The House of Twenty Thousand Books

by Sasha Abramsky

  Jacobs had hoped to be appointed principal of Jews College, the country’s leading Orthodox seminary for rabbinic students and a stepping-stone to the position of Chief Rabbi. Instead, he found himself fighting for his professional survival. In 1961 the Chief Rabbi, Israel Brodie, issued a proclamation preventing Jacobs from taking up the headship of Jews College, and for the next three years, Jacobs and Brodie feuded, more or less in public. In 1964, Jacobs tried to return to a job he had held previously, as rabbi of the New West End Synagogue. Once again, Brodie intervened, refusing Jacobs a licence to take up a rabbinic position in a United Synagogue. Shortly thereafter, Chimen’s father stepped into the fray in support of the Chief Rabbi.

  Yehezkel Abramsky had long retired from the Beth Din and was living in Israel, giving weekly Talmudic discourses to enormous crowds of followers; but from a distance he helped orchestrate the opposition to Jacobs. Where Jacobs, like Spinoza, espoused a more critical vision of religious observance and the role of ritual, Yehezkel clung to the Orthodox understanding of Torah as the literal word of God, to be obeyed in all its details. Schooled in the Musar yeshivas, he had never tailored his pronouncements to meet the shifting mores of the moment, and only very rarely had he doubted himself after taking a position. One such case had occurred back in Byelorussia, when a sick man had asked him whether he could drink a glass of water on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Abramsky had told him he could not, and the man had subsequently died. Whether the lack of drinking water had anything to do with his death was beside the point; Yehezkel felt guilty about it. His biographer reported that, while he was in Moscow’s Butirki Prison waiting for the death sentence the courts had handed down against him to be carried out, he conducted a reckoning of his life and concluded that this was one of the actions for which God was punishing him. Of course, in the end the death sentence had not been implemented, and Yehezkel had had ample opportunity since to make amends for the Yom Kippur ruling. He was a stern dayan, but was widely regarded as a kind and humane man. When it came to Jacobs, however, he saw no reason to compromise his beliefs. The man was an upstart, a modernist railing against millennia of carefully worked-out ideas and traditions. The historian Miri Freud-Kandel believes that he considered Jacobs ‘an agitator’. It was, for Yehezkel, simply unthinkable that Jacobs could rise up the rabbinic ladder to the point where he would become a viable contender to be Britain’s Chief Rabbi. Louis Jacobs was denounced as a heretic by Yehezkel and others who shared his views. Not only was he excluded from the job at Jews’ College but, because of the opposition of the Chief Rabbi and of leading religious figures such as my great-grandfather, he was essentially barred from ever again serving as a rabbi of a United Synagogue.

  The story caused a sensation in the British media, and has been described as the greatest schism in Anglo-Jewry’s long history. ‘The Jacobs Affair is the theological scandal of Anglo-Jewry’, Freud-Kandel explains. ‘Nothing compared’. Outraged at his treatment, with defectors from the New West End Synagogue Jacobs set up the New London Synagogue, where he founded a Conservative Jewish movement known as Masorti, outside the control of the Chief Rabbi and the United Synagogue, promoting a modern Orthodoxy and eschewing the ultra-Orthodox beliefs that men such as Yehezkel Abramsky had brought with them from Eastern Europe in earlier decades. He became something of a guru to religious Jews of an assimilationist bent in London, something even, given the moment, of a counter-cultural hero to them.

  What did Chimen, in full retreat from Communism, and starting out on a near half-century project to study and interpret the modern Jewish world, think about this? Without a doubt, in private he sided with Jacobs – although he did so without picking a public fight with his aged father. Nor did he take a public stand on whether Jacobs was qualified to be Chief Rabbi – throughout his life, Chimen, a non-believer, was averse to stepping into controversies within England’s Jewish religious community. But, quietly, he did reach out to Jacobs and, over the years, the two men eventually became friends. They would meet periodically and discuss trends in modern Anglo-Jewry.

