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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to the New Books Network Jewish Studies channel. I'm your host, Dora Roussi, Executive Director of Unity Through Diversity Institute, where we explore the future of our heritage. Today, we're really delighted to speak with Rabbi Dr. Yossi Levine about his book, Hacham Tzvi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate, published by the Litman Library of Jewish Civilization in 2024.
Welcome, Robert Levine, and thank you for joining us here today. Thank you so much for having me. So rather than me introduce you, I think you are much better equipped to touch upon what points are more important for this in terms of your biography. So if you would give us a little bit of an insight into who is Rabbi Dr. Levine. Sure. I grew up in Los Angeles. I've been living in New York City for the better part of the last 30 years.
I studied English at Columbia and then did my rabbinic ordination at yeshiva university for about the past 20 years i've been uh the rabbi at the jewish center which is a modern orthodox synagogue on the up west side of manhattan And in about 2012, I decided to pursue a PhD at Yeshiva University. I wrapped it up just in the nick of time, right before COVID in 2020. and the research that I used for my doctoral dissertation became the basis of the book.
which I wrote in the early part of this decade and which was published just last year, as you said, in 2025. Thank you. That gives us a little bit of insight. I'm sure we'll come up with some other biographical things as well as we go along. So I want to start with how you open the book. And you open it with a map.
And I hope everybody's looking at the book as we're speaking, but if not, not while you're driving. But if not, go back and look at it afterwards. And so you open with a map of all the different places. And you note on page 49, if maps, I love quotes, so I'm going to keep quoting, if maps provide the context within which to understand the biography of Chacham Tzvi, letters and books provide the content.
Can you give us a little bit of an overview of the context and content by way of biographical information now of Chacham Tzvi? And, of course, you can follow along on the map for those who are watching.
Okay, I had actually, in an earlier draft, I had called the chapter something like mapping Chacham Tzvi, and I think the editor said something to the effect of, you know, that's too cliche, we're not going to call it that. But there was something quite... gripping about the degree to which Chacham Tzvi was all over the map people say where was he from where did he live and I say how much time do you have It's a long story and a long way to trace.
on any Mac. So in a snapshot, Chacham Tzvi was born in Moravia in... 1658. It's a time of great tumult and travail in the world, and Jewishly, this is in the... aftermath of the Hamelnitsky massacres. It's in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. Chacham Tzvi's own parents were refugees. There's a refugee crisis in the second half of the 17th century in Ashkenazic. Jewish communities. Chacham Tzvi then comes of age in the 1660s where you have
the advent of Shabtai Tzvi, perhaps the most important and most famous failed Messiah in the history of the Jewish people. I'm happy to return and talk about it. Sabadianism, because that's a big looming issue in the life of Shabtai Tzvi, in the life of Chacham Tzvi, even though Shabtai Tzvi apostatizes a year after he declares himself the Messiah and then dies.
By 1676, the Crypto-Sibadian subterranean followers of Shabtai Tzvi, even after his death, continue to loom large in the background of this generation, and that's something to bear in mind. even though he's of Ashkenazic descent, and I'm sure we'll touch on this, Hacham Tzvi trains in Yeshivot, in houses of study, in the Ottoman Empire. So he is born in Moravia, but grows up in Budapest. And then his parents send him.
to study in cities like Salonica and Constantinople. And so he trains among his Spartic brethren, which... maybe wasn't as unusual in the moment as it seems because Ashkenazic learning centers had been so devastated by recent events. Hakan sees back and forth between the city of Budapest and the Ottoman Empire often in the 1670s, 1680s. And then tragedy strikes. Rahamsvi has the misfortune of being in...
What was then called Alt-Offen is now known as Budapest in 1686. There's a war, a siege of Buddha, as it's known, between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire. And Chacham Tzvi's wife and infant daughter are tragically killed in the battle. And Chacham Tzvi's parents are taken captive. And I just think about this in this moment. Forgive me for jumping to, you know, the 21st century. But, you know, as I was researching and writing and thinking about these issues.
