SBL Sunday November 21

Today was another pleasant day at the SBL. I went to the morning session of the Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism section, and heard papers on merkabah elements in early Christian writings (Ascension of Isaiah and Hebrews), as well as a review of the new book by Bogdan Bucur, Angelomorphic Pneumatology: Clement of Alexandria and Other Early Christian Witnesses.

In the afternoon, in lieu of going to sessions, I went to the book display and got several expensive books from European publishers - Mohr Siebeck and Brill. It's still a wonder to me how university presses in the United States still manage to publish scholarly books that cost much less than these excellent European presses. I've published several articles in books from these presses, and their cost is always much too high to recommend to anyone to buy them. I also had a good time talking to a friend of mine about Jewish Studies and especially about the definition of the word "Jew" - at what historical point can we start speaking of "Jews" and not "Israelites"? We agreed between ourselves that the term becomes relevant - to refer to an ethnic-religious group - in the books of the Ezra-Nehemiah, specifically pointing to the returning exiles who go from Babylonia to the Persian sub-province of Yehud after the decree of Cyrus in 538 B.C.E. Obviously, others disagree, and argue that the term only really becomes meaningful in the time of the Maccabees in the second century B.C.E., or even later in the first century C.E. or afterwards.

In the evening, to the reception for Rachel Elior, to honor her with the presentation of a festschrift, edited by Andrei Orlov and Daphna Arbel, entitled With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism. I contributed an article to the volume, "'They revealed secrets to their wives': The Transmission of Magical Knowledge in 1 Enoch." The reception began with an introduction by Andrei and Daphna, and continued with greetings and appreciations by the other people attending the evening - many of whom had contributed to the festschrift. Rachel then thanked all of us and talked about how she had gotten interested in the connections between Hekhalot literature and the Qumran texts - when she discovered the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice in 1987 and began to read them together with the Hekhalot hymns. I didn't know the particular story of her learning about the Songs, but I do remember her Hekhalot seminar at the Hebrew University in the 1988-1989 academic year, when we spent quite a long time reading Qumran texts, and focused upon the Sabbath Songs.

After that reception some of us left and went to the JTS reception, which was marked by the presence of good kosher food - and plenty of it! (Always an important consideration at these convention receptions).

Tomorrow morning I'm heading back to Ithaca, and won't be going to any other SBL sessions, unfortunately. This has proven to be an enjoyable conference.

Yad Vashem - Untold Stories of the Murder Sites in the Occupied USSR

I just came across a New York Times article published last year about new research being done at Yad Vashem on lesser-known killing fields in the Holocaust: "New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews" (April 19, 2009). One report about Liepaja is from a German sailor who filmed the killings at Skede.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981 interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, “After the civilian guards with the yellow armbands shouted once again, I was able to identify them as Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now, were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.

“At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time, the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand.

Yad Vashem has created a website devoted to this topic - the Untold Stories. There are several pages devoted to what happened in Liepaja.

Touring Copenhagen - Resistance Museum

I arrived in Copenhagen Friday afternoon from Tartu, via Riga (which was a little nerve-wracking, because I had left one piece of luggage in the luggage storage room in the airport, and I had to figure out how to get it on as hand luggage without paying an enormous sum of money to Air Baltic, which allows only one piece of checked luggage - but I did get it on without having to pay). I was pretty tired, so I didn't go anywhere once I got here, but I went out yesterday morning. The first challenge was figuring out how to buy a metro ticket at the closest stop - there were directions in English, but they weren't very clear. With the help of several patient Danish people, I bought the ticket and headed for my first destination, the harbor, where I was going to take a harbor tour.

It was really a beautiful day - not too hot, with a nice breeze, and it was great to be out on the water. We sailed into the harbor and on several canals (I hadn't realized before this that Copenhagen has canals), passing lots of other tourist boats doing the same thing.

People relaxing at the water's edge, with the Amalieborg castles behind them.

When we got back, I was hungry and had lunch in an Italian restaurant (of which Copenhagen appears to have an abundance). I then walked over to the Museum of the Danish Resistance (during WWII), which turned out to be quite an affecting museum. It covered the whole period from the German invasion in April 1940 to the liberation in May 1945, including the rescue of the Danish Jews from Nazi deportation. The story is really quite amazing. Almost all were ferried to Sweden by the Danish resistance; only about 450 were captured and sent to Terezin, and of those, about 400 survived.

