Quantitative Analysis of Rabbinic Literature
One of the things we noticed when mapping Noda Bi-Yehuda is that the map for Vol. I looks different from the map of Vol. II, and that his sphere of correspondence seems to shrink over time. Take a look at what I wrote in the post about this.
We now have another way to visualize this: distinct heatmaps for the two volumes. You really see how Vol II covers a far more compact area, especially relative to the overall number of responsa. Take a look:
We’ve got a new map of Rav Yosef Shaul Nathansohn’s Sho’el U-Meshiv. He wrote more responsa than there are pages of Talmud. If one learned Sho’el U-Meshiv Yomi it would take longer than Daf Yomi. That’s really something.
Anyhow, we mapped it. You can toggle both city maps and heat maps for Sho’el U-Meshiv and Maharsham. They were both Galician, one generation apart, so it really offers an interesting basis for comparison. I haven’t even started digging in.
A few people asked me about Gedolei Yisrael who lived in Ukraine, so I made a map. It covers some 50+ towns. Some, like Lviv and Brody, get into the Hall of Fame of Jewish communities on the first ballot. Others are lesser known. About half are best known for the Hasidic courts named for them. In all, this should help make what is going on there now much realer. The order is random, and I’m sure there are major figures from other places. Please make suggestions in the comments. Note that this is not a comprehensive map of Jewish communities in Ukraine. Our Searchable Map of Hebrew Place Names, for instance, has over 1500 Jewish communities in today’s Ukraine.
Among the figures included in this map, the one that gave me a jolt was R. Menachem Mendel Hager, the first Rebbe of Vizhnitz, because of the name of his book: Ahavas Shalom, the Love of Peace.
You can open a larger map in a new tab by clicking here.
What subscriber lists can tell us about the Hungarian yeshiva world in the years before its annihilation.
When we talk about “the yeshiva world” we most often refer to the yeshivot established in Greater Lithuania in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and their transplants in the US, Israel, and elsewhere beginning in the interwar period. Rarely is there discussion of other yeshivot, and when there is, they are generally given short shrift.
There is no doubt that, structurally, the Lithuanian yeshivot differed from other yeshivot. One salient difference is that many of them functioned independently of the host communities and had their own fundraising networks. I recall learning this from Prof. Shaul Stampfer in the summer of 1999 and finding it to be quite a revelation. But there were, it must be noted, community-based Lithuanian yeshivot as well, most notably the Ramailes Yeshiva in Vilna. But Lithuanian yeshivot are not our topic today.
A number of months ago, I noticed that some books include rosters of yeshiva students within presubscriber lists (prenumeranten). Here’s an example that comes from a book called Shulhan shel Arba, a treatise on proper conduct at the table, composed by Rabbeinu Bahya ben Asher, a disciple of Rashba (late-13th and early-14th century Spain). In 1939, Rabbi Yitzchak Essner, a resident of Presov, (Czecho)slovakia, reprinted the work at Vranov (nad Topľou) with his own commentaries. There are four pages of prenumeranten, including sub-lists from five different Hungarian yeshivot. Here’s the beginning of the list from the yeshiva in Dunaszerdahely:
Few outside of those who really study Hungarian Jewish history have even heard of Dunaszerdahely, know that it was the home of R. Yehuda Aszod, or are aware that it was actually home to yeshivot. But it was. A glance at this list (there are 2 or 3 more students on the next page) shows that, contrary to the common understanding, the students were not just local boys, but actually came from fairly far away. Their hometowns are listed, and I have highlighted them in green. Here’s a map of the hometowns:
And this is but a small cross-section of books bought by yeshiva students in Dunaszerdahely. Of the 20 or so books with Hungarian yeshiva subscribers that I have mapped thus far, about 5 have lists from Dunaszerdahely, and there were between 12 and 41 subscribers to each book. (Lest one consider that fluctuation in the size of the yeshiva accounts for the difference, note that the books in question were all printed between 1938 and 1940.) Here’s a look at the hometowns of all subscribers from the yeshiva of Dunaszerdahely. It’s zoomed out a bit to include the one subscriber from Poland and one from Prague:
There are about 120 books that have lists of Hungarian yeshiva students (about 2/3 of these were published between 1920 and 1943), and thus far I have encountered about 35 yeshivot, which is a fraction of the 230 yeshivot listed by Rabbi Dr. Armin Friedman in his dissertation on the subject. Some of the yeshivot were tiny, but there were over 300 students at the yeshiva in Munkacs in the early 1940s.
