Small Batch Dispatch | Venetian Yiddish??

Friends, it's been too long.

I had a grand vision for the blog post I had promised you. It was going to be insightful, full of research to back up what I think is a fascinating story. And, it was going to be ready by now.

This topic has proven to be more elusive than I had realized it would be - after a few failed starts, I realized that I needed to refine the question that I wanted to ask, to make it more specific [read: researchable]. I also came to find that the sources I wanted to utilize were more difficult to procure than I had realized they would be. Also, I learned that traveling for work and buying a new house would prove to be far more demanding of my time than I realized they would be. So, by long way of apology, I wanted to assure that I will have something [hopefully] stimulating [hopefully] soon about the twisted and beautiful journey of the Hebrew language, and to thank you for being patient.

But don't despair, for I *do* have another Small Batch Dispatch to share with you. And it is about Jewish languages, at least!

I was driving home today and heard an interview on NPR about a new production of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" that's touring Washington, D.C. and which stars Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones, anyone?) as Shylock. In the interview they played a clip of some dialogue that had been added to the play (a comedy that is notorious for being, overall, rife with anti-Semitic themes and concepts) by The Globe, and I was surprised to hear that it was Shylock and his daughter Jessica speaking to each other in Yiddish.

Jonathan Pryce and his real-life daughter Phoebe as Shylock and Jessica (image courtesy http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre/136020/review-the-merchant-venice)

My first thought upon hearing it was "Wait, is that Yiddish?"
My second thought was "Hmm, that's kind of an interesting choice."
And my third thought was "Wait, did the Jewish community of 16th century Venice even speak Yiddish?"

I had always thought that the Jewish community of Venice at the time that Shylock would have been alive (the time of the Renaissance in Europe, approximately) was largely descended from Jews who had fled Spain after 1492, and that they would have thus spoken Ladino (the language of the Jews who lived in Spain until they were expelled) or at least not Yiddish (which is the language of Jews from Germany and Central/Eastern Europe). However, it turns out that I was only partly correct - the Jewish community that was eventually allowed to settle in Venice was itself a melange of Jews from many different places, but it was divided into not one but two ghettos. The Ghetto Nuovo ("new ghetto") contained Jews of German and Italian extraction, and so it is likely to presume that Yiddish could have been spoken by the people who lived there. The Ghetto Vecchio ("old ghetto") was populated with Jews who had fled from Spain and Portgual - Yiddish would not have been the lingua franca of that community. (You can read more about that here)

So far, then, it seems plausible that Shylock and Jessica could have argued with one another in Yiddish. However, in thinking about Shylock's status as a wealthy merchant dealing with the Venetian ruling class of his day, it seems more likely that Shylock and Jessica would have been part of the Spanish/Portuguese Jewish community in the Ghetto Vecchio - that community was wealthier, more powerful, and overall more prominent than the Ashkenazi community living in the Ghetto Nuovo.

One thing I don't know is whether, at the time of Shakespeare's writing, the Jews of Spain/Portugal would have reached the prominence they eventually achieved over the Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Venice, and thus if the Jews of Venice at the time would have been known in Shakespeare's time as speaking Ladino or Yiddish (in addition to Italian and Spanish). (And you can read more about that here). Is that something that Shakespeare would have even known or cared about - which language Shylock would have spoken in the privacy of his own home?

Either way, it's interesting to ponder the accuracy of The Globe's decision to give Shylock a more sympathetic background by giving him and his daughter a scene in which they speak in their "native" tongue. The intention is noble enough - Pryce speaks convincingly of his view of Shylock as representative today of the outsider, the maligned immigrant, the feared "other," and so giving him a bigger dose of humanity is surely important. However, is it historically accurate to assume that Shylock would have spoken Yiddish? Of course, Yiddish is (after Hebrew) the language most commonly associated with Jews today, and so having Shylock speak Yiddish highlights his Jewishness and otherness for modern audiences in a way that they can relate to, perhaps more than if they had him and Jessica speak to each other in Ladino (which far fewer people might recognize), but the question of authenticity remains.

