Desert Harvest 2.1

From the desk of the Director
Prof. Dr. Heiko A. Oberman

   The 1992 Festival week for 'Town and Gown' was a stirring experience. Not only did we encounter the genius of human artistic expression when we listened to Ophra Yerushalmi play Liszt, Schubert, and Mozart, but we were also powerfully moved listening to Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi discuss the Jewish responses to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain before, during, and after that momentous year 1492. We, thus, enjoyed both the heights of human endeavor and confronted the powerful impact of the sheer courage and perseverance of a people to survive despite the cruelty it has repeatedly faced. There is ample reason to thank once again our guests for this special and important Festival in Tucson, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Ophra Yerushalmi. This week will not soon be forgotten.
    The power and significance of these events point out the importance of the coming together of the University and the larger-Tucson community. The Annual Week for 'Town and Gown' is just one of our efforts to accomplish this. Inside you will see that our Summer Lecture Series continues as another avenue by which we strive to offer significant adult education programs to interested community groups. The responses we have received from the Tucson community have shown us that both sides benefit from this quality program.
    To ensure the continuation of this many-sided outreach 'for all seasons,' I ask you to consider giving a generous donation to the Division. Such a gift is your investment in higher education.

Professor prompts reflection on Jewish history
Dr. Morris Martin

[Dr. Martin is a member of the Division's Board of Advisors and a professor of humanities who has taught at Oxford, Princeton, and the University of Arizona. This review was published in the Tucson Citizen, February 20, 1992.]

    It is seldom that an academic visitor to Tucson touches both the heights of scholarship and depths of feeling in a general public lecture. This occurred February 12 in the Social Sciences Auditorium on the University of Arizona campus.
    The lecturer was Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish history, culture, and society at Columbia University, New York.
    The lecture on "1492: Jewish Responses to the Expulsion from Spain" was part of a week of events designed to focus the attention of the Tucson community on the program, directed by Regents' Professor Heiko A. Oberman, of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies in the History Department of the University.
    Professor Yerushalmi, warmly introduced by University President Manuel Pacheco, took as his point of departure the currently topical year 1492, not for its Columbus overtones, but for a comparably significant event, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in that same year. That action was one of the last state-inspired, total expulsions of Jews faced with forcible conversion or exile.
    Many of those who refused to convert left in the first instance for Portugal, which received them, but only temporarily. In 1497 all Jews in Portugal were converted by force. The rest of the Hispano-Portuguese Jewry wandered overseas, finding a welcome only in the vast reaches of the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
    This scattering, this diaspora, resulted in communities of exiles from the Balkans to North Africa, outcasts, torn from their roots and seeking a place to settle and rebuild their lives. There they pondered the terrible events that had overtaken them. How were they to respond, to make sense of them?
    The response was threefold. First, to repent, the moralistic response. Surely, they must have sinned and were in need of repentance, for such a disaster to have overtaken them. They identified their sins in three areas. The study of philosophy, which had enticed people away from the Torah, from the Law of Moses; immorality, the well-to-do Jews living comfortably with mistresses, even Christian mistresses; and the desperate attempt to come to terms with events that spoke to them of the end of history, which had led them to various forms of intense Messianism, even to calculating the date of the coming of the Messiah.
    A second response was to study history, to search for a "natural cause" in events, even to a providential cause that was not yet fulfilled by events.
    The third response was simply despair, despair that the Messiah would ever come, that in a deep sense, God had become the enemey of His people and there was no recourse from His wrath.
    Such responses were the result of profound personal reflection on disaster. None showed a way to the future, except for one that came from a group of Jewish mystics in the town of Safed in the Land of Israel.
    It came as a renewal of the teaching of the Kabala, the mystical lore built upon the commentaries of the Torah from the 12th century onwards. It focused around the teachings of Isaac Luria, who penetrated the dilemma of the Exile on the most profound level.
    He asked the perennial question, "Where does evil come from?" and concluded that exile is the existential state of being, even that of God, and propounded a myth, a poetical story of the creation of the world in which God, from being all, withdrew into Himself to create space in which light could exist.
    In the course of this, the light that emanated from God scattered, the vessels that held it, broken, the sparks of divine light fell into the darkness of the abyss, and evil entered the world.
    But it remained for the people of God to lead in the restoration of this scattered light. Obedience to the Torah, act by act, obedience by obedience, would light up the sparks and bring redemption to the Jews and all mankind. In this pictured explanation lay a hope beyond all despair. A century later this teaching led to a powerful worldwide Messianic movement, known as the Sabbatean movement, which ended in disaster when its founder converted to Islam in 1666. But it had kindled a hope.
    Professor Yerushalmi had carried his audience through the centuries with the expertise of a great scholar and lecturer. He spoke, not from a prepared text, but from his wealth of knowledge. Then he moved to a deeper level. In a moving epilogue, he pointed to our own bloody century and posed the question of the Jewish response in our day to the horror of the Holocaust, for which he used, by preference, the Hebrew term Shoah.
    Recalling the ways in which the generations following 1492 had come to see their tribulation from a spiritual perspective, he asked, "Are we ready to find a transcendental meaning for the Shoah?"
    To this reply, which was a quiet challenge to his audience, was contained in a few words, those of a historian who is also a humanist: "It is too early. We are not yet ready." But like his predecessors, he left the door open for hope.
    The listeners paid the lecturer the tribute of silence, before breaking into prolonged applause. Professor Oberman, sensing the meditative mood of the audience, decided to dispense with questions and to allow them to take their own thoughts home with them. It was a moment of long perspective on the workings of history.
    This remarkable feast of knowledge concluded the following day when Professor Yerushalmi, at a reception in his honor at Professor and Mrs. Oberman's home, spoke of the work done by the students involved in Professor Oberman's graduate program. "He is equipping outstanding students with exceptional historical skills and high motivation to spread the study of the medieval era. He is training them in the perspective of human history freed from the dogmatic prejudices which have bedeviled them in the past. His work here is unique in America."

