Adam Taub
Sacred Frauds: Jewish Literary Forgeries from the Bible
Adam Taub - Sacred Frauds: Jewish Literary Forgeries from the Bible
- [Host] Welcome, everybody. Today we will be hearing from Adam Taub. Adam studied natural sciences and law. He practised in the field of intellectual property before setting up a consultancy that coaches senior executives. He has a master’s in education from University College London. He has been a lecturer at the London School of Jewish Studies for 20 years and is the co-founder of a charity called Etgar that aims to inspire a love of Jewish learning in young Jewish students. And today he will be telling us about sacred frauds, Jewish literary forgeries from the Bible. So Adam, whenever you’re ready, over to you.
- Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So in 1995, a book was published in Germany, this book. It’s called Fragments, Memories of a Wartime Childhood by the author, Binjamin Wilkomirski. Now it’s the story of a wartime childhood experience, which included six years in Majdanek and Auschwitz. The book caused a sensation when it was published. It was translated into 12 languages. It was published in the UK and the US. In 1996, it won the National Jewish Book Award in the US. It won the Jewish Quarterly literary prize in the UK and it won the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in France. Christopher Hope, the literary critic, called it achingly beautiful. The New York Times says it was written with a poet’s vision, a child’s state of grace. Ann Kauffe in the Washington Post described it as one of the great works about the Holocaust. Everyone agreed it was a masterpiece. The problem was that Binjamin Wilkomirski’s memoir was a fabrication from beginning to end, one of the great hoaxes of the publishing industry. Wilkomirski was actually born in a village close to Bienne in 1941. His mother, Yvonne Grosjean, was unmarried and she placed her son, named Bruno, in an orphanage. In 1945, he was adopted and went to live in a relatively prosperous home in Zurich. Wilkomirski had never been in the camps and wasn’t even Jewish. Now, calling this a hoax is really actually not accurate. It suggests that it was a conscious attempt by the author to dupe publishers and the public, like, for example, in the case of The Hitler Diaries.
But nobody accused Wilkomirski of that. Everyone agreed that he was a damaged individual who appears to believe the extraordinary story that he told in Fragments. But, of course, this insincerity doesn’t make it true, but it does raise a number of absolutely fascinating questions about authenticity of authors. Why are we so affronted and outraged by fictional historical narratives, in particular, Holocaust narratives? Well, the first is we don’t like to be friars. We don’t like to be taken for a ride. We don’t want our emotions to be manipulated without our consent. And in relation to Holocaust literature, there’s this visceral fear that we have that it might erode the power of testimony, which is obviously essential to Jewish identity and it gives ammunition to Holocaust deniers. Second question, does the fact that it’s a fraud affect the quality of the book as literature or as art? And this is a very difficult issue. And in fact, the film director, Orson Welles, made a whole film about this called F for Fake. And what’s so interesting in the case of Fragments is that once it was revealed to be a fake, a number of the literary critics went back over their reviews and started re-reviewing it saying, “On second thoughts, this is not such a great work.” And the final question which we ask ourselves is why did he do it? Well, in the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, he really believed it. But in the case of other frauds, what are people doing it for? Is it attention? Is it money? Is it the delight in getting away with it? Is it a sort of a Walter Mitty feeling that I actually did it? Or is it all of these things and a mix of them?
So I want to look at that issue in relation to frauds that have been perpetrated in Jewish tradition. Fragments really is an extreme example of false attribution, because it affects us in such a visceral way. But we are familiar with the idea of false attribution and even comfortable with the idea in some circumstances. So for example, we have no problem with pseudonyms that disguise who the author is. So for example, George Elliot disguises her sex by calling herself George Elliot. And so, too, J.K. Rowling who disguises herself through initials and then later when she becomes famous, chooses the name Robert Galbraith, again to disguise herself and we have no problem with that. More than that, false attribution is also a classic literary device. Indeed, it’s very common in the early form of the novel as a way of explaining to the reader how the author came to have this story. So probably the most famous example is Frankenstein. And Frankenstein, we know the story, but actually, the way it opens is with correspondence between a sailor and his cousin and the sailor says, “I have on board this fellow, Victor Frankenstein, and he’s very interesting,” and tells the story as if he’s been recounting it. Many author play with this confusion of artifice and reality. And one of my favourites is the short story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who also creates worlds within world and has all these artificial references and footnotes, which makes the whole thing look like an academic exercise and you’re never sure, is this real or is this just simply a fake? So really, false attribution has two dimensions to it and the first is false attribution is passing your work off as somebody else’s and that’s very common in art where a forger will create a piece of art, a painting or a sculpture in the style of somebody else and try to sell it.
