On the whole, however, it is safer to conclude that Judah the Prince made a contribution to written literature, that he set down at a particular moment (about 200 C.E.) the traditional book which had been writing itself for many decades, partly by the minds of the Rabbis, partly by their pens. He started the book on a new career of humane activity. Sherira and the Geonim were what they were because Judah the Prince was what he was. This is the essential fact about tradition. The more we give of our best to our age, the more chance is there for all future ages to transmit of their best to posterity.
NATHAN OF ROME’S DICTIONARY
A dictionary may seem an intruder in this gallery. The present series of cursory studies clearly is not concerned with works of technical scholarship. But the dictionary by Nathan, son of Jehiel, earns inclusion for two reasons. First, because when one surveys the expressions of the Jewish spirit, it is impossible to draw a line between learning and literature. Secondly, quite apart from this intimate general connection between the scholar and the man of letters, the dictionary of Nathan belongs specially to the course of culture. Among the Christian Humanists who, at the period of the Reformation, promoted the enlightenment of Europe, were not lacking appreciators of the services rendered to enlightenment by Nathan’s Aruk (to give it its Hebrew title).
Nathan (born about 1035 and died in 1106) was an itinerant vendor of linen wares in his youth. He belonged to the family Degli Mansi, an Italian rendering of the Hebrew Anaw or Meek. The latter is still a rare but familiar Jewish surname. Legend has it that the founder of the Degli Mansi house was one of the original settlers introduced into Rome by Titus. At all events, the family had a long record of literary fame. Like many another merchant-traveller of the Middle Ages, Nathan made use of his earlier wanderings (as he did of his later journeys), to sit at the feet of all the Gamaliels of his age. Many and various were his teachers. He abandoned business when he returned to Rome after his father’s death. He tells us how he made the arrangements for the interment, and here straightway we perceive that his Aruk is no ordinary dictionary. For in the poem, which he appends as a kind of retrospective preface, he records how sternly he had ever disapproved of the expenses incurred at Jewish funerals in his time. Protests were vain, but example was more fruitful. In place of the double cerements in common use, he laid his father in his tomb with a single shroud. This, he records, became the model for others to imitate. Death was a frequent visitor in his abode. Of his four sons, none survived the eighth year, one not even his eighth day. Grief did not crush him. “I found sorrow and trouble, then I called on the name of the Lord,” he quotes. He proceeded to erect a house of another kind. Not of flesh and blood, but vital with the spirit of Judaism, his Aruk is a monument more lasting than ten children.
In what, then, does the importance of the dictionary consist? It is, of course, primarily, what Graetz terms it, “a key to the Talmud.” No doubt there were earlier compilations of a similar nature, but Nathan’s book was the most renowned of its own age, and became the basis of every subsequent lexicon to the Talmud. Gentile and Jew, from Buxtorf to Dalman and from Musafia to Jastrow, employed it as the ground-work of their own lexicographical research. Moreover, it was again and again edited and enlarged; but we are not dealing here with bibliographical details. Suffice it to mention the final edition by Alexander Kohut. Kohut began his Aruch Completum while a European Rabbi in 1878, and finished it in New York in 1892. It is remarkable that two of the best modern lexicons to the Talmud (Kohut’s in Hebrew and Jastrow’s in English) both emanate from America.
Besides its value for understanding the text of the Talmud, Nathan’s Aruk has earned other claims to fame. Nathan’s dictionary marks an epoch, says Vogelstein. Consider the situation. The centre of Jewish authority was leaving Babylon. The last of the great literary Geonim—or Excellencies, as the heads of the Babylonian schools were called—died in the year 1038. Europe was replacing Asia as the scene of Jewish life. Was the old tradition to die? At the very moment of the crisis, three men arose to prevent the chain snapping. They were almost contemporaries, and their works supplemented each other. There was the Frenchman Rashi—the commentator; the Spaniard al-Fasi—the codifier; and the Italian Nathan—the lexicographer. Between them they re-established in Europe the tradition of the Gaonate. The Babylonian schools might come and go; they might for a time enjoy hegemony, and then fall into decay; but the Torah must go on forever!
The manner in which this dictionary carried on the tradition is easily told. Much of the lore it contains, explanations of words and of things, must have been orally acquired in direct conversations with those who were personally linked with the older régime. It is again full of quotations of the decisions and customary lore of the Babylonian schools. If on this side the Aruk has almost played out its part for us, it is not because those decisions and customs are less interesting to us than they were to our fathers. But we are now in possession of very many of the gaonic writings in their original. We have recovered several of the sources from which Nathan drew. The Egyptian Genizah—that wonderfully preserved mass of the relics of Hebrew literature—has yielded its richest harvest just in this field. We are getting to know more about the thought and manner of life of the eighth to the eleventh centuries than we know about our own time. But for a long interval men’s knowledge of those centuries was largely derived from the Aruk. As a source of information it is not even now superseded. There still remain authors whose names and works would be lost but for Rabbi Nathan’s quotations.
Another aspect of the book which makes it so valuable for the history of culture among the Jews is the number of languages which Nathan uses. What an array it is! Kohut enumerates (besides Hebrew and Aramaic) Latin, Greek, Arabic, Slavonic dialects, Persian, and Italian and allied speeches. Nathan cannot have known all these languages well. He certainly had little Latin and less Greek, but he repeated what he had heard from others or read in their books. It is remarkable, indeed, how well the sense of Greek words was transmitted by Jewish writers who were ignorant of Greek. They often are not even aware that the words are Greek at all; they suggest the most impossible Semitic derivations; but they very rarely give the meanings incorrectly. This applies less to the Italian than to the German Jewish scholars. I mean that the former had, on the whole, a more intimate acquaintance with the classical idioms. In the case of Nathan’s Aruk the languages cited do imply a wide and varied culture. Most interesting is Nathan’s free use of Italian. Just as we learn from the glosses in Rashi’s commentaries that the Jews of northern France spoke French, so we gather from Nathan’s dictionary that the Jews of Rome must have used Italian as the medium of ordinary intercourse.
Nathan’s Aruk, while, as we have seen, it was a link between the past and his present, was also part of the chain binding his present to the future. Nathan records the tradition as he received it, but he also points forward. Take one of his remarks, which is quoted by Güdemann. There is much in the Talmud on the subject of magic, and Nathan duly explains the terms employed. But he says: “All these statements about magic and amulets, I know neither their meaning nor their origin.” Does the reader appreciate the extraordinary significance of the statement? Nathan, the bearer of tradition, yet sees that the newer order of things also has its claims. Tradition does not consist in the denial of science. And so, though a Gaon like Hai had a pretty considerable belief in demonology, Nathan cautiously expresses his scepticism. Even more emphatically, a little later, Ibn Ezra frankly asserted that he had no belief in demons. It may be questioned whether this enfranchisement from demonological conceptions could be matched in non-Jewish thought of so early a date. The Aruk assuredly points forwards as well as backwards.
And all this we derive from a dictionary! The Aruk obviously belongs to culture as well as to philology—if the two things really can be separated. The study of words is often the study of civilization. Max Müller maintained that if you could only tell the real history of words you would thereby be telling the real history of men. He carried the idea absurdly far; but Nathan’s Aruk is a striking instance of at least the partial truth of the great Sanskrit scholar’s contention.