A note on Erev Rav

Isaac the Bound has written a good article on the development of the concept of Erev Rav, which you should definitely read before this one. For the most part, I don’t have much to add, except to note that the use of the term by Kookists to describe their enemies is not merely a case of ‘subconsciously integrating the paranoia and cultishness of the Sabbateans’ (though it is that too), but also the product of ideological descent. However, I don’t want to spoil the end of the Modern Jewish History series right now by elaborating. Instead, I’ll comment on a different aspect that, in a certain sense, is a small matter, but also points to perhaps the most important issue of all.

It is true that the Zohar fundamentally transformed the midrashic concept of the Erev Rav from a group that used to exist (and, certainly in some cases, is used to excuse the Jewish people of responsibility) into a permanent spiritual entity, described as one would expect given the squalid and diseased imaginations of the authors of the Zoharic corpus. There is nothing misleading about describing this as a Zoharic innovation and quite alien from the spirit of Rabbinic Judaism.1 However, the innovation does not come from literally nowhere. The Babylonian Talmud in Beitzah 32b records the following story.

ואמר רב נתן בר אבא אמר רב עתירי בבל יורדי גיהנם הם כי הא דשבתאי בר מרינוס אקלע לבבל בעא מנייהו עסקא ולא יהבו ליה מזוני מיזן נמי לא זינוהו אמר הני מערב רב קא אתו דכתיב ונתן לך רחמים ורחמך כל המרחם על הבריות בידוע שהוא מזרעו של אברהם אבינו וכל מי שאינו מרחם על הבריות בידוע שאינו מזרעו של אברהם אבינו

Now, it is important to be clear that what is written here doesn’t even resemble the Kookist doctrine, and anyone who tries to tell you it does is, at best, an incompetent reader. First of all, the lack of compassion attributed to the wealthy Babylonian Jews is not based on their positively possessing a special quality of Erev Rav. Rather, it is the absence of descent from Avraham that is (allegedly) betrayed by their miserliness. Erev Rav lineage is called on to explain how they ended up being part of the Jewish people without possessing Jewish traits. Secondly, and probably more importantly, the source goes out of its way to say that it is compassion to all creatures that demonstrates unblemished descent. This is indicated both by the use of the term בריאות, and, secondly, by the self-evident fact that Avraham exercised compassion to gentiles since there were no Jews for him to be compassionate towards. Accusations of Erev Rav today are primarily directed precisely towards those who object to killing Arab civilians, torturing prisoners, expelling families from their homes and similar. Even if we were to agree to the proposition that circumstances in the Levant are such that we have to engage in cruel policies for the greater good, it would still be the case that the error of the Left is showing an excess of precisely the virtues the Talmud claims indicates Abrahamic descent. This is why Rambam alludes to this passage immediately after emphasising the need to treat non-Jewish slaves with compassion.

However, with that said, this source presents two genuine problems. First of all, who is Shabtai Bar Merinos? He doesn’t appear anywhere else, and he doesn’t appear to be either a רב or a רבי. Secondly, while we can no doubt sympathise with his distress upon receiving neither a business loan nor charitable donations, who exactly is he to make drashot about the lineage of others, given that this is literally forbidden? Indeed, since both Talmud and codified halacha tell us that כל הפוסל במומו פוסל, doesn’t that mean that Shabtai Bar Merinos himself should be presumed Erev Rav until further notice? The source certainly tells us that at least some Jews in the talmudic period expressed their dissatisfaction with other Jews by declaring them descendants of the Erev Rav; we do not know their identity, when or where precisely they lived, or how numerous they were, but we know that at least some existed.2 What it doesn’t tell us, certainly not on its own, is whether this was correct. In other words, and to simplify matters somewhat, is it possible that this source is wrong?3

The Talmud contains a lot (really, a lot) of material, and not all of it can be authoritative for the simple reason that some of it contradicts other bits. This is even more so if, as I believe we should, we open up the range of potentially authoritative texts to the full contents of Yerushalmi, Tosefta and the halachic midrash. What we need, therefore, is some kind of system for classifying the disparate material as more or less authoritative. In fact, all branches of Orthodox Judaism already do this, because it’s literally impossible not to; it’s just that the way they do this is usually not well articulated, but rather arbitrary, and, not infrequently, capricious. It is, almost invariably, done in a way that it completely oblivious to the advances made in academic Talmud study over the past hundred years, which, though they do not tell us in any simple way what to do, certainly can, and therefore should, inform how we derive guidance from the text. The way we treat sources is inevitably shaped by our views of who wrote them, who recorded them, when and why, and, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, we’ll learn from them better if our views are accurate.

The standard Orthodox response is that once we permit ourselves to make judgements about what parts of the Talmud are less or not at all authoritative, then we will end up throwing the whole thing out. The simple answer to this is that, as above, in reality all Orthodox groups already do it too. In fact, no small number do it in ways that are quite reprehensible, such as unashamedly flouting multiple sources across Hazal teaching that Jews should do their utmost to avoid relying on charitable donations. However, even if we subtract the areas of obvious hypocrisy, they would still have to do something generically similar because there is no other way to deal with the Talmud. What we are suggesting as mekorists is doing it an intellectually responsible and rigorous fashion.

However, there is another argument too. Let us grant that there is a danger in allowing academic Talmud study into the beis medrash; there is also a danger in not doing so. When we block the paths of measured and critical intellect, people don’t stop making chiddushim; instead they make chiddushim unbound by philology, common sense, or plausibility. The authors of the Zohar pored relentlessly over the whole talmudic and midrashic corpus finding any scraps they could use as raw material for their morbid and depraved fantasies, which they weaved without any concern for epistemological standards of any kind. Their heirs, the Sabbateans, did so too, with even more intensity and vigour. The Sabbatean insights were in due course laundered through various channels and form the bulk of what is called hashkafa today. And the heirs of the Sabbateans are not done either, for each day Yitzhar and Bat Ayin discover new sparks among the klippot and send them forth among Israel. Whatever power the traditionalist Judaism of the Yekke or the Oiberlander once had to restrain all this through appeals to conservatism and established doctrine is spent.

Being in diaspora had its drawbacks, but one benefit was that, to a certain extent, none of it really matters. I have read things by Chassidic ‘masters’ so unhinged that it makes the hair stand on end, but though these were imaginations gone very haywire, that’s all they were. In the realm of the mind, we were not doing well at all, but we couldn’t actually do anything about it. For better or for worse, though, a group of Jews escaped the swirling mental prison of wordplay and non-sequiturs we had made for ourselves, built for us a country, and then handed it over. One way or another, what happens over the next few decades will determine what happens to the Jewish people for centuries to come. The question before us is what the Judaism of our Jewish state will be. Every time you ask a question because you want a proper answer not a ‘terutz’, every time you think, you are making a small rebellion against national solipsism. There’s a lot of work to do, and if you do a bit of it, you can say you tried.