And then the other one is plagiarism, which is passing someone else’s work off as your own and that’s very common in literature. But what I’m really interested in in this talk is actually, false attribution in relation to literature where people take their own work and pass it off as somebody else’s. And there’s an important point to bear in mind, which is interesting and it will become important later on. There is a difference between a literary fraud and an artistic fraud. With an artistic fraud, the value lies in the created object. I’ve done a painting, people think it’s a Matisse. The value lies in the painting. All I have to do is prove some form of artificial provenance. But with literary fraud, the value lies in the words that I’ve written. And so in order to assert ownership over that work, I need to explain how that work came into my possession and why I have the right to publish it as opposed to anybody else. There needs to be a meta story, a story around the story, about how I came across it and that will become important a little bit later. So let’s go and look at some examples of this false attribution and let’s go right back to Tanakh. And there are many unattributed books in Tanakh that we have a tradition as to their authorship. So we have the five books of Moses, which is, by attribution, written by Moses, although, of course, he only appears to write Devarim, Deuteronomy.
And even then, there’s a question as to what actually he wrote within that. Then there’s the Book of Ruth, which is supposed to be written by Samuel. The Book of Proverbs written by Solomon and Song of Songs, also by Solomon and Esther, which is written by Mordecai. And perhaps the most intriguing is the book of Psalms, which is always attributed to David. But of course, Psalms contain psalms which obviously come much, much later. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.” This is 300, 400 years after David lived. And yet somehow, there is this comfort with attributing the Book of Psalms to King David. And there’s also a range of jurisdiction that didn’t make it into the Bible, but which is also worth mentioning, the apocrypha. So the apocrypha has books like Tobit and Judith and the Wisdom of Solomon and the Letter of Jeremiah. And then alongside that are ones that didn’t even make it into the apocrypha, but they’re called the pseudepigrapha and that literally means falsely attributed, things that are attributed to other scholars. Normally, individuals write from the Bible, so we have things like the Apocalypse of Abraham and we have the books of Adam and Eve and we have the Book of Enoch and we have the Testament of Moses. All of these were in the pseudepigrapha, books that have been attributed to other people in order to give the contents a greater sense of authority. And the final collection of books that I mention in this area are the gospels themselves, because the gospels actually don’t mention who wrote them and yet they are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Now these aren’t famous people, but the reason for the attribution is different. What they want to do is give the works credibility to make it appear that the authors of these works didn’t come much after Christ, years later, decades later potentially, but rather were contemporaneous and these are direct witness accounts. And indeed, the word gospel means witness. But it’s come to mean or it’s by association, truth, as in the phrase, gospel truth. So that’s the Bible. Let’s come forward a little bit and talk about another book in Jewish tradition. Probably the most important and the most famous of all false attribution in Jewish tradition and it’s the one that I’m sure has had the greatest impact. And that book is the Zohar. The Zohar is the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought. It’s the basis of all Kabbalistic thinking and it’s a commentary on mystical aspects of the Torah and it contains discussions about the nature of God and the origin and structure of the universe and the nature of souls and angels and redemption and so on. And it first appears in Spain in an area called the Kingdom of Leon in the 13th century and it’s published by a Jewish writer named Moses de Leon. And de Leon ascribes the work to Shimon bar Yochai and he’s a very interesting character. He’s a Tanna in a period of the destruction of Jerusalem and a terrible, terrible period. And according to legend, Shimon bar Yochai and his son go off and hide in a cave away from the Romans for 13 years and they studied the Torah. And eventually, Shimon bar Yochai is inspired by the Prophet Elijah to write down the Zohar. And this has been taught to all of the great Jewish minds, Abraham, Moses and so on, but it’s actually Shimon bar Yochai who writes it down.
