Highlighting: “Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate” by Yosie Levine. The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. 2024. Hardcover. 296 pages. ISBN-13:
978-1835536414.

On December 8, The Jewish Center hosted a launch for Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine’s new book, “Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate,” which is published by The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award from the Association for Jewish Studies. The event featured Rabbi Levine in discussion with Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar and professor at Yeshiva University, and Yaacob Dweck, professor of history and Judaic studies at Princeton University.

While the combined professional accomplishments of the panelists are too numerous to list, it would be remiss not to mention that Dweck’s focus is on Jews of the early modern period, Rabbi Levine holds a PhD in early modern Jewish history, and Rabbi Schacter holds a PhD from Harvard University, where he wrote his dissertation on Rabbi Jacob Emden, the son of the Hakham Tsevi. To most gathered in the room, though, Rabbi Schacter is the beloved fifth rabbi of The Jewish Center, and Rabbi Levine is the current and beloved seventh rabbi of The Jewish Center.

Rabbi Schacter began the evening by describing the accomplishments of this academic rabbinic biography: “Rabbi Levine has brought to bear an incredible rabbinic knowledge. None of the previous books dealt with, at length, a rabbinic analysis of the sugya, of the teshuva, going all the way back to the Gemara, and tracing all of the sources that relate to a specific subject. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi lends itself to that because probably the only work he published in his lifetime is a book of responsa. But we are sitting here in the presence of a massive talmid chacham.”

Continued Rabbi Schacter: “Rabbi Levine deals with the subject matter at the highest level of rabbinic knowledge and presentation.” In addition, “the book reads beautifully … It’s not just the substance and the content which is stellar, but also the way it’s presented. And that makes this book incredibly interesting and unique and very, very significant.”

The life of the Hakham Tsevi (1658-1718) was quite complicated, but the message of the evening was straightforward: What can we learn from the Hakham Tsevi, one of the leading halachic authorities of the early modern era, and, more fundamentally, who was the Hakham Tsevi?

Many know of the Hakham Tsevi because of his highly regarded responsa, his opposition to Shabbatai Tzvi and the Sabbatean movement, and his serving as the chief rabbi of Amsterdam for a time.

As explained by the panelists, there is much more to learn about the Hakham Tsevi.

Born in Moravia, the Hakham Tsevi died at the age of 59 and did not have an easy life. During a siege in current-day Budapest, his young wife and infant daughter were killed and his parents were taken captive.

He fled Budapest and ultimately married again. He trained in Sephardic yeshivot, even though he was Ashkenazi. He went to places like Belgrade, Salonika, Constantinople, Sarajevo, London, Amsterdam and Breslau, to name just a few. A scholar and leader, the Hakham Tsevi was strong-willed, and, stating it mildly, did not always leave communities under the best of circumstances.

Setting the stage for the substantive discussion of the evening, Dweck detailed some of the challenges of the early modern period that impacted the Hakham Tsevi’s relationship with his communities.

First, the expulsion of Jews from Western Europe caused extraordinary conflict within the Jewish community in the 16th and 17th centuries as there was friction between different populations. Next, there was the advent of the printing press, which changed how knowledge was obtained and “could be very, very dangerous for a rabbinic elite that doesn’t want to be challenged.” In addition, the mystical phenomenon of kabbalah became a public part of Jewish culture over the course of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Finally, of course, there was Shabbatai Tvzi, who claimed to be the Messiah and founded the Sabbatean movement.

Adding another layer of complication to this era was the concept of the “Port Jew” which, as Rabbi Levine explained, typically refers to Jews living in Sephardic communities in port cities like London or Amsterdam. Rabbi Levine reflected on his belief that rabbis who ministered to these communities were special because port cities are likely heterogenous, which creates all kinds of opportunities and problems.

Rabbi Schacter—who has a deep understanding of the pulpit of The Jewish Center and the diverse community that the Modern Orthodox synagogue in Manhattan serves—asked Rabbi Levine to identify the lessons he could learn from the Hakham Tsevi and his experiences in port cities, ministering to multifaceted communities.

Rabbi Levine responded: “The first message of Hakham Tsevi, which I think has a lot of resonance in this moment, is his extraordinary capacity for resilience, which is to say, that he suffered tragedy after tragedy, and look what he manages to do. He keeps pushing forward, and he keeps on standing for principle, and he keeps on producing, and he publishes this work which lasts for 300 years and counting.

“And so I think the first and maybe most important message from Hakham Tsevi for our moment, particularly as we stand here 14 months after October 7, thinking about things like a siege, people in captivity, and people who were murdered, is this capacity to move forward to the next chapter and to embrace this amazing resilience.”

The second message is the “ability to stand for principle. Hakham Tsevi, wherever he went, was uncompromising. He stood for something, he believed what he believed, and if somebody didn’t like it, it was of no consequence to him. “[His] principle was more important than [his] career or [his] job or [his] house or anything else.”

Rabbi Levine also noted that the mystery of the Hakham Tsevi is one of the reasons he was drawn to a man “who has this deep-rooted Ashkenazic background and yet feels so comfortable training and living in the world of Sephard and then he adopts not a small number of Sephardic practices, which he integrates into his own identity.”

“He was a pursuer of truth. And if he believed that the Sephardic minhag was better sourced or more deeply rooted, or more legitimate, then OK. Then we want to pursue that kind of reasoning because it’s going to get us closer to the truth.”

Addressing the audiences he had in mind when he was writing this book, Rabbi Levine stated: “I wrote this book … to make a contribution to the scholarship [as well as] to promote conversations like this and to have people wonder aloud about what relevance these stories and these episodes can have for our contemporary lives.”

Rabbi Levine also wrote this book for students: “They are learning in the beis medrash and they come across a teshuva. My hope is that, in some way, this book will help broaden the horizon of that student to see something beyond the page.”

As to questions yet unanswered about the Hakham Tsevi, “for every fact that we can point to and say, ‘I know this about the Hakham Tsezvi,’ there are a hundred things that I wish I knew that I can’t know.”

“I wrote this book as an opening gambit. My hope is that the next scholar will come along and build upon it and answer the questions that maybe got identified but were left unsolved or unresolved. I hope, at the very least, it pushes the conversation forward.”

“Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate” is available for purchase on Amazon.

Judith Falk is the creator of the Upper West Side Shtetl Facebook Group. You can follow her on instagram @nyc.shtetl. She is a lawyer by day and a former legal reporter.