  In December 2005, the Jewish Chronicle conducted a poll of its readers: who was the greatest British Jew since 1656, when Jews had been re-admitted to England after centuries of exile? The winner, hands-down, was Louis Jacobs. No Orthodox contender came close. Seven months later Jacobs died, his reputation now secured. I doubt if Chimen voted in that poll; but he would have been, at the very least, intrigued by the result. It gelled nicely with the ideas he had developed in a raucous public debate with Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, in 1977, in which he had urged Britain’s rabbis to not shy away from the secular and to reach out to young Jews with a fresher message. One could be a good Jew, Chimen argued, without necessarily subscribing to Orthodoxy.

  Indeed, despite his growing obsession with all things Jewish, Chimen never re-embraced Orthodoxy. To the contrary, what most interested him about the great Jewish religious commentaries was how they related to the march to modernity: how Rashi’s interpretations of Biblical texts had segued into Maimonides’s ethics, and how Maimonides ultimately led to Spinoza, the greatest of all Jewish philosophers.

  Nearly half a millennia after Maimonides published his The Guide of the Perplexed, Baruch Spinoza was shunned by the rabbinate for his heretical views: his belief in a God that was, in essence, ‘nature’; his conclusion that the universe was bound by inviolable rules of nature; and his argument that those rules, rather than miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea for Moses, truly represented the infinite power of God. Maimonides had depersonalised God yet retained the possibility of miracles; now Spinoza was, to all intents and purposes, turning God into another name for ‘the universe’. Spinoza’s God was everything; therefore, in some ways, the religious leaders who rounded on him realised that He was nothing. He existed so far removed from human concerns, so remote from human lives that the rituals of religion, the codes of conduct embodied in the Talmud, ceased to have any purpose. Infuriated by arguments for a God who seemed to have no need for coteries of rabbis and scholars to interpret His will, the rabbis excommunicated Spinoza from Amsterdam’s Jewish community; his very name became anathema. Ultimately, however, Spinoza’s ideas largely triumphed over those of his critics. Of course, many continued to believe in an activist, personal God; but, in the centuries following Spinoza’s death, an array of Jewish thinkers turned away from ultra-Orthodoxy and sought answers to ethical and scientific questions using Spinoza’s framework for understanding the universe.

  In Chimen’s library, one could see how Spinoza, a man ahead of his time, had influenced the emergence of modernity. He was a philosopher of religion who helped pave the way for the triumph of the scientific mindset: he set the intellectual stage for Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity more than two hundred years later, as Einstein himself acknowledged. His God and Einstein’s – the god who did not play dice, the god who presided over the space-time continuum – would have understood each other all too well.

  In that overheated upstairs room, the ceiling of which would periodically suffer water damage after a particularly heavy rainstorm, Chimen would occasionally take out his first editions of Spinoza to consult: a Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, printed in Amsterdam in 1670 and an Opera Posthuma from seven years later which was published by Spinoza’s friends shortly after his death. Also in that room, Chimen would lovingly examine his first edition of Descartes’ Meditations, which he had acquired from his friend Piero Sraffa in exchange for a letter by Lenin and a rare book by Friedrich Engels. Unusually for a book in that room, it was not written by a Jewish author, but apparently it had earned its place in this room by virtue of Descartes’ intellectual affinity with Spinoza, a generation his junior. You cannot understand the Enlightenment without understanding how Descartes and Spinoza broke down medieval certainties. Nor can you understand the Haskalah and the emergence of modern Jewish culture and politics without understanding the Enlightenment. By extension, therefore, Descartes was as much a part of the modern Jew
ish story, or of Chimen’s particular version of it, as was Spinoza.

  ***

  As Chimen’s curiosity grew, so he sought to venture down practically every byway of Jewish thought and history. He owned mystical Kabbalistic texts, and gorgeous Haggadot, some printed, some resurrecting the arts of medieval manuscript calligraphy, from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as a trove of rare documents relating to Sabbatai Zevi, a seventeenth-century mystic who had allowed his followers to believe that he was the Messiah, only to grievously disappoint them by converting to Islam at the point of an Ottoman sword. Zevi was one of only a handful of Jews forcibly converted by the Sultans during this period, and his conversion was viewed by much of the rabbinic elite with something approaching relief, since they had long maintained that he was a dangerous false Messiah. Perhaps because of Zevi’s conversion trauma, many historians argue that he came to hold a profound appeal for Marrano families in the Levant, those Spanish and Portuguese families forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, who had, in secret, retained some aspects of their Jewish heritage. Zevi’s humiliation was, they felt, theirs too. Spinoza’s family, exiles who had moved to Amsterdam generations before the philosopher’s birth, had been a part of this community.

