I always wondered about the apostrophe in "Hambro'". For that matter, I've never been able to determine what "Hambro'" referred to.
Funny you should refer to the Great Synagogue as "The Great." My Scottish brother in law refers to the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem (where he lives) in the same way.
It's some kind of quaint 18th century abbreviation for Hamburger. I say this because it was founded by one Moses Hamburger (see); and as you can see, R. Ya'akov Emden saw it as ק"ק המבורג שבלונדון.
I call it The Great presumably because I was influenced by the way it is referred to by British writers.
By the way, I am counting the minutes and hours until someone says, "Hey, what kind of divorce is this?!"
Oh, I'm not even touching the divorce...unless it was a chalitzah?
Hamburger!! Aha! You don't know how I was searching for an area of London called "Hambro'".
"There is extant a printed prayer recited by R. Meshullam Zalman in December of 1776 on the occasion of a fast day declared for the success of the British soldiers fighting in America"
london's shuls participated in the 13 dec. 1776 fast. i've seen a pamphlet published by the ashkenazim with content by RMZ. for some a reason i remember it being a sermon (maybe it includes a prayer)? in any case, it's not nearly as interesting as the pamphlet published by the sephardim with the order of service, sermon and special prayer.
ok, got i (searching with Israel Meshulam Solomon):
http://books.google.com/books?id...result&
resnum=1
it's the form of service and his sermon. if it did include an entire prayer composed by him (i don't think it did?), it was nothing compared to the sephardi one mentioned above.
nope. i misread the citation. 2 separate publications from the ashkenazim. one sermon (which is what i think i saw?) and one form of service (although it doesn't necessarily mean he composed a special prayer).
do you think the divorce ceremony described was accurate, or someone's imagination. as noted above, there are aspects of chalitza to it, and the formulaic statements they both made at the end...
kt,
josh
I am inclined to think it is one of two possibilities. The first is that the account is largely drawn not from what happened that day, but from one of the many books of the time describing Jewish ceremonies. Either elements of chalitza got mixed in, or the source contained erroneous information. The other possibility is that what is described is essentially what happened, but my thinking is that the rabbi and the rebbetzin spat at and cursed because they hated each other, not because they were enacting part of a ceremony which has escaped our attention before. Of course they may also have actually shown their contempt for one another in a milder fashion, and it could have been exaggerated.
There's no reason to think the Chalitzah ceremony was somehow mixed in, just because spitting is mentioned. Were that the case, undoubtedly the shoe, which is also part of the spectacle, would have been mentioned.
No, it seems that this was an accurate report. [Must check other divorce records in same locale/period, natch]. The description of her receiving the get with open arms made me think of all the sugyos in 4th chapter of Gittin describing the method by which a woman must actually "receive" a get. I can easily see some rabbi somewhere mandating the woman to actually hold out her arms and make a show of "receiving" it.
As for the spitting - nu. This is the 18th century. People did all sorts of weird things. Today we have a minhag to say "mazel tov" at the conclusion of the get ceremony. That might appear equally as bizarre to people in the 18th century, as spitting in each other's face appears to us genteel folks today.
Fascinating, in any event. Shkoaich, Fred.
LoZ, thanks for the link to that JQR article. "Naturally" I know that article, I meant that I haven't been able to locate a copy of the actual printed pamphlet yet, the usual places to look being Google Books and Thomson-Gale's 18th Century Collections Online.
Nachum, you gotta love 18th century abbreviations. It's interesting, for example, to see how they reflected the changes in pronunciation, so all those words ending in -ed, but no longer pronounced, would often be spelled -'d. Or to see something like 'em for "them" in a scholarly work.
DF, I'm not sure if it is accurate, although as I said it could be. The reason why I'm not so sure is because the almost universal tendency in the 18th century was to look at Judaism and its rituals as exceedingly weird and ridiculous, and this is reflected in the numerous books describing Judaism (a notable exception being the one book written for Europeans by a rabbi, namely Leone Modena's (R. Yehuda Aryeh Mi-Modena) Riti (translated as History of the Present Jews, by Leo Modena, a Venetian rabbi, translated from Italian by Simon Ockley, 1707).
