The Book of Delight, and other papers

by Israel Abrahams

Gibbon's account of the Roman post recalls another Jewish institution, which may have been somehow connected with the Bê-Davvar. The official custodian of the goat that was sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement was allowed, if he should feel the necessity—a necessity which, according to tradition, never arose—to partake of food even on the fast-day. For this purpose huts were erected along the route, and men provided with food were stationed at each of these huts to meet the messenger and conduct him some distance on his way.

That the postal system cannot have been very much developed, is clear from the means adopted to announce the New Moon in various localities. This official announcement certainly necessitated a complete system of communication. At first, we are told (Rosh ha-Shanah, ii, 2), fires were lighted on the tops of the mountains; but the Samaritans seem to have ignited the beacons at the wrong time, so as to deceive the Jews. It was, therefore, decided to communicate the news by messenger. The mountain-fires were prepared as follows: Long staves of cedar-wood, canes, and branches of the olive-tree were tied up with coarse threads or flax; these were lighted as torches, and men on the hills waved the brands to and fro, upward and downward, until the signal was repeated on the next hill, and so forth. When messengers were substituted for these fire signals, it does not appear that they carried letters; they brought verbal messages, which they seem to have shouted out without necessarily dismounting from the animals they rode. Messages were not sent every month, but only six times a year; and a curious light is thrown on the means of communication of the time, by the legal decision that anyone was to be believed on the subject, and that the word of a passing merchant who said that "he had heard the New Moon proclaimed," was to be accepted unhesitatingly. Nowadays, busy men are sometimes put out by postal vagaries, but they hardly suffer to the extent of having to fast two days. This calamity is recorded, however, in the Jerusalem Talmud, as having, on a certain occasion, resulted from the delay in the arrival of the messengers announcing the New Moon.

Besides the proclamation of the New Moon, other official documents must have been despatched regularly. "Bills of divorce," for instance, needed special messengers; the whole question of the legal position of messengers is very intimately bound up with that of conveying divorces. This, however, seems to have been the function of private messengers, who were not in the strict sense letter-carriers at all. It may be well, in passing, to recall one or two other means of communication mentioned in the Midrash. Thus we read how Joshua, with twelve thousand of his warriors, was imprisoned, by means of witchcraft, within a sevenfold barrier of iron. He resolves to write for aid to the chief of the tribe of Reuben, bidding him to summon Phineas, who is to bring the "trumpets" with him. Joshua ties the message to the wings of a dove, or pigeon, and the bird carries the letter to the Israelites, who speedily arrive with Phineas and the trumpets, and, after routing the enemy, effect Joshua's rescue. A similar idea may be found in the commentary of Kimchi on Genesis. Noah, wishing for information, says Kimchi, sent forth a raven, but it brought back no message; then he sent a dove, which has a natural capacity for bringing back replies, when it has been on the same way once or twice. Thus kings train these birds for the purpose of sending them great distances, with letters tied to their wings. So we read (Sabbath, 49) in the Talmud that "a dove's wings protect it," i.e. people preserve it, and do not slay it, because they train it to act as their messenger. Or, again, we find arrows used as a means of carrying letters, and we are not alluding to such signals as Jonathan gave to David. During the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Emperor had men placed near the walls of Jerusalem, and they wrote the information they obtained on arrows, and fired them from the wall, with the connivance, probably, of the philo-Roman party that existed within the doomed city.

In earlier Bible times, there was, as the Tell-el-Amarna bricks show, an extensive official correspondence between Canaan and Egypt, but private letter-writing seems not to have been resorted to; messages were transmitted orally to the parties concerned. This fact is well illustrated by the story of Joseph. He may, of course, have deliberately resolved not to communicate with his family, but if letter-writing had been usual, his brothers would naturally have asked him—a question that did not suggest itself to them—why he had never written to tell his father of his fortunes. When Saul desired to summon Israel, he sent, not a letter, but a mutilated yoke of oxen; the earliest letter mentioned in the Bible being that in which King David ordered Uriah to be placed in the forefront of the army. Jezebel sends letters in Ahab's name to Naboth, Jehu to Samaria. In all these cases letters were used for treacherous purposes, and they are all short. Probably the authors of these plots feared to betray their real intention orally, and so they committed their orders to writing, expecting their correspondents to read between the lines. It is not till the time of Isaiah that the references to writing become frequent. Intercourse between Palestine on the one hand and Babylon and Egypt on the other had then increased greatly, and the severance of the nation itself tended to make correspondence through writing more necessary. When we reach the age of Jeremiah, this fact makes itself even more strongly apparent. Letters are often mentioned by that prophet (xxix. 25, 29), and a professional class of Soferim, or scribes, make their appearance. Afterwards, of course, the Sofer became of much higher importance; he was not merely a professional writer, but a man learned in the Law, who spread the knowledge of it among the people. Later, again, these functions were separated, and the Sofer added to his other offices that of teacher of the young. Nowadays, he has regained his earlier and less important position, for the modern Sofer is simply a professional writer. In the time of Ezekiel (ix. 2) the Sofer went abroad with the implements of his trade, including the inkhorn, at his side. In the Talmud, the scribe is sometimes described by his Latin title libellarius (Sabbath,11a). The Jews of Egypt, as may be seen from the Assouan Papyri, wrote home in cases of need in the time of Nehemiah; and in the same age we hear also of "open letters," for Sanballat sends a missive of that description by his servant; and apparently it was by means of a similar letter that the festival of Purim was announced to the Jews (Esther ix., where, unlike the other passages quoted, the exact words of the letter of Mordecai are not given). The order to celebrate Chanukah was published in the same way, and, indeed, the books of the Apocrypha contain many interesting letters, and in the pages of Josephus the Jews hold frequent intercourse in this way with many foreign countries. In the latter cases, when the respective kings corresponded, the letters were conveyed by special embassies.

