16 January -- The Book of Memory (Carruthers)

What did I read in my reading-hour today? I picked up Mary Carruthers's The Book of Memory, again. In general, I find it very hard to read books linearly (especially books in English, for some reason), and this book is harder than most. I took a class with Prof. Carruthers in graduate school, and it was fascinating, so I really want to read this book as a whole, but I find it hard, each time. Hard concepts, of course.

I dived into chapter 2 today: “Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory.” The book is about ancient and medieval conceptions, and of course the scholars of those eras would not have used the word neuropsychology, but they do describe the acts of building/storing memory (μνῆσις, memoria) and recollection (ἀνάμνησις, reminiscentia) as somatic processes. This goes back to Aristotle.

This chapter focusses mainly on descriptions from Antiquity (mainly Aristotle, but also a bit of Augustine, from Late Antiquity) and from the High Middle Ages. In the earlier Middle Ages, writers did not write much about the theoretical workings of these processes; but they did write practical information about how to memorize Psalms and prayers, and Carruthers says that much of that material reflects the same theoretical underpinnings as the ones in this chapter.

Basically, there were three fundamental assumptions, going back, at least in part, to Aristotle: (1) There are two distinct types of human knowledge, of “singulars” [particular material things] and of “concepts; (2) the whole sensing process (picking up sensations, storing them, recollecting them) was a somatic process; and (3) “everything created, even knowledge, has an immediate, proximate material cause”. (p. 58)

Aristotle thought that the sensory information was received by the heart, and stored by the brain. By Galen's time (3rd century CE), medicine knew that only the brain, not the heart, played a role in any of these processes, but nonetheless the language of "recordari" and "learning things by heart" has remained through today.

Section heading: Brain physiology and the formation of memories

For Aristotle, memory-impressions are made up of “physiological affections”, but are more than that -- just as a house is made up of bricks, but is more than that. The external images are impressed upon the memory, like the impression of a seal on wax. People with different physical constitutions (wet, dry, hot, cold) will have different capabilities in absorbing and retaining such impressions, just as wax will be be different in different states.

This physical understanding of memory and recollection persisted through the end of the middle ages; many books recommended various diets and activities for better memory retention. (So this is where the קשה לשכחה stuff comes from!)

Aquinas distinguishes between sensory memory and “conceptual memory”, to solve the problem that memoria stores only “phantasms of particular sense objects or composite images derived from particular sense objects”. How, then, can people remember concepts? With the Conceptual Memory, which is a part of the intellect (presumably, not a part of the memoria). And yet even this Conceptual Memory / Intellectual Memory is known through images: if we think of a concept of a triangle, we picture a triangle in our mind, even though we're not thinking of a specific triangle. (Aquinas attributes this point to Augustine, but in fact it's already present in Aristotle.)

Aristotle's "sensory soul" has two major faculties:

• 1. The "common sense" (sensus communis). This is the receptor of impressions from all five senses, and also the source of awareness. (This usage is interesting, because it is completely different from the English meaning of "common sense" that I know, namely, the wits to know how to behave in a given situation.)
• 2. Imagination (imaginatio). Not all animals have imagination, but any animal that knows how to learn (horses, dogs, birds, perhaps bees) has it. "Imagination" is the process whereby phantasmata (mental images) are formed, and move the animal to action. Human imagination is more than that: it means not just being moved by a phantasma, but also forming some sort of voluntary opinion about it: it is a quasi-rational activity.

Avicenna distinguishes between the imaginatio that is solely a retentive faculty, on the one hand, and "deliberative imagination", which involves composing an image and making a judgment about it. This is what Aristotle calls φαντασία λογιστική or βουλευτική, Arabic wahm, Latin estimativa. “Later Latin writers re-defined estimativa as something like ‘instinct’ in animals [...]; they called the human power cogitativa, defined as a conscious, though pre-rational, activity.”

[I'm not really sure what Avicenna is adding here to the distinctions that we already see in Aristotle.]

This is as far as I have gotten today. It's very difficult material.

15 January -- more Ta-Shma on Talmudic commentary (and a bit of Judith in Latin)

Today, I decided to read more of Ta-Shma's book on the history of medieval commentators on the Talmud. I thought I might continue the chapter on Italy (i.e., on R. Isaiah di Trani), but I don't read very linearly -- rarely have the patience to continue on one day what I left off on the previous day. So instead, I read a bit about the Ramban. There were some things that I knew, and other things that I didn't know.

Ta-Shma talks about how in the Ramban's Milḥamoth Hashem, which he wrote to defend the Rif against the criticisms of the Ra'avad, the author keeps insisting that the opinions that he expresses therein are not necessarily his own positions, but merely a possible way of reading the sugyoth and issues in accordance with the Rif's reading. I vaguely knew this, at least passively, but I didn't realize that it was something that the Ramban constantly emphasized. (Or maybe I did know that, and forgot.) The Ramban insists that halakhic argumentation is not like algebra (תשבורת) or astronomy (תכונה), where one can bring mathematical proofs, and demonstrate that one's opponent is objectively wrong; one can only bring arguments to convince and persuade, and the more persuading arguments will win the day -- but not necessarily the next day.