It was just so obvious to me that, you know, this is history. This is Jewish history. We don't have a vocabulary of Jewish captives in the 21st century. And then here we are after October 7th. thinking about Jewish hostages, thinking about Jewish captives, and it's quite... It's quite arresting when one considers how what should be in the annals of Jewish history is now a live issue once again. So Chacham Tzvi's parents are taken captive and Chacham Tzvi manages himself. to uh to escape
with nothing. His family is lost. His library is lost. He leaves Budapest and finds refuge for a few years. in Sarajevo, actually among a Sephardic community in Sarajevo, where he functions as a rabbi for a short time. He hears that his parents are alive. They've been ransomed by the Berlin Jewish community. He heads north to present-day Germany, what would be today northwestern Germany. And he marries and settles in the home of his wife's family in Altena Homburg von Speck.
You know, we know the city of Hamburg in the 17th and 18th century, these three communities had formed a kind of federation. So Hamburg is the bigger city. It's fortified. It's actually part of another... sovereignty. It's actually part of Denmark at the time. But Hamburg, Alton, and Vonsbeck joined together and become a united federation. They have won.
Chief Rabbinate, there's an Ashkenazic and Sephardic community locally, but Chacham Tzvi settles in and this becomes a quiet part of his life for around the next 20 years. He studies and teaches in a Kloys, which is a Yiddish term for a privately funded study house. And when his father-in-law passes away, his father-in-law was the head rabbi of this community. When his father-in-law passes away, the community turns to him and says, will you be our rabbi? Chacham Tzvi accepts.
Funny kind of footnote to the story, he was hired by two of the communities and half of the other community. In Altena, there was actually a rotation. And it sounds funny to our contemporary sensibilities. but for six months of the year, Chacham Tzvi was the rabbi of that community, and for six months of the year, another rabbi was the rabbi of that community, if it sounds like a model that...
probably isn't going to be too successful. It's a model that wasn't too successful. It only lasted for a couple of years. And because there were some internal disputes, Chacham Tzvi had to quit that rap. In 1710, he's invited to become the chief rabbi of Amsterdam. We could spend a lot of time talking about Amsterdam if you had to pick one place to live. as a Jew in 1710, and go back to that map, there is probably no more desirable place than Amsterdam.
It's a city of very progressive thinking in the sense that there's religious toleration. It's possible to... be involved as a Jew in all kinds of commercial enterprises. The book business is booming. It's the print capital of the world. generally and Jewishly. And Chacham Tzvi, by this point, he has a big family, packs up.
his family, and relocates to become the chief rabbi of Amsterdam. We're happy to talk more about this, but there are two communities living side by side. There's actually an engraving, I think there's an image that I put in the book. of the two synagogues. The two synagogues, which are literally across the street, or it's Amsterdam, so across the canal from one another, the Sephardic synagogue and the Ashkenazic synagogue.
The Sephardim have been there much longer. They arrived at the beginning of the 17th century. They've established themselves. They're the older, venerable community. And they're wildly successful. You know, the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam used there. family connections to become great, successful traders and merchants. The Ashkenazi community has humbler roots. They're coming again as refugees in the second half of the...
17th century, but by 1710, they've built themselves into an established community as well. They hire Chacham Tzvi to become their rabbi. 1712, in Amsterdam, Chacham Tzvi publishes his magnum opus, which we're happy to return to. It's his book of shelo de tshuvot. It's a book of responsa. And 1713, a Sabadian comes to town. There's a whole controversy. Chacham Tzvi tries to sound the alarm bells.
and it doesn't go well for him. He loses his position and he retreats to Ashkenazic enclaves in Poland. 17, 18, he's hired to become the chief rabbi of the Jewish community in present-day Lviv, which would have been known as Lemberg at the time, and it's there that he passes away at about the age of 60. in 1718. So I know that was a lot to take in, but hopefully we covered a lot of the map. Yes, we definitely have.
