March 13, 2007
Jew vs. Jew in Lemburg
, by Michael Stanislawski:
On September 6, 1848, a young Orthodox Jew with the very inauspicious name of A.B. Pilpel (Hebrew for pepper), bearded with sidelocks and dressed in a black hat and a long caftan, entered the kitchen of the district rabbi of Lemberg, Abraham Cohen, and, pretending to light his cigar from the stove, poured arsenic into the Cohen family’s soup. Within hours of their supper later that evening, the entire Cohen family was severely ill. And by 3 o’clock the next morning, Rabbi Cohen and his infant daughter, Teresa, were dead.
The book chronicles the case of what might have been the first Jewish assassination by another Jew since the times of the Second Temple. It's a tale of Jew vs. Jew that seems to have application for today.
Nadler concludes his review with:
Stanislawski has written not only an important historical morality tale about the dangers of religious extremism, but also a cautionary tale about the unforeseeable perils unleashed when governments try to force modernity, or, for that matter democracy, on a deeply traditional religious society.
Hm. I recently read it. I thought the author makes far too much hay out of it, connecting it with Rabin and all. Exceptions that prove the rule. It struck me as a bit of a Da Vinci Code tendency in modern semi-scholarly literature. Get the sexy angle, in this case Orthodox Jewish violence, and hopefully more people will notice your book about 19th century Lemberg. zZzZz
(Seriously, I read it because it's the type of thing *I* read--but without the Rabin angle, how many people might read it?)
Posted by: S. at March 13, 2007 2:48 PMMy favorite example of "dredging up suppressed Jewish history" has to do with the exile of the Jews from Spain. There were community leaders and rabbonim who just went and converted to Christianity, and took high positions in the Church. Crazy stuff, but you never hear about it these days - the official line is that everyone left or just pretend to convert.
Posted by: DMZ at March 15, 2007 9:50 AM
