Stanford University Press Blog

The Book of Radiance

An old Jew reflects on what the Zohar illuminates about the nature of the Jewish tradition.

by RABBI YEHIEL E. POUPKO

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

Until the Zohar was written down, or emerged and erupted, or was composed, sometime in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth century, a Mitzvah, a Commandment, was just that: It was God’s instruction. If anyone wanted to know why the Jews obeyed the Mitzvot, or if anyone were curious as to the purpose of the Commandments, the answer was very simple: The purpose is to obey God. The reason why the Commandments are obeyed, followed, and observed is because God commanded them. Thou shalt not steal…; Remember the Sabbath Day…; Do not eat everything available out there…; and on, and on, and on. Any time a Jewish person asked that question from the first century onward (and even earlier), the given answer was the same. The reason for the Commandments is that God has commanded them.

Yet the Zohar changed the answer to that question in a fundamental way. One obeys the Mitzvot. One fulfills the Commandments. One integrates the Mitzvot-Commandments into one’s life not only because God commanded it but because the Mitzvot have far-reaching cosmic power. They can in fact have an effect, as if one can imagine it or even say it, on God’s very Self.

A New-Ancient Zohar

On translating the Zohar’s poetic and unruly Aramaic, while staying true to the text’s original ambiguity.

by DANIEL C. MATT

 

 The Zohar Collector's Set

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

It has been an adventure to spend eighteen years translating the Zohar. This mystical commentary on the Torah is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah, but also a gem of world literature that has remained mostly hidden ever since it was composed in Spain in the thirteenth century.

When the project was first proposed to me, back in 1995, I was simultaneously thrilled and frightened. How could I hope to complete such a vast undertaking, translating and explicating some 1,600 pages of dense, intentionally cryptic Aramaic? Yet, how could I turn down this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, I decided to try it before committing myself to the project; but this experiment drained me so much that I decided to decline the offer, amazing though it was. Then, however, I met Margot Pritzker, who had first proposed the idea to me. She said that she understood my hesitation, and then she asked how long such a project might take. “Twelve to fifteen years,” I replied, to which she responded simply, “You’re not scaring me.” When I heard that, something inside of me flipped. Maybe it was that I heard her words as a challenge: “I’m not scared. Why are you?” In any case, in that moment I changed my mind and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The Zohar is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah but also a gem of world literature.

Exploring the Zohar

A syllabus for plumbing the depths of a multi-volume masterpiece of Jewish mysticism.

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Ever since it emerged mysteriously in thirteenth-century Spain, the Zohar has enthralled, confounded, challenged, and enraptured readers. Composed mostly in lyrical Aramaic, the Zohar is a mosaic of biblical interpretation, medieval homily, spiritual fantasy, and imaginative commentary written in the form of a mystical novel in which a group of rabbis wander through the hills of Galilee, discovering and sharing secrets of the Torah along the way.

This immense compendium of writings, widely regarded as the apex of medieval Jewish mysticism’s intellectual and literary prowess, forms the centerpiece of the kabbalistic tradition within Judaism today and is regarded by many as sitting alongside the Torah and Talmud as a sacred text in its own right. Comprising twelve large volumes, the Zohar is virtually an entire body of literature, and after two decades of painstaking translation, all volumes are now available in an authoritative English translation (a limited edition collector’s set is also available). No longer bound by its ancient Aramaic vault, the English translation found in The Zohar: Pritzker Editions opens myriad avenues of religious and academic exploration to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

To help guide curious seekers through this monumental text, we’ve gathered below a short syllabus of books that will help unpack the many subtleties, splendors, and mysteries of the Zohar as well as the history of medieval Jewish mysticism.

The Bizarre Tales of Yiddishland

Trawling through the Jewish dailies of yore reveals a world of outlandish goings-on.

by EDDY PORTNOY

This cartoon originally appeared in a 1930 issue of Moment, a daily newspaper printed in Warsaw, and offers commentary on rampant street violence in the city. Caption reads: "Conceptual battle between porters. Involves brutal and cutting argumentation."

Even on its scrappy margins, idiots, psychics, brawlers and criminals do not play a particularly significant role in Jewish historiography. This isn’t because such figures don’t exist among Jews, but more because the general trajectories of Jewish historiography, with the obvious exception of the Holocaust, tend to emphasize upward mobility. Unless they wound up as success stories, the lives of those in the lower echelons of the Jewish societies haven’t served as a major research interest for most historians in this field. There is a minor literature on Jewish gangsters, but it’s also contextualized as a distinctly one-generational, upwardly mobile phenomenon.

