hello and welcome to jewish history lab we're going to continue today with more of a discussion
on the literary philosophical religious level looking at a stage in intellectual literary
development that's related to a population called the acharonim sometimes spelled a-c-h-a-r-o-n-i-m
literally that term means the latter ones like the latter authorities the later authorities and it's
a contrast to their predecessors known as the rishonim who are called the first ones whom we
spoke about in a previous class so let's go in and try to understand uh who exactly are the acharonim
and what are they all about so let me remind you of a discussion we had in a previous lecture about
this notion of the decline of the generations in hebrew yoridat hadorot the decline of the
generation there's this idea which is uh religious philosophical that the closer a population was
to the moment of revelation at sinai shown here by the way in this great picture of charlton heston
as moses in the great cecil b demille classic which had a big influence on me really i was i
was overwhelmed when i first saw this movie at any rate um there's this idea that you
know at that moment when god spoke to the jewish people as described in the bible
and they they all said wow you know and uh well there's a lot to say about that that was like the
the greatest sort of spiritual sensitivity uh on a a large population that had ever occurred in human
history and it's all been downhill since then right as we go further and further away in time
from that revelation at sinai according to jewish theology uh you know people get less
and less spiritually sensitive now this does not mean that they become less intelligent
in fact uh the there's a very basic principle that goes along with the gen decline of the
generations that later generations are considered more authoritative for a host of reasons that will
not concern us here but you know basically uh much more uh familiarity with uh social innovations
technological innovations are big uh a more of a you know grasp of material that might not have
been available to earlier generations just on a simple technical level like my phone has the
entire talmud and all of its commentaries that have ever been digitized on it right here in the
palm of my hand so in many ways i here living in the 21st century have at my moments reach you know
books that 500 years ago most scholars would never have been able to see because they were existing
only in manuscript and so on this is not the place to have a discussion of this philosophical concept
but the notion that in jewish history many of the more traditional historiographies really count
populations in the terms of how far away they are from sinai so we have for example the the
generation of sinai which is called the door daya the generation of knowledge because they
were filled to quote isaiah with the knowledge of god uh despite the behavior that's described
in the bible uh then you have like you know i'm just going to summarize some of the major
the major levels the the post-babylonian exile which represents a big step down but nevertheless
still living in the temple era second temple era of course then you have the tanayim
or the scholars associated with the mishna and this goes right up into the the third century the
early third century and then they're followed by the amor who are the main scholars associated with
the talmud and as i mentioned i'm i'm skipping over kind of like uh subdivisions within these
generations sometime after the amoraim then you have the so-called rishonim the first ones
and they represent such a significant shift in the type of thinking and the types of things they did
for research that we have a whole lecture alone on the rishonam i encourage you to go back in this
series and listen to that if you want to know more about the acharonium but that's where we are right
now the acharonim are the scholars who lived after the 16th century and they are in many ways quite
distinct from the richonim we haven't had anyone really innovate a new term for late 20th early
21st century thinkers but we might be getting close to that as i hope to discuss at the end
of this brief discussion uh let's think about well what exactly are the acharona now what what
exactly did they do that's different from the reshow name so the characteristics
of the acronym this is something that you know i haven't read a lot about it i just had to sort
of think to myself about what it's like studying the writings of acharonium as opposed to the study
of writings of rishonim and i can say three things first of all they tend to write super commentaries
rather than commentaries meaning rather than write a commentary on the talmud itself
on the bible itself on the mishnah itself they tend to write commentaries that
even when they are based on that core text they're widely cognizant of a much broader
literature by way of contrast for example you know maimonides will quote directly from the talmud
he's a rishon but he will not spend a lot of time talking about other commentators on the talmud he
will really base his halachic discussions based on his own assessment of how to understand the
talmud itself whereas super commentaries will be commentaries on maimonides on the talmud so it
tends to be sort of a meta analysis rather than a first order analysis that's also i think very
much characteristic of modern research in general that you have to do like kind of a literary survey
who else has written on this topic and what did they say that's the kind of thing that acharonium
tend to do much more so in my humble opinion than rishonim secondly in terms of their expression
they are almost always written in rabbinic hebrew there's some interesting non-rabbinicki bracharone
but the vast majority are writing in rabbinic hebrew and their language is still coded but not
nearly as cryptic as the rishonim you know like when i went to yeshiva which is a tradition
i went to orsamaya traditional lithuanian style yeshiva we spent almost all our time
learning how to decode rishonim uh the retva the the rashba and so on and then when we got
to acharonim it was like all of a sudden we went so fast even though we were reading so much more
text covering so much more mileage the language was just kind of like a breath of fresh air in the
rishonim every single syllable every single little jot and tittle in the text means so much and you
have to pause and you have to contemplate what it means and what are the possible ambiguities
whereas in the writings of the acharonium tend to be far more straightforward less cryptic uh more
prolix they tend to be much more you know longer they take a lot more words to say something but