What's more, the question of authenticity is also connected to the integrity with which the story of the Jews is told - if Shylock speaks in Yiddish, but a Jew of his time and community would have actually spoken Ladino, are we not obfuscating the historical world and story of the Jews of Spain, and their descedants? Are we not flattening the story to make it more palatable to modern theatergoers, and thus denying it some of its truth?

Small Batch Dispatch - AJC Global Forum 2016

I know that I said that my next post would be about the Hebrew language. And it will be. But I had to interrupt my radio silence to share an amazing experience that I am currently having.

I'm attending the American Jewish Committee's Global Forum this year, which is a gathering of advocates, community leaders, journalists diplomats and thought-influencers on a range of issues relating to the Jewish world and global Jewish advocacy. As you can imagine, that covers a range of issues that impact policy on the local, national and global level, which means that I have been nurturing my Jewish policy-wonk side pretty hard. And loving it. I'm going to aim to do a series of smaller posts sharing some of the experiences that I find to be particularly profound, including this one.

Tonight I had the opportunity to hear The Honorable Vian Dakhil, the sole Yazidi member of the Iraqi Parliament, speak about her experience raising awareness of the plight of Iraq's Yazidis at the hands of ISIS. When ISIS began its catastrophic takeover of much of Iraq, they systematically targeted the Yazidi minority for persecution and extinction. The situation became so dire that Ms. Dakhil made a singular plea to her fellow Members of Parliament to send badly needed assistance to the Yazidis and save them from near certain annihilation. 

Thanks to her efforts, thousands of Yazidis have been saved, but thousands of Yazidi men have been murdered and thousands of Yazidi women and girls have been sold by ISIS into sexual slavery. Dakhil spoke tonight to the Global Forum about her efforts and the plight of her people as she accepted the AJC's Moral Courage award. 

I haven't yet come across a clip of her remarks from tonight, but here is the introduction video:

Here also is her plea to the Iraqi Parliament. If you don't know her name, or know the story of the Yazidis, you should.

Her words were so powerful, the story she tells so devastating, that I was moved to tears by the enormity of what was being presented to us. After the Holocaust, the world vowed "Never Again," and yet we have seen time and again that genocide continues. It is not often that we have the opportunity to be in the presence of someone who puts action to the vow of "Never Again," and who reminds us that courage in the face of the most irascible evil is possible. 

I want my blog to be a vessel through which I explore deeply Jewish issues that resonate with me. I cannot think of more Jewish values than those of pursuing life over death, of exhibiting courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and of standing on the side of the persecuted. This may have been one of the most poignant (and poignantly Jewish) moments I have ever experienced. 

That's all for tonight. A lot of to think about.

New topic in the works - Hebrew!

Hey everyone,

Thanks for stopping by and checking out my blog so far! I had a blast learning and writing about The Golem - its history and its enduring meaning - and have been thinking for a while about what I want to investigate next. And it has to do with the Hebrew language.

Language has always fascinated me as a tool of communication, of expression, and of conveying identity. I am amazed at the number of languages there are (for now, of course...), and at the unique musicality and history that each one offers. And one cannot arguably engage with the history of the Jews without also encountering the miracle that is the story of Hebrew. I'd like to look at the idea of the Hebrew language as a unifying force among Jewish communities throughout history - when did it serve a unifying purpose, and when did it not? What major shifts have happened to Hebrew and the use of "Jewish languages" from the time of Biblical Hebrew to the Modern Hebrew spoken in Israel today? What lessons from the past (and present) can we take with us into the future?

So, as always, stay tuned - I hope to have the next post up within the coming weeks.

He is the Golem/We are the Golem

It's here! The first blog post is finally here. Thank you for being patient - I know it's been a few weeks, and I hope that what I present below is interesting enough to have made the wait worthwhile.

1. How widespread was the Golem - was it a widely adopted practice for communities to make Golems, or are these stories about the Golem largely apocryphal?

