Wedding Booklets and 500 Answers to R. Joseph Caro [on] Toledot Jeshu [and] Torah Study on Christmas Eve

Related to the upcoming wedding of a friend of mine: in a short post at the Michtavim blog last year about volumes published about/by the renowned Sassoon family -- it was a post about Cecil Roth's dedication"To Adolf Hitler" (see here) -- I discussed the Sassoon family, which hailed from Bombay (India), then Letchworth, Hertfordshire (England) and now live in Jerusalem (Israel), and I mentioned how on the occasion of Chanah Sassoon's marriage to Yehuda Michel Nissel, a 650-page-volume of rare letters from the personal collection of R. David Solomon Sassoon of Jerusalem was published for the attendees at the wedding (and then sold at local Hebrew booksellers worldwide), entitled Nahalat Awot: Teshuvot, Michtavim, Tefillot, Minhagim (Jerusalem: Yad Samuel Franco, 2007). Shortly thereafter, in response to a request for additional sources on the topic of wedding booklets, Prof. Shnayer Z. Leiman pointed me towards a little-known-source in R. David Oppenheimer (Chief Rabbi of Prague), She'elot u-Teshuvot Nishal David, as well as the more-popularly-known, though quite rare, Seder ve-Hanhagah, published on the occasion of the 1701 wedding of R. David Oppenheimer's daughter, Blima, in Frankfurt am Main, of which "[t]he only extant copy of Seder ve-Hanhagah [which] is in the famous library of [R. David Oppenheimer], which is today housed in the British Library," was distributed at a recent wedding in Brooklyn, New York. (Yitzhak Yudelov also recently published an introduction to this Seder ve-Hanhagah.) And nearly twenty years ago, on the occasion of an earlier wedding in the Sassoon family -- Sarah Sassoon to Shmuel Eliyahu Lipka -- a volume was published by Solomon D. Sassoon, A Comprehensive Study of the Autograph Manuscript of Maimonides' Commentary to the Mishnah (Jerusalem: DS Sassoon, 1990). About the famed Sassoon book and manuscript collection, which has since been broken up "in a series of celebrated auctions," see David S. Sassoon, Ohel Dawid: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Hebrew and Samaritan Manuscripts in the Sassoon Library (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 2 vols. (email me for the PDFs).

One of my early research projects (post-Marcus Jastrow) was about Chaplain Louis Werfel z"l, a forgotten mid-twentieth-century American Orthodox rabbi and chaplain during World War II, who was killed sixty-five years ago in a plane crash during Chanukah 1943. On Werfel, see my "The Flying Rabbi: Chaplain Louis Werfel (1916-1943)," The Yeshiva University Commentator (4 April 2004), available here, where I wrote that "[a]s a young soldier serving in the American army in Oran, Algeria, my grandfather (Donald B. Butler) was one of the soldiers who buried Chaplain Louis Werfel in North Africa with a proper Jewish burial." During summer 2004 I took a trip to the National Archives in College Park, MD (aka NARA II) -– when, as some of you might remember, I collapsed and was rushed to the hospital (and I recovered at the home of DJB and SBB) –- and I perused the original chaplaincy files of Chaplain Louis Werfel in the Modern Military Records unit of the Textual Archives Services Division, including his monthly Report of Chaplains, as well as a report of his funeral written by his colleague Rabbi Jacob J. Honig, who was then serving as a US Army chaplain in North Africa. Chaplain Honig briefly observed the death of his friend and colleague, Chaplain Louis Werfel, in his monthly Report of Chaplains (January 1944): "It is with profound shock and a sense of deep reverence for his memory that I record the burial of my friend and colleague, Chaplain Louis Werfel." A more more detailed description of Werfel's funeral was found in the Chaplain Louis Werfel's chaplaincy files at NARA II, where the archivists graciously declassified the document.

Additionally, I was recently told of another Jewish chaplain who was killed, forty years ago, during Chanukah. Chaplain Morton Singer "died in a plane crash in [Chu Lai,] Vietnam while on a mission to conduct Hanukkah services for Jewish Military personnel. Chaplain Singer... brought courage and spiritual solace to thousands of men [and] will be remembered for his magnificent dedication," in The New York Times (26 December 1968): 37.