  The Kabbalah – the mystical premises of which intrigued, though never convinced, Chimen – expounded a doctrine of contraction: an all-encompassing, infinite God had, according to this theory, created the world by contracting Himself to generate an empty space. It seems to me that Chimen was trying to fill as much of that void as possible with words.

  He had a Bomberg Hebrew Bible printed in Venice in 1521 – the same year and place that the Tosefta (which Yehezkel Abramsky spent a lifetime studying), was first printed, and a mere five years after the city’s Jews had been unceremoniously confined in Europe’s first Ghetto. That Bible was among Chimen’s most prized possessions.

  Bomberg was one of the great innovators of the printing press, and created stunningly beautiful editions of the Bible, the Talmud and other texts. In 1992, writing about a Babylonian Talmud printed by Bomberg that he had been asked to evaluate, Chimen’s joy at handling the volumes shone through. ‘Volume one has been affected by dampness, but otherwise the whole Talmud is in very good condition, wide margins, and with very few marginal notes. All the blank leaves have been preserved, which is most unusual for Hebrew books’. The rarity of the Bomberg artefacts that he saw before him fascinated my grandfather: ‘Complete sets of the Talmud, whether of the first, second and third printing are known only in a limited number of sets. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen sets in the whole world’.

  Chimen’s own Bomberg Bible was not the most famous version – those were published in 1524 and 1525, and came complete with essays by the editor, a Tunisian named Yaakov ben Yayim ben Yitzhak ibn Adoniahu; with extensive commentaries by Rashi and Abraham ibn Ezra; and with beautiful woodcuts. The margins were perfectly aligned and in some places the Hebrew commentary text spiralled around a verse in circles. But, even if it was not quite of that calibre, Chimen’s Bomberg was still extraordinary. Coming only three-quarters of a century after Gutenberg had first set his printing presses in motion, it was a technological marvel, a Stradivarius of the printing world. Bomberg was as far ahead of Gutenberg in style and technique, in the way he could manipulate space and play around with imagery, as the iPod was ahead of vinyl records half a millennia later. In the space of a few decades, printing had emerged from infancy into the full splendour of adulthood.

  Chimen had another Venetian Hebrew Bible, this one from 1621, just a century later than his Bomberg. He had a Torah scroll from Prague, dating to 1610. And, somewhere on those shelves were scraps from an even older Torah, this one from 1557.

  In his bibliographic peregrinations, my grandfather had also acquired Hebrew texts printed in Constantinople in the early sixteenth century. One was a text from that city’s greatest sixteenth-century rabbi, the Talmudic scholar, mathematician and Euclid expert, Elijah Mizrahi. This book, Sefer ha-Mispar (‘Book of the Number’), was published in 1532, six years after Mizrahi’s death, by his third son, Israel, and was one of the first secular scientific books to be published in Hebrew. Chimen had another Constantinople volume, too, from ten years earlier – within living memory of the capture of the Roman imperial city by Sultan Mehmed II’s armies in 1453.

  Paradoxically, Hebrew printing in what would become the Ottoman capital took off centuries before Islamic printing in the city got a foothold, having been begun as early as 1493 by two Portuguese brothers, David and Samuel Nahmias. In the decades that followed, the Nahmias press published more than one hundred books, in tiny editions that never exceeded three hundred in number, many of them written by Sephardic refugees from the expanding powers of the Spanish Inquisition to the west. ‘Without the Inquisition’, Paul Hamburg, the librarian of the Judaica Collection at the University of California at Berkeley, believes, ‘Spain would have developed as the center of Jewish printing in Europe. That didn’t happen – because the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492’. On his mother’s side, Chimen’s rabbinic ancestors, he once told me, were among those who had fled from the increasingly intolerant Spain and headed east.