First, I'll give a very quick initial answer to the question - stories about making Golems are abundant in Jewish and, later, non-Jewish sources. From the Torah to the Talmud through to the Middle Ages and the 21st century, the Golem is an incredibly well known and well-traveled story. I did not come across any sociological or anthropological evidence suggesting that communities regularly engaged in Golem-making (i.e. no archaeological digs revealing ancient Golems, for instance), but I found plenty of tales about the Golem that speak to its importance as a symbolic figure. It's not that I found an answer to prove or disprove my question, but more likely that I just worded it slightly wrong.
Golems are ancient, abundant and enduring as a powerful metaphor for issues of power, defenselessness, the anxiety brought on my technology and the modern world, and Man's relation to the Divine. The concept of the Golem has its origins in the Tanakh, specifically Psalms 139:16 (1):

16. Your eyes saw my unformed body, and on Your book they were all written; days have been formed and one of them is His.

טזגָּלְמִי | רָאוּ עֵינֶיךָ וְעַל סִפְרְךָ כֻּלָּם יִכָּתֵבוּ יָמִים יֻצָּרוּ וְלוֹ (כתיב וְלֹא) אֶחָד בָּהֶם:

The root from which we derive the word "Golem" is ג.ל.מ, which appears in this passage as a contraction meaning "my unformed substance" - Galmi (גלמי) or "Golem sheli" (גלם שלי). The word we use today, "Golem," comes from this root referring to an unformed substance, and the process of creating a Golem referred to creating a human-like being from such a substance. From there, when Jewish sages partook in the act of making Golems, at least in the early days, the process actually referred to the act of divine Creation they were seeking to emulate. Indeed, an important distinction is that a Golem is considered "unformed" in that it doesn't possess a soul or the capacity for independent will, and so the act of Golem making was not seen to be on the same spiritual level as the "capital C" Creation reserved for G-d. (1)

Throughout history, the underlying purpose for creating a Golem, and thus the metaphorical role the Golem has played in communal folklore, has changed somewhat. The view of a Golem and the act of its creation as having an essentially religious and mystical foundation, however, has seemed to stay relatively consistent. Jewish sages drew on the writings of the kabbalistic "Book of Creation" (Sefer Yetzirah) as their instructional manual for creating a Golem. The act of creating a Golem was considered to be so deeply spiritual, in fact, that it was believed that only those scholars who were sufficiently learned and spiritually pure were qualified enough to attempt it. (2)

Until about the 12th Century C.E., Golem-making was seen largely as a mystical journey unto itself and seems to have been more of a meditative, spiritual experience. (3) It could be said that the experience, the attempt to approach the Divine in the ability to create, was the end in itself - as opposed to the making of an actual quasi-human. A shift appears to happen around the 12th Century C.E., though, in which tales emerge of Jewish communities in Spain making Golems who helped with household tasks. This is, it seems, the first transition in the conception of the Golem from being a purely metaphorical concept into the physical result of a mystical process. (4)

This transition went a step further several centuries later, when Golem tales took on a slightly more perilous element. Not only were Golems created for the purpose of helping humans with tasks, in some Golem tales they now possessed the capacity to grow larger each day and to ultimately overpower their masters, wreaking havoc and destruction in their wake. (5) I'd like to make a brief note here that this appears to be, at least from what I could gather, one of the earlier examples of where Golem stories seem to take two slightly divergent branches - in the first branch (what I'll call Type 1), the emphasis rests on the Golem as a protective force, although it does possess the tendency towards chaos. This type of story seems to be more common among Jewish sources, compared to what I'd call the second branch or Type 2, where the Golem not only tends to become more powerful than its creator but is a more destructive, violent force. From my reading it seems that Type 1 Golem stories were more common within Jewish communities, and that the story morphed once it moved beyond the boundaries of Jewish communities to contain the tendency towards violence and destruction seen in Type 2.