And then Moses de Leon is the one who then publishes it in the 13th century. But modern academic scholarship, starting really with Gershom Scholem, concludes that the author of the Zohar is, of course, Moses de Leon himself. And the article in the Zohar in the Jewish Encyclopaedia of 1906, quotes this story and it says, “After the death of Moses de Leon, a rich man called Joseph of Avila offered his widow, who’d been left without any means of supporting herself, a large sum of money for the original manuscript from which her husband had made the copy and she confessed to him that her husband himself was the author of the work. She’d asked him several times, she said, why had he chosen to credit his own teachings to another? And he replied that if the doctrines were put into the mouth of Shimon bar Yochai, they would be a rich source of profit.” Now this testimony, which appeared in the first edition of a book by Abraham Zacuto in 1566, was censored in later editions and it remained absent from all editions until 300 years later in the 1857 edition when it was finally reintroduced and the story was retold. So that’s a story of a book that’s trying to build on Jewish tradition. And in fact, most sacred forgeries support the basic tenets of Orthodox tradition and they simply aim to add to that tradition. But what happens when a forgery aims at changing or undermining Halachic rulings? That is a much more potentially damaging forgery and there is an astonishing example of this.
The most notorious rabbinic forgery was written in the late 18th century and it was called the Besamim Rosh and it was published in 1793 by a man called Rabbi Saul Berlin. Rabbi Saul Berlin was the son of the chief rabbi of Berlin, Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Levin. and Rabbi Saul Berlin had a reputation as a scholar, a brilliant individual and he’d been chief rabbi of the Frankfort-on-the-Oder. But he was influenced by enlightenment ideas. And we can see this in his literary career. His first literary work that we have is an anonymous letter that he writes called the Katuv Yosher and in it, he mocks what he calls the absurd learning methods of Jewish schools and he says that rabbinic casuistry, which is the main part of the curriculum, injures the common sense of pupils and deadens their noble aspirations. He’s somebody who’s deeply influenced by enlightenment thinking. In 1792, he then writes a work called the Mitzpeh Yokt'el, the Watch Tower of Yekutiel, and he writes it under a pseudonym, Ovadiah ben Baruch. And the book is a polemic against Raphael Cohen, one of the most zealous advocates of rabbinic piety, who was also a rival candidate for the Berlin Rabbinate and in the book, Berlin ridicules Talmudic science as ignorant and dishonest in comparison to secular science and finally in 1793, he publishes the Besamim Rosh and here it is, this is the frontispiece of the Besamim Rosh, which he claims is produced by Isaac de Molina. Isaac de Molina gathered this and it is a collection of responsa answers to Halachic questions and the bulk of them are written by Asher ben Jehiel, who is the Rosh and he is an extremely important and significant and authoritative Rishon.
And Isaac de Molina lived in the 1400s, maybe the 1500s in Egypt. And according to Rabbi Saul Berlin’s introduction, Rabbi de Molina found these response in a volume in Alexandria and copied them and he then claims to have found a copy of Rabbi de Molina’s copy in Italy and he publishes it. Now the response are very detailed, very well-researched and written in a style that is appropriate for this particular age, but they contain some extremely radical ideas. For example, they permit people to sit shiva for someone who committed suicide. They allow people to ride in a carriage on Yom Tov. They question whether you can drink ordinary wine made by a non-Jew. And finally, they deal with studying secular subjects, which they suggest is an obligation. When the book was published, instantly, it was controversial and it was attacked in a book that was published the same year, 1793 and a number of scholars attacked it, the most important of whom was Rabbi Moshe Sofer, the Hatam Sofer who called it the Ketzvi haRosh, the lies of the Rosh. Saul Berlin defended his work. His father, Rabbi Zevi Hirsch also defended him and he claimed to have seen the manuscript. But in the end, Saul Berlin had to resign his rabbinate and he went to London and he died a few months later and in a letter found in his pocket, he warned everybody not to look into his papers and requested that they’d be sent to his father. What’s remarkable, though, about the story is that although Saul Berlin was put into herem, the book itself, the Besamim Rosh lived on.