Some of these books are by gentiles, some by converted Jews. They are interesting, and some of them contain genuine and interesting descriptions of minhagim and halachic interpretations that fell into disuse, but they also contain many errors, willful and otherwise. So one such book may be a source for describing this ceremony, but to be more certain we'd have to find a book that describes such a get. Still you make an important point (which I think I hinted at) that what they did and said may be totally consonant with how people, or Jews, or some Jews, behaved at a get in the 18th century.
I hear you.
Do you know why the name "Tevel" is so often asociated with the name "Dovid"? I saw what you wrote above, and then I immediately thought of the author of Nachlas Dovid, R. Dovid Tevel. I typed in the two names into Google and got a lot of other hits, too. It seems like these two names used to go together, like "Tzvi Hersh", "Areh Leib" etc. But I understand those, what's the connection between Dovid and Tevel? (Meinyan linyan, what does Falk have to do with Yehousha?)
Wait a minute - is "Tevel" some sort of corruption of "Dovid'l"?
If I am not mistaken, no one has demonstrated why Falk became the kinnuy and/ or name pair for Yehoshua, although they indeed went together like Aryeh and Leib.
As for Tevel, it is indeed a corruption of David, or David'le.
And "Asher" and "Lamm"? Or Yehoshua Heschel?
Can't speak to Asher Lamm, but Heschel must be a Yiddish diminutive of Yehoshua. This would follow the model of "Menachem Mendel."
Prof. Morris Silverman at YU used to repeat some fascinating theories about why some names went together: for example, "Alexander Ziskind" was "Alexander, child of Zeus," and "Shraga Feivel" was from "Phoebus Apollo," the god of light (=shraga). Unfortunately, I later learned that these connections were no longer accepted by scholars.
I still remember the first time I say the name Feyvush written as Phoebus. It was one of those light bulb moments.
If there's anything to the spitting story, I would speculate that it might be connected to the general concept of getting the husband to renounce any conditions or "moda'os" that he might have made prior to and about the giving of the get, and to state that he was giving it of his own free will. Essentially the idea is to ensure that he can't come back later and claim it was given against his will or based on some condition, and thus disqualify it - and it's remotely possible that this was extended into having the guy show how he hated being married to his spouse and wanted out.
But I'm more inclined to think it never happened. It's highly unlikely that the reporter was present at the time, and once you have someone unfamiliar with the customs reporting a third-hand account of something, all bets are off. In our own times, the NY Times can't get these things right, and they have much better connections.
BTW S. how do you know that RYE's version of events in London is wrong?
It's actually not unlikely that he was present. Something about not projecting present norms onto the past. Nowadays we are in a position of strength and we don't tend to invite gentiles to observe our prayers and rituals, but there are many, many examples back then of just that. I imagine it had to do with showing the gentiles that the synagogues are not, in fact, dens of vipers, and that Jewish rituals can be quite reasonable and pleasant. Although I don't know this, in England transparency could conceivably have even been a condition of resettlement. In fact, until well into the 19th century many British Jews of the upper class eschewed all political involvement on the grounds that this is what was agreed with Cromwell.
However, you are quite right that even eyewitness testimony, especially about something strange, is usually wrong in some respects. I don't think the NY Times has better connections, but they do have better reporting standards.
I know that RYE's version of events in London is wrong because this shul (Hambro') existed for 30 years before they chose to take a rabbi, namely R. Meshulam Zalman, and prior to that time they (voluntarily) relied on the rabbi of the Great Synagogue (Duke's Place) as their rabbi too. It was only at this point, when the Great Synagogue was appointing a new rabbi, that the Hambro' Synagogue chose not to accept his authority any longer and appoint their own. RYE's version has the Great as breaking away from the Hambro', or the community, as he puts it. I am in no position to judge whether RYE was, you know, making it up, or whether he was conveying some kind of version stemming from the Hambro' itself, but this isn't the kind of thing where we are in no position to judge what happened.
Why would RYE want to make it up (even if he was the type of person who made things up)? What difference is there for him and his son who broke off from who? Either way, the guys in the GS didn't want his son and the guys in Hambro did.
And since he claims to have been heavily involved in the negotiations, it's likely that he would be aware of basic facts like this.
According to RYE, the breakoff took place prior to his son's arrival in London, and over that issue.
So is it possible that the initial idea was for his son to be rabbi jointly over both synagogues (since you agree that the GS position was open at this time), but the GS people didn't want him and pulled out of the common-rabbi arrangement in reaction, leaving him to be rabbi of only the Hambro synagogue, where he had more support? This would fit with both versions.
Dan, if scholarship no longer accepts the Feyvush-Phoebus, Ziskind-Zeus theories, what do they say otherwise?
>Why would RYE want to make it up (even if he was the type of person who made things up)? What difference is there for him and his son who broke off from who? Either way, the guys in the GS didn't want his son and the guys in Hambro did.
I don't know. To grant his son greater prestige? Don't forget that the rabbi of the Great Synagogue was the quasi-Chief Rabbi. In RYE's version this would mean that his son was the British Chief Rabbi, and not his nephew at the Great.
>And since he claims to have been heavily involved in the negotiations, it's likely that he would be aware of basic facts like this.
Right, all the more reason that he simply made it up, or to put it a nicer way, chose to interpret facts a certain way. That said, he wasn't in England and negotiations were with the Hambro' and possibly they presented their situation this way. It is understandable that they wished to see themselves as the mainstream of Ashkenazim in London at the time, rather than the "sectarians."
The latter suggestion is plausible, except that it's not that there was a common rabbi in the sense that the Great would object. It didn't mean that the rabbi divided his time, which any shul understandably wouldn't care for, it meant that the other shul acknowledged the leadership and flagship status of the Great. If anything, the fact that the Hambro' Synagogue pledged allegiance to the Great through the means of accepting its rabbi as its spiritual leader lent the Great greater prestige. I doubt the people at Hambro' had anything to say about who the Great chose, and in your scenario they not only accepted RMZ but also rejected RDTS.
However, the possibility that first RYE tried to get RMZ into the Great, is possible. The thing is, I simply don't know that's what happened. The standard book to read is Charles Duschinsky's History of the Great Synagogue, which I linked to in the post. Barring that, there are almost certainly extant letters and documents which would probably give the complete picture as it happened, and perhaps you're right.
>Feyvush-Phoebus
Feyvush is Phoebus. It just doesn't have to have a mythological origin.
And Schneur, Yente, and Sphrintze are all Spanish. :-) I would like to know what Zishe is, though.
>I would like to know what Zishe is, though.
I think it's the diminutive for Süsskind.
Although many sources connect Feivel (Feivish) with Phoebus Apollo, a more modern theory -- cited in Benzion Kaganoff's "A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History," pp. 56-57 --takes the view that it is derived from a French name Vives or Vifs, meaning "life." This theory is said to be supported by French Crusade-era records, which always spell the name with a "v," and 16th century German records, which are the first to go over to the Germanic "f." According to Kaganoff, the name was given to a boy who was an orphan at the time of his bris, and was a prayer that he be granted life. For this reason it was often coupled with Uri or Shraga, the idea being that "ner Hashem nishmat adam."
Kaganoff further explains that Shprintze is the Spanish "Esperanza," Yente is the French "Gentille," and that "some scholars" say that Shneur means "shnei ur" (two lights) and was used under sad circumstances similar to Uri or Shraga. Whether or not K.'s book is the gospel truth, it's a storehouse of plausible-sounding information and I highly recommend it.
Thanks, Dan. Both Faivush reasons - the Apollo reason, or the "only-given-to-orphans reason - sound pretty implausible. But then again, what do I know?
The "Shnei ur" business - that it was a compromise for two sets of granparents who each wanted the name of the kid - fer sure is bogus.
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