If you're looking into examples of these Types of stories, I'd recommend the following as examples: (6)

Туре 1

• Ibn Gavirol - 12th Century Spain 
• Rabbi Eleazar of Worms 
• Rabbi Elijah of Chelm - 16th Century Eastern Europe 
• Rabbi Judah Loew ben Betzalel- the Maharal and Golem of Prague - 16th century 
• Rabbi Yudl Rosenberg - 19th Century Poland

Туре 2

• Jakob Grimm's translation of the Golem story into German - 18th Century Germany
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (You're probably thinking "Wait, what??!?"I know, but don't worry. I'll explain.)

The two distinct journeys that the Golem story has taken offer significant insights within each Type. I think the Type 1 or "Jewish-facing" versions of the story offer compelling insights for Question 2, and that the Type 2 versions of the story, those that have proliferated beyond the borders of the Jewish world, provide a helpful lens for Question 3.

2. How did this change of perspective on/approach to self-defense - from one in which Jews made an instrument of protection with their hands to one in which Jews physically took their protection into their own hands - intersect with changing ideas of Jewish destiny and the nature of the world?

I'm still searching for an exact quotation linking my rabbi's anecdote about the Israel Defense Forces as the "new Golem" of the Jewish people to David Ben Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir or any other such figure in Israeli history. There may not be one that I can easily find. 

But that's okay - the idea itself is still compelling. After all, this whole topic is about folklore, so perhaps it's fitting that this anecdote is part of the modern folklore of the Jewish people - perhaps not attributable to a specific person but illustrative of the sentiments of a given era. Golems have existed for centuries as mythical protective figures in Jewish lore, created by Jews to meet the external threats against them. The IDF, too, you could say, was created by the Jews to defend themselves against the new external threats of a modern world and a tough neighborhood.

Second, in the course of researching this topic I came to the realization that there is perhaps a better way to think about the question, since Golems exist primarily in folklore and are not widespread as actual, physical artifacts (that I know of). However, the formation of the State of Israel in the aftermath of the destruction of the world that birthed the Golem-as-Protector suggests and illustrates a change in the way that Jews viewed protection and self-defense. Ideas of Jewish destiny had, in fact, been evolving over the centuries - from the eras of Emancipation and Enlightenment in the 18th Century (in which Jews entered non-Jewish societies for the first time as [supposedly] equal citizens of the nations in which they lived) through to the rise of political Zionism and Jewish nationalism in the late 19th Century and early 20th century (in which Jewish sovereignty in the form of returning to the Land of Israel after centuries of exile was seen as the only way to ensure the Jews' security and wellbeing). (7) 

What I think is noteworthy about this shift is that it seems to have been driven by largely secular ways of seeing the world and the role of the Jewish people in that role, whereas I'd argue that the Golem emerged from a view of the world that was largely spiritual/religious in nature. Golem-making was done by sages deeply rooted in Jewish thought and kabbalah and was, of course, folkloric and metaphysical; the IDF and the State of Israel, on the other hand, were established mainly by secular Zionists, Jews who had decided forgo the religious prescript to wait for period of exile to come to an end with the return of the Messiah and instead took matters (and destiny) into their own hands. The Golem was folkloric and perhaps reflects a mindset - creating an instrument of defense while waiting for the larger Redemption to be brought by G-d - where the IDF and State of Israel are very tangible. The roots for both, however are the same - deeply grounded in Judaism, Jewish history and the Jewish outlook on the world - as is the overall goal of self-defense, but the philosophical underpinnings appear to be arguably different.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, discussions about the IDF as the "new Golem" of the Jewish people have taken several forms. Interestingly, the coloration of the Golem story with shades of both the benevolent (protective) and perilous persist when applied to the Israeli military power. Within this type of discourse, the Golem serves as a metaphor through to contemplate the point beyond which the protective defense provided by the IDF risks outgrowing the original purpose and values that it was established to defend, and the very real external threats that Israel faces. (8) Additionally, the Golem has made several appearances in graphic novels by Israeli writers, including in the work of Israeli graphic novelist Eli Eshed, and in those works the theme of protector manifests itself into a superhero narrative. (9)