The museum was divided into several sections, starting with a general introduction to Nazism. While some of the exhibits were photographs or facsimiles, many were authentic artifacts of the time period. One of the first items that I saw, to my shock, was the label below from a canister of Zyklon B, which had been found by a Dane in the hold of a sunken German ship.

The next part of the museum was devoted to the first stage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark – accommodation to the wishes of the occupiers. Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, and the Danish government quickly capitulated. The Germans ruled Denmark through a Danish government coalition, so that full Nazi policies were not implemented (for example anti-Jewish legislation). This included Denmark furnishing Germany with many of its food needs during the war, as well as favorable trade agreements for Germany. The next item illustrates this trade.

These are toy figures of Hitler and Mussolini, purchased in a Copenhagen store in 1943. It had somehow never occurred to me that little figurines of fascist dictators were made – presumably for children to play with!

This is one of the German ENIGMA code machines, which was used by the German Navy in Esbjerg, Denmark.





  The Communist Party was not outlawed in Denmark until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. At that point, the Germans told the Danish government to intern the leaders of the Danish communists, which they did. In November 1942 about 250 were sent to the Horseroed camp, which was run by the Danish police, not by the Nazi Gestapo (later on it was taken over by the Nazis).

A drawing from the internment camp by one of the inmates, Knudaage Larsen.

The next part of the museum was devoted to various types of Danish resistance to German rule in the early years of the occupation. An underground press flourished with newspapers produced by various factions of the Danish resistance. The picture above is of the printing press used to print a newspaper called “Frit Danmark,” which was a collaboration between Communists and Conservatives.

The Danish resistance was in close communication with the British by various methods, including illegal telegraph machines. The picture below shows a reconstruction of a room with equipment used by a telegraphist.

The Jews of Denmark were untouched by German persecution until the Danish government resigned in the summer of 1943, in the face of German decrees that they could not accept. This meant that Denmark was now under direct German rule, and they quickly organized for the arrest of the entire Danish Jewish community on October 1-2 (Rosh Hashanah). The Danish underground found out about the German decree, and through quick action, managed to save almost the entire community by ferrying them to Sweden.

On the right is a model of one of the boats used to ferry Jews to Sweden.

About 500 Jews, however, did not manage to get away – they were captured and sent to Terezin. Most of them survived the war without being deported to Auschwitz because of pressure exerted by the Danish government and aid sent by the Danish Red Cross.

(I visited Terezin in the summer of 2005 when I visited Prague - I wrote about it here).

This is a revolting German propaganda poster [from 1942] about Jews being forced to wear the yellow star. The text reads:

The cat cannot change his spots!

The leading English newspaper "Daily Mail" reported:

"The participation of Jews in breaking British wartime economic legislation has caused Judaism and Jewish names to be ostracized in England, said the Chief Rabbi Dr. J. Hertz in a London synagogue."

With these accusations, the rabbi certainly wanted to warn his racial comrades to greater caution in their dark black marketing business, so that the English people would not recognize whose lice are in the fur. His efforts, however, are likely to be in vain. So are the Jews. First they chase the people into war, and while the soldiers of those nations fight and bleed, they make business out of the war, pushing and cheating and filling their filthy pockets at the expense of their host peoples. In Germany the blame was pinned on them. We have separated them from the German national community and they are marked with a yellow Star of David.

Everyone knows: Whoever wears this sign is an enemy of our people.

A jacket belonging to one of the Danish Jews imprisoned in Terezin. 481 Danish Jews were imprisoned in Terezin, of which 51 died there. The rest were sent to Sweden at the end of the war.










When I came out of the museum I was feeling sad at the fate of some of the resistance fighters (who were captured and executed by the Nazis), and sat for a little while thinking and looking out over a stream. I then walked towards what turned out to be a fort, but on the way encountered a statue erected after the war, dedicated to those who had fallen in the war. (It's below).

Our fallen
in Danish and allied war service
1940-1945
Raised by the Danish people

What *is* in Tartu?

I just spent a week in Tartu, Estonia, at a conference on biblical studies. I gave a paper on whether there were women mystics in early Judaism, and went to lots of other interesting papers. I also went on a couple of tours - one of a series of communities along Lake Peipsi (which forms the border between Estonia and Russia - I had hoped I could take photos of Russia on the other side of the lake, but it's actually quite large, so I couldn't fulfill my desire of saying that I could see Russia from Estonia, unlike Sarah Palin who claimed that she could see Russia from Alaska), and another in and around Tartu itself.