Also interesting was Ta-Shma's point that Ramban's comments in the Milḥamoth are so thorough that if we see a line in Ra'avad on which Ramban does not comment, that is evidence that the line is not really authentic, but a later accretion!

Most interesting, and new to me, was the publication history of the Ramban's talmudic commentaries. The Milḥamoth does not survive in a single manuscript, only in the 16th-century printed edition. Since then, it has been part of standard talmudic study around the world. On the other hand, the Ḥiddushim (or, on some tractates, the Liqqutim, which cover much less material than the Ḥiddushim) were not published in the 16th century; the one exception to this is Bava Bathra (Venice 1523). They were printed mainly in the 18th century, with Shabbath in 1837 and Bava Metzi‘a in 1928.

Was there such a big culture of printed hitherto-unpublished old manuscripts in the 18th century? That's interesting; I associate the main periods of such trends to be the 16th century, when printing was just starting out, and the 19th and 20th centuries. I thought that whatever did not make it through the manuscript-->print bottleneck of the 16th century was typically forgotten through the 19th century, or even through today. Why was there such an interest in printing the Ramban's Ḥiddushim in the 18th century? I don't know.

*       *       *

When I put down the Ta-Shma book, I read chapters 3 and 4 of Judith in the Latin Vulgate translation. This kind of Latin (and, presumably, a lot of the Latin based on it) has so much easier syntax than older, "Classical" Latin. I really think that Latin teachers should assign hundreds of pages of the Vulgate before moving on to high quantities of Classical Latin. I would guess that that's probably what happens in Catholic Schools.

It is interesting that Jerome uses the word “cilicia” to mean, evidently, sackcloth. The Lewis and Short Dictionary says that this word originally referred to a kind of “covering, originally made of Cilician goats' hair, used by soldiers and seamen”. And yet when I looked in Esther, I saw that Jerome translated Hebrew saq as “sacci”. So I figured that “cilicia” was probably based on the term in the Greek Septuagint; after all, the Lewis and Short dictionary mentions the equivalent Greek word Κιλίκιον. But no: the Septuagint text, at least here, has σάκκοι even in Judith. So why does Jerome have “cilicia”? It's a mystery to me.

Ta-Shma on Isaiah di Trani

I've started reading Israel Ta-Shma's chapter on Italian commentators on the Talmud in the 13th century. There really is only one, he says, and that is Isaiah di Trani (roughly 1165-1240). This is because Italian Jewry, even in the area around Rome and to the north, was still closely associated with Greek Jewry through the end of the 13th century; and Greek Jews, through at least the 14th century, did not write commentaries on the Talmud -- and therefore, neither did most Italian Jews. (What did Greek Jews write? Commentaries on Scripture, on midrashim [both halakhic and aggadic], and commentaries on the She’iltoth.)

However, Isaiah di Trani studied in Ashkenaz, and he wrote a commentary on the Talmud, like the Ashkenazim. (Ta-Shma does not say explicitly that R' Isaiah got the idea of writing such a commentary from the Ashkenazim.) This influence of Ashkenazic interpretation, that of the school of the Tosafists, is evident in R' Isaiah's commentary, as well as in his halakhic works (Sefer Ha-pesaqim and Sefer Ha-makhria‘). His work prevented Maimonides’ halakhic opinions from becoming accepted in Italy until the end of the 13th century. (When they finally did get fairly well accepted there, this was a result of the Italian love of Maimonides’ philosophical writings. Thus, this was the opposite of the situation in many other regions, where Maimonides’ philosophical writings were accepted, reluctantly, only because his halakhic works had already become popular.)

R' Isaiah traveled around the Greek-speaking world, where he tried to convince the local rabbis to give up the traditional halakhic rulings of Greek Jewry, and adopt the rulings of the Tosafists, which he had learned in Ashkenaz. He also traveled twice to the Holy Land.

R' Isaiah's commentary on the Talmud survives in only a single manuscript, from the late 13th century, and is barely quoted in medieval works, other than those of R. Isaac Or Zarua‘ and his circle, for they had known R' Isaiah personally when he had studied in Ashkenaz. The commentary lay unknown for centuries, until it was printed in the 1860s. Since then, it has become wildly popular in yeshivoth.

What is prominent about Isaiah’s commentary on the Talmud? It is called תוספות רי"ד, but it is not really a “tosafoth”. It is the work of a single man, like the “ḥiddushim” of the scholars of Christian Spain, not a compilatory work like the French or Ashkenazic “tosafoth”. On the other hand, it does make use of the techniques of the Tosafists -- analyzing the concepts behind the halakhic opinions cited in the Talmud, and resolving contradictions between different talmudic passages.

