The Self-Inflicted Wound
There was, as we have seen in the previous essays, no sin about which the sages are so emphatic in their denunciation as evil speech. They linked the word metzora, a leper, to the phrase motzi shem ra, one who speaks negatively of his fellow. Not only is it deeply wrong in itself; it leads eventually to a complete loss of faith:
This is the progress of the scorners and the wicked. First they indulge in idle talk…. Then they speak ill of the righteous…. This leads them to speak against the prophets and their message…. From this they come to speak against God and deny His existence.1Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Tumat Tzaraat 16:10.
The fact that the metzora had to live outside the camp as a pariah was, say the sages, a punishment measure for measure. By his bad speech he sought to divide society, so he is condemned temporarily to live outside society.2Yalkut Shimoni I:552.
Nonetheless, it is a fault we can trace throughout Jewish history. Joseph brought a bad report about some of his brothers to their father. Moses, say the sages, was guilty when he said about the Israelites, “They will not believe in me.” As was Miriam when she spoke against her brother, and as were the spies when they brought back an evil report about the land. And so on.
During the periods of both Greek and Roman rule, there were Jews who acted as informants against their own people. It was Hellenised Jews in the second century BCE who invited the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV to impose forced Hellenisation on the Jewish population of Israel – a process that led to the rebellion we recall each year on Ḥanukka. Less than a war between Jews and Greeks, the Maccabean revolt was a kulturkampf, a war of cultures, between Jew and Jew.
There were similar defections to Rome two centuries later. Tiberius Julius Alexander, chief of staff of Titus, the Roman general who conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple, was a Jew who had renounced his Jewishness – a nephew of the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo.
So deep was the problem that the sages introduced a special paragraph into the weekly prayers, “For the slanderers let there be no hope.”3There were various versions of this prayer in early rabbinic times, some referring to “heretics” and “sectarians.” Nonetheless, the word “slanderers” suggests those who brought evil reports about Jews to the Roman or other non-Jewish authorities.
Sadly, it continued.
In the Middle Ages, many public denunciations of Jews and Judaism were led by converted Jews. Nicholas Donin, a former student of Rabbi Yechiel ben Yosef of Paris, compiled a list of thirty-five accusations against the Talmud, which led to the Paris Disputation of 1240 and the burning of twenty-four cartloads of Talmuds in 1242.
Another Jew-turned-Christian, Pablo Christiani, was responsible for the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, in which he debated with Nahmanides (Ramban). Failing to defeat him in argument, he turned to other methods and was responsible for Nahmanides’ enforced exile two years later. It was Christiani who persuaded Louis IX of France to make Jews wear a distinctive badge that made them recognisable as Jews in public.
It was a Jewish convert to Christianity, Joseph (later Johannes) Pfefferkorn who in the early sixteenth century wrote a series of anti-Jewish tracts calling for the expulsion of Jews from major German cities, and persuaded Emperor Maximilian to seize Jewish books, especially copies of the Talmud. The great humanist Erasmus called Pfefferkorn “a criminal Jew [before his conversion, he had been found guilty of burglary and theft] who had become a most criminal Christian.”
Internal arguments within the Jewish community also brought disaster. In the early thirteenth century, for example, a bitter dispute broke out between devotees and critics of Maimonides. For the former, he was one of the greatest Jewish minds of all time. For the latter, he was a dangerous thinker whose works contained heresy and whose influence led people to abandon the commandments.
There were ferocious exchanges. Each side issued condemnations and excommunications against the other. There were pamphlets and counter-pamphlets, sermons and counter-sermons, and for awhile, French and Spanish Jewry were convulsed by the controversy. Then, in 1232, Maimonides’ books were burned by the Dominicans. The shock brought a brief respite; then extremists desecrated Maimonides’ tomb in Tiberias. In the early 1240s, following the Disputation of Paris, Christians burned all the copies of the Talmud they could find. It was one of the great tragedies of the Middle Ages.
Did the Dominicans take advantage of Jewish accusations of heresy against Maimonides to level their own charges? Was it simply that they were able to take advantage of the internal split within Jewry, to proceed with their own persecutions without fear of concerted Jewish reprisals? One way or another, throughout the Middle Ages, many of the worst Christian persecutions of Jews were either incited by converted Jews, or exploited internal weaknesses of the Jewish community.
Moving to the modern age, one of the most brilliant exponents of Orthodoxy was Rabbi Meir Loeb ben Yechiel Michal Malbim (1809–1879), chief rabbi of Rumania. An outstanding scholar whose commentary to Tanakh is one of the glories of the nineteenth century, he was at first welcomed by all groups in the Jewish community as a man of learning and religious integrity. Soon, however, the more “enlightened” Jews discovered, to their dismay, that he was a vigorous traditionalist, and they began to incite the civil authorities against him. In posters and pamphlets they portrayed him as a benighted relic of the Middle Ages, a man opposed to progress and the spirit of the age.