  By the 1530s, the Nahmias men had been joined in Constantinople by Gershom Soncino, scion of a famous Italian printing company. Gutenberg had printed the first books in Germany, but Jews within the Holy Roman Empire were not allowed to print Hebrew volumes. As a result, it had been in Italy that the first such books were printed, in 1475, thirty years after the German printing revolution. The Soncino family had been amongst the earliest of these printers. The Mizrahi book in Chimen’s collection was one of Gershom Soncino’s productions.

  A generation later, these printers were joined by another Sephardic duo, the brothers Solomon and Joseph Yabes. With the Nahmias, Soncino, and Yabes presses all working in Constantinople, the city became one of Hebrew printing’s most vibrant locales, catering to the Jews living in Balat, a neighbourhood to the south of the Golden Horn; in Haskëy, to the Golden Horn’s north; and in Ortaköy, on the European side of the Bosphorus.

  The leaves of many of these books were made of vellum, a thick, soft calfskin material that sounded like small waves lapping up against the shore when the pages were turned; only the very best volumes were printed on vellum. The ink on these pages was as clear five hundred years later as the day they were printed. In a Bomberg Bible, even today, one can still see the black lines inked over certain words in the commentaries by Venetian censors, concerned lest anything remotely hinting at anti-Christian sentiment be allowed off of the presses intact. Originally, the pages would have been loose sheets, tied together with a silk ribbon. Over the centuries, one owner or another had bound them in thick covers, the strongest of them made of pigskin (rabbinic rulings hold that, so long as the non-kosher animal is not eaten, its skin can be used to bind books). Some of the volumes had copper clasps, the metal blueing from oxidisation, to keep them from flapping open. There were small symbols on many of the pages, instructions from the editors to the typesetters. There were commentaries running down both margins: copies of Rashi’s notes on the Talmud were typically given pride of place in the inside margin or ‘gutter’, while the less prestigious commentators’ notes appeared in the outside margin. These were, in a sense, the original footnotes, a scholar’s guide to how the text should be read. Chimen loved the detective-work quality of this sort of material, teasing out not just how the Biblical text itself was understood, and how that understanding changed over time, but how the various commentators fed off of each other’s ideas. Over the centuries, more and more commentaries were added in. Today, a Bible can include up to forty commentaries, the various authors’ thoughts printed around the main body of the text in increasingly complex patterns.

  I never asked Chimen how he felt when he touched Renaissance vellum, but given his ecstatic love of rare books it must have been an almost sensual thrill. ‘Look at the technology’,
Paul Hamburg said, as he showed me a Bomberg that he had acquired for the University of California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. ‘When you figure out all of it was done by hand – the straight lines and the columns, and the quality of the printing, and the fonts. I get very excited’. Given the awful conditions in which he kept these jewels – Hillway was chronically overheated, and the ceilings often leaked – I suspect that Chimen also experienced some relief knowing that these were books built to last. If they were going to reside in an environment as challenging as 5 Hillway, it was just as well that they were printed on a material as durable as vellum. Even so, the edges of the calfskin pages appeared mottled, as pocked by little brown spots as the arms of an old man.

  One level down in the printed word hierarchy were volumes printed on parchment. Slightly less expensive, but still beyond the price of an average sixteenth century buyer, parchment was also made from animal skin (though usually sheep, goat, horse or donkey, rather than calfskin) treated with lime and scraped and dried. The pages were still thick, but they felt crisper, more like card. They were more fragile, more prone to accidental ripping. Chimen had many parchment volumes too.

  Most books, however, were made of rag-stock paper. Unlike wood pulp paper, which came to be the norm from the mid-nineteenth century on, and which allowed for cheaper, mass-produced books, to be printed, Renaissance paper had no acid content. As a result, instead of fading to brown after a few years, and losing the integrity of its structure, as does most modern paper, the pages of a book printed four or five hundred years ago often survive intact and readable, even if kept in a home as climatologically unsuited to the storage of rare materials as Hillway.