Lehman, Marjorie. The En Yaakov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. xi + 319 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8143-3480-5.
It is most often taken for granted that rabbinic Judaism, out of which all present day interpretations of Judaism developed, is based on the writings of the ancient rabbis collectively called the Talmud. The general truth of this assumption obscures the fact that the Talmud in medieval and early modern times was often the subject of attack, not merely on the part of external adversaries of rabbinic Judaism, like Karaites and Christians, but from the inside by rabbinic Jews themselves.
Such a moment of crisis for the Talmud came in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jews were beset in this period by the severe trials of aggressive Christian proselytization, anti-Jewish riots in Spain that resulted in thousands of forced conversions, the expulsion from Spain of 1492, and the difficult process of rebuilding Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere. In this critical period, the Talmud had to withstand significant internal intellectual challenges to its primacy in the Jewish educational curriculum. On the one hand, Jewish rationalistic philosophers sought to remake Judaism through their assertion that the truths Judaism teaches are identical with those taught by ancient Greek philosophers, and that the words of both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud are to be interpreted in this light. On the other hand, kabbalists, while strongly asserting the identity of their teachings with those of the ancient rabbis, also insisted on the primacy of their own theosophical truths, and thus tended to downplay the Talmudic texts compared to those of the kabbala.
That the Talmud survived these multiple challenges to remain a potent force to this day within Orthodox Judaism, and a challenging presence to many other Jews is attributable, in no small part, to the prodigious intellectual efforts of Rabbi Jacob ibn Habib and his book, En Yaaqov. Marjorie Lehman’s well-written book sheds important light on ibn Habib’s accomplishment and its ramifications for Judaism’s future.
Ibn Habib’s En Yaaqov project attempted to meet the multiple challenges the Talmud faced in his day by emphasizing the importance of the non-legal aggadic section of the Talmud, felt by many, friend and foe alike, to be its weakest point. Whereas the Talmud’s legal [halakhic] teachings were consistently taken seriously, since rabbinic Judaism was a religion that emphasized correct observance of religious laws that sought to govern all aspects of life, relatively few gave their full attention to the aggadic narratives of the Talmud. Indeed, many Jews were content to view the aggada as a series of stories that had almost no serious meaning or consequence for them. Ibn Habib’s En Yaaqov centered precisely on the aggada and gave it an importance it had not hitherto enjoyed.
How did he do it? Lehman argues that Ibn Habib in his En Yaaqov squarely faced the challenge to make the Talmud Judaism’s definitive normative text by redefining the Talmud as a document of faith. For him, this meant that answers to the theological and existential questions haunting Jews of his era could be sought in a properly presented and interpreted aggada. This meant that Jews would pay more attention to the aggadic parts of the Talmud and thus engage in the renegotiation of “the boundaries of what counted as formal Talmud study”. (p. 84)
The importance of ibn Habib’s attempt to base Judaic faith on the Talmudic aggada is stated by Lehman in this way:
“He focused on faith at the precise moment when his fellow Jews were questioning their own faith or had turned away from it entirely. Toward this end, he distanced himself from the Maimonidean goal of arriving at an intellectual perception of God through the acquisition of knowledge in the name of locating a more personal and achievable relationship with God; one could strengthen a conscious relationship to God by having faith in one’s heart. He pushed aside mystical theology and its promise of unification with the godhead for a more pragmatic and spiritual message.” (pp. 118-119)
Ibn Habib’s message is fleshed out in Lehman’s detailed analysis of his commentaries on key aggadic texts dealing with the concepts of God, wisdom, the power of prayer, reward and punishment, Messianism, and immortality.
Jacob ibn Habib did not live to complete his magnum opus, which was finished by his son, Levi ibn Habib, who had a somewhat different agenda than his father. Nonetheless, his En Yaaqov remains a significant milestone in early modern Jewish intellectual history. In her last chapter, Lehman speaks briefly of the ways in which En Yaaqov was renamed and reformatted over the centuries to satisfy the needs and desires of printers, censors, and readers. The author, who wished to make her book mainly a study of Jacob ibn Habib, dealt with the posthumous history of the book with less detail than might be desired. She herself understands that there is another book that must be written on this subject. (p. 188)
If, as Lehman states at the outset, “Jewish identity is informed by history”, (p. vii) then this study of how the aggada of the Talmud fared in the early modern period can help us to more fully appreciate the factors that made and continue to make the Talmud relevant to contemporary Jewish life.
Ira Robinson
Academic Fellow, CIJR
Department of Religion, Concordia University