Interestingly, I have not found such lists for yeshivot in Lithuania – or anywhere else, for that matter. This seems to be a strictly Hungarian phenomenon. It could be that it is a matter of social class. Interwar Hungary (including regions like Slovakia, Transcarpathia, and Transylvania that had been part of Hungary until 1920) was very much middle class. That does not mean that all the students had money, but that enough of them had disposable income to make it worthwhile for an author or agent to sell in the yeshiva.
The yeshivot were also somewhat institutionalized. Each one had a system of gabba’im in charge of various aspects of yeshiva life. The red highlighted text above identifies a student as ג”ר דחמ”ז – gabbai rishon de-hevra mezonot. He was in charge of either organizing meals for students at the homes of local community members or of procuring the food to be served in the yeshiva kitchen. While some yeshivot were linked directly to the rosh yeshiva (often the local rabbi), and followed him if he moved, by the late 1930s, several yeshivot had permanent buildings and several staff members, and so had attained a degree of institutionalization and perceived (though, in hindsight, tragically illusory) permanence.
This post covers much of the ground from my presentation at the AJS conference in Chicago last week. There’s a lot more to investigate and discuss. I’m posting the map from which I took the images above. As you will see, you can filter it by several variables. For example, you can look (better in a separate tab) at a particular book, a particular yeshiva, or a particular town. It includes some 2,000 data points, which is really only the tip of a very large iceberg.
How our curiosity about a 200 year old ledger sparked broader interest about how libraries sell off items
About a month ago, a friend of HaMapah notified us via our Facebook page that a document that may be of great interest to us had just gone up for auction. I took a look, and, indeed, it’s just the sort of thing that provides the sort of information we are gathering through our Responsa Mapping project and through the Prenumeranten project. The document in question is the pinkas (ledger) of an emissary (shada”r, or sheluha de-rabanan) from the Jewish community of Tiberias to collect funds in western Europe.
I looked at the images and other files uploaded by the auctioneer, Genazym, and was utterly enthralled. The emissary, Israel Hayyim Raphael Segre, visited hundreds of communities, and each donor signed his or her name to the pinkas. Several leading rabbis signed, including R. Akiva Eger, a fact that drove the price of the item up to $200,000! This also makes the document a valuable historical resource. The study of travel, fundraising networks, and, more generally, the geography of Jewish history is in its infancy, and these sorts of pinkasim will be an important resource as this field develops.
Curiosity piqued, I went into the NLI catalogs to see what else I could find. I was somewhat surprised to find that the very manuscript on auction was already cataloged, microfilmed, digitized, and available on KTIV. Even more surprising, it had apparently been part of the JTS collection. This sparked a tweet thread:
Okay, the latest Genazym catalog dropped in the last day or two. https://t.co/1VWiBW3qkv
— Elli Fischer (@Adderabbi) July 7, 2021
And there's something really curious, perhaps even suspicious, about one of the most remarkable items on auction. This thread will raise the questions. I don't have answers. 1/n
The thread generated interest and discussion, and it eventually turned into an excellent article for JTA, by Asaf Shalev. It really gets into the deaccession practices of various libraries, especially JTS, and the calls for greater transparency in the process. Over the past week, lots of folks have reached out about it and commented to me about it privately, even folks without much interest in this field. In truth, I wouldn’t have found what I found without the HaMapah community.
Since the pinkas is digitized, and the list of cities visited was uploaded by Genazym, I’d like to try to map the route in full. Some of these places we have not encountered before, including southern German hamlets like the ones where my grandfather and his ancestors were born. Once we convert the PDF posted into a spreadsheet and look up the places, we will see about mapping the full route. I think that would be pretty cool.
