The Man Who Collected all the Legends of the Jews

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The Jews, in the words of the British-Jewish historian Lewis Namier, “suffered from too much history and not enough geography”. Namier made this famous observation before the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 (from which I’m writing). This change—from a scattered diaspora to a people with a state—was seismic. Even the effort to secure an independent state is often an intellectually enriching struggle.

While the Jews are an ancient people, they hitched themselves to the national wagon at a later stage (the end of the 19th century), which meant they had to catch up on many stages that other peoples completed over a much longer period. Specifically, regarding this essay, the collection of legends, myths, and folklore in modern volumes is particularly significant.

Today, I’d like to tell you the story of just one of those modern collectors, the scholar Louis Ginzberg, and his wonderful multi-volume series titled The Legends of the Jews

On the first day of creation God produced ten things: the heavens and the earth, Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, wind and water, the duration of the day and the duration of the night.

Though the heavens and the earth consist of entirely different elements, they were yet created as a unit, "like the pot and its cover." The heavens were fashioned from the light of God's garment, and the earth from the snow under the Divine Throne. Tohu is a green band which encompasses the whole world, and dispenses darkness, and the Bohu consists of stones in the abyss, the producers of the waters.

-          The First Day, from The Legends of the Jews

This is probably the only Jewish manuscript who gave us a picture of God. It was written in Corfu, Greece, in the 18th century. It is preserved in the Braginsky Collection in Zurich and, alongside its many poems and liturgical pieces, includes 60 illustrations of various scenes from the Book of Genesis, painted in gouache by a talented artist who specialized in Venice.

Rabbi Professor Louis Ginzberg was born in 1873 in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to a devout Jewish family. From an early age, he was known as a child prodigy, learning to recite the Hebrew Bible by heart at the age of 7 and memorizing much of the Rabbinical literature by the age of 14. When it came time for him to write The Legends of the Jews, the 36,000 references found in the fifth and sixth volumes were written (according to him) from memory.

After finishing his primary education, Ginzberg received a doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1898 with his study of "the Aggadah (Jewish folklore) in the writings of the Church Fathers." A year later, he emigrated to the United States and was employed by the Jewish Encyclopedia, where he got his first taste of writing for the general public about Jewish history and literature. In the two years he worked for the encyclopedia, he composed over 400 entries.

In 1902, he became a Professor of the Talmud at the recently founded Jewish Theological Seminary of America, a position he held for the last 51 years of his life. Ginzberg wrote many scholarly books during his long career, but his greatest (and probably only) bestseller was his monumental work on Jewish folklore and mythology, The Legends of the Jews, which appeared in six volumes between 1909 and 1928.

This book (re)tells the biblical story, beginning with the creation of man and ending where the Books of Chronicles end—which are the last two books of the Hebrew Bible—using thousands of folklore tales, myths, and historical anecdotes taken from ancient and later Midrashim by the Talmudic sages, ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible, the works of Philo of Alexandria, Josephus Flavius, the Jewish Apocrypha, and the Church Fathers.

The slaying of Abel by Cain did not come as a wholly unexpected event to his parents. In a dream Eve had seen the blood of Abel flow into the mouth of Cain, who drank it with avidity, though his brother entreated him not to take all. When she told her dream to Adam, he said, lamenting, "O that this may not portend the death of Abel at the hand of Cain!"

He separated the two lads, assigning to each an abode of his own, and to each he taught a different occupation. Cain became a tiller of the ground, and Abel a keeper of sheep. It was all in vain. In spite of these precautions, Cain slew his brother".

-          Fratricide, from The Legends of the Jews

The murder of Abel, The Holkham Bible Picture Book (ca. 1330)

A mistake often made when trying to understand The Legends of the Jews is to focus exclusively on its "inner" Jewish context. To understand Ginzburg's work, in other words, we must go back—not to the Jewish mythological past alone, as Ginzburg himself did, or even to the Jewish history of the 20^th century—but to Europe at the end of the 18th century, and to a political landscape entirely different from the one we know today. At that time, in the pre-national era, Europe's map was characterized by large autocratic empires in which different peoples and cultures lived, speaking a multitude of languages. There was also a vast array of small principalities and states sharing a common language and culture, such as the German or Italian principalities.