From desert to Downing Street
Curtis Bostick

    I returned from Cambridge, England, with several computer disks filled with notes, transcriptions, and translations of late medieval texts, dozens of microfilm copies of manuscripts, hard-to-come-by books purchased in wonderful second-hand stores, and an insatiable appetite for my favorite cuisine—American fast food. Previously, I had nourished my mind as I researched manuscripts primarily written by the Lollards, England's prominent group of 'dissenters' before the Reformation of the sixteenth century. I actually handled their books and gazed at their writing, often aided by a magnifying glass as I attempted to decipher late medieval script. This work was accomplished at the University of Cambridge Manuscripts Room, the British Library, Department of Manuscripts, and at the glorious Bodleian Library in Oxford, still so medieval in its atmosphere. I could not refrain from touching the walls of the staircase as I ascended to Duke Humfrey's reading room where the manuscripts are 'fetched.'
    I was grateful that my family was able to accompany me due to the generosity of the Division in providing additional funds beyond those granted by the Fulbright-Hays fellowship. My youngest daughter, Rebecca, learned to walk while we lived in Cambridge, while my oldest, Andreah, acquired a fine English impersonation of a rather Victorian grandmotherly type.
    Since returning to the States, I have focused primarily on writing my dissertation concerning visions of the End in Late Medieval England with some case studies involving continental examples. I have recently been invited to present my research at an international conference entitled, "Heresy and Literacy (c. 1000-1530)" to be held in Oxford this coming July. This spring semester will be very busy, but the prospect of completing my dissertation with an eye of job interviews next year should energize my efforts.

News from Tübingen
Jeff Tyler

   So what does a Division student do while on a research year in Europe?
    Well, at this very moment, I am sitting at a table, in a small room of the General State Archive of Baden (Badisches Generallandesarchiv) in Karlsruhe, Germany. For the past ten hours I have been tantalized, teased, and tortured by the documents, some 500 years old; sometimes the handwriting leaps from the page, guiding me effortlessly to new discoveries. Most of the time I grind along, word by word, sentence by sentence, piecing together the peculiar alphabet of some priestly scribe. To my left is a letter, addressed to the city of Constance by the Bishop of Chur in 1460, enquiring about two servants held captive. The writing is clear; pieces of old wax cling to the parchment where the letter was sealed 532 years ago. To my right is another letter, from the Bishop of Hildesheim to Constance in 1538. I must find out why this Roman Catholic bishop would write to a distant Protestant city on such friendly terms, in the middle of the Reformation! All the more curious since the citizens of Constance are barely on speaking terms with their own Bishop; he fled their city 12 years before. In the next room of the archive, two scholars finger documents from the nineteenth century very slowly and carefully. Ironically, my late-medieval texts, recorded on hearty parchment, will easily outlast the crumbling paper of 100 years ago. Who says the technology of the Middle Ages is primitive? Part of the so-called Dark Ages!
    This is my home from Wednesday to Friday of most weeks. In a way it is the fourth and largest stage of my research year. I began last June in Mannheim (stage one), where for eight weeks I attended the Goethe Language Institute. For four and a half hours a day, I studied conversational German with students from eight countries. A Fulbright language course followed in August/September in Regensburg (stage two). This course sought to prepare us for the German University courses and research. From October to December, I examined the library collections of the University of Tübingen. This third stage marked the very welcome arrival of my wife, Beth; oddly we live in the house of a Princeton professor in a small village outside Tübingen. During stage four, which extends to the end of my fellowship, I work in archival collections, beginning here in Karlsruhe and moving eventually to Munich.
    When my eyes struggle to follow the text, I have only to turn to my surroundings, to a Europe and former Soviet Union being reborn and reshaped into a new world. The dramatic changes of the last two years give me fresh energy for encounter with late-medieval Europeans who faced a world as uncertain as our own; they would experience the division of the church, the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, and savage wars which would decimate the German people. Perhaps they felt as anxious and angry as the three men who screamed at us violently, "Foreigners GET OUT," while we walked down a darkened street in Erfurt (in former East Germany).
    As I carefully bind up these manuscripts on my table and contemplate my train ride back to Tübingen, I am wondering about the Bishop of Hildesheim. But I am asking, as well, how can I bring these two very different and volatile worlds together for my students.

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