We are delighted to be participating in this half-day conference on Monday, May 31. It will be an opportunity to showcase our projects as well as the other projects at our “home base” of the E-lijah Lab at the University of Haifa.
We are involved in two sessions. In one, Prof. Wodzinski, the lead researcher for the Prenumeranten Project, will be presenting some of our newest findings and insights, including a lot of material that we have not discussed here or in our other lectures. Prof. Avriel Bar-Levav, a leading historian of the Hebrew book, will respond.
Moshe and I will present a new facet of our research on metadata in responsa, specifically, about understanding who includes metadata and why. Responding to our presentation will be Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg, whose research focuses on the (re)organization of material in books, and especially on collections of responsa.
And the rest of the conference looks amazing, too. You can register here: https://forms.gle/DZQDbCmJstDcpWxKA
For more information: https://sites.google.com/…/innovationsindigitaljew…/home
Hope you can make it!
Last week we gave a presentation (in Hebrew) in a series called “Homrah Ve-Ru’ah” for the Hadarim Center for Israeli-Jewish Culture. It’s a basic intro to our projects, but it includes some new findings. There’s also a fun Q&A session at the end.
Several Spanish Rishonim mention a place called “Alcolea”. We misidentified it, but we think we got the right one now.
We recently got an email from reader JR Ayaso regarding our identification of the town אלקוליעא, which appears several times in Responsa Rivash, with Alcolea in Almeira Province, in Andalusia. He points out that there are several localities in Spain called “Alcolea” (prompting me to consider writing a song about all these Alcoleas, to the tune of Naomi Shemer’s “Al Kol Eleh”, but I digress), and suggests that Rivash is referring to Alcolea Del Rio, on the Guadalquivir River, in Seville Province. This prompted me to take a closer look.
Looking at our map of Responsa Rivash shows that Alcolea does, indeed, seem to be a geographical outlier. Since that map will be updated, here’s a screenshot of what it looks like now:
Alcolea is the relatively large green dot southeast of Granada. Almost all of the Rivash’s early responsa were written to Aragon and Navarre. In fact, the only major outliers, we thought, were Alcolea and the dot to the northwest of it, Pinar. It turned out that Pinar was a misidentification of פינה, which is actually Pina De Ebro, in Zaragoza Province, smack dab in the middle of Aragon. So it seems that Mr. Ayaso is correct; we got the wrong Alcolea.
What about Mr. Ayaso’s suggestion that it refers to Alcolea Del Rio? Well, it’s problematic for similar reasons; Seville is even further away from Rivash’s base in Aragon. But that is only two of the 13 Alcoleas on the Spanish Wikipedia disambiguation page. [Protip: When studying such things, look at the Wikipedia page of the local language. The English disambiguation page has only 9 Alcoleas.]
Meyer Kayserling, in his Jewish Encyclopedia entry for “Alcolea”, lists Responsa Rivash as a source on the community and writes that it is in Jaen Province. Jaen is also in Andalusia, and moreover, we found no Alcolea in that province. Perhaps he is referring to one of the other Alcoleas in Andalusia, but it would remain an outlier – possible, but only after discounting other possibilities.
The Jewish Virtual Library has an entry on Alcolea, which they identify, based on Encyclopedia Judaica, with Alcolea De Cinca – in Huesca Province, right in Rivash’s home territory. Furthermore, a while ago Prof. Simcha Emanuel shared with me a monograph by Dr. Zunz, titled “Uber die in den hebräisch-jüdischen Schriften vorkommenden hispanischen Ortnamen.” It is essentially a gazetteer of Iberian place names that appear in Hebrew works. Here’s Zunz’s entry for אלקוליעא:
Zunz points out that it is mentioned in Responsa Rivash and that it has the suffix דסינקה (De Cinca!) in a responsum of Rabbenu Nissim (Ran). Page 63 in the Rome Edition of Responsa Ran corresponds to responsum #30, written in 1349-50. Two other places are mentioned in this responsum about the acceptability of testimony to the betrothal of a woman named Bella. One, as Zunz notes, is אלבליט (or אלבליט דסינקאה), and the other, noted by Leon Feldman, is Lerida (לרידה; Lleida). We have identified אלבליט דסינקאה as Albalete De Cinca, a town that is literally across the River Cinca from Alcolea De Cinca. Lleida, the largest town in the region, is about 30 miles away. Ran’s responsum is thus addressed to the rabbinic leaders of the two small towns involved in the dispute and of the larger town nearby. You can see the dispute moving up the food chain from the village to the larger town to the acknowledged posek of the country.