One Purim, they sent him a gift of a parcel of food that included pork and crabs, with an accompanying message: “We, the local progressives, are honoured to present these delicacies and tasty dishes from our table as a gift to our luminary.” Eventually, in response to the campaign, the government withdrew its official recognition of the Jewish community, and of Malbim as its chief rabbi, and banned him from delivering sermons in the Great Synagogue. On Friday, March 18, 1864, policemen surrounded his house early in the morning, arrested him, and imprisoned him. After Shabbat, he was placed on a ship and taken to the Bulgarian border, where he was released on condition that he never return to Rumania. This is how the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the campaign:
M. Rosen has published various documents which disclose the false accusations and calumnies Malbim’s Jewish-assimilationist enemies wrote against him to the Rumanian government. They accused him of disloyalty and of impeding social assimilation between Jews and non-Jews by insisting on adherence to the dietary laws, and said, “This rabbi by his conduct and prohibitions wishes to impede our progress.” As a result of this, the prime minister of Rumania issued a proclamation against the “ignorant and insolent” rabbi…. In consequence the minister refused to grant rights to the Jews of Bucharest, on the grounds that the rabbi of the community was “the sworn enemy of progress.”4Gershom Scholem, Encyclopaedia Judaica, 11:822.
Similar stories could be told about several other outstanding scholars – among them, Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer, Rabbi Yitzhak Reines, and even the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik of blessed memory, who was brought to court in Boston in 1941 to face trumped-up charges by the local Jewish community. Even these shameful episodes were only a continuation of the vicious war waged against the Hasidic movement by their opponents, the mitnagdim, which saw many Hasidic leaders (among them the first Rebbe of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi) imprisoned on false testimony given to the local authorities by other Jews.
A not dissimilar phenomenon occurred in Russia during the rise of communism. Its prophet, Karl Marx, was descended from a line of rabbis; his father had him converted to Christianity when he was six years old. Marx was savage in his disdain for Jews. His 1843 essay “On the Jewish Question” drew heavily on the anti-Semitic theories of Bruno Bauer. Jews epitomised the capitalist order he sought to overthrow.5Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 188–208.
Many Jews were drawn to the revolutionary cause, and they too were attracted to its messianic universalism, which led them to oppose not only Judaism, but also Zionism and Jewish socialism (Bundism), which they saw as particularistic and parochial.
For example, Rosa Luxemburg, the Marxist theorist, resolutely refused to identify as a Jew. To followers of Marx, she wrote, “The Jewish question as such does not exist.” When a Jew wrote to her claiming her attention for the atrocities being committed against her people, she wrote back, “Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?” She felt, she said, every people’s pain, none more than others. “I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto.” Eventually she was murdered.6J. L. Talmon, Israel Among the Nations (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 43–45.
The Talmud contains a striking passage about prophets who speak badly about their own people:
The Holy One, Blessed Be He, said to [the prophet] Hosea, “Your children have sinned,” to which he should have replied, “They are Your children, the children of Your favoured ones, children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Extend Your mercy to them.” Not only he did not say this, but he said to Him: “Sovereign of the universe, the whole world is Yours: exchange them for a different nation.” Said the Holy One, Blessed Be He, “What shall I do with this old man? I will order him: Go and marry a promiscuous woman and have children born of promiscuity. Then I will order him: Send her away from thy presence. If he can send her away, then I too send Israel away.”7Pesaḥim 87a.
This is a remarkable text that needs unpacking. The book of Hosea begins with God commanding the prophet to marry an unfaithful woman. He does. She then has children. God orders the prophet to call two of them Lo-ruḥama, “unloved,” and Lo-ami, “not My people.” The Talmud, puzzled by these events, suggests that the prophet himself was being tested for speaking badly about his own people, telling them that God no longer loved them or considered them as His people. God was showing him that it is hard to disown those you once loved even if they have been unfaithful to you.
The prophets were social critics. It was their task to admonish the people. But you cannot be a prophet unless you love, and show that you love, the people whom you are criticising. That is the point the Talmud is making.8The political philosopher Michael Walzer has two fine books on this subject: Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987) and The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
There may be a fine line between the constructive criticism of a friend and the destructive criticism of an enemy, but we can usually tell the difference. The prophets often said harsh things to their contemporaries, but they identified with them and always carried an underlying message of hope.
The divisiveness of Jewry through the ages, and the willingness of Jews to slander their opponents to the non-Jewish authorities, represents a profound moral and spiritual failure, one for which they eventually paid a heavy price. The sages know what they are saying when they speak of evil speech and slander as destructive of community. It is as if they understand God as saying: If you wish Me to love you, then you must love one another. Love does not mean being uncritical, but it does mean being loyal. If you criticise me, but I know that you care for me, I can accept the criticism and grow thereby. But if you criticise me to a third party, then I know you intend harm, and I can no longer distinguish between valid criticism and malicious defamation.
We no longer know the condition known to the Torah as tzaraat, but we can still understand what the sages have to say about Jews who denounce their fellow Jews to others.