Search, Research, and Serendipity

Stefan C Reif Joshua Blau was a brilliant scholar of Arabic who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1957 and died at the remarkable age of 101 just a few short months ago. He told me once that he inherited his passion for learning from his Hungarian father and his sense of humour from his Galician mother. One needed great wisdom to survive in Hungary and an ability to laugh at tragedy to survive in Galicia. Blau was fond of saying that serendipity, and not only research, played a major role in scholarship and I recently had reason to concur with such an assessment.

Some fifty-five years ago, my friend Natty Gordon and I would walk, talk, and eat our way through the long Shabbat afternoons of the summer in our native Edinburgh. The walking was between Marchmont, Liberton, and the synagogue in Salisbury Road; the talking was about how we were planning to change the world (drastically of course); and the eating was done at the afternoon meal (se‘udah shelishit) in his parents’ home or mine. The talking was not totally restricted to the future but occasionally touched on the past. I told him about my paternal origins in Kalusz, Galicia, and he informed me about his father’s family having come to Edinburgh from Maishad, Lithuania. For some reason, that latter name nestled in my memory. In 1967, when I was in the latter stages of writing my doctoral dissertation, I applied for a major and highly competitive award at the University of London and was interviewed by Professor Judah Benzion Segal (1912-2003), a distinguished scholar then teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His colleagues always referred to him as “Ben Segal”. I apparently impressed him since my application was successful. More important than that, however, was the degree to which he impressed me with his knowledge, his insights, and his charm. I later ascertained not only that he had won the Military Cross in the

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Second World War but that his father was the famous biblical scholar, Moshe Hirsch Segal (1875-1968; henceforth “MHS”), and that Ben had been born in Newcastle. Why Newcastle, I wondered.

Ben Segal’s daughter, Naomi, was a Fellow and Lecturer in French at St John’s College, Cambridge, from 1986 until 1993. We coincided there on a number of occasions and I was able to share with her my feelings of gratitude to her father and my admiration for the publications of her grandfather. Naomi went on to a chair at the University of Reading, making it a trio of Segal professors in a direct family line. She took pride in her grandfather but I was a little surprised not to hear from her anything personal about him. It must have been in the 1990s that I had a number of one-to-one meetings with the then Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, concerning Jewish education, Genizah research, and his plans for a new annotated prayerbook. I was able to offer some suggestions in connection with that liturgical project and, in the course of one of our discussions, I mentioned the name Aryeh Leib Frumkin. He had edited a version of the important and pioneering prayer-book of the ninth-century talmudic scholar, Amram ben Sheshna, who had headed the rabbinical academy in Sura, Babylonia. Jonathan mentioned that Frumkin was his great-grandfather, his mother Libby having been the daughter of one of Frumkin’s sons, Eliyahu Ephraim. I duly made a mental note of the connection.

In an article published in 1910, when he was at the beginning of his academic career, MHS was critical of what he called the “dry casuistical studies” of the yeshivot which “did not draw any sharp distinction between the past and the present.” At the same time, he was not appreciative of the more scientific and historical approach to Jewish history and literature that he regarded as a dry intellectual exercise unrelated to the daily observances of Judaism. For himself, he recommended that modern Jewish learning should “cease to be the exclusive possession of the professional student, and must become

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again, as it always had been, the common property of the whole Jewish people.” What kind of education did he receive that produced such a response? All this came together when I was invited to submit an article to mark the sixty-fifth birthday of a distinguished Catalan scholar from Barcelona (“not Spanish”, she tells you) who teaches at universities in Rome. Her expertise is in a book of proverbs written around 180 BCE by a Jerusalem teacher called Simeon Ben Sira and the invitation appropriately stipulated a topic relating to that ancient Jewish book. I had long used and appreciated the introduction and commentary written by MHS in Modern Hebrew and proposed to assess its importance, explain why it had been neglected and suggest that it should be translated into English. My idea was simply to summarize MHS’s life and career and then describe his work on Sefer Ben Sira.