One might expect this epistolary activity to display itself at an even more developed stage in the records of Rabbinical times. But this is by no means the case, for the Rabbinical references to letters in the beginning of the common era are few and far between. Polemic epistles make their appearance; but they are the letters of non-Jewish missionaries like Paul. This form of polemical writing possessed many advantages; the letters were passed on from one reader to another; they would be read aloud, too, before gatherings of the people to whom they were addressed. Maimonides, in later times, frequently adopted this method of communicating with whole communities, and many of the Geonim and other Jewish authorities followed the same plan. But somehow the device seems not to have commended itself to the earliest Rabbis. Though we read of many personal visits paid by the respective authorities of Babylon and Palestine to one another, yet they appear to have corresponded very rarely in writing. The reason lay probably in the objection felt against committing the Halachic, or legal, decisions of the schools to writing, and there was little else of consequence to communicate after the failure of Bar-Cochba's revolt against the Roman rule.

It must not be thought, however, that this prohibition had the effect we have described for very long. Rabbi Gamaliel, Rabbi Chananiah, and many others had frequent correspondence with far distant places, and as soon as the Mishnah acquired a fixed form, even though it was not immediately committed to writing, the recourse to letters became much more common. Pupils of the compilers of the Mishnah proceeded to Babylon to spread its influence, and they naturally maintained a correspondence with their chiefs in Palestine. Rab and Samuel in particular, among the Amoraim, were regular letter-writers, and Rabbi Jochanan replied to them. Towards the end of the third century this correspondence between Judea and Babylon became even more active. Abitur and Abin often wrote concerning legal decisions and the doings of the schools, and thereby the intellectual activity of Judaism maintained its solidarity despite the fact that the Jewish people was no longer united in one land. In the Talmud we frequently read, "they sent from there," viz. Palestine. Obviously these messages were sent in writing, though possibly the bearer of the message was often himself a scholar, who conveyed his report by word of mouth. Perhaps the growth of the Rabbi's practice of writing responses to questions—a practice that became so markedly popular in subsequent centuries—may be connected with the similar habit of the Roman jurists and the Christian Church fathers, and the form of response adopted by the eighth century Geonim is reminiscent of that of the Roman lawyers. The substance of the letters, however, is by no means the same; the Church father wrote on dogmatic, the Rabbi on legal, questions. Between the middle of the fourth century and the time of the Geonim, we find no information as to the use of letters among the Jews. From that period onwards, however, Jews became very diligent letter-writers, and sometimes, for instance in the case of the "Guide of the Perplexed" of Maimonides, whole works were transmitted in the form of letters. The scattering of Israel, too, rendered it important to Jews to obtain information of the fortunes of their brethren in different parts of the world. Rumors of Messianic appearances from the twelfth century onwards, the contest with regard to the study of philosophy, the fame of individual Rabbis, the rise of a class of travellers who made very long and dangerous journeys, all tended to increase the facilities and necessities of intercourse by letter. It was long, however, before correspondence became easy or safe. Not everyone is possessed of the postmen assigned in Midrashim to King Solomon, who pressed demons into his service, and forced them to carry his letters wheresoever he willed. Chasdai experienced considerable difficulty in transmitting his famous letter to the king of the Chazars, and that despite his position of authority in the Spanish State. In 960 a letter on some question of Kasher was sent from the Rhine to Palestine—proof of the way in which the most remote Jewish communities corresponded.