It was republished 88 years later in 1881 in Krakow. and there is no mention of the controversy. It’s published simply as a straight book of responsa. The introduction by Saul Berlin has been removed and also two of the most controversial teshuvot, but other than that, it’s published exactly as it is and what’s remarkable is when you see it, the pages have literally just been removed, whited out, because they haven’t bothered to reset the type. What I find fascinating about the story is that the rabbis knew it was a forgery. They knew it, but they weren’t able to eliminate it from the canon, because it’s written in this rabbinic style and because it contained so many interesting insights and source material, the book somehow entered the canon and over time, the details of the dispute were forgotten and all that was left was this collection of rabbinic to teshuvots. And the introduction to a new version of the book was given by Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef and he argues in his introduction that, “I know this is fraudulent, but actually, there are good things in this book and I am going to use them.” And he quotes them in a number of his own responsa. And it’s a fascinating problem with these sacred forgeries, because once they are accepted, they’re actually quite difficult to shake off. So now we come to my favourite sacred forger and he is somebody who is remembered for what he created, or at least, for one of the things that he created and he is a remarkable individual. And I have, since this is a talk about plagiarism, I have to mention that this book here, Pini Dunner, wrote a book called Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs and the story is told extremely well in this particular book. So one of the most prominent rabbis in the 16th century Europe was the Maharal of Prague, known as Rabbi Yehudah Loew and he’s the chief rabbi of Prague and he’s probably most famous for creating the Golem of Prague.
And his works on Torah were famous and widely disseminated in his lifetime and after his death, his students continued to propagate his ideas and they really became fundamental theology underpinning Jewish life in Europe and even today, the Maharal is one of the major scholars who is still continued and still continues to influence Jewish thought. So just imagine the excitement that greeted the publication of his Haggadah shel Pesah in Warsaw at the beginning of the 20th century. The text was apparently based on a long-lost manuscript that had lain undiscovered in an obscure French library that the publisher claimed had been put together by the Maharal’s son-in-law, Rabbi Yitzchak Katz. He’d recorded all of the traditions that the Maharal had followed at Seder and also his teachings and put them together in the manuscript. Now the most remarkable new piece of information contained in Haggadah was that the Maharal had included a fifth cup at the Seder. This was a cup of wine that only he drank and over which he recited a unique proclamation. So Maharal devotees around Europe, around the world started to introduce this practise into their own Pesach Seders. The fact that this fifth cup had been given authority by the Maharal was what allowed it to be introduced. The only problem is that the document was a fraud, perpetrated by Rabbi Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg and he’s a character I want to tell you just a fraction about. Rabbi Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg was a fascinating individual, a rabbinic scholar, an Illui, sort of a child genius who claimed to be descended from the Maharal He was born in a town in Poland in 1859, and he married at 17.
He was appointed rabbi of a town called Tarlow at only 25. And much later he would call himself the Tarla Rebbe, even though there was no Tarlow Hasidic dynasty and they certainly never ran a Hasidic court when he was rabbi there. So already it gives you a hint that this individual is not necessarily within the bounds of accuracy. From Tarlow, Rabbi Rosenberg moved to Lublin where he served as a dayyan on the Beit Din and although he was an exceptional scholar, he began to attract criticism because of his fondness for Russian literature and eventually, he moved to Warsaw where he opened a tiny synagogue and acted as a community dayyan. This didn’t really provide him with sufficient funds to look after his family, so in 1902, he published a book, it’s a commentary on tractate Nedarim of the Talmud. It’s very complex volume that has no Rushi commentary. Either it was lost or it was never written. So the book, Yadot Nedarim, as Rabbi Rosenberg entitled it, was a very erudite work and is still used today by Talmud scholars who are looking at the volume of Nedarim. So it gives you an idea of the level of his scholarship. Now perhaps the sales of the book were slow or perhaps he needed more money or perhaps Rabbi Rosenberg was just looking for something else, but for whatever the reason, in 1905, Rabbi Rosenberg published the Maharal Haggadah in Warsaw. And on the title page, he asserted that this was the first time this Haggadah commentary had ever been published.