Rivash was a primary disciple of Ran and, upon the latter’s death, became the leading halakhist of Aragon. It stands to reason that the responsa he wrote to Alcolea were indeed to Alcolea De Cinca, which was firmly in “his” territory, had a documented Jewish community, and had consulted with Rivash’s master when a dispute arose. This is not ironclad proof, but the evidence makes this conclusion the most likely by far.
Thank you, Mr. Ayaso, for asking this question and leading us down this fun little “rabbi hole”.
Some notes on some recent subscription lists we’ve come across and some comments on odd spellings of place names.
We have been following the “Jewish Miscellanies” blog by Jeffrey Maynard for a while. He consistently posts about the rare and interesting books in his collection, mainly, but not only, of Anglo Judaica. Some of the books in his collection have really interesting Prenumeranten lists.
One such book that he wrote about is “Zecher Ov” by Rev. Hanokh Henikh (Henry) Olivenstein, published in 1916. The author was a “Swiss-army Jew” who served communities in Wales. The subscribers include people from lots of places in the UK and elsewhere, but there’s a remarkable cluster of tiny little hamlets in southern Wales, where he ministered. Most of these places do not appear in Kagan’s index. Here’s a screenshot; you can explore further by typing “Wales” in the “English Name” text box in our Searchable Map.
Since the last update of the map, we’ve identified another place in this list: לאמבאראדאך is Llanbradach, Wales. The only place on the Zecher Ov list that we have not identified is נאוי which is in France (or was in 1916).
More recently, Maynard wrote about a volume of R. Meir Dan Plotzki’s Hemdat Yisrael that was published in 1924. The subscribers are from Belgium, England, the US (plus R. Yehuda Leib Graubart in Toronto), and Argentina. It’s a fascinating list that includes many American Orthodox rabbinic and lay leaders. We will have more to say on that in the future, as there are some similar lists.
One interesting feature of this list is the way that some city names are spelled. We have already written how Yiddish place name spellings are phonetic, and so subject to lots of variance, based on dialect. There is also variance based on regional modifiers. For example, if you live in Frankfurt am-Main, you refer to your hometown as Frankfurt. Likewise if you like in Frankfurt an der Oder. In some circumstances, however, you will have to specify which Frankfurt you refer to.
Predictably, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of places whose names mean, simply, “New City”. This includes anyplace named Neustadt or Nove Mesto or Villanova or Ujhely. Naples and Nablus and Newton fit the pattern, too. So when a Hebrew source mentions ניישטאט or עיר חדש, it can be a challenge to disambiguate.
Fortunately, most such places have an additional modifier. To take an example of a pretty famous place, consider Brisk. Today it is known as Brest, Belarus, and it’s easy to see how Brest and Brisk are cognates. But at various times, it was known officially as Brest-Litovsk. What’s the Litovsk? It simply means “Lithuanian”. So the Russian Brest-Litovsk, the Polish Brześć Litewski, and the Yiddish בריסק דליטא simply specify that the reference is to the Lithuanian Brisk, not a different one. In this case, the other one is Brześć Kujawski, בריסק דקויא, or Brest Kujavsk, in Poland.
[Sidebar: The idea that some people call Satmar “Sakmar” because it otherwise means “St. Mary” is silly. As the Brest/Brisk example illustrates, the t/k shift happens elsewhere, and in no language does Satmar or Satu Mare mean “St. Mary”. Perhaps one will argue that just as religious Jews changed Satmar to Sakmar to avoid invoking St. Mary, they changed Brest to Brisk to avoid naughty thoughts? There are other examples – like Saponta, a town very close to Satmar, which is known in Jewish sources as Spinka. At some point, we will post about all the different places in rabbinic sources that are named for saints and other elements of Christianity.]