When you say he was all over the map, you mean in a physical sense he was all over the map. It's not that he was thinking differently, but one of the other things, he's all over the map in terms of his interactions with others. If you look, I mean, Hamburg had a strong Sephardi community before he got there, and Amsterdam also, as you mentioned, and he always had these interactions. And maybe we'll skip ahead now and say he's called Chacha.
But like you said, he's very much in the Ashkenazi world, and hacham is very much a Sephardi term. Can you explain that a little?
Yeah, so the kind of legend is that he was called a hacham when he had been training in these Sephardic yeshivas in his youth, and for reasons that he never... writes about, he decides to preserve and maintain this title for the rest of his life, even though Predominantly, he's living in Ashkenazic communities, he's serving Ashkenazic communities, but he is known as Chacham Tzvi.
So there's a certain way, and I try to make the case, that... probably more than any one of his contemporaries and maybe more than any one of his, you know, any other early modern rabbi. Pacham Tzvi was more integrated. and created a kind of hybrid identity between the worlds of Ashkenaz and Svarad. And that makes for a fascinating conversation. It's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding. Constant IT bottleneck. We need a platform.
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and he never really rebuilt it. But he was always living in a city where he had access to great scholarly work. And he encouraged scholars to study text. and especially the mishnah but he distanced himself from the kabbalah and i'm bringing what you told us And like you said, this is kind of almost to me an integration of the Spanish-Portuguese approach because they also distance themselves from the Kabbalah.
And among most of the masses, there was... fear that the integration of books into the general public would cause very problematic results. What did Chacham Tzvi think about all this difference with Kabbalah and the integration of the mass? Availability of books. Yeah, so it's a big topic at this moment. So, you know, print has kind of unending influence. impact on Jewish life in the early modern period.
And there's so much to say about how it changes Jewish life. And one of the ways in which it changes Jewish life is what scholars think of or call the democratization of knowledge. So in a preprint society or in a society where you have access to only manuscripts or not too many books, So knowledge is concentrated in the hands of people who are especially trained in the textual culture of that time and place.
The knowledge is going to be concentrated in the hands of people who can afford the manuscripts, right? And the lay people are going to have much less, if not no access to these texts. And of course, you know, you could think about... You can think about the Reformation and its connection to these topics and to these debates. So one area where this comes up in the life of Chacham Tzvi is the area of Kabbalah.
And there's a kind of standing debate among scholars what the relationship is between Kabbalah and Sabadianism and between those who were followers of Shabtai Tzvi. Was it Kabbalah that sort of permitted the... channels of Sabadianism to flow, or was it Shabtai Tzvi who kind of opened up the floodgates and created more interest in the study of Kabbalah? But either way...
Most would agree that there's an important correlation, and the rabbis of the era certainly saw Kabbalah as a potential source of danger. the thinking was that in the hands of the uninitiated, in the hands of those who are not really equipped, to study and understand these texts. Kabbalah could be abused.
And one thing could lead to the next, and it could be the abrogation of halakha, the abrogation of Jewish law, and even sectarianism, which of course was on the minds and hearts of all the early modern. rabbis in the aftermath of the Shabtai Tzvi debauch. So Chacham Tzvi went on record and said very explicitly, This is not what laypeople should be studying. Kabbalah should be preserved in the hands of the initiated and should not be left to the masses. It's just too dangerous.
And I argue in the book that in some ways Hachantzvi was kind of at the beginning of this curve, a little ahead of his time, where in the 18th century, this became a more common trope among traditional rabbis. Even if they had studied Kabbalah themselves, even if they considered themselves Kabbalists, Chacham Tzvi began to create this sense that maybe we should kind of keep Kabbalah behind closed doors. If it gets into the hands of the masses, it could be today.