Perhaps most notable, in Ta-Shma's eyes, is the extent to which R' Isaiah argues with himself, and attacks his own previous views. He wrote his commentary on the entire Talmud four or five times. Unlike revisers in Christian Spain, who might add a word or a paragraph to their previous work, R' Isaiah actually re-studied the Talmudic passages from scratch, and came to entirely new conclusions. He often writes things such as: מה שתירצתי שם הכל הבלים -- “the explanation that I gave their [in the earlier version of this commentary] is utter nonsense.

13 January 2014: Saturn's Jews (Moshe Idel)

I started with picking up The Jeweled Style (Michael Roberts) from where I left it a few days ago, but he kept quoting Late Antique Latin poems with (often intentionally) unusual vocabulary, so I spent all the time looking words up in the dictionary, so I put it down.

Then I picked up Moshe Idel's monograph Saturn's Jews. His argument is basically that at the same time that Maimonides was re-defining Judaism as an Aristotelian system, other Jews, such as Abraham ibn Ezra, were re-defining Judaism in terms of astro-magic -- specifically, that what makes Jews Jewish is their relationship to the planet Saturn. Maimonides and Ibn Ezra are each engaged in an "intercorporal reading" of the corpus of Torah/mitzvoth along with another either Aristotelian philosophy or The Planets.

Anyway, Ibn Ezra says, ultimately based on some earlier, Muslim astrologer Al-Kabi‘si (Alcabitius), that Saturn is associated with / has power over Saturday, Jews, and sorcery.

And the association of these three concepts -- Saturday, Jews, and sorcery / bad magic -- becomes a strong tradition later on in Jewish tradition. And then the Christian idea of the Witches' Sabbath is an anti-Semitic mis-understanding of this.

Ibn Ezra says that the reason that we aren't supposed to do melakha on the Sabbath is that "Saturn and Mars are maleficent planets, and whoever will commence a certain labor, or start a journey during one of the two, will be damaged [...] Behold, you will not find in any of the days of the week a consecutive night and day when these two maleficent planets are presiding, but only during this day [Shabbath, i.e. Friday Night under Mars and Saturday Day under Saturn -- this being the reason why it is not worthwhile to be preoccupied by things relating to this world, but by things related to the fear of God." (p. 11)

This book is hard, and not particularly rewarding. I think I'm not going to finish it.

12 January 2014 -- מעשה חושב: התיק לספר התורה (ברכה יניב)

I read a bit from the first chapter of Bracha Yaniv's book מעשה חושב: התיק לספר תורה. She argues that the form of the tiq in Talmudic times was such that the opening was on the top, not the side, like this:

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS0B7ar3aOo2n35DEaz5iN6_kRuDPqhVx6WVx5SIlKF5Awci5sO

In order to read the scroll, one needed to pop the top of the tiq, and remove the scroll. Therefore, the scroll was also wrapped in fabrics, so that you wouldn't have to touch the leather/parchment when reading.

She argues that this was still the form of the tiq in 11th-century Babylonia, but that today's Middle-Eastern form, where the opening is on the side and the scroll can be read while inside the tiq, was starting to arise in some other places at the time. We do not have any artifacts nor artistic depictions until much, much later, so she derives this from her interpretation of two written texts about crowns for Torah-scrolls. I don't remember exactly what her argument was, but I remember that (a) I wasn't entirely convinced by her understanding of the texts, and (b) I felt that maybe I shouldn't have a say, because I know extremely little about the field of material culture and art.

The stuff about the crowns was interesting -- the phenomenon seems to have started around the 11th century as an ad-hoc thing on Simchath Tora, when people would string together myrtle-branches (hadassim) or women's jewelry or other materials to make an ad-hoc crown for the Torah scroll. (Then the question was: Once you have made them into a crown for the Torah scroll, are you ever allowed to wear them again? This was in the context of a question to one of the Rav Hai Gaon; it seems that Rav Hai's basic answer was yes, though he didn't necessarily recommend the practice in general.) The crown is described as being placed either "on top of the tiq", or "on top of the Torah scroll, while it is still sitting inside the tiq". Yaniv understands this as meaning that the tiq was as I described above: open from the top, and thus one could open the lid, and put the crown on the Torah-scroll, without removing it from the tiq.

Rav Hai Gaon spoke also about communities that used to remove the Torah scrolls from the tiq specifically on Simchath Tora; Yaniv reads this as meaning that the rest of the year, they always kept them inside the tiq, which means that the tiq must have been like today's Middle Eastern ones -- for otherwise, never removing the Torah-scroll from the tiq would mean it would be impossible to read from it. (Rav Hai isn't so much in favor of this custom of removing the Torah-scroll from the tiq on Simchath Tora, but he says: "If they are doing it in order to show mourning for the death of Moses, by keeping the Torah-scroll naked, that is acceptable."

The one other source that she had from the 11th century was a Karaite source, which criticized communities for bowing to the Torah scrolls, and even bowing to the empty container of the Torah scroll, once the scroll has been removed. Yaniv argues that this must refer to the old kind of tiq, which opens from the top; but I was not convinced by this, because the Karaite author might be speaking about the whole Aron-Qodesh apparatus, which becomes empty when one removes the Torah-scroll, no matter what kind of tiq the scroll is in.