The former task turned out not to be so simple as the latter. I came across references to a birth in Mosedis, a rabbinic education, marriage in London, a spell in Oxford, and an appointment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The entries in the various encyclopedias, both of the traditional hard copy and of the “cloudier” variety, were distinctly indistinct and undistinguished in what they offered. I did some ferreting and, remembering Natty’s Meshad (the Litvaks’ pronunciation of what was in Yiddish Maisyad), I made the connection with the shtetl of Mosedis in north western Lithuania, and with Scotland. What emerged was that, in the 1890s, numerous families left the imperial Tsarist province (“gubernia”) of Kovno, of which Mosedis was then a part, and settled in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. While most of Natty’s extended and extensive family chose Edinburgh, the Segals went to Dundee. Why did MHS go to London and then to Oxford? He had apparently been a brilliant young scholar and the family had therefore sent him to London to acquire a British education. While there, barely subsisting on his meagre earnings as a Yiddish journalist, he visited the East End

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wine-shop from which Aryeh Leib Frumkin made his living (academic Jewish studies being no more lucrative then that they are now) and met Hannah Leah, the daughter of Aryeh and his wife Sheina. They fell in love and married in 1899. Thanks to my acquaintance with Naomi Segal, I was able to receive from her, and from her cousin, Charles Merkel, copies of some important family records and to piece together other parts of the jig-saw. Naomi’s father, Ben, had written an account of Hannah Leah and I made use of that delightful article in my reconstruction. So MHS was Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks’s great uncle. In order to make a better living, and evidently with an eye on studying Semitics at Oxford, MHS, accompanied by wife Hannah Leah, and baby Sarah, moved there in 1901 and served as the spiritual leader of the community. From the Oxford reminiscences of the Zionist intellectual and public figure, Sir Leon Simon (1881-1965), MHS’s commitments to Judaism, Zionism and Jewish education, as well as the award of an Oxford BA and MA and numerous prizes, became clear. What remained obscure were the college to which he might have belonged and the rabbinic education that preceded the London experience. With the kind assistance of one of the University Archivists at Oxford, I learned that MHS had been admitted to read Bible and Semitic Languages in 1903 as a non-Collegiate student. This had been possible in Oxford from as early as 1868 for those with limited financial means. I also learned from the same source that he had previously studied in “Jelsehi”. It did not require any flash of brilliance to conclude that this entry at Oxford had to be read as Telsehi and that MHS had studied (and apparently excelled) at the famous yeshivah of Telz/Telshe/Telsiai, less than forty miles to the south-east of Moseidis.

His rabbinic education at Telz and his study of Semitics at Oxford gave him the firm foundation that he needed for his subsequent academic career. It also encouraged a critical approach to the various forms of Jewish learning as well as an interest in providing a modern understanding of Jewish commitment that combined a love of Jewish sources, a yearning for the homeland in Eretz Yisrael, and an Page 20

enthusiasm for the new academic centre that opened its doors in Jerusalem in 1926. Segal did some teaching at Oxford until 1909 but had no formal appointment there. Hence the need to move on to a Jewish communal post in Newcastle, where Esther and Ben were born and, later, to other such positions in England. He moved to Jerusalem in 1926 to teach Bible at the Hebrew University but Ben remained in England and Naomi therefore saw her grandfather and grandmother only three times. It was in Jerusalem in 1926 that MHS was granted semikhah (rabbinic ordination) by the city’s Chief Rabbi, Ha-Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, himself a distinguished scholar of halakhah (Jewish religious law). Although a prolific and assiduous scholar, MHS was regarded by the secular circles at the Hebrew University as too rabbinic to teach scientifically, by the religious as to open to literary criticism of the Pentateuch, and by those who had made aliyah from central Europe as insufficiently well trained since he lacked a Ph.D. Such mitteleuropäische Gelehrte were apparently unaware that it was not until 1917 in Oxford (and 1921 in Cambridge) that such a degree was available at England’s oldest universities. I suspect that they simply could not relate to someone with an Oxford education, as happened later with other scholars; but that is another story for a future occasion.

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