We do not realize it, but we often do the same thing. To disambiguate the many Springfields, Salems, and Portlands in the USA, we use the state name. Locally, Springfield is Springfield, but in many cases one will need to specify whether one is referring to Illinois, Massachusetts, the fictional setting for “The Simpsons”, or one of the many other Springfields.
When the person writing out the subscriber lists knows about this, they will account for it and use a format similar to the familiar [City, ST] format. But what if they are not? Funny things happen. Consider this responsum from Maharsham:
The דאלעסטעסקא mentioned here is none other than Dallas, Texas. It got all smushed into one word, which is typical for European place names but not American ones.
That’s just one example, though. In the subscriber list for Hemdat Yisrael, we find no less than six examples:
האליאגמאס
ספרינגהעלדמאס
פאלריווערמאס
מאלדענמאס
דענווערקולרדא
לואי סווילקי
If you want to try to figure these out on your own, stop reading here. We will ID the places at the end of the post.
One peculiar thing here is that 4 of the 6 examples are from Massachusetts. Massachusetts is better represented on the subscriber list, as there were lots of small Jewish communities there, but that does not explain why 2/3 of these examples are from one state. Disambiguation can perhaps explain one of these examples, though we are doubtful about even that.
I (Elli) think that this reflects a peculiar habit of Massachusettsans to add “Mass” as a sort of suffix to cities in that state. If you heard a Massachusettsan speak and had no geographical knowledge, you might easily conclude that there’s a place called “Woostamass”. The transcriber of the subscription lists can easily have made such mistakes.
Anyhow, the places where city and state are contracted into one word (or two oddly-parsed words) are:
Holyoke, MA
Springfield, MA
Fall River, MA
Malden, MA
Denver, CO
Louisville, KY
If you have another theory, we’d love to hear it!
An immigrant from Poland to Tunisia in the 19th century tried to bridge cultural worlds while satisfying his wanderlust.
For the past ten years, it has been my delightful lot to help the elect of the human race, to be a deliverer and courier of all kinds of books, old and new, from Sefarad to Ashkenaz and from Ashkenaz to Sefarad. No distance was too great for me. The dry heat of Africa did not stop me, and the ice of Ashkenaz did not deter me….
I witnessed the wisdom of Ashkenaz rejoicing in the courtyards of Sefarad, and the sagacity of Sefarad raising her voice in the streets of Ashkenaz – and it was from me. I brought it about. Though I ate bread in misery, this legacy is more beautiful to me than the legacy of traders in gold and jewels….
Sweeter to my palate were dry bread dipped in stagnant water in the bowels of a ship and bread, dates, and water from a skin on a dune in the Arabian desert than every delicacy of kings and princes.
Sefer HaZikaron, Publisher’s Apologia, Livorno, 1845
Eliezer Ashkenazi was born in Poland in the early 19th century, but Tunis had become his hometown by the mid-1840s. According to his own account, financial circumstances forced him to abandon his yeshiva studies at the age of 17. It seems that his heart remained in the study hall, though, as he became a collector, dealer, copyist, and publisher of Jewish manuscripts.
Through NLI catalog, we can trace the manuscripts that passed through his hands: some he bought, some he copied (or co-copied), and some he commissioned others to copy (and then printed). One he left at the home of a friend in Modena, Italy, and never retrieved. The manuscripts were medieval and modern, Ashkenazic and Sephardic. Some of them he saw or acquired in Tunis and elsewhere in North Africa, and others he came upon during his travels.