Elsewhere in the world of literature, the Golem tale still caries a great deal of currency. Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay centers around the Golem of Prague in the context of World War II, and also incorporates the history of comic books in America and the Jewish immigrant experience of the early to mid 20th Century. The Golem of Prague is arguably the most famous of the Golem stories, and it exemplifies the Golem-as-protector idea. It was created to protect the Jewish community from the numerous external threats it faced, although the Golem's creator (Rabbi Judah Loew ben Betzalel) installed an emergency brake of sorts that could be used to stop the Golem if it began to run amok. The Golem was activated when the letters אמת (emet - "truth") were carved on his forehead, and when a slip of paper bearing the word שם (shem - "name" - a reference to the ineffable Name of Gd) was removed from his mouth. To deactivate the Golem, the first letter of אמת (emet) needed to be erased so that only מת (met - "dead") remained, and the slip of paper was reinserted. The Golem supposedly still rests in repose in its original home, the Altneu Shul in Prague's Jewish Quarter, which draws thousands of visitors each year.**

These pictures are from our trip to Prague back in 2012 - on the left is the Rabbi Loew's grave in the synagogue of Prague's Jewish Quarter, and on the right is the Altneue Shul (just a few steps away), where the Golem still lives to this day...

3. (Or, really, 2b) What relationship exists between the view of the Golem and the emergence of the Enlightenment and a swing towards the scientific vs. mystical view of the world and its origins?

Apparently, a pretty strong one. There are many examples in each Type of Golem story that warn about the dangers inherent in attempting to engage in the act of creation, no matter how benign or noble the purpose. As I mentioned above, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was inspired by the Golem stories. At first I was really surprised to learn this, but then I thought about it some more and it makes a lot of sense. Frankenstein was published at around the same time that Golem stories were entering German and European discourse and literature, having migrated beyond the Jewish world through emerging sociologists, anthropologists and the like documenting the stories and sharing them with a broader audience. (10) This also coincided with the Enlightenment period in Europe, when modern approaches to scientific thought and inquiry were challenging the ways in which humanity had previously engaged with technology. 

It is easy to imagine that a great deal of anxiety and trepidation accompanied what was no doubt a flourishing of ideas about the possibilities of science and reason; for that reason it's easy to see why a story like the Golem (a not-quite-human being created by humanity, that had the potential to both defend and overpower it) would find a new meaning among non-Jewish audiences. Instead of serving a benign role, however, Frankenstein's monster is the opposite. Shelley's story serves as a meditation on the risks and hubris involved in creating artificial intelligence and traversing the boundary between life/aliveness and death/deadness, and Dr. Frankenstein represents both the audacity of the human imagination and the arrogance of those who engage in such work yet ignore or underestimate the inherent risks.

These same themes continue to fascinate and occupy our imaginations today, and I believe that they will continue to do so as long as we struggle with the benefits and challenges posed by advances in technology and efforts to automate and re-create human behavior/humanity.

**Additional Notes

One of the most fascinating things that I learned about the Golem story as we know it is that many of its singular elements - the Blood Libel accusation leveled against the Jews by their Christian neighbors, the persecution of the Jewish community by the anti-Semitic priest Thaddeus, etc - were inserted into the Golem tale by Rabbi Yudl Rosenberg, who was writing in Poland in the late 19th century. Anti-Jewish discrimination and violence was, to be sure, a factor of Jewish life for the Jews of Rabbi Loew's Prague, but there are no reported instances of the Blood Libel being leveled against the Jews of Prague during Rabbi Loew's time in Prague; they were, however, a staple of Eastern European Jewish life during Rosenberg's time. What's more, Rabbi Loew himself was not thought to have believed in magic or the occult. He was a learned scholar, however, and is thought to have discussed kabbalah and mysticism with the Holy Roman Emperor himself, thus positioning him well to be associated with Golem tales (in line with the requirement that only wise sages versed in kabbalah could create them). Golem Redux focuses attention on this fascinating theory behind how the Golem tale has arrived to us in most well-known form-picking up elements throughout history to reflect the realities of Jewish life in each contemporary time. (11)

Concluding Thoughts...