Historiographical research norms in the Jewish corner of the field tend to lean heavily on organizational life, as well as on figures such as politicians, artists, writers, scholars, and at least a few rabbis, among others of this ilk. This stands to reason, not only because these are doubtlessly among the leading types played in any society but also perhaps more importantly, this cast of characters typically leaves a longer paper trail than your average person. Figures like the aforementioned criminals, psychics, brawlers, et al, seem to do their best not to leave much data in their wakes for historians to plumb.

But when I began to explore the urban interwar Yiddish press as a graduate student, I discovered a huge amount of data on average and below average Jews situated in societal depths, a bizarre chronicle of common folks in a Yiddish cultural context, people whose striking stories wound up in the papers mostly because something in their lives had gone terribly wrong.

By trawling the Yiddish newspapers of New York and Warsaw, I found a chronicle of a Yiddishland about which I hadn’t been taught.

Holocaust Memories On Camera

Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm and challenge its narrative.

by JEFFREY SHANDLER

Over 53,000 Holocaust survivors have filmed their testimonies for USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive. Photo courtesy of the USC Shoah Foundation (used here with permission).

In 1997 I was attending a conference on responses to the Holocaust, when a man raised a provocative suggestion about video interviews of Holocaust survivors. At the time, the USC Shoah Foundation was in the process of making recordings for its Visual History Archive (VHA), now the largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, and other organizations had been making similar videos for over a decade. The man commented that a colleague of his had been watching videos of survivors and claimed he could tell what Holocaust histories or novels they had read and what films or television programs they had seen because these works informed the way the survivors told their stories.

These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives.

This claim resonated with an observation I’d made two years earlier. A student told me that her grandmother was a Schindler Jew—that is, she was on the list of Jews Oskar Schindler had rescued from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the film Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, her family persuaded the grandmother to travel with them to Poland to see where she’d grown up and spent the war years. On the trip they made a video, which my student shared with me. I found it especially intriguing at one point, when the family visited the site of the Płaszów labor camp, where the grandmother had been a prisoner. She recalled worrying about being conscripted to work in Schindler’s factory, because every time her circumstances had changed, it had been for the worse. Then one of her sons asked: “That scene in Schindler’s List, when the Jews presented Schindler with a ring—was it really like that?” The grandmother replied that she didn’t know; she wasn’t there when it happened. Her son seemed disappointed and asked another question about the film; then a different relative asked another one. It soon became clear that, for some family members, the grandmother’s story did not stand on its own but was engaged in relation to Schindler’s List—not altogether surprising, given that the film had motivated the family’s trip to Poland to begin with.

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluck

A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.

a Q&A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.

 

Q:

Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?

 

A:

LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.

In Memory of Alan Mintz

Mintz’s commitment to Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing.

Select works of Alan Mintz. Photo by Kalie Caetano.

Last week, the field of Jewish Studies lost an influential scholar whose work leaves a lasting impression on the study of Hebrew literature. Alan Mintz passed away on May 20, just a few weeks before the planned publication of his latest book, a major critical study of S.Y. Agnon’s A City in Its Fullness.

We at Stanford University Press were grateful for the opportunity to work with Alan Mintz, whose intellectual commitment to interpreting and advocating for the importance of Hebrew literature came through powerfully in his writing. We extend our heartfelt condolences to the larger community of Alan’s colleagues, students, friends, and family who will keenly feel his loss.

Here, we share remembrances of Alan from current and former editors of the Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture series who worked with Alan throughout the years.

 

—STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

History’s Economic Underpinning

Jewish economic history—too long stigmatized—opens up surprising insights into the past, and the present too.

by ADAM TELLER

Gold medal coins with the bust of Bogusław Radziwiłł.

When I began the research that would eventually lead to the publication of Money, Power, and Influence in Eighteenth-Century Lithuania—a study of the Jews’ economic past in eastern Europe—I felt as if I was swimming against the tide in the study of Jewish history. The field I was working in, Jewish economic history, had been in the doldrums since the mid-twentieth century. The use of economic motifs in the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that led up to the Holocaust had made it a topic that many felt too hot to handle. Moreover, the rise in popularity of first social and then cultural history had opened new vistas in understanding the complexities of Jewish non-Jewish interaction in the Diaspora that seemed to render insignificant issues of the Jews’ economic life.

