Crafted under my guidance by Claude.
Towards the end of parashat Lech Lecha, Hashem gives Avraham the mitzvah of milah, and spells out what happens to one who does not keep it:
| יד וְעָרֵל זָכָר אֲשֶׁר לֹא יִמּוֹל אֶת בְּשַׂר עָרְלָתוֹ וְנִכְרְתָה הַנֶּפֶשׁ הַהִוא מֵעַמֶּיהָ אֶת בְּרִיתִי הֵפַר. | 14 And the uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken My covenant. |
What does venichreta, "shall be cut off", mean? Rashi gives the standard rabbinic understanding:
ונכרתה הנפש. הוֹלֵךְ עֲרִירִי וּמֵת קֹדֶם זְמַנּוֹ.
"That soul shall be cut off -- he goes childless, and dies before his time."
That is, karet is a punishment at the hands of Heaven. Not something that the community carries out.
Shadal agrees. But in his commentary on this pasuk (also on Sefaria), he first brings and rejects a competing explanation, from the Christian scholar Clericus (Jean Le Clerc). And the proof that Clericus offers is a Latin poem by Petronius. Here is Shadal:
ונכרתה הנפש ההיא מעמיה – עונש בידי שמים, והנכון כדברי רז״ל {מועד קטן כ״ח.} שילך ערירי וימות קודם זמנו. ודעת קלעריקוס שיגורש מבין היהודים, או שיהיה נחשב כנכרי, עד שיצטרך לגלות בין הנכרים, והביא ראיה משיר רומי נמצא בשירי Petronius, זה לשונו:
"That soul shall be cut off from his people -- a punishment at the hands of Heaven, and the correct [understanding] is like the words of our Rabbis, of blessed memory {Moed Katan 28a}, that he will go childless and die before his time. And the opinion of Clericus is that he will be expelled from among the Jews, or that he will be regarded as a foreigner, to the point that he will need to go into exile among the foreigners. And he brought a proof from a Roman poem found in the poems of Petronius, and this is its language:"
Shadal then quotes the Latin. I'll give it alongside my own translation. (Shadal's text reads cilli, glossing it as asini, "of the ass", in the second line. The text at the Latin Library, fragment XXXV, reads coeli, "of heaven", instead. I give both.)
|
Iudaeus licet, et porcinum numen adoret Et cilli (i. asini) summas advocet auriculas; Ni tamen et ferro succiderit inguinis oram, Et nisi nudatum solverit arte caput, Exemtus populo Grajam migrabit ad urbem, Et non jejuna Sabbata lege premet. Una est nobilitas, argumentumque coloris Ingenui, timidas non habuisse manus. |
Though the Jew may worship a pig-god, and call upon the lofty ears of the ass [or: the highest ears of heaven], still, unless he has also cut with iron around the border of his groin, and unless he has with skill loosed the bared head, cut off from the people, he will migrate to a Greek city, and will not keep the fasting Sabbaths by the law. There is one nobility, one proof of free birth: not to have had timid hands. |
One can see why Clericus liked this. Exemptus populo, "taken out from the people", is very close to venichreta... me'ameha. And here it is described as a social consequence. The uncircumcised man is not counted among the Jews, and he has to go live among the Greeks.
But Shadal is not impressed:
אמנם מי יסמוך על הרומיי הזה שהיה מאמין שהיהודים עובדים לחמור, ושאינם אוכלים החזיר משום עבודה ושהם מתענים ביום השבת? והאיש הזה לא ידע שהיהודים נימולים לשמונה ימים, והוא סבור שהם מלים את עצמם בגבורת לב
"However, who would rely on this Roman, who believed that the Jews worship a donkey, and that they do not eat the pig because of [its] worship, and that they fast on the Sabbath day? And this man did not know that Jews are circumcised at eight days, and he thinks that they circumcise themselves with courage of heart."
That last point is the final couplet. The "nobility" is not to have had timid hands, that is, to have been brave enough to perform the cut on oneself.
Shadal counts four errors in the space of eight lines. Each of them, by the way, was a standard bit of ancient lore about the Jews. The pig abstention as reverence for the pig is debated in Plutarch's Table Talk (4.5). That Jews fast on the Sabbath turns up in Suetonius (Augustus 76) and in Tacitus (Histories 5.4). And the donkey is the most famous of them all. Apion claimed that the Jews kept a golden ass's head in the Temple, and Josephus has to refute him (Against Apion 2.80). Tacitus says that they consecrated the image of an animal in their sanctuary, the animal that had led them to water in the desert. For a survey, see the Encyclopaedia Judaica article "Ass Worship".