And there's also the concept of rabbinic authority. We see it today with the internet. And since you have two hats as a... historian scholar and also as a pulpit rabbi today. Can you tell us a little bit how this plays out today, this crisis of rabbinic authority? So it's always dangerous when you ask somebody who studies history to talk about the present day. You have both hats.
Yeah. So, you know, if I have congregants listening, I guess I feel more comfortable talking about the 17th century than the 21st. But I'll say a word about both. So, one of the big themes, and this is true in the life of Hans V, but true in the life of traditional Judaism much more broadly, one of the big themes in the early modern period... is this crisis of authority. There's one scholar, I think it's in a footnote in this book, who says, you should just be careful.
Every generation thinks there's a crisis of authority and there's a lot of truth to that. But I think we can appreciate that it was particularly pronounced in this moment in the 17th, in the 17th, 18th century. The rabbinate had been professionalized and you have salary. rabbis, salaried employees who are beholden to their communities, and that creates tension. In the medieval period, a rabbi could pronounce harem, say there's a ban, and that's maybe the beginning and end of the conversation.
And in the early modern period, so the lay leaders say, well, maybe we have to sign off on the ban too. Or maybe bands are not the province of the rabbi. Or if the rabbi wants to publish something, she needs our permission first. And so there's this tension. And often, rabbis and laypeople work together, and everything was just on the door. So I don't want to say there was always a conflict, but at particular moments, there was this kind of open question.
who has the final word, and that could get very messy. Now, one of the things that differentiates the early modern period from the contemporary period is the answer to the question of like, well, what's writing? So let's just say that somebody does something they shouldn't have done, and the rabbi has to make a pronouncement, and the rabbi says this person is banned. So that has consequences. If I've been banned, everything revolves around my community.
So it means that I can't shop at the local butcher shop. It means my kid can't go to the local... school. It means that my daughter can't... There's all kinds of consequences because I'm reliant on the community. And at some point, when we start to approach the modern period, there's no consequence. Because I'm not reliant on the community. And you could kick me out of your community and I'll find my own community. I'll start my own community. I don't need a community. I can shop anywhere.
So, you get to the 21st century, And these issues are amplified, that there's no harem, there's no excommunication, there's no ban, there's no consequence, someone acts badly, what are you going to do, kick them out of the synagogue? They go next door to the next synagogue. So very hard to enforce. Any... societal or communal norms when there's no mechanism for enforcement and there's no consequence, even if you could enforce what it is that you were trying to enforce.
senior colleague who once told me the following story. It probably goes back 50, 60 years. So he was at the beginning of his rabbinic career and he was flying to a particular city for a trial. So a tryout, say in Yiddish, the term is a Prabhup. So you spend a whole Shabbat, you're a candidate for a rabbinic position, you spend a whole Shabbat with the community, and the community gets to know the candidate, and the candidate gets to know the rabbi.
speaks and he teaches and everyone gets to know each other and then the community can decide if they want to hire this person. So my colleague was sitting on the plane next to a priest. And they got to talking. This was an era when people still talked to each other on planes. And the priest says to the rabbi, you know, where are you going? And the rabbi says, it explains this whole process where he's headed.
And the priest turns to him and says, just a second, you're telling me the community of people for whom you're meant to be a moral authority is going to be responsible for hiring and firing you? So on reflection, how does the rabbi have any moral authority in the 21st century when he knows that the congregation is at the end of the day responsible for his... contract and responsible for
you know, his salary and so on. So it's a quite different model than what we might have had, you know, a few hundred years ago. Yeah, it definitely gets complicated. It starts to play out here. as you call it, early modern rabbis. So I want to go back to the Sephardi Ashkenazi conundrum and this tension that's throughout. And I'm going to do it with a quote from your book from page 131 for those who are following along. broken new ground
He adopted a decidedly oppositional orientation towards minhag and freely attacked long-standing Ashkenazi traditions. He imported into his Allahic decisions practices from the Sephardi Malou. and advocated for a Sephardi educational curriculum. So we already mentioned he focused on Mishnah rather than the standard Talmud that we are used to seeing in the Ashkenazi Yeshivot, but it's more than that. So can you explain that a little bit?
Sure. So there's a couple pieces to unpack here. One, since you mentioned it, I'll just say a word about it. And that is Facham Tzvi's orientation to menhag, to cultural practices that have become tradition in a particular community. And in Ashkenaz, and scholars have written about this a great deal, in Ashkenaz, in the medieval and early modern period, minhag, this notion of an accepted tradition, minhag was elevated to an almost canonical stat. And the thinking was, this has been our practice.
These were the received traditions of our ancestors. Our grandparents were very pious people. If they were doing it this way, it means we should be doing it this way. And we can't mess. We can't mess with these practices. And obviously there's a whole range, right? Some of these practices were rabbinically ordained. Some of these practices were more in the realm of folk practices. Sometimes they're very old. Sometimes they're not as old.
But as a general matter, in Ashkenaz, minhag is sacrosanct. And in Sepharad, it's not that the Sephardim don't care about these Amin Hagim. They do. but there's more license to open up a question and say, is this really a received tradition? Does this really have a rabbinic imprimatur? Is there something wrong about how this minhag actually came down to it?
So, you know, a classic example is Kaparot, this minhag of picking up a chicken and waving it on Arab Yom Kippur on the day before Yom Kippur. helps us atone for our sins. And it's an old tradition. And Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of the Shulchan Aruch, speaking for the Sephardic community, says this... is not a real thing. And he quotes the earlier Sephardic authority, like, we're going to have to ask some questions about this practice.
seems a little bizarre, seems a little suspicious, and they do away with the practice. And the Ashkenazim say, we hear all the questions, but we're going to do it anyway, because this is always the way we did it, and so we're going to continue to do it. So Chachan Tzvi adopts this Sephardic orientation. And five, six, seven examples that I record in the book where he says, I know this is what people do, but let me tell you why I think this is not actually the right way to do it.
One case where he... where he wasn't successful, just because, again, this is contemporary and has lots of relevant application. who's much more famous than his father, Jacob Emden quoted his father as saying, you know, every year before Pesach... Chacham Tzvi would say, if only I had the authority to do away with kidney-o.
I would do away with kitniot. This is Ashkenazic practice that on Passover you refrain not only from eating leavened foods, actual chametz, but even these other foods which are legumes or could be confused with chametz. And this causes all kinds of strictures in the Ashkenazi community because things like corn and rice become prohibited for the duration of Pesach. And Chacham Tzvi said, I'm not powerful enough to do away with it, but if I could, I would.
The second point I'll just say a word about is the educational curricula. And again, as you already pointed out, there's a yawning chasm between what Jewish education looks like. in the early modern period for Svartim and what it looks like for Ashkenaz. And the Svartic Yeshivot are organized.
They're bibliocentric. They start with Tanakh. They start with the Bible. They progress through the learning of Hebrew language and grammar and Mishnah. And at some point, you get to Talmud and you get to Halakha. And the Ashkenazi yeshivos, they're like a free-for-all, and everyone's studying Talmud at very young ages, and they're trying to figure out Tosfos, which is the complex commentary on the Talmud at early ages. And hacham, Spain.
given his druthers, said, I much prefer the Sephardic curriculum. And he was actually responsible for trying to implement that kind of curriculum in the communities in which he lived. Again, we can't know because he doesn't say, but presumably it was his exposure to the Sephardic yeshivot and the Sephardic curricula in his youth. that gave him the impetus to appreciate how valuable that kind of curriculum would be and gave him the impetus to try to implement it in the communities where he's
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I don't know if you want to talk a little about that you mentioned before. You might want to... So this is a very particular kind of rabbinic genre. Someone writes, usually a junior rabbi writes to a more senior rabbi and says, I have this question. I'm dealing with this conflict in my community. I'm dealing with this unresolved question of halachic practice.
I suspect I know the answer, but I'm not sure. Or this is very weighty. I feel uncomfortable opining on this. I need someone more senior to guide. And so Chacham Tzvi, over the course of his rabbinic career, receives hundreds of questions like this, and he responds to them. He collects 170 or so of these shelo du chavot. Sometimes we're privy to the question, sometimes we only see the answer and have to intuit the question. And this collection of responsa...
becomes the book by which Chacham Tzvi is known to posterity. These are the questions, answers, these are the responses of Chacham Tzvi. Just fascinating to note that some of these issues which seemed like... You know, how relevant could they be? 300 years later, he wrote this book, he published this book in 1712. And yet, in 2025, so many... of the response that he wrote continue to animate Halakha conversations today. We talk about, you know, when does life end?
How do you ascertain whether a person is alive or not? Do we use a... a measure of brain activity, of respiratory activity. These are very weighty questions. If someone is alive and you try to take an organ and save somebody else's life. Is that okay? What if they're not yet dead? If somebody walked over to me and took out my kidney, that would be a soul.
you're not allowed to do that. But if someone has left this world and taking out their kidney could save someone's life, well, what an amazing thing that would be. These are very important, very important questions and sometimes very weighty questions. And stunning to know that so many of Chacham Tzvi's words continue to inform those waiting conversations. And on a little lighter note, something that also people are into today, keeping two days of Chag, which I'm blanking on how to say.
But two days of a real festival rather than the one day that they keep in Israel. Different things are in the book. It's worth reading both this book and that book. I think your last paragraph in the book, if you'll allow me, really sums up what we've been saying and what the book is about. So I'm, as I love to read, I'm going to read it out loud. Before his tombstone was destroyed by the Nazis, it was adorned with the image of a gazelle, a zvi.
moving swiftly and confidently from one field to the next. Chacham Tzvi was attacked often by adversaries who thought themselves wiser or more capable. Perhaps some of them were. but those adversaries never stopped him from speaking his mind, rendering his legal decisions, or publishing his rulings. In fact, they often compelled him to act or react.
It is the give and take between querist and respondent, between rabbinic colleagues and lay leaders, that illuminates the dynamics of the early modern rabbinate. Chacham Tzvi entitled his magnum opus, Students of Halakha remember him by the answers he generated, students of history by the questions. And I just... To me, that really encapsulates what you've been talking about and just who he is and opened a world for me. I hope other people will continue the questions and continue standing up.
to question and make sure that others question and that we find some answers. Thank you for this. I really appreciate it. At the New Books Network, though, we don't just leave it with the conclusion. We have to ask what you are working on next. So what can we look forward to seeing from you next? So I've actually taken a little bit of a jump, and I'm working now on the early 20th century. I'm looking at some of the rabbinic personalities who are less well-known.
tend to be Eastern European immigrants to the United States. circa 1890, 1900, 1910, who were basically responsible for building the infrastructure of Jewish life that... We American Jews are now blessed to live. So it's been a fascinating journey. I'm a little sidetracked at the moment because I uncovered a cache of rabbinic letters and some of them.
need to be published, so I'm going to work on getting a couple of those out. But the larger project is to think about how these rabbis in the early part of the 20th century shaped traditional American Jewish life. So we definitely look forward to hearing that. And I'm also curious to see their interactions with the Sephardi community that has already been there. So we'll have to also continue on that. But thank you very much. We've been speaking with Rabbi Dr. Yossi Levine about his book.
Chacham Tzvi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate, published by the Littman. Library of Jewish Civilization in 2024. To continue exploring the diversity of the Jewish people, follow Jewish Unity through Diversity Institute on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and our podcast, Reclaiming Identity. Thank you it's been a true pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.