Closer related to Chanukah, Prof. David Berger, dean of Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University, has recently written several Zionist-centered historiographical articles, most-recently in David Berger, "Maccabees, Zealots and Josephus: The Impact of Zionism on Joseph Klausner's History of the Second Temple," in Shaye J.D. Cohen and Joshua J. Schwartz, eds., Studies in Josephus and the Varieties of Ancient Judaism: Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume (Leiden & Boston: EJ Brill, 2007), 15-27; and earlier in idem, "Religion, Nationalism, and Historiography: Yehezkel Kaufmann's Account of Jesus and Early Christianity," in Leo Landman, ed., Scholars and Scholarship: The Interaction Between Judaism and Other Cultures (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1990), 149-168.

Earlier this week I mentioned that my reading of choice for Chanukah 5769 -- I should note, of course, during non-paper-time -- would be Maran Ovadiah Yosef's Hazon Ovadiah, Hilkhot Hanukkah (which I used over the past few weeks in preparation for Chanukah), however, when I went to Geulah to purchase a Chanukiyah (see below for a picture from night #3), and I picked up two volumes: Yitzhak Kofman, Sefer Yemei Shemoneh (Ashdod: Mechon Or Hadash), which is the sequel, of sorts, to the celebrated volume by Yerachmiel Zeltzer, Ner Le'Meah (Brooklyn: [n.p.] 1975), which offered one hundred answers to the undisputed "famous question" of R. Joseph Caro -- clearly the official Chanukah question -- who asked, in Beit Yosef le-Orah Hayyim 670, how come the holiday of Hanukkah lasts for eight days if the miracle was for only seven days? (A good question, no?) I note that Yemei Shemoneh is the sequel because it contains five hundred answers to this famous question of the Beit Yosef! Following two days of browsing the volume, my copy of Yemei Shemoneh is on temporary loan to my friends at "YU-East" at a yeshiva in Bais Yisrael [ve-hamavin yavin]. The second volume that I purchased on Sunday was the special edition of Moriah published by Yosef Buxbaum, ed., Kovetz ha-Moadim (Jerusalem: Machon Yerushalayim, 2002), devoted to Hanukkah, Purim, and Tisha B'Av. Among the articles included in this collection are an appendix of a half-dozen articles -- by R. Abdullah Somekh zt"l, R. Yosef Lieberman, R. Benjamin Shlomo Hamburger, R. Yaakov ha-Levi Lifshitz, R. Yissachar Dov Klausner, and R. Yehoshua Mondshein -- related to Torah Study on Christmas Eve (pp. 217-235). For recordings at YUTorah.org on the topic, see Prof. David Berger, "Tosafot, Shittuf and the Halakhic Status of Christianity," delivered last year at Yeshiva University's Kollel Yom Rishon (30 December 2007), see here, as well as a lecture by R. Daniel Z. Feldman, "Nitle Nach," see here.

Related to the particular placement of an upcoming pericope, R. Hayyim Elazar Shapira zt"l explained that the reason why the Torah specified that Rachel Imeinu was buried in Ephratha -- i.e. "Bethlehem" (Bereishit 48:7) -- is because "Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem acts as a constant protest against Christian worship at the Church of the Nativity, also in Bethlehem," as mentioned on 30 June 1982, when Louis Jacobs delivered the Gershom Sholem Memorial Lecture at the annual London general meeting of the Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, entitled "The Munkacer Rebbe on Christianity." This lecture published over two decades later in idem, Their Heads in Heaven: Unfamiliar Aspects of Hasidism (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), 170-181. See also idem, "Attitudes Towards Christianity in the Halakhah," in Ze'ev W. Falk, ed., Gevuroth HaRomah: Jewish Studies Offered at the Eightieth Birthday of Rabbi Moses Cyrus Weiler (Jerusalem: Meisharim Publishers, 1987), xvii-xxxi [pp. 1-15].