And he claimed it was based on this manuscript, which had originally be held in the Royal Library in Metz, a small town on the border of France and Germany and home to a well-established, century-old Jewish community. In his foreword to the Haggadah, Rabbi Rosenberg wrote how it had been extremely difficult for him to bring the manuscript to print, particularly because its current owner had refused to part with it under any circumstances and this comes to the point that I made early in the talk that you need to prove why only you have access to this document. So below Rabbi Rosenberg’s foreword was a letter addressed to him written by a man called Chaim Scharfstein. Scharfstein wrote that he was sending Rabbi Rosenberg an accurate handwritten copy of the original manuscript held in the Royal Library and he assured Rabbi Rosenberg that no one else would get a copy except for him, as had been agreed between them. Now in the years that followed, Chaim Scharfstein would go on to play a significant role in Rabbi Rosenberg’s literary output. In 1909, Rabbi Rosenberg published another book called Nifle'ot Maharal, The Wonders of the Maharal, based on another manuscript from the Royal Library in Metz and again, purportedly authored by the Maharal’s son-in-law. This time, the contents of the manuscript described the Maharal’s creation of a golem, a mythical and powerful creature animated by Kabbalistic formulas who was used by the Maharal to protect the Jewish community of Prague against the evil conspiracies of the local anti-semites. The Maharal golem myth was not original.
It had its origins back in popular culture in 1832 when a German Jewish poet and author called Berthold Auerbach wrote a fictional account of what must have been an ancient oral legend that describes a series of stories involving the golem of Prague. But what was clear from Auerbach’s version is that it was written in a folklore style. It was never meant to be taken seriously. It was like the golden treasury of Jewish tales. Nifle'ot Maharal is a completely different work. The title page described how the stories it contained were originally written down by Rabbi Katz, the very same Rabbi Katz who’d recorded the Maharal’s commentary on the Haggadah. And just as the Haggadah manuscript that lain undiscovered for centuries in the Royal Library of Metz, so, too, had the golem manuscript. And the title page also claimed that the Metz library had been destroyed during a war approximately a century earlier. Perhaps this was a reference to the Napoleonic wars and during which many Jewish manuscripts had gone missing and then turned up in other private collections. The 1909 manuscript was extremely well-received and it was followed in 1913 by my favourite of the manuscripts that he wrote and this was a publication called The High Priest’s Choshen Mishpat and the book was based on yet another manuscript, it claimed, from the Metz library.
This one written by Rabbi Manoach Hendel, a well-known student of the Maharal who died in 1612. Rabbi Hendel had apparently devoted many years attempting to catalogue the whereabouts of sacred utensils that had survived the Roman destruction of the temple in 70 CE. This manuscript documented that quest in great detail and one of the most extraordinary parts of the manuscript was an incredible story that Rabbi Hendel claimed to have heard from the Maharal himself about his involvement in the recovery of the 12 precious stones, which have been part of Choshen Mishpat. This was a breast plate with 12 jewels on that was worn by the high priest. Evidently, the 12 precious jewels, the Choshen Mishpat had somehow been stolen and had made their way to England where they were being kept in the Belmore Street Museum in London. In the year 1590, the Maharal discovered that the precious gems had been stolen and he went to London to locate them so that they could be returned to the museum for safekeeping. Once he was in London, the Maharal pretended to be an antiques collector and in that guise, met someone called Captain Wilson, who turned out to be the thief who had stolen the gems. The Maharal offered to buy them from Wilson and they agreed on a price. They also agreed that the transaction would take place two weeks later, giving the Maharal enough time to raise the money. During that two weeks, the Maharal generated mayhem through mystical means for Captain Wilson. And by the time the two weeks were up, Wilson agreed to give the Maharal the precious jewels for nothing and the Maharal was able to return them to the museum.