For those of you who may not know where Estonia is (no need to be embarrassed, I checked on the map to be sure exactly where it is), it's the northernmost country of the Baltic states, and it's right next to Russia. From 1940-1991 it was part of the Soviet Union (along with Latvia and Lithuania it was swallowed up by the Soviets as a result of the pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany that agreed to divide the Baltic states and Poland between them). Then, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, it became an independent country again. It's also a member of the EU. There's quite a bit of anti-Russian sentiment there, as a result of this history.

The tour that I took on the Sunday before the conference started first went to several small villages along Lake Peipsi that are inhabited by the "Old Believers" - a sect that split off from Russian Orthodoxy in the 17th century, when the official church enacted a series of reforms that the Old Believers rejected. The reaction against them was extremely violent - Old Believers were persecuted, their priestly leadership was murdered, their churches were burned down - so as a result many of them left Russia for other safer locations, including Estonia. They managed to survive through the years of communist rule, and the communities still exist. I just looked up the term on the internet, and discovered that there are communities of Old Believers even in Oregon!

We went inside an Old Believer church, and it was really beautiful inside. (Unfortunately, they didn't want us to take photos, so I can only describe it). The inside was painted with bright colors, and the front of the church was covered with beautiful icons, vividly painted. One of the women members of the church spoke to us about the religion and tried to explain the differences between the Old Believers and other kinds of Russian Orthodox, but frankly I didn't really understand it. She also talked about how for the most part women are the religious leaders of the community, even though according to their theology men should be - because there are so few men now left who are priests.

We then got back on the bus and went to a little museum of Old Believer life, where another woman told us about Old Believer life, including some very interesting rules that she had grown up with. When her grandmother was alive, the family would never eat with anyone who was not also an Old Believer - if a stranger came to the house, that person had to eat on separate dishes. Also, if anyone in the family went away to work far away, and then came back, he had to go through a two-week period of eating on separate dishes as well before he would be considered pure enough to eat with the family.

The rest of the tour consisted of a visit to a castle (actually, not much of a castle, it was from the 19th century, built by a German baron), where we had lunch, and then a visit to the shore of Lake Peipsi to watch the "christening" of a boat built out of local reeds. This consisted of someone reciting something in Estonian, which of course we didn't understand, then pouring some rum over the boat, and then passing around the rum to whoever was interested in drinking. Unfortunately, we didn't bring our bathing suits, so there was no possibility of taking a dip in the lake - and it was very hot!

We then returned to Tartu, rather sated with Estonian tourism, and got down to the serious business of biblical scholarship the next day.

On Tuesday afternoon I went on a walking tour of Tartu with the same guide who had taken us to Lake Peipsi, and the tour had a very interesting ending. She showed us some of the main buildings of the University of Tartu, where the conference took place, brought us to the town hall in front of which is a statue of two students kissing, had us slog up the hill behind the university where we saw the university observatory and the supreme court of Estonia, which is headquartered in Tartu, and then back to the main university building where we had started. At that point one of the people on the tour asked the guide about the Soviet occupation - because the guide was uniformly negative about the period of Soviet rule.

The guide answered and then a woman named Irena, who was also on the tour, interrupted her - saying that she had studied at the University of Tartu in the 1970s because it was one of the few universities in the USSR where Jews were freely admitted (she herself now lives in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, but she grew up in Leningrad). She also then mentioned one of the luminaries of the University of Tartu who had taught there for many years - a Jewish scholar of semiotics named Yuri Lotman who founded the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. He was from St. Petersburg/Leningrad and was unable to find work in Russia because of antisemitism, and so began teaching in Tartu in 1950.

Irena also talked about another Jewish scholar at the university in the 1930s named Lazar Gulkowitsch. The University of Tartu established a chair in Jewish Studies in 1934, and he took up the position. He was killed when the Nazis invaded in 1941. (Many of the Jews of Estonia escaped the Nazis by going east into the Soviet Union, but about a thousand didn't, among them Gulkowitsch). A scholar at the conference, Anu Pölsdam of the University of Tartu, gave a paper about Gulkowitsch that I'll write more about here.

It was interesting to see the guide then backtrack on her uniformly negative view of the Soviet period. I guess this was just a taste of the internal politics of Estonia.