Of course, no end-of-the-year post at the Michtavim blog can be complete without the requisite sources regarding Torah study on Christmas eve. My apologies if you've read this in the past, but I haven't received too many complaints from readers of the Michtavim blog; see Yechezkal Solomon, "Nittel in the Sources," Ohr Yisrael 2 (Kislev 5756 [1996]): 133-155; Marc B. Shapiro, "Torah Study on Christmas," Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 319-353; compare with Yisrael Barukh Messinger, Nitel u-Me'or'otav (Spring Valley, NY: YB Messinger, 2000); and Melekh (Marc B.) Shapiro, "A Letter of R. Eleazar Fleckeles Concerning Torah Study on Christmas Eve," Ohr Yisroel 30 (2002): 165-168. The picture below of R. Elazar Fleckeles, author of Teshuvah me-Ahavah (Prague, 1809), appeared in Iveta Cermanová, "Karl Fischer (1757–1844) I. The Life and Intellectual World of a Hebrew Censor," Judaica Bohemiae 42 (2006): 147:

As, within certain circles, the medieval Jewish version(s) of the history of Jesus -- entitled Toledot Yeshu (information is corrected and updated from my faux pas of last year [ve-hamavin yavin]) -- will be read by many tonight, see the brief discussion regarding "the historical Jesus" and about Torah Study on Christmas Eve, in David Berger, "On the Uses of History in Medieval Jewish Polemic Against Christianity: The Quest for Historical Jesus," in Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, & David N. Myers, eds., Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 25-39; Hillel I. Newman, "The Death of Jesus in the Toledot Yeshu," Journal of Theological Studies 50:1 (April 1999): 59-79; and R. Moses Sofer (Hatam Sofer), "Comments on Kuntres Toledot Yeshu ha-Notzri," Yerushateinu 2 (2007): 72-77. For a dissertation that I would have greatly enjoyed (and made use of [!]) during Spring 2008, when I took Prof. Berger's graduate seminar on "Christian–Jewish Polemics in the Middle Ages" at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies, Yeshiva University, is William Horbury, "A Critical Examination of the Toledoth Jeshu," (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1970), which has not fared too well within the extant academic literature. See especially Horbury's discussion of the 'History of Toledoth Yeshu Literature' (pp. 4-36), "Jewish Traditions of Jesus in Antiquity" (pp. 307-437), and "The Toledoth and Jewish Polemical Literature" (pp. 467-519). See also idem, "The Trial of Jesus in Jewish Tradition," in Ernst Bammel, ed., The Trial of Jesus: Cambridge Studies in Honour of C.F.D. Moule (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1949), 102-121. Additionally, for a little-cited undergraduate thesis, see Brad Sabin Hill, "The Appearance of a Medieval Book in the New World: A History of the Toledoth Yeshu in America," (unpublished, Brown University, 1975); special thanks to Prof. Shnayer Z. Leiman for pointing me towards this source, and for the earliest citation of this thesis, see Stephen Gero, "The Nestorius Legend in the Toledoth Yeshu," Oriens Christianus 59 (1975): 108-120. See, more recently, the description of 'Toledot Yeshu literature in America' in Yosef Goldman (research and editing by Ari Kinsberg), Hebrew Printing in America 1735-1926: A History and Annotated Bibliography (Brooklyn: YG Books, 2006), 1:179 (#191), and esp. 2:938 (#1062).

In addition to the recent posts the Seforim blog mentioned in a previous post at the Michtavim blog, see Elliott Horowitz, "Edmund Wilson, Hebrew, Christmas, and the Talmud," the Seforim blog (25 December 2007), available here; and Dan Rabinowitz, "The Name Machabee," the Seforim blog (21 December 2008), available here. For a recent historical retrospective on "the foremost historian of antiquity" of several generations ago, see Albert I. Baumgarten, "Elias Bickerman on the Hellenizing Reformers: A Case Study of an Unconvincing Case," Jewish Quarterly Review 97:2 (Spring 2007): 149-179, and see the interesting comment that "[t]he typescript of [Bickerman's] The Jews in Greek Age is on the backs of letters from Beth Jacob Teachers Seminary (Brooklyn), Shaarei Tzedek Hospital (Jerusalem), Yeshiva Torah Vodaath (Brooklyn), Bikur Cholim Hospital (Jerusalem), Al Tidom, and Notzer Chesed" (169).

For a source that Malcolm Gladwell seems to have overlooked during the course of his research for his recently-published volume Outliers (2008), see Hirsch Jakob Zimmels, "Jesus and Putting up a Brick," Jewish Quarterly Review 43:3 (January 1953): 225-228; and lastly, related to the current discussion in the Daf Yomi to Kiddushin 71, see Hannah G. Sprecher, "Diabolus Ex-Machina: An Unusual Case of Yuhasin," Jewish Law Association Studies 8 (1996): 183-204.

Enjoy the remainder of Hanukkah and see below for me and my Pepsi Chanukiyah: