Avinoam J. Stillman
Early modern Jews left mundane traces of their every-day lives in the margins of their manuscripts. Alongside formal compositions, blanks spaces were used to record family histories, economic woes, and ritual practices. From the historian’s point of view, this means that even kabbalistic manuscripts – devoted to esoteric theological, cosmological, and ritual speculations – can be valuable sources for social and cultural history. In conjunction with the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, I want to explore one seasonal source from 17th century East-Central Europe: a piquant anecdote about one family’s deliverance from a collapsing sukkah.
First described in 1930 by Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Ms. Heb. 28°1 is a complex manuscript of 344 folios which combines textual units written by several Ashkenazi hands from the early 17th century to the 18th century.1 Ms. NLI Heb. 28°1 is perhaps most notable for juxtaposing medieval Spanish kabbalistic texts with early modern kabbalistic material associated with Isaac Luria. It is difficult to tell exactly how the book was compiled, at least based on digitized black-and-white microfilm images; pages in different handwritings are interspersed throughout. However, one section, mostly consisting of tracts attributed to Luria’s ostensible student Israel Saruq, was copied by a scribe named Yitshak ben Avraham Moshe Yisrael Eilenburg.2 His name appears in a marginal note on f. 106r, and we learn from colophons on f. 134v and f. 150v that he was from Kraków and active around 1621-1622. He wrote in a relatively clear Ashkenazi Hebrew non-square script, marked by occasionally extravagant bet and ‘ayin characters, and his lines are evenly justified, drooping downwards only slightly.
On f. 179r-v of this manuscript, Eilenburg recorded several personal fragments and anecdotes. On f. 179r, he notes some genealogical information that he heard “from a very old man, his honor Mr Gottschalk of Hotzenplotz [today Osoblaha in the Czech Republic]” about his paternal ancestors, who were rabbinic scholars and communal leaders in cities like Poznań and Kraków. On f. 179v, we find the following miraculous story:
“We must praise and thank and applaud the great kindness which the Blessed God has done for us, on the first night of the holiday of Sukkot, in the year “God is my Light and Salvation” [1636]. We were sitting in the Sukkah, which stands on boards which are laid across the length of the courtyard of the house of my father-in-law, his honor Mr Shimon Katz. I and my wife and all of my children, may God save and protect them, were sitting at the table and the boards broke, and we fell to the ground. God, may His name be blessed, placed His hand so that not one of us would be hurt, except for one woman whose foot was broken. At that time, there were almost forty people inside the Sukkah, men and women, boys and girls, and our scream ascended above and God, in His great mercies, had mercy upon us to save us. Thus, may we merit to see the raising up of the fallen Sukkah of David [the Temple], quickly in our days, and may the gates of Heaven be opened, and our breakages and those of God’s people, the house of Israel, be fenced up. This is the prayer of the small one, Yitshak son of my master and father, our teacher and Rabbi R. Avraham Moshe Yisrael of blessed memory, known as Eilenburg.”
עלינו לשבח להודו׳ ולהלל על החסד הגדול אשר גמל עלינו ית״ש בליל א׳ של חג הסוכו׳ שנת ה׳ אורי וישע״י שהיינו יושבים בסוכה העומדת על הקורו׳ שמונחים לאורך החצר בבית חמי כמ׳ שמעון כ״ץ ואני ואשתי וכל בני יצ״ו היינו מסובים על השלחן ונשברו הקורו׳ ואנחנו נפלנו עד לארץ וה׳ ית״ש סמך ידו שלא נזוק שום א׳ מאתנו זולת אשה א׳ נשברה רגלה והיה אז בתוך הסוכה כמעט ארבעים נפש אנשים ונשים וילדי׳ וילדו׳ וצעקתינו עלתה למרום וה׳ ברחמיו המרובים רחם עלינו להציל אותנו כך נזכה לראו׳ בקימת סוכת דוד הנופלת במהירה בימינו ויפתח שערי שמים ויגדור פרצותינו ופרצו׳ עמו בית ישראל כה תפלת הקטן יצחק בלא״א מהר״ר אברהם משה ישראל ז״ל ה״ה איילונבורג
This story reflects several aspects of the world of early modern East-Central European Jews. We learn quickly that Eilenburg was married to the daughter of Shimon Katz and spent the holiday of Sukkot with his wife’s family. Eilenburg and Katz were the surnames of prominent Ashkenazi lineages, and these details bespeak the tendency of elite families to intermarry. Katz, the father-in-law, was apparently wealthy enough to have a large courtyard in his house, and to construct a sukkah for some forty people. Moreover, he spared no expense; the luxurious floorboards of their temporary dwelling almost did the celebrants in! At the time of the accident, we find a mixed-gender crowd of “men and women, boys and girls” all sitting together in the sukkah. Although women are not strictly obligated by the letter of halakhah to sit in the sukkah, Ashkenazi Jewish women often participated in this and other rituals.3 Early modern kabbalistic ritual manuals such as Or Tsadiqim, attributed to the Lurianic scholar and Kraków native Meir Poppers (d. 1664), even encourage married couples to sleep together in the sukkah – provided, of course, they were alone, “so that they not be embarrassed.”4
Eilenburg’s position as a member of a well-endowed rabbinic family was not coincidental. Even after many other kabbalistic works had been printed, Lurianic (in this case, Saruqian) kabbalistic knowledge were preserved largely in manuscript.5 Until the late 18th century, when they began to be printed in substantive numbers, these esoteric texts were almost exclusively copied by hand and studied by select circles of Jewish scholars. The primary theoretical texts of Lurianic kabbalah – albeit not necessarily its practical ethos or ritual innovations – were largely cultivated by and for elite Jewish men of sufficient means and education. In short, the act of copying such texts was classed, and Eilenburg had textual privilege. To be sure, he was far from alone in pursuing esoteric knowledge; in Ms. Heb. 28°1, his pages survive alongside textual units copied by and commented upon by several other Ashkenazi scribes and scholars. Similarly, his access to kabbalistic knowledge was indebted to the wider network of early modern kabbalists who circulated esoteric knowledge in East-Central Europe, the Mediterranean, and beyond. His personal reminiscences, embedded in a complex codex, thus attest to the particular social contexts of early modern kabbalistic knowledge.
Sad to say, Eilenburg’s troubles were not over after his close call in the sukkah. In a note on the same page, albeit from some years later, he records that, while eating dinner on Thursday, 5 Tevet 1630, he almost choked to death on a clove of garlic. Thankfully, he was saved from asphyxiation by the grace of God. Far more tragically, Eilenburg was the victim of anti-Jewish violence on Monday, 11 Elul 1644, when he and the members of his community were travelling from Jarosław – where the regional Jewish governing body, the Council of Four Lands, met every summer – through the town of Witkowice. According to a note he left in 1645, he was attacked and bloodied by a local nobleman and a mob of villagers wielding farm implements, seemingly for no reason other than hatred. After the attack, Eilenburg lived at least until 1646, long enough to copy another manuscript, this time a collection of halachic material (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Opp. 273).
A sukkah is a marginal place, a liminal space between inside and outside, with permeable walls and a verdant roof. In Lurianic kabbalah, the sukkah itself represents the “surrounding lights,” the orot maqifin, of the maternal divine countenance, the partsuf ima, which form a womb around the lower divine persona. So too, the occasional and informal notes on the edges of codices are essential contexts of the more formal content contained in the book. Just as the “surrounding lights” mediate between the different divine persona, the experiences of individual copyists, often preserved in their marginalia, shaped their relationship to their texts. To draw a simpler analogy, Eilenburg’s notes attest – like the sukkah itself – to the realities of human vulnerability, mortality, and transience, as well as to improbable survivals and the vagaries of divine providence.
[1] Gershom Scholem, Catalogus Codicum Cabbalisticorum Hebraicorum (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1930) #26, 67–71 [Hebrew].
[2] Yosef Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari, vol. I, (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008), 519 [Hebrew].
[3] On the Talmudic background see Marjorie Lehman, “The Gendered Rhetoric of Sukkah Observance.” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 309–35. For the early modern codification of this exemption, see Joseph Karo’s Shulkhan Arukh, Orakh Hayyim, 640:1. On women’s sukkot observance in medieval Ashkenaz, see Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 138–171, esp. 144–149.
[4] Meir Poppers, Or Tsadiqim (Hamburg, 1690), folio 19r. See also the suggestion of Moses Isserles that husbands and wives should dwell in the sukkah together in Shulkhan Arukh, Orah Hayim, 639:2.
[5] Andrea Gondos, Kabbalah in Print: The Study and Popularization of Jewish Mysticism in Early Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), 19.
Suggested citation: Avinoam J. Stillman, “The Fallen Sukkah of Yitshak Eilenburg: From the Margins of an Early Modern Ashkenazi Kabbalistic Manuscript,” Knowledge in Circulation: The Reception and Transmission of Jewish Esoteric Knowledge in Manuscripts and Print in Early Modern East-Central Europe, September 23, 2021, https://esknowcirc.hypotheses.org/389
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
esknowcirc (September 23, 2021). The Fallen Sukkah of Yitshak Eilenburg: From the Margins of an Early Modern Ashkenazi Kabbalistic Manuscript. Knowledge in Circulation. Retrieved October 6, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/oio7