Modern Judaism in Orient and Occident (East and West)

The author is no novice in this area of research; however, thirty years have passed since he was last engaged deeply in the history of religion. During the ten years of his stay on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, on the classical soil of the religious life of antiquity, where Abraham the patriarch perceived the one-unified God, while Assyrians and Babylonians around him remained caught up in polytheism; where Ezekiel the prophet preached and Ezra the regenerator of the exiled people taught; where Hillel the Elder, the great tanna, grew up; where the Talmud developed while all around the Persians gave themselves to the cult of fire; where in the great academies of Sura and Pumbedita the geonim lectured on theology and at the same time refreshed themselves at the then-gushing fountain of Arab science; where Se‘adya Gaon and Ḥai Gaon were active; where Karaism produced its most famous men who fortunately spurred the rabbis to cultivate a philosophy of religion, Hebrew grammar, and biblical exegesis; where adherents to Islam began to work out a scientific foundation for Islam and to develop its teachings—on this classical soil of religious inspiration, where even today under a glorious sky, in pure air and amidst luscious vegetation the mood is attuned to a life of contemplation, the author, too, was led to the science of religion, and all the more easily so, because his education, his biblical and talmudic studies had disposed him toward and prepared him for this field of research.

In light of the enormous influence that Arab culture and literature exerted in the Middle Ages on a significant swath of Jewish writing, I turned eagerly to the study of Arabic language and literature in Baghdad. My teachers were ulemas and sheikhs with whom I was friendly and whose efforts I later rewarded by excerpting from the works of European orientalists: Sprenger, Weil, Dozy, Kremer, and others, passages that spoke favorably about Muslims and Islam, and translated them into Arabic. These passages were later assembled into an organic whole and in 1873 were published in Baghdad’s Arabic newspaper As-saurâ in the form of a long series of articles under the title “The Francs on Islam.”

While my articles were appearing in As-saurâ, the more liberal spirit of Midhat Pasha, the governor-general of Baghdad, was still dominant and an open word was allowed.

In the land of the Talmud [i.e., Babylon], I was hoping to enter more deeply into talmudic dialectics; hence, I also attended the talmudic academies in Baghdad and sat at the feet of seasoned teachers, the most important of whom was Rabbi Solomon Bekhor Ḥutzin, who is mentioned in the first part of this book.

It is a strange sensation to study Talmud in the homeland of the old sages of the Talmud. Entering deeply into one of the Talmud folios, one feels transported back to one of the ancient academies at Nehardea, Sura, or Pumbedita.

I found that the Babylonian talmudists were able to read the language of “their” Talmud more fluently and understood it more readily than their Western coreligionists, even if they had not gone through the latter’s critical training. The Baghdadi talmudist reads his talmudic text as a book close to him in language and spirit and with an intimate familiarity akin to his own home.

The European talmudist usually reads the Talmud with both hands on a folio page; with a finger of one hand he indicates where he halts in the text, and with a finger of the other hand he follows Rashi’s commentary on the margin; he considers text and commentary to be organically connected and reads both almost simultaneously. The Baghdadi talmudist, in contrast, first goes through a paragraph or an entire page and only then turns to Rashi’s commentary. It’s possible that he is assisted therein by the on-average better memory of the oriental. [ . . . ]

Around that time a wealthy rabbi from Baghdad who had a reputation of holiness among the masses and, together with his brothers, owned a large trading company, went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Immediately upon his return he threw himself with fanatical zeal into the dissemination of kabbalistic ideas and introduced new kabbalistic customs. In Livorno he had a book printed that consisted of confused biblical interpretations and kabbalistic maxims and employed a plethora of mystical permutations of letters, as well as word and sentence contortions. I set myself the task to confront this man in public.

I did not dare do so in Baghdad itself because the man and his entourage were very powerful. I chose a different path.

At that time, the Hebrew weekly Ha-Magid, published in Lyck in East Prussia, was the most important and most widely read Hebrew newspaper; it was also disseminated in Baghdad. About twenty copies arrived in the city every week, which were read by hundreds of people of the better classes. The Arab Jew, who has been reading the Bible in school for years and whose mother tongue is closely related to the language of the Bible, is on intimate terms with the holy tongue not least because he frequently uses it as the language of conversation, especially when he wants to render his discourse incomprehensible to non-Jews. Besides Ha-Magid there also arrived in Baghdad the Hebrew weekly Ha-Levanon, which was printed in Mainz. These were the only papers available to the Jews of Baghdad to inform themselves about both world events and scientific topics. In 1875, I turned to Rabbi Silbermann in Lyck and asked if he would make available to me two columns in his paper. He very happily complied with my request. From that moment I was a regular contributor to the paper for several years.

I wrote a long series of articles about the history of the Jews in Baghdad, about their mores and customs then and now, and reported subsequently about the efforts of the rabbi mentioned earlier to introduce new kabbalistic elements into ritual and liturgy.

A year later I wrote a series of essays for Ha-Magid about my travels through Babylonian regions, about their history and geography, in which I focused on identifying the places mentioned in the Talmud and in the writings of the geonim. This work was widely recognized and appreciated; and even recently it was praised and frequently cited by Grünhut and Adler in their edition of the Travels of R. Benjamin of Tudela published by Kaufmann in Frankfurt am Main.¹

This work was followed by others, mostly travelogues and descriptions of Jewish life in the Orient.

My attacks on the kabbalistic activities of the aforementioned rabbi did not pass unnoticed; in due course they caused me to live through some very dark hours. Although my articles were strictly objective and scientific in nature, it did happen from time to time that I felt provoked to use pointedly polemical language. This was all the more embarrassing for the coddled rabbi and his entourage as my polemic made its way into the public. So it was hardly surprising that my article stirred up an immense commotion in the Orient and in Baghdad set off agitation that eventually led to the ban.

A number of rabbis, presided over by the chief rabbi, assembled in the main synagogue and excommunicated me on account of my articles, which were understood as calumny against the assiduous scholar; the ban was immediately announced in all Baghdad synagogues and broadcast in the streets of the Jewish quarter. In 1876, in Nos. 24, 25, and 26, Ha-Magid printed the protocol of the ban which was signed by 27 rabbis.