Like a one-man Mekize Nirdamim society, he published three books and facilitated the publication of several more, all of which consisted of unpublished treatises, letters, liturgical compositions, and commentaries. Of the three he published, all within the span of a decade, the first was Sefer Ha-Zikaron, whose preface, by Ashkenazi, is excerpted above. This book is a supercommentary on Rashi’s Torah commentary by R. Avraham Bakrat, a rabbi who was expelled from Spain and ended up in Tunis in the early 16th century. Ashkenazi discovered the manuscript there and brought it to Livorno to print. He actually printed two editions in that year: one for Italy and one for North Africa; the latter lists sponsors from several Algerian cities: Mostaganem, Tlemcen, Constantine, and Algiers. The former contains several pages of prenumeranten as well as approbations from leading Italian rabbis like the famed Shadal (Samuel David Luzzatto) and Yashar (Isaac Samuel Reggio). The list is apparently by order of city traveled, so we can chart his route across northern Italy (with a detour to Rome), from Trieste to Cuneo and on to Marseilles in France. He sold books in c. 40 different cities in all.
His next literary undertaking was four years later. He published Divrei Hakhamim, a compilation of 11 mostly medieval treatises with a clearly rationalist bent. This work was published in Metz. It, too, has several pages of noms des hommes genereux– the names (in French) of those generous people who pre-purchased the book. This list, too, is in order of visits, and here Ashkenazi takes us to almost 100 different places, mainly villages, in Alsace and Lorraine, along France’s border with Germany and the most heavily Jewish regions in 19th century France.
The third book, Ta’am Zekenim (whose title JE creepily translates as “The Taste of Old Men”) was published in Frankfurt in 1855. It is likewise a compilation of several older treatises, with an introduction by R. Eliakim Carmoly, a kindred spirit of Ashkenazi’s who had recently retired from being Belgium’s chief rabbi. There is barely a page of subscribers to this book, from a handful of larger cities. I do not know what accounts for this change in strategy, but it seems likely that he did not visit all of the cities where subscribers lived. I’ve combined the lists for Ta’am Zekenim and Divrei Hakhamim in one map.
The striking thing is that there is no overlap between the places in the Sefer Ha-Zikaron lists and the subsequent lists. It’s almost as though Ashkenazi wanted to tour a different part of the Jewish world when he published his second book. Having done Italy and Africa, he opted to tour France instead. He wrote the preface to Ta’am Zekenim in Marseille – the terminus of his prior tour – in 1854. From there, presumably, he sailed back to Tunis.
After 1855, he seems to have settled down a bit. In 1858, he wrote to Senior Sachs (we see you, Shneur) about the community in Tunis. This letter became the first in a series of dispatches to Ha-Levanon on the history and travails of this community; these articles, listed in the bibliography of the JE entry on Tunis, form the basis for Robert Hattal’s La Chronique d’Eliezer Ashkenazi : sur les juifs de Tunis. In 1868, he copied in Tunis a manuscript of correspondences between R. Meir Ha-Levi Abulafia (“Ramah”) and Provencal rabbis on behalf of Jehiel Brill, editor of Ha-Levanon, in Paris, who printed it.
It is not likely that Eliezer Ashkenazi would be inducted into the 19th century Hall of Fame of Jewish scholars, bibliophiles, and codicologists. It was a crowded century. He collaborated with some better-known scholars, like the aforementioned Shadal, Yashar, R. Carmoly, Brill, and Sachs, as well as Salomon Munk. Unlike some other, he really pounded the pavement. He had passion and knowledge, and from his introductions to his publications it is clear that he had a flair for playing up his familiarity with both Ashkenaz and Sefarad in order to make his books more enticing. He professes an interest in cross-pollination between Jewish cultures and works to bring it about.
It also seems that he did not travel for the job, but that he picked the job for the travel. He seems to have had a good deal of wanderlust. In addition to the places already mentioned, he also writes of visits to Morocco and Gibraltar, thus completing his circuit of the Western Mediterranean. It is hard to know the effects of his attempts to serve as a cultural bridge and a courier of knowledge and enlightenment, but he considered the endeavor worthwhile, and we tend to agree with him.
On a personal note (and a natural affinity for Ashkenazim named Eliezer), one of the hardest parts of the COVID-19 era has been the inability to travel. I have found myself feeding my wanderlust vicariously, through the travels of people like Eliezer Ashkenazi, until things open back up and we can hit the road again.
