The Legend of Safed

Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalah

Eli Yassif, Haim Watzman

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780814341117
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Jewish life through the legends created and narrated in Safed in the sixteenth century.

In 1908, Solomon Schechter—discoverer of the Cairo Geniza and one of the founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America—published his groundbreaking essay on the city of Safed ( Tzfat ) during the sixteenth century. In the essay, Schechter pointed out the exceptional cultural achievements (religious law, moral teaching, hermeneutics, poetry, geography) of this small city in the upper Galilee but did not yet see the importance of including the foundation on which all of these fields began—the legends that were developed, told, and spread in Safed during this period. In The Legend of Safed: Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalah, author Eli Yassif utilizes "new historicism" methodology in order to use the non-canonical materials—legends and myths, visions, dreams, rumors, everyday dialogues—to present these legends in their historical and cultural context and use them to better understand the culture of Safed. This approach considers the literary text not as a reflection of reality, but a part of reality itself—taking sides in the debates and decisions of humans and serving as a major tool for understanding society and human mentality.

Divided into seven chapters, The Legend of Safed begins with an explanation of how the myth of Safed was founded on the general belief that during this "golden age" (1570–1620), Safed was an idyllic location in which complete peace and understanding existed between the diverse groups of people who migrated to the city. Yassif goes on to analyze thematic characteristics of the legends, including spatial elements, the function of dreams, mysticism, sexual sins, and omniscience. The book concludes with a discussion of the tension between fantasy (Safed is a sacred city built on morality, religious thought, and well-being for all) and reality (every person is full of weaknesses and flaws) and how that is the basis for understanding the vitality of Safed myth and its immense impact on the future of Jewish life and culture.

The Legend of Safed is intended for students, scholars, and general readers of medieval and early modern Jewish studies, Hebrew literature, and folklore.

1

Voices Rising from Safed

Voices upon voices, frenzied and frightening . . . quarrels and clashes.

—Rabbi Moshe Alsheikh

Wonderful, Wretched Safed

Safed sits on a mountain, enveloped in nebulae of mysticism and mystery. It had this magical aura also during its great golden age more than 400 years ago. The aura was so potent that a simple Jew from a town in Moravia divorced his wife, liquidated his assets, and set off alone, on the intermediate days of the Sukkot holiday in October 1602, for the Safed of his dreams. Solomon Shlumil of Dreznitz,1 who sought to immerse himself in the town’s kabbalistic milieu, would become one of the major shapers and disseminators of the myth of Safed. He describes his first encounter with the town in one of the letters he sent to his family and teachers in Europe,

And I found a holy community here in Safed, because it is a great city of God, a city full of wisdom [or Torah], close to 300 great rabbis, all men of piety and action. And I found eighteen yeshivot in Safed, may it be built and established quickly in our day, and twenty-one synagogues, and a great house of study with close to 400 boys and young men. . . . And on the eve of every new month, until midnight, they act as on Yom Kippur, imposing on themselves a prohibition against work, and all the Jews gather in the one large synagogue . . . and pray an awe-inspiring prayer to God until noon, and sometimes devote the entire day to God in prayer and sermons. And the Gentiles who live on the soil of Israel are all submissive and subservient to the holiness of Israel. . . . Other than this, I found the entire Holy Land full of God’s blessing and plentiful and inexpensive food beyond measure and estimation and telling . . . which even in its destruction produces fruit and oil and wine and silk for a third of the world, and [men] come in ships from the ends of the earth, from Venice and Spain and France and Portugal and Constantinople, loaded with grain and olive oil, raisins and figs and honey and silk and soap, good as the sand on the beach. We buy wheat as clear as the sun . . . and olive oil . . . and sesame oil and sesame that is as sweet as honey and has the taste of manna . . . and wine, whoever buys grapes at the time of harvest and stores them in the press . . . as well as spirits of mead . . . and bee honey . . . and grape honey . . . and raisins . . . and dried figs, chickens, very cheap eggs . . . and fish . . . sometimes very cheap. And inexpensive rice and many varieties of legumes and lentils like you have never seen and which taste like nuts, cheap. And all kinds of jams and countless good vegetables that taste like nothing you have ever tasted can be found all the time, throughout the year, in the summer and winter, almost at no cost, in addition to good fruit, carobs, oranges, lemons, melons, and watermelons that taste like sugar . . . and also healthy and clear air and healthful water that lengthen one’s days. For this reason most inhabitants, almost all of them, live long lives, eighty, ninety, even one hundred years. . . . And this is the sign, overseas almost all people and small children are full of boils on the knees and thighs, and in the Land of Israel, thank God, there is not even one person suffering from boils, neither children nor adults; instead all are as clean as gold, thank God.2