It's been really fun researching this topic. Exploring for the sake of exploration in this way is like combining all of the things I loved about academic research as a student without the pressure of publishing! 

I've left some footnotes below giving some more information about the sources I referred to for this piece. Any errors are my own.

Because of the parameters I placed on myself for this blog, I had to cut this post off at a certain point and realized that there would be questions raised through the research process that I would not be able to address here. I fully welcome your thoughts on this post and on these other questions that came to mind, so please leave me a [constructive-if-not-positive] comment! 

Some footnotes... 

1. I learned about about this source through a Torah on Tap series at a local synagogue- this most recent series focused on the mythical, fantastical and paranormal in Judaism, including but not limited to the Golem. (I found the above translation here).
2. Another invaluable resource for this research was The Golem Redux: From Prague to Post-Holocaust History by Elizabeth R. Baer. This work focuses largely on the ways that Golem narratives have operated and morphed over the millennia, and was helpful in piecing together the distinctions I've noted between Golem stories within and beyond Jewish communities. Pg. 17-19.
3. Ibid, Pg. 20.
4. Ibid, Pg. 20-21.
5. Ibid, Pg. 21-22. 
6. This categorization of types of Golem stories is, admittedly, incomplete as I am sure there are many other stories in contemporary literature that could also be included. The Golem Redux was a major source for many of these titles (Pgs. 20-31). 
7. The evolution of Jewish political theory as it relates to Jewish sovereignty is a really fascinating one, and one that I did not have space for within the confines of this particular topic. I'll leave the history of the Jewish people that to the masters - Max I. Dimont's Jews, God and History first opened my eyes to how dramatic and bad-ass Jewish history is, and Simon Schama's documentary series "The Story of the Jews" captures that same drama in striking visual detail. I also recommend Ruth R. Wisse's Jews and Power for the way it delves into a multi-layered topic deftly and forcefully. I am working my way through it, and am also utilizing it for my next blog topic. So stay tuned! :)
8. This article in the Jerusalem Post, and this article in Ha'aretz, uses the Golem metaphor to different but equally illustrative effect. I don't necessarily ascribe to either viewpoint, but I think that it's interesting to see how the ideas behind the Golem story are applied in different ways to the IDF.
9. You can learn more about Eli Eshed and his Golem comic here and here.
10. The Golem Redux. Pgs. 26-28.
11. Ibid, Pgs. 30-31.

Inter-post Post - the Crowd has spoken!

Shalom friends,

Rest assured that I am diving deep into my first topic for this blog, and I'm already learning some pretty amazing things. I can't wait to share it with you as soon as I'm able to wrap my brain around enough to make for both interesting reading and a somewhat coherent perspective/interpretation.

But in the meantime, I wanted to take a break and say thank you for the great ideas with which you showered me when I put out a call for ideas for what to name this fledgling project! It was tough to choose which one would become the new official blog name, but I am ready to reveal the winner...

Going forward, and thanks to the creativity of my friend and fellow Hebraeophile** Merav Fine, I'm going to call this blog "Jewbilation: for the love of all things Israelite." It's a pretty perfect title because it not only captures how I feel when writing and researching for this blog, but it also has hints of all of the wonderful and goofy components of Jewish-ness that I think are so great - the many names we have for ourselves, the diversity of who we are, and the fact that it just feels good to celebrate it all (and there's a tie to Biblical harvest practices, too - not too shabby!).

Many thanks, Merav! :)

**Not a real word. Yet.

Topic 1 - He is the Golem/We are the Golem

The first topic that I want to write about is the role of the Golem as symbolic of a certain view of Jewish self-defense/reaction to powerlessness, and if or how the way we view the Golem has changed with the way we (the Jews) see ourselves and our own self-defense/reaction to powerlessness (real or perceived) today.

