and the copy was inherited first by Moshe’s son Chayim Hamel (d. 1788) and then by members of the next generation, Yosef Hamel and Chayim Hamel Segal of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). The manuscript was deposited in the Bavarian State Library in the second half of the nineteenth century. [Comments by David Kauffman, quoted by Rabinovitz 1929]

The Bavarian State Library manuscript was published as a book in 1892 by David Kauffman in Pressburg (Bratislava) under the name “Zikhroynes Glikl Hamel” (Yiddish: the Memoirs of Glikl Hamel).

This entry sent me in two directions.  First, was to the original manuscript, which was in the Bavarian State Library.  Second was to the original publication of the manuscript by David Kauffmann.  The first I pursued with an email to the Library.  For the second, I consulted WorldCat only to discover that there were very few copies of Kauffmann’s book in the U.S., and none available by interlibrary loan.

Then things started to get interesting.  The Bavarian Library responded that they did not own, and in fact had no record of owning, this manuscript.  On a whim, I then asked if they had records of their users and their requests from the late nineteenth century.  They did!  And they could find no record of David Kauffmann.  They referred me to the Frankfurt Library, which does have a copy of the manuscript.  Frankfurt made a microfilm and sent it to me.

Did I catch David Kauffmann in a lie?  Did he create the manuscript and make up a provenance for it?

Well, no.  Here in Jerusalem I was able to consult both Kauffmann’s original publication and the masterful work, Glikl: Memoires 1691-1719, ed. and translated by Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem, 2006).  The Wikipedia entry was somewhat misleading – Kauffmann never claims to have consulted the manuscript in the library.  Rather, he apparently got the manuscript directly from its owner to copy.  The work was already known and cited in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Moreover, Turniansky shows that Kauffmann used the same manuscript that is now found in Frankfurt.  She traces the transmission of the manuscript, although she cannot account for it during the entire period.

Is it possible that Glikl didn’t write it?  Yes, but David Kauffmann certainly did not forge it.  The very first page of the manuscript contains the information that Glikl’s son, and then grandson, copied the original manuscript.  We do not possess the manuscript in her hand, but Turniansky did discover her signature in an obscure register.  It is vaguely possible that her son or grandson forged it, but having been now properly chastised in my unfounded theories, I’ll stay with the consensus that it was actually hers.

So in the end, when it came to advancing knowledge, I accomplished exactly nothing.  I did, however, learn quite a bit along the way (including the life story of David Kauffmann, a Hungarian Jewish scholar who having written an almost unimaginable number of books and essays died young).

Next up: Translations of the Mishnah into Yiddish.

I am now on sabbatical and have been working recently in the Judaic Studies Reading Room at the Jewish and National University Library at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  The room could use some renovating and it gets a little crowded and stuffy, but I had forgotten what a pleasure it is to work there.  About 70% of the resources that I need to do my writing are in that room; 5% I can instantly get online; 5% are available in the next room; and 15% I can order up to the room from the closed stacks (they arrive in less than an hour).  5% are more difficult to attain.  This concentration of resources allows me to be maximally productive.  I often move from book to book in unpredictable ways, following up footnotes and references.  It is not unusual for me to consult upwards of 50 different resources in the course of a day, if I can get my hands on them.

Shortly before I started my sabbatical, I was asked to attend a faculty focus group at our library at Brown.  Brown is facing the same challenges as many libraries in America: the costs of materials (especially journals) are rising at a time of constrained budgets; physical space is finite; and book use, as measured by check-outs and requests from storage, are decreasing.  To many administrators, these factors all point in the direction of reducing book purchases in favor of increasing digital resources and putting more books into remote storage.

At Brown, I can also obtain about 95% of the library materials that I need, but I would estimate that for 50% or more of them I need to wait at least a day, and often a week.  The changes that the library is flirting with would further tilt those numbers.  I would more or less be able to do what I do now, but slower.  I understand the library’s challenges, but I, and other humanities scholars, would be the ones who primarily take it on the chin.  It would directly impact my productivity and, to be crude, that comes out of the university’s prestige and my pocket.

I do not fear the move toward the digital; I have already invested in it as both as consumer and producer.  But for the time being, printed materials matter, and the best places to produce new knowledge in the humanities will be the ones that recognize that.

When I was a teenager I discovered the existence of Rashi, the famous medieval Jewish commentator on the Bible (among other books).  Lacking the Hebrew skills necessary to read him, I acquired the only English translation I could find, an edition of the Pentateuch that contained an interlinear translation of Rashi.  I liked the idea of it; I would not only be able to read Rashi, but also learn Hebrew along the way.

That project failed quickly and miserably.  The truth is that I found the interlinearity to be a nightmare.  Typographically I was going from left to right and then right to left all while going right to left.  The English translation was almost impossible for me to parse.  I could get nothing by lining up the Hebrew and English.  Rashi went back to the shelves for several years.

This incident came to my mind as, over the last few months, I’ve been looking into the translation of the Torah into Greek, that is, the production of the Septuagint (or at least the first five books of it) in the third century BCE.  As part of his own research into the nature of the Septuagint, Professor Benjamin Wright III has produced a new English translation of the Septuagint and a series of papers that apply theories of translation, particularly those dealing with interlinear translation, to the Septuagint.

The basic problem with the Septuagint is that it is in bad Greek.  Who would have used such strange Greek, and for what purpose?  Wright asserts that the later myths that developed about this translation, found especially in The Letter of Aristeas (and then used by Philo and Josephus) are historically worthless.  The only information that we really have about the Septuagint is the Septuagint itself, and this information has to be delicately teased from the translation.

Wright points out that there are two basic models of translation.  One attempts to render sense to syntactical units, be they paragraphs, sentences, or even clauses.  The other, in which the idea of interlinearity comes into play, goes word for word, with rendering larger syntactical units comprehensible a secondary concern.  This is why I had so much trouble with my attempts to read Rashi – the translation went according to each Hebrew word rather than the larger sense he was trying to make.

The Septuagint, Wright argues, largely follows the word-by-word approach.  I think that the later, ancient Jewish readers realized and were also bothered by this: Aristeas, Philo, and Josephus all go to great lengths to assert how “exact” the Greek translation is, which might be a polite way to acknowledge and justifying its peculiarity.  Why, though, would anyone translate in this fashion?  Wright states that the reason must have been to attempt to draw people into the Hebrew original.  Alone, the Septuagint is incomprehensible.  It is really meant to be read alongside of the Hebrew, not replace it.  Written by and for Jews, it is either a primer or an interpretive guide of some sort.  It is interesting to note in this regard that I know not a few people today who claim to have learned Greek, Latin, and Aramaic by reading the weekly Torah readings in those languages.

“Interlinearity” was a scribal practice in antiquity, as we know from several artifacts that write the same “text” in multiple languages (e.g., the Rosetta Stone).  But this leads to a technological issue for the Septuagint.  To my knowledge all of the earlier fragments of the Septuagint are only in Greek.  For a model of interlinearity to work, one would need two different scrolls open at the same time.  Who would have bothered?

It is always dangerous to try to infer the nature of a reading community or experience from a text.  What we do gain in this case, though, is an insight about the nature of the translation technique of the Septuagint, and, more generally, greater awareness about the kinds of trade-offs that all translators must make.