Now the problem with this story, even though it was a cracking story, was that it had nothing to do with the Maharal nor with Rabbi Manoach Hendel nor indeed, with Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg. This remarkable tale was a piece of contemporary fiction written and published in 1899 by the author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a short story entitled The Jew’s Breastplate and here is a cover of the book as it was reprinted. The Jew’s Breastplate by Arthur Conan Doyle. Now, Rabbi Rosenberg must have been familiar with the story in a Russian translation and he must have been pretty certain that nobody who read his Hebrew translation or his later Yiddish translation would be remotely familiar with this English language literary vignette. He was so convinced, clearly, that he didn’t even bother to change the name of the characters. Captain Wilson is the same Captain Wilson in The Jew’s Breastplate as it is in the story of the Maharal of Prague. And as it turns out, the entire backdrop to all these three works, the Haggadah, the story of the golem and the Choshen Mishpat, the breastplate are all fictional, because there was never a royal library in Metz, nor was there a Rabbi Yitzchak Katz and nor has Rabbi Manoach Hendel left us with any manuscript relating to the Maharal in the form claimed by Rabbi Rosenberg. In fact, even Chaim Scharfstein is a fictional creation produced by Rabbi Rosenberg to generate the impression that his Maharal material was authentic.
Whether the Maharal ever created a golem, obviously, is a question for scholars to debate. But I love the idea, though, that the story that Rabbi Rosenberg creates about the Maharal draws on Kabbalistic ideas and magic, which itself was forged by Moses de Leon. In 1913, shortly after publishing his Choshen Mishpat forgery, Rabbi Rosenberg moved from Poland to Toronto, Canada and in 1919, he moved again to Montreal where he became one of the most prominent rabbis in the city and for the remainder of his life and he died in 1935. Rabbi Rosenberg regularly published books and pamphlets on Jewish subjects, but he never again published any Maharal-related material. So it’s unclear whether Rabbi Rosenberg thought his fictional Maharal stories would be taken seriously or whether he actually cared. It’s certainly the case that the Haggadah was taken seriously and the fifth cup was drunk around the world. And Rabbi Rosenberg must have been aware of that during his lifetime. But at no point did he attempt to put this right. At no point did he publish a response afterwards, disavowing its authenticity or admitting that he had made the whole thing up. Rabbi Rosenberg had mixed genuine material with his own imagining material to produce the Maharal Haggadah, which means that the Maharal never drank a fifth cup of wine and that Rabbi Rosenberg’s claims were all concocted in order to generate wider interest in his new publication and no doubt, in order to boost sales. And it is possible that the reason he stopped publishing these strange books is because, maybe, in Montreal he had finally found the recognition, the fact that he was recognised as one of the great rabbis of the community, that meant he no longer needed to find an alternative outlet in order to get recognition.
So I want to come onto the last couple of questions and then tell you one final story. The question is why do people commit these literary frauds? And I think there are four reasons why people commit these literary frauds. The first is obvious, financial gain. If you’re able to publish a work by a famous author from the past who is already recognised, you will get an enormous number of sales in comparison to what you might get as an individual. That’s the first reason. The second reason is what I call The Wizard of Oz effect. If you remember the final scene in The Wizard of Oz, you have the wizard behind the curtain and in front of you, you have all this extraordinary goings on, the lightning and the flashing and so on and they’re looking at this little fellow and the Wizard of Oz is saying, “Stop looking behind the curtain, just look at me, just focus on me.” And I think there was an element that there are people who feel they have something important to say, but that they are overlooked. And that by adopting the cloak of somebody of greater authority, they get their point of view across. It is accepted more easily. The third reason, I think, is what is called scholastic vanity and you get this a lot with painting and forgeries.
They feel that they are talented individuals who are not recognised for their own artistic brilliance. And so what they do is they take on the art world, the critics and they say, “Let’s see if you really can tell what’s what.” And they put a forgery out there in order to test the community, because then they know that they’ve pulled one over of all of the other scholars. And I think that’s also true of some of the Jewish scholars that we see. And I think in the case of Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, I think that might have applied as well. And then there’s one final reason that I think relates, in particular, to Jewish forgery and it’s the issue of creativity. Where is the creative output for some of these remarkable Jewish scholars? Yes, they can do Halachic works, commentaries and so on, but what do you do if you are a truly creative individual? And I can only think of a handful of Jewish scholars who have had that opportunity, the most famous of whom is, of course, Nachman of Breslov who wrote his extraordinary tales. But it is very difficult to find a creative outlet, especially, if you are in the Lithuanian Orthodox tradition rather than the Hasidic tradition. And so these forgeries may well be an extraordinary creative output or outlet for some of the rabbis. So finally, let me bring you to one last forgery, which has a personal connection for me. This is a book called the The Malbim Haggadah. This is not the Maharal Haggadah, this is the the Malbim Haggadah. The Malbim was also an important commentator, not as famous as the Maharal, but an important commentator and still very much followed today. And the Malbim Haggadah was published in Warsaw in 1883 and it was translated and published in English in 1993.