The question of the materials used in writing has an important bearing on our subject. Of course, the ritual regulations for writing the holy books, the special preparation of the parchment, the ink, the strict rules for the formation of the letters, hardly fall within the province of this article. In ancient times the most diverse substances were used for writing on. Palm-leaves (for which Palestine of old was famous) were a common object for the purpose, being so used all over Asia. Some authorities believe that in the time of Moses the palm leaf was the ordinary writing-material. Olive-leaves, again, were thick and hard, while carob-leaves (St. John's bread), besides being smooth, long, and broad, were evergreen, and thus eminently fitted for writing. Walnut shells, pomegranate skins, leaves of gourds, onion-leaves, lettuce-heads, even the horns of cattle, and the human body, letters being tattooed on the hands of slaves, were all turned to account. It is maintained by some that leather was the original writing-material of the Hebrews; others, again, give their vote in favor of linen, though the Talmud does not mention the latter material in connection with writing. Some time after Alexander the Great, the Egyptian papyrus became common in Palestine, where it probably was known earlier, as Jewish letters on papyrus were sent to Jerusalem from the Fayyum in the fifth century B.C.E. Even as late as Maimonides, the scrolls of the Law were written on leather, and not on parchment, which is now the ordinary material for the purpose. That the Torah was not to be written on a vegetable product was an assumed first principle. The Samaritans went so far as to insist that the animal whose hide was needed for so holy a purpose, must be slain Kasher. Similarly with divorce documents. A Get on paper would be held legal post factum, though it is not allowed to use that material, as it is easily destroyed or mutilated, and the use of paper for the purpose was confined to the East. Some allowed the Book of Esther to be read from a paper copy; other authorities not only strongly objected to this, but even forbade the reading of the Haftarah from paper. Hence one finds in libraries so many parchment scrolls containing only the Haftarahs. The Hebrew word for letter, Iggereth, is of unknown origin, though it is now commonly taken to be an Assyrian loan-word. It used to be derived from a root signifying to "hire," in reference to the "hired courier," by whom it was despatched. Other terms for letter, such as "book," "roll," explain themselves. Black ink was early used, though it is certain that it was either kept in a solid state, like India ink, or that it was of the consistency of glue, and needed the application of water before it could be used. For pens, the iron stylus, the reed, needle, and quill (though the last was not admitted without a struggle) were the common substitutes at various dates.

We must now return to the subject with which we set out, and make a few supplementary remarks with regard to the actual conveyance of letters. In the Talmud (Baba Mezia, 83b) a proverb is quoted to this effect, "He who can read and understand the contents of a letter, may be the deliverer thereof." As a rule, one would prefer that the postman did not read the correspondence he carries, and this difficulty seems to have stood in the way of trusting letters to unknown bearers. To remove this obstacle to free intercourse, Rabbenu Gershom issued his well-known decree, under penalty of excommunication, against anyone who, entrusted with a letter to another, made himself master of its contents. To the present day, in some places, the Jewish writer writes on the outside of his letter, the abbreviation [Hebrew: beth-cheth-daleth-resh-''-gimel], which alludes to this injunction of Rabbenu Gershom. Again, the Sabbath was and still is a difficulty with observant Jews. Rabbi Jose ha-Cohen is mentioned in the Talmud (Sabbath, 19a) as deserving of the following compliment. He never allowed a letter of his to get into the hands of a non-Jew, for fear he might carry it on the Sabbath, and strict laws are laid down on the subject. That Christians in modern times entrusted their letters to Jews goes without saying, and even in places where this is not commonly allowed, the non-Jew is employed when the letter contains bad news. Perhaps for this reason Rabbenu Jacob Tarn permitted divorces to be sent by post, though the controversy on the legality of such delivery is, I believe, still undecided.

Besides packmen, who would often be the medium by which letters were transmitted, there was in some Jewish communities a special class that devoted themselves to a particular branch of the profession. They made it their business to seek out lost sons and deliver messages to them from their anxious parents. Some later Jewish authorities, in view of the distress that the silence of absent loved ones causes to those at home, lay down the rule that the duty of honoring parents, the fifth commandment, includes the task of corresponding when absent from them. These peripatetic letter-carriers also conveyed the documents of divorce to women that would otherwise be in the unpleasant condition of being neither married nor single. Among the most regular and punctual of Jewish postmen may be mentioned the bearers of begging letters and begging books. There is no fear that these will not be duly delivered.

Our reference to letters of recommendation reminds us of an act, on the part of a modern Rabbi, of supererogation in the path of honesty. The post is in the hands of the Government, and, accordingly, the late Rabbi Bamberger of Wurzburg, whenever he gave a Haskamah, or recommendation, which would be delivered by hand, was wont to destroy a postage stamp, so as not to defraud the Government, even in appearance. With this remarkable instance of conscientious uprightness, we may fitly conclude this notice, suggested as it has been by the modern improvements in the postal system, which depend for their success so largely on the honesty of the public.