The 'Sephardi Hacham' Isaac Badav: From Native Agency to Institutional Facilitation (Hebrew)

• In Event: Sephardic & Mizrahi Vernacular Religion and Scholarship

Abstract

The institutionalization of Jewish Studies in pre-state Israel/Palestine is usually narrated as an internal Ashkenazi affair or Zionist and Hebraic rebirthing of an originally German-Jewish discipline on ancient soil. More recent research has concentrated on how local clusters of intellectuals branded as Sephardi, Arab-Jewish and even indigenous to Israel/Palestine were sidelined by this otherwise successful migration of knowledge from Europe to the Middle East.
My presentation tempers the broader implications of this admittedly important corrective to the narrative by focusing on the Ottoman Sephardi antiquarian and rabbi, Isaac Badhav (1859-1947). Initially a disseminator of Ladino homiletics, Badhav’s seven decade long and avid collecting of documents, familial archives and manuscripts stemming from the Yeshiva study halls and Genizot of his native Jerusalem was a monumental achievement. Revealingly, however, little of this archival effort was appreciated by Badhav’s rabbinic colleagues nor did it benefit from any kind of Ottoman/post-Ottoman Sephardi support network. The reception finally afforded this ‘Sephardi Hacham’ — to quote Gershom Scholem — was in fact largely an Ashkenazi one. Moreover, Badhav’s death coincided with the founding of the first institution devoted to the study of Middle Eastern Jews turned ‘Mizrahim’ by a future Israeli President, the Russian born Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. By probing the entangled histories of the ‘Ben-Zvi institute’ and Isaac Badhav’s legacy I will demonstrate how a Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish studies cluster was in fact able to sustain itself in 1950s Israel and beyond.

Author

• Noah Gerber, Tel-Aviv University