The modern nation-state, in which a dominant culture with a central language exists, began to take hold only with the onset of the French Revolution and the export of revolutionary principles by the revolution's armies, and later, by Napoleon's conquests. With the rise of national sentiment, the demand for independent and separate states for the different European nations grew, and as part of that great historical shift towards the nation-states we know today, something developed that can be called a "double gaze." The national future relied not only on the shared language of the people demanding a state but also, and no less importantly, on the shared stories that people told about their past—stories that referred not only to (imagined or real) history but also to another time, an earlier mythological time.

The Italian Renaissance did much to revive (or, in its view, resurrect) the classical cultures of Greece and Rome. Now, in the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th, various peoples could and did turn their gaze to "their" own classics: to the literature and mythology of the Germans, Celts, and Scandinavians especially. The ancient and rich shared mythology served as proof of the existence of those historical peoples and validated their demand for political independence.

In this period, often referred to as the era of "romantic nationalism," various mythological stories were collected from both medieval manuscripts and living storytellers and poets. These stories were edited into coherent and cohesive works, which were published in large, luxurious volumes. A prime (and wonderful, it must be said) example is the "casting" of Finnish mythology into a thick volume of epic poetry by the doctor and folklorist Elias Lönnrot, known as the Kalevala. But while Lönnrot mostly collected ballads performed by living performers, a century later, when Ginzburg set out to collect Jewish legends, he relied on the thousand-year-old rabbinic literature written after the closing of the Hebrew Bible.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Ginzburg’s grand project already revealed what academic research would need many more decades to acknowledge: ancient Jewish culture is not (just) a rational culture, concerned mostly with law and behavioral norms. This was how it was portrayed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the truth is that it was a culture with a rich and living mythology, a culture of learning and thought that was not afraid to return to the most mysterious moments in its sacred texts and expand upon them. This is the case with Enoch son of Jared, a figure mentioned in a single sentence in the Bible—in Genesis.

Already in the Second Temple period, a vast literature was written about this Enoch, literature linking the man beloved by God with two stories mentioned in Genesis but not connected to each other: the story of the "sons of God" descending to earth and the story of Noah’s flood (my first Substack post dealt extensively with this topic).

In the last decade or two, conspiracy theorists have identified the First Book of Enoch as a major point of interest—they read there about events mentioned only briefly in the Bible, about the existence of giants, about the first rebellion against God, and about the true reason for the flood: the elimination of that rebellion. The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that these people have not yet latched onto Ginzburg's Legends of the Jews. More than any other work I know, the volumes composed by the greatest legend scholar of his generation open up a magnificent window into the behind-the-scenes drama of the Bible.

While all these abominations defiled the earth, the pious Enoch loved in a secret place. None among men knew his abode, or what had become of him, for he was sojourning with the angel watchers and holy ones. Once he heard the call adressed to him: “Enoch, thou scribe of justice, go unto the watchers of the heavens, who have left the high heavens, the eternal place of holiness, defiling themselves with women, doing as men do, taking wives unto themselves, and casting themselves into the arms of destruction upon earth. Go and proclaim unto them that they shall find neither peace nor pardon. For every time they take joy in their offspring, they shall see the violent death of their songs, and sigh over the ruin of their children. They will pray and supplicate evermore, but never shall they attain to mercy or peace.

-          The Fall of the Angels, from The Legends of the Jews

The first part of Ginzburg's book is structured as a continuous and electrifying narrative of biblical events. This story comes to us as one long, chronological, and flowing tale. But in fact, almost every paragraph is a fusion of many traditions, originally written in numerous languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, or Arabic. These traditions often contradict one another, either in order to justify different messages, or because they are based on different traditions. Ginzburg's editorial work, polishing, and combining these traditions created, in the words of the scholar Avigdor Shinan, "something new that had never existed before in the world, and which, in fact, only exists in Ginzburg's book." The second part of the book is intended for scholars, and it consists entirely of notes on the many traditions from which Ginzburg drew the various legends.

To me, The Legends of the Jews is, above all, a way to create interesting literature that builds on previous myths and legends. I highly recommend picking up a copy to discover this for yourself. And hey… perhaps, if you're a fiction writer, you'll want to base your story on the mythology you find there. Don’t you think it’s time for fantasy and sci-fi writers to start looking into other, largely unexplored sources? I do.