I was convinced that this was not the case. I believed (and still do) that the study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies. This is because an integral aspect of most economic activity is that it engages the individual in a broad network of relationships and interests. The line stretching from owner of the means of production to producer, and from there to distributor (and those servicing the market), and thence to consumer, is often a very long one. It crosses and re-crosses seemingly impenetrable social barriers of class, ethnicity, religion, and gender (not to mention physical segregation where that exists), connecting those it touches in the most natural way. The study of Jewish economic history is therefore a means of understanding one of the most important mechanisms of social integration that functioned wherever Jews lived—even in societies where their integration was frowned upon.

The study of Jewish economic life is a key field through which to examine the relations which developed between Jews and surrounding societies.

Removing the Shroud of Oblivion

Recovering the cultural memory of Salonica’s Jewish community.

by DEVIN E. NAAR

A 1910 postcard from Salonica featuring a Jewish man and women in traditional Jewish clothing.

The dynamic port city of Salonica, once home to the Young Turk movement that overthrew the Ottoman sultan in 1909 and the city over which the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Ottomans fought during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, is today a largely forgotten corner of the former Ottoman Empire and the second city of contemporary Greece. Salonica and her Jews—who remarkably numbered half of the city’s diverse inhabitants a century ago—once played key roles in the region’s culture, politics, and commerce. But the historic significance of the city in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness, a veritable “orphan of history,” as one scholar put it.

The historic significance of Salonica in modern times—and particularly that of its Jewish residents—has largely been excised from academic and popular consciousness.

The city’s invisibility to the outside world runs counter to my own upbringing, which was filled with stories from my Salonican-born relatives, all centering around this vibrant place and its people. Enchanting tales were told of my great grandfather, a rabbi and kabbalist, walking down the streets of Salonica side by side with a priest and an imam, or composing protective amulets for farmers who repaid him with live poultry and fresh produce; or my grandfather and his brother riding their prized possession—a bicycle—along the sea with the White Tower in the distance; or my great uncle and his wife and their children remaining in the city and “disappearing” during World War II. But how exactly did they disappear? Just as importantly, how had they lived? I wanted to access this lost world of Jewish Salonica—both to understand the world from which my family came and to restore a voice to the city and its Jewish community.

The “I” in History

My grandparents were victims of the major tragedies of the first half of the 20th century.

by IVAN JABLONKA

Identification records for Matès and Idesa Jablonka, June 1938. Sûreté générale du ministère de l'Intérieur, Archives nationales (France).

Being a historian does not preclude one from talking about one’s family, but it does offer the use of a unique vocabulary to describe it: the language of the social sciences. My attempt at a family biography is both a private and public reflection about the fate of my family and I speak about them not as if theirs was a unique, remarkable destiny, but rather as one that traversed, and was perhaps determined, by broader social forces.

If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My father's parents were born in Poland in the early 20th century. As officials in the local Communist Party, which was illegal at the time, they were sentenced to five years in prison. On their release, they migrated to France, without a visa, and settled in Paris in the late 1930s. A few years later, they were arrested and deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. To summarize, we can say that they spent their entire lives in hiding: first in Poland, as communists; then in France, as illegal immigrants; and finally, under the Vichy regime, as Jews. Three clandestine lives, three absences from the world, until the ultimate one: their annihilation in the context of genocide. If their life was short and tragic, it is because they were manipulated by one totalitarianism and destroyed by another, under the indifferent gaze of democracies.

My book, A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, is a reflection on the fate of my family, but it is also an essay on the writing of history. Three methodological issues are close to my heart: the use of the "I"; the need for distance and reflexivity; and the relationship between history and memory.

 

 

The Everyman of Poetry

The quiet subversiveness of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry has been too long overlooked.

by CHANA KRONFELD

Yehuda Amichai reading at Tmol Shilshom café in Jerusalem, June 1994. Photo by Yair Medina. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

My first meeting with Yehuda Amichai, in the fall of 1970, was what we call in Hebrew a chavaya metakenet, a “corrective” or “healing experience,” one that mends a messy or unpleasant earlier experience. Overeager and all too young, I was trying to put together a series called “Rendezvous with an Author” for Israeli Educational Television, which would allow high school students to meet with cutting-edge Hebrew writers in a relaxed roundtable discussion of the writers’ work. I was still reeling from a failed attempt to produce the series’ pilot: an author whose stories I adored was so sadistically cruel to the young students that we had to stop the taping! And then it came to me—Yehuda Amichai, of course.

He was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet.