Shlumil’s letter, dated July 19 (24 Tammuz), 1607, was copied and printed and reprinted. Texts of this sort are fine tinder for feeding the fire of myth. Shlumil provides details of Safed’s full and intensive religious life, which puts aside the chores of the everyday and makes life into an ongoing sacrament. Safed’s Jews live lives of profound religious experience that overshadows the practical and the material. Shlumil underlines the security they feel as a result of the respect and admiration they receive from the town’s Gentile inhabitants. He portrays the flourishing economy, which benefits not only the wealthy but also all levels of society—all enjoy plenty. Even more important for Shlumil is the difference between the dark, disease-ridden, ugly Exile and the purifying light of Safed, a clear sign of God’s special favor for the city and its inhabitants.

Safed’s marvels and ideal life of Torah are also described by the Yemenite traveler and poet Zechariah (Yahya al-Dahiri), who visited the Land of Israel forty years before Shlumil, in 1567. He offers a different account of life in Safed at that time.

And I came to that city [Safed]

And within it the Divine Presence dwelt

For within it is a great community far from falseness

Fourteen thousand

In eighteen yeshivot

Stationed at the study of Talmud

There I saw the light of the Torah

And the Jews had light . . .

And they made a breach in the boundary of wisdom

Never have ignorants been found among them . . .

In synagogues and houses of study

Hearing preachers

Preaching in many methods

For they know every secret

From the ceiling to the foundation

Especially the great light the sage Joseph Karo

Whose yeshiva the sages of Safed never leave

Because the Talmud is deposited in his heart . . .

And I went one Sabbath to his yeshiva

To see his glorious greatness

And I sat at the door, at the doorposts

And my ideas were turbulent with ignorance

And the elderly sage sat on a chair

And held forth on the subject at hand

In his speech removing man from the yoke of time

To bring him close to the faithful God . . .

And he spoke both the simple meaning and the Kabbalah

This precious and sublime sage

Some 200 valued and superior students

sat on benches

And when he ceased to speak his wisdom

He signaled to one student facing him

To speak of the soul and its powers

And its purpose and about it

And he stood before him

Chanting his thoughts3

Those who heard Zechariah’s account of his long journey through the Holy Land or read of it generations later in his written account, Sefer haMusar (Book of Ethics), cannot but be impressed by the wonderful atmosphere of Jewish religious learning that he experienced in Safed. The full force of the world of Torah was concentrated in this small patch of the Upper Galilee. Hundreds of students, dozens of houses of study, and the greatest scholars of the era could be found within the narrow bounds of Ottoman Safed. Zechariah’s account is completely devoid of the everyday life evoked by Shlumil—the marketplace, merchandise, regular people, material existence. Perhaps he thought such details so inconsequential that he did not bother to mention them. More likely, however, he simply saw them as entirely subsidiary to Torah study. That seems more likely because the connection between the two can be felt in Shlumil’s letter, as it could be heard in the voices of Safed’s Jews many years later. So, for example, Eleazar Azkari, one of Safed’s leading ethicists and a member of the fellowship of Luria’s students, writes:

Here in Safed we established a holy fellowship and gave it the name Sukat Shalom, and many have gathered to return [to God] with a full heart. From time to time the head of the court also preaches to each community on repentance. Also in each single fellowship the comrades listens together. The material days are sealed, and pound like the sea on the Torah and on the service [of God].4