And there is an essay in the book, which asks the question who wrote the Malbim Haggadah? And it examines the evidence. In particular, the original title page of the Haggadah in 1883 and it reveals that it is unlikely that the Malbim wrote the commentary, which makes up the bulk of this book. His contribution was limited to the essay that he wrote, which appears at the front of this book. But the commentary was probably written by a student of his called R. Naftali Maskil Le-Eitan and the essay concludes as follows, it says, “In view of the likelihood that R. Naftali Maskil Le-Eitan authored this commentary, it is difficult to understand how this commentary has come to be known, in the relatively short span of a hundred years, as the Malbim Haggadah by laypersons and Torah sages alike.” So the question is why was the volume, in which this essay is written, called the Malbim Haggadah? And I can tell you the answer. The Malbim Haggadah was translated by my brother Jonathan and his colleague, Yisroel Shaw and when they approached the publisher, which is Targum Press, and they explained the moral difficulty they had in calling this the Malbim Haggadah when actually, the commentary had not been written by the Malbim, they were told, in no uncertain terms, by their publisher that this is the Malbim Haggadah. We are publishing it as such, because otherwise, it will not sell. Thank you very much indeed.
[Host] Hi. So we have a couple of questions.
Please.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Host] Our first is, if you could, don’t mind un-blurring your background for a minute so that you can hold up the books. I think when you hold anything up, it’s blurred.
I’m so sorry.
[Host] So people couldn’t see those.
Ah, forgive me. Okay, I will just do that. Hold on.
Great. And if you can just hold them up for a couple of seconds, so people can write it down.
100% percent, with pleasure. Is that clear now? Can you see me?
That’s perfect.
A - So I will just go through very quickly the things that I showed. So there is Binjamin Wilkomirski’s book, Fragments. That was the first thing that I showed. Then I showed the Besamim Rosh, which is the frontispiece, which is here and this is the fake responsa. And then I showed Pini Dunner’s book, which is Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs and then I showed the frontispiece or the front cover of Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, which is The Jew’s Breastplate, short story by Arthur Conan Doyle. And finally I showed the Malbim Haggadah, which is the book that was translated by my brother and his colleague.
Q - [Host] Thank you. I think some people are still having a little difficulty with some of those. So I’m just getting a question to repeat the name and author of the book about the Maharal forgery.
A - Ah, yes. I’m going to hold it up again, so this is it. This is Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs and it’s by Pini Dunner. And it covers Shabbetai Tzvi and Jacob Frank and a few others and it’s a really fun read.
- [Host] Great. And I think all of our other comments are just honestly thank yous and people just thanking you for such a well-researched and fascinating lecture. I mean, there’s 20 plus comments just of that. So thank you so much and if anyone has any other questions and wants to pop them in the chat, that will be great. And if not, then I won’t take up any more of…
Q - Oh, Dana’s asking if you could please repeat the name of the author of Fragments again?
A - Yes, it is Binjamin, B-I-N-J-A-M-I-N, Binjamin and it is Wilkomirski, W-I-L-K-O-M-I-R-S-K-I.
Q - [Host] Great. And Jerry wants to know if the lecture will be available to watch again. I will just say, email us at info@lockdownuniversity.org and we can send you a copy to rewatch. Adam, thank you so much, that was absolutely fascinating. I really appreciated that.
It was a pleasure. Really a pleasure. In fact, there’s a lot more to say on it, but that is more than enough, I think, for one evening. So thank you so much for inviting me.
[Host] Great, all right and have a great rest of your evening, everyone. Bye-bye.
Bye.