more words helps with the precision and rapid understanding and then third in general they
tend to lean towards the pragmatic they the acronyms still deal with theoretical
questions but those theoretical questions are not pure theory they tend to be linked to an actual
situation they tend to be linked to a specific question that was raised about a a real life case
and um and and they will use all of this other body of information that they've accumulated
in order to bring it to bear on that particular issue those are three characteristics uh that in
my humble opinion are associated with the acronym it may be helpful in this context to sort of look
at the first author who is widely considered as the uh sort of the initiator of this era a liminal
character who whose writings really straddle the period of the rishonim and the piriracharoni
and this is of course none other than maran betty osef rabbi yosef karo the author of the shulkhan
arukh as this book and subtitle explains now who was this individual he was a fantastic scholar a
remarkable legal scholar also a kabbalist as we shall see in the next lecture god willing
and he is the author of the most widely used code of jewish law the shulkhan arukh or the set table
however why don't we call him maran which is a title respect you know like our rabbi why
don't we call him maran aruch why do we call him maran betty yosef also by the way he's known as
the author as as if to say this is really the model of all authorship so the reason is because
his magnum opus is not the shulhana rook and in fact he placed much less emphasis
on the importance of the shohana rook his greatest work of scholarship is undoubtedly this incredible
work called the batio safe which is a rishon style commentary on an earlier code called the tour
and what he does with the tour is he begins this kind of meta-analysis but he really goes
deeply into the sources once again using the kind of of pragmatic tools to draw out
the theoretical foundations of the decisions as laid down in the tour now amazingly he
went and he wrote commentaries on other great codes such as maimonides mishnitora
and when he had finished all of these only then did he go on to write the shokhan arukh which he
clearly intended actually not as the primary text to be studied he hoped that people would study his
bait yosef and his kessev mishna other works like that on other great commentaries uh the shokhan
arc was intended to be kind of like a short form of all of the decisions that were reached
after having discussed all of the previous codes and he actually intended for people to review it
every 30 days can you imagine studying the entire shohana every month but that's really what he was
it was kind of like a short form was a concise version of the much longer rishon style but uh in
terms of thinking that he put into his earlier commentaries so the bait yosef is considered
widely the last work of the rishon era and the by the same author is considered the initial book of
the period of the acharonim he also had a fantastic and amazing life which also straddled
you know the great iberian jewish population he was among the exiles from the spanish expulsion
as a child he wandered throughout europe and the uh he was in constantinople and ended up in spot
which again i hope to speak about in the very next lecture fascinating figure so that's sort
of like what the acharonim are all about let me just ask one last question what about the the
period we're in right now it's been a long time five centuries that we have been thinking about
acharonim and writing like acharonium is there something new are we in a post-acharon period
so there are definitely acharonim who are still alive and well and working with us rebecca and
kamineski is one of the greatest rabbis very widely respected currently living in israel
whose work clearly belongs within the genre of the acharonim but there's an interesting
kind of development that again i'm kind of going out on a limb here this is not really my
area of expertise they say that historians shouldn't talk too much about our own times
because we're like pressing our windows up against the glass but uh when i look at like new books
on jewish thought particularly in halacha which is where in jewish law where the acharonim tend
to be concentrated the most i see an interesting phenomenon of hyper-specialization partially
assisted by technology because now if you want to find everything that's ever been written on
even the most arcane subject it's simply a google search away obviously there are some specialized
databases and so on but it's accessible and so all of a sudden a person can accumulate an incredibly
broad grasp of what has ever anywhere been written about a specific issue and write a
book about how these things come to pass i'll give you one example which is kind of amazing
i'm sure many of you who are watching this are familiar with the custom that on the holiday
of chanukah one should eat um foods associated with oil right the oil is put in the hanukiah
the candelabra and so on so you one of the most common foods is uh potato latkes and also
donuts which are known in hebrew as sufganiyot so in israel and in jewish neighborhoods all over
the world you'll see lots and lots of sufganiyot that are baked and available for this holiday they
tend not to be at least in recent times they tend not to be what most americans think of as donuts
they don't have a hole in them but they are hollow and they're typically filled with jelly or custard
or something like that i know you don't really want to hear about this but let's there's a reason
for this uh and just a couple of years ago this remarkable perhaps post-acharonic work came out
uh so-called safer emek hasufkanim the book of the valley of the donuts and the subtitle reads um
that it's all about the custom of eating donuts on the holiday of chanukah and it's a massive tome
actually hundreds of pages all about eating donuts on hanukkah so part of me wants to think that this
is clearly post-acharonic that we have gotten to such a level of specificity and detail that we
can produce these massive works of jewish law and thought related to something as prosaic as eating
doughnuts and it remains to be seen what's next i mean what are the posterone like i don't know
how long this can last that i have a feeling there's some great thing on the horizon but
we'll just have to wait and see at any rate i hope you found this brief lecture useful uh if you did
please consider subscribing or getting involved in the channel it's really nice to see
so many people really interested in jewish history thank you very much for watching