Like Shlumil, Azkari does not ignore the mundane, the material days. He also knows that not all hours and days are sacred. But even on these days, the mundane is “sealed” or limited, and even they “pound like the sea,” meaning that they are drowned out by the sound of the sea of Torah and the service of God. That is the significance of the wondrous and ideal life of Safed. Everyday life and weekday activities are not placed outside the pale but rather become an inseparable part of the closed circle of the life of Torah and piety. Zechariah, a traveler coming from the outside, sees only spiritual activity, but Safed’s inhabitants—Shlumil writes some five years after his arrival in the city and Azkari is a native—point to the complexity, a town in which there are weekdays as well as days filled with Torah and service of God (as in every Jewish community) but in which the sacred overshadows the mundane and poses an impossible tension between the two. It is this complexity that makes Safed unique but that is also the source of the considerable tension, signifying its life and being.

Diametrically opposed to these ideal depictions, which were major factors in establishing the myth of Safed, come other voices, resentful and angry about the city’s economic and spiritual plight. In 1592 one of Safed’s great scholars, Rabbi Moshe Alsheikh, set out on a fundraising mission to Jewish communities in Turkey and Italy. That year, in Constantinople, he penned a missive, “Hazut Kashah” (Difficult Vision), in which he coins the idiom, “Because of Safed, may it be built and established quickly in our day, all the Land of Israel is maintained, and if there is no Safed, there is no Tiberias or Jerusalem or Hebron and there is no city in the Land of Israel, God be with me.”5 He immediately follows these praises, which are consistent with what Shlumil and Zechariah wrote, with the following plaint:

And before we tremble and shout our wounds on the land that God has cursed, we will tell just one of the thousands of evils and sorrows that have raged on us, because they are uncountable, only one evil out of many, because they are more than the locusts. . . . God and Israel knows, and Israel knew, that we have declined from the beginning, all earlier days were better than these. . . . For there is not even a bit of relief in the Land of Israel, which God gave us through tribulations, sustenance for the hungry and to pay the poll tax to those who hate us, and all sorts of cataclysms and disasters and false charges by wayward officials, small and large, and all sorts of taxes they afflict us with, legitimate and illegitimate, to the point that the Hebrews has been depleted of people; they have gone down to the roads and gates, broken, both the rich and the poor destroyed in Zion . . . for we are wearied by the many tribulations and evils and can no longer withstand them, but the land is miserable, the land has crumbled, the graceful land roars like a lion, because its mourners has become frequent, its agony doubled. . . . A very heavy famine [has befallen us], unlike any before; there is no sustenance. . . . There are no buyers and no sellers, the currency no longer buys anything, the poor have no work, and the penniless seek employment but there is none . . . hungry and thirsty, beaten, weeping and screaming, dragged, hidden and imprisoned, because the city is wretched, its sons impoverished within it these many days . . . and all the people weep from end to end, these weep and those weep, the rich weep and cry out that the middle ones who ate up all their money and impoverished [them], and the middle ones cry out from the multitudes who have plundered them and thus become poor, as if they were dead, and the poor who always perished in the city as eternal dead. . . . The leaders and wealthy have left the city in full view of all, and the ears ring in the streets and roads voices upon voices, frenzied and frightening, between one man and another, between man and wife, between father and daughter, quarrels and clashes on behalf of their obligations and accounts . . . and in their bitterness they seize and drag them and raise a deadly hand against them and interrogate [them], and one beats the other with a stone or a fist. . . . Because they have walked the streets of Safed, may it be built and established quickly in our day, and all those who knew it from ancient times and have turned to it and were ashamed [because of its situation], alas, lonely sits the city once great with people, how has it been overthrown. Because from such a multitude a fissure could have opened up between the walkers on its streets, but now it is reviled and ravaged, bereft of its children, sitting bereaved and forlorn. . . . Because but a few have remained in the city and there is no counting their tribulations, their faces are blacker than soot, they are not recognized in the streets, none comes or goes because those who go out and those who come in have no respite from troubles . . . for there is no bread throughout the land, and even if God were to endow the land with bread, in our house there is no bread, because there is no business, as the clothing trade has ceased, which was the mother of all life, from which both rich and poor lived, and without it we are all dead. . . . Then all wept. . . . And in their horror, as they wept, they turned their faces to the city’s sages and said to them, your eminences, why did you leave your honor, for do we not remember the God-fearing sages who came before you, with all their troubles and their age on the troubles of their flocks and cast their souls before them to save them from thunder, and you are all silent on your watches.6

Even taking into account that the letter was written to compel well-off communities in Turkey and Italy to contribute to the support of the Safed community, the sense of desperation in Rabbi Moshe’s letter rings true.