The topic was inspired by a conversation we had at a recent Torah study group held by a local synagogue about the Golem. The Golem, if you don't know, is a creature of Jewish mythology formed from mud who is given a human shape and, for the most part, performs the commands of his creator (he is for the most part devoid of his own thought or volition). The most famous version of the Golem story is the one about Rabbi Judah Loew ben Betzalel, the Chief Rabbi of Prague in the Middle Ages. Rabbi Loew, the story goes, created the Golem to protect the Jewish community from its many external threats. Other Golem stories sprang up in other Jewish communities of Europe throughout the Middle Ages.

Over the course of pouring over Biblical, Talmudic and modern texts looking at the origin of the Golem story, the rabbi leading our discussion made the comment that in the modern era, those who were part of the founding of the Israel Defense Forces chose to see themselves as the "new Golem" of the Jewish people - the new defender of the Jewish people. He said it almost as an after thought, but when he said it I could feel it grip me and refuse to let go. This subtle comment struck me with the sense that the tonal shift he described could symbolize something pretty significant about the ways in which Jewish communities think about themselves in relation to their surroundings, has or hasn't changed over the millennia. But what?

Here are some of the questions I think I'll explore with this topic:
1. How widespread was the Golem - was it a widely adopted practice for communities to make Golems, or are these stories about the Golem largely apocryphal?
2. How did this change of perspective on/approach to self-defense - from one in which Jews made an instrument of protection with their hands to one in which Jews physically took their protection into their own hands - intersect with changing ideas of Jewish destiny and the nature of the world?
3. (Or, really, 2b) What relationship exists between the view of the Golem and the emergence of the Enlightenment and a swing towards the scientific vs. mystical view of the world and its origins?

Now, like I've said, I'm giving myself a month to chew these over - some of these questions might be smaller or bigger than I'm imagining. Regardless, I'm excited to jump in!

What I think about all day...

For as long as I can remember, I've loved the stories of the Jews - our incredible history, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the role that history and collective memory have on our notions of who we are. Whenever I find myself in a bookstore, I always (consciously or unconsciously) gravitate to the sections where I can find books on Jewish-just-about-anything: history, philosophy, language, religion, etc. Even in academic settings, I couldn't/can't get enough of it - in college, my favorite research project was the one I did comparing how Hasidic Jewish and Amish communities respond to genetic diseases, and my main research in graduate school focused on how the notion of Jewish Peoplehood is currently being lassoed by Jewish communal organizations to forge community in a world where notions of Jewish identity are more fluid (and thus more ripe with possibility) than ever. What did I ask my parents for for my birthday? A cookbook examining modern notions of Jewish cooking (it's like all of my favorite things - Jewish history, food, books, pictures of food, and feeding people I love - wrapped up into one beautifully-bound volume. How could I not ask for that for my birthday??

I love learning deeply about topics related to the Jewish people - whenever my husband and I come home from a text study get-together hosted by a local synagogue, I always wonder whistfully (and audibly) "How hard would it be to get an honorary Ph.D in Jewish history? Can I just audit Jewish studies classes all day for fun?" Finally, after years of this, the other night he said to me "So then blog about it!"

He's right.

I'm going to use this space as a place to brain-dump about Jewish topics that fascinate me. I want to avoid turning this into a place where I make listicles about fun Jewish things - the internet is already really good at that - and instead use it as a place to dig deeper into ideas I find intriguing/confusing/perplexing. I want to keep my musings grounded in sources and fact as much as possible, and I welcome [constructive] comments and rigorous discussion. I want to give myself time to really do this right, so I'm going to plan for maybe a month to focus on a given topic. Maybe that's too little time, or too much - we'll see!

First of all, though, I kind of hate the working title that I have for the blog (Jew-storian? Really?) so I want to crowd-source. What would you, dear friend and reader, call this blog if you were naming it? I can't offer much in the way of a reward for the best title, other than the honor of naming rights and (if I know you and live close enough nearby) maybe some baked goods...