Having gotten into the habit of reading his poetry daily for my own emotional sustenance since age fifteen, I was sure: Yes, Amichai would be the one to start with. He would know how to connect with the students and put them at ease; he would be able to talk about the most complex poetic issues with utter simplicity and without egocentric affectation. I had never met him before, but from everything I heard, he was invested in not playing the role of the Great Poet—even though by 1970 his status as the most revolutionary, indeed the most important poet of the Statehood Generation (dor ha-mdina) had solidified and he was acquiring an international reputation. Regardless, he was synonymous with unpretentiousness. And indeed, in his Everyman appearance and unaffected manner, Amichai proceeded to treat the students as his equals, joking his way into all our hearts, and thus the series was off to an exciting start. That experience was the beginning of my lifelong friendship with the man and the catalyst for my dedication to study and teach the work of the poet.

In Memory of Benjamin Harshav

Stanford University Press remembers a gifted poet, translator, and literary scholar.

Benjamin Harshav, 1928-2015, via Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Harshav, poet, author, teacher, translator, and literary scholar, died last week, leaving behind him a remarkable legacy in the fields of Yiddish and Hebrew literary scholarship. A prolific writer and editor of multiple volumes on poetry, literature, and culture, Harshav published no less than eight titles with Stanford University Press—titles that included translations, edited anthologies, and original essays. His life spanned nearly nine decades and three continents—from Eastern Europe, to Israel, to the United States. During his life he was a champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement and worked indefatigably to bring volumes of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry to wider audiences through translation.

A champion of comparative literature who took part in a watershed poetic movement.

Harshav’s Yiddish roots ran deep—he was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1928, a town which he described as the “self-styled bastion of Yiddish culture.” But in 1941, the year the Germans wrested the city from Soviet control, Harshav and his family fled to the Urals, where—despite that fact that he would eventually follow a calling in literary scholarship—Harshav attended university to study math and physics.

Message in a Bottle

The buried manuscript of a Greek Jewish inmate of Auschwitz.

The main gate of Auschwitz. Creative Commons image by Tulio Bertorini via Wikimedia Commons.

In a Q&A with the editors of Sephardi Lives, each was asked to share some of what they regarded as being the most memorable stories recorded in the compendium of Sephardi experience on which they collaborated, collecting and translating—with the help of other scholars in the field—over 150 documents written by or about Sephardi Jews. Co-editor Julia Phillips Cohen mentioned (among others) a diary, partially erased by time, written by a Greek Jew named Marcel Nadjary who was interned at Auschwitz. Of this record she says:

Amazingly, the manuscript—which bears witness to Nadjary’s dogged refusal to be cowed by the dehumanizing experience of the camp, his enduring faith in God, and his deep attachment to Greece—was discovered between Birkenau’s Crematoria I and II in 1980. Much of the original was by then lost to the ravages of time, leaving only a fragmented text full of spaces that can no longer be filled in. Somehow, to my mind, these absences do not detract from the text but instead make it even more powerful. They bear testimony not only to the story of the man who had the courage to write and bury his manuscript while imprisoned in Auschwitz but also to the incredible material history of the text itself and to its reappearance in the world after so many decades.

Dear Rebecca …

A Turkish Jew interned at Drancy writes home.

The camp in Drancy, circa 1941. Creative Commons image from the Bundesarchiv of Germany via Wikimedia Commons.

The following is a letter from Yaco Soulam, detained in Drancy, to his wife, Rebecca in Paris. The letter was translated from Ladino by Julia Phillips Cohen and is excerpted below from Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History 1700-1950:

Located in a northeastern suburb of Paris, the Drancy camp was first established by the German authorities in August 1941 as a site of internment for foreign Jews living in France. It later became the primary transit camp for all of French Jewry. In this intimate letter a Sephardi man named Bension Haim Yaco Soulam (1901-1942) tells his wife, Rebecca Soulam (née Bensasson) (1900-1974) about his days spent in the camp, urges her to keep their family safe, and attempts to arrange a clandestine meeting with her while he is interned. Yaco's letters to his wife during this period, written in a combination of French and Ladino, included elaborate coded messages and instructions, including his suggestion that their children keep a record of their naturalization as French citizens as a form of insurance. By contrast both husband and wife remained stateless, although they had come to France from Turkey more than a decade earlier; having failed to renew their papers with the Turkish authorities, they were not recognized by the Turkish consulate as Turkish nationals. Along with countless other stateless Jews of Turkish origin, Yaco was deported from Drancy to Auschwitz, where he perished. His wife Rebecca remained in Paris for another two years before she too was sent to Auschwitz. Having endured the horrors of the camp and nearly dying of typhus, after the war Rebecca Soulam was reunited with her children, both of whom survived in hiding.