The letter’s depiction of Safed could not be more different from that of Shlumil of Dreznitz. Shlumil trumpets Safed’s prosperous economy, the abundance of food and its low price, attainable by all. In contrast, Alsheikh paints a picture of grinding poverty and famine. Shlumil lauds the harmonious relations between the Jews and Gentiles in Safed and its environs. Alsheikh writes of oppression, disturbances, and mortal fear of the Arabs and Turks. Where Shlumil, like Zechariah, speaks of a flourishing spiritual life and a sense of holiness under the leadership of great and learned rabbis, Alsheikh speaks of a great religious crisis, with the community losing faith in its spiritual leaders.7

Voices from Outside

Outsiders can offer a view from a distance that may be more objective, free as it is of the heavy burden of Jewish history. In 1600 an English traveler, William Biddulph, visited Safed and wrote of his visit, “When we came to the top of the mountains, we saw Saphetta [Safed] on the right hand a universitie of the Jewes, where they speake Hebrew and have their synagogues there.” This English traveler, acquainted with the venerable universities of Oxford and Cambridge, each a collection of individual residential colleges in which young students studied and lived, perceived Safed in that light. He understood the scattered houses of study, the city’s pride, to be colleges of a single university. At Oxford and Cambridge instruction was offered in a sacred language, Latin, so it was logical that the holy tongue of the Old Testament, Hebrew, would be the language of instruction and speech at the putative University of Safed. That this traveler paralleled the ascetic spiritual character of the British universities with the sacred milieu of Hebrew Safed shows how the idealization of Safed had seeped into the world of Christian travelers who passed through and made brief visits.

But other visitors came away with other impressions. A Portuguese traveler, Pantaleão de Aveiro, visited Safed in about 1565. He met many Portuguese Jews who had found a haven in the Galilean town after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. “One night several Jewish women of Portuguese extraction came to me with tears in their eyes,” he wrote of one such encounter, “lamenting that their sins had taken them out of Portugal not to the Promised Land, as they had believed, but to the Land of Despair, as they had seen with their own eyes and as they had experienced in their plight.”

Another voice is that of a German traveler, Ludwig von Rauter, who visited Safed in 1568. He relates that “the city sits on a mountain and is inhabited by 2,000 Jews, most of them elderly, and they come here from all lands when they are already old, both men and women, their desire being to die in the Holy Land.” According to von Rauter, Safed’s streets were lined with indigent refugees who had fled religious persecution in their own countries but then greatly regretted it. Some were old and ill, with their lives already behind them, whose expectations were to die and be buried in the soil of the Holy Land. In other words, von Rauter did not see Oxford and Cambridge but rather a poor Levantine village full of misery and affliction, dejection and death.8

Discord and Strife

How can the polar contradictions between these accounts of Safed be explained? Most likely, the contradictions are illusory and the accounts simply portray different facets of a single multifaceted reality. The opposing impressions and disputes about Safed testify to its unique position in Jewish cultural history. As with every culture, the most profound understanding of its life and mentality emerges not from agreements about it but rather from the disparate voices that tell of clashes between ideas and values, between social groups, and between religious beliefs. Safed’s culture has been depicted, since Schechter’s 1908 essay, as almost monolithic, where groups of different backgrounds, customs, and so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Voices Rising from Safed
• 2. The Myth and Its Disenchantment
• 3. In Fields and Wilderness
• 4. And He Woke and It Was a Dream
• 5. Sin Crouches at the Door
• 6. And He Had Knowledge About Everyone
• 7. Life and Legend
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index