However, Petronius may not actually be guilty of the donkey. Everything rides on one word in the second line. Shadal's text, presumably as he got it from Clericus, reads cilli, a rare word for an ass, and it even comes with a gloss, i. asini, so that nobody will miss it. But the text in the Latin Library reads coeli, that is caeli, "of heaven". Then the line says that the Jew may "call upon the highest ears of heaven". That is, he prays to the God in heaven, rather than to an image. That is not an error at all! It is about what Juvenal says (Satires 14.97), that the Jews worship nothing but the clouds and the divinity of the sky.
Daniel Klein, in his English translation of Shadal, notes this in a footnote, but I think the point should be made a bit more explicit. Read with caeli, the donkey charge disappears. And it was one of the strongest items on Shadal's list, since it is so outlandish. The pig-god, the Sabbath fast and the self-circumcision remain. So Petronius would still be a poor witness, but a less ridiculous one than Shadal's text makes him. (Recall, though, that belief that Jews worshiped donkeys was prevalent.)
There is an irony here. Shadal is checking Petronius against what he knows of Judaism, and finds him wanting. But the Latin he is checking is not something he verified. It came to him through Clericus, together with the reading that makes Petronius look worst. That is the same problem one step back. Shadal was able to check the Roman's report about the Jews, but not the scholar's report about the Roman.
Still, Petronius is an unreliable witness, and Shadal rules him out. But Shadal does not stop there:
ומכל מקום גם דברי המשורר הזה אינם שקר מכל וכל. ואם אינם ענין לממאן למול את עצמו תנם ענין לממאן למול את בניו, כי יתכן שהיה בית דין אומר לו מול את בניך או צא מארץ ישראל, לא שיהיה זה המכוון במילת ונכרתה, אבל היא תקנה הכרחית לשמירת הדת. גם יתכן שנתאמתו באיזה זמן דברי המשורר הזה כמשמעם, כגון שנולד אדם בשעת שמד ולא מלוהו, ואח״כ כשגדל נמנע להמול מפני הכאב, ואז גירשוהו ישראל מקרבם.
"Nevertheless, the words of this poet are also not entirely false. And if they are not relevant to one who refuses to circumcise himself, apply them to one who refuses to circumcise his sons. For it is possible that the beit din would say to him, 'Circumcise your sons, or leave the land of Israel.' Not that this is what is intended by the word venichreta, but rather it was a necessary enactment [takkanah] for the preservation of the religion. It is also possible that at some time the words of this poet were borne out according to their plain meaning. For instance, a person was born at a time of persecution and they did not circumcise him, and afterwards when he grew up he refrained from being circumcised because of the pain, and then Israel expelled him from among them."
And then he returns to the pasuk, and proves from elsewhere in Tanach that karet is death at the hands of Heaven, not expulsion:
ומה שכתוב ואם העלם יעלימו עם הארץ את עיניהם מן האיש ההוא וגו׳ ושמתי אני את פני באיש ההוא ובמשפחתו והכרתי אותו וגו׳ מקרב עמם (ויקרא כ׳:ד׳ וה׳), וכן מה שכתוב לעיני בני עמם (שם שם י״ז) מורה באצבע כי הכרת מיתה בידי שמים, ולא גירוש; וכן ביחזקאל (י״ד:ח׳) ונתתי פני באיש ההוא והשימותיו לאות ולמשלים והכרתיו מתוך עמי.
"And what is written, 'And if the people of the land do at all hide their eyes from that man... then I will set My face against that man, and against his family, and will cut him off... from among their people' (Vayikra 20:4-5), and likewise what is written, 'in the sight of the children of their people' (ibid. 17), points with a finger that karet is death at the hands of Heaven, and not expulsion. And similarly in Yechezkel (14:8), 'and I will set My face against that man, and will make him a sign and a proverb, and I will cut him off from the midst of My people.'"
The point of the Vayikra proof is that there, the people of the land fail to act. If karet were something the community carried out by expelling him, it could hardly happen precisely when the community looks away. Instead, Hashem steps in and does the cutting off Himself.
So it is worth being precise about what Shadal grants. He does not think that ancient Jews worshipped donkeys, of course. And he does not think that expulsion is the peshat of venichreta. What he allows is that the social fact Petronius describes may have really existed at some point, as a rabbinic enactment or as a response to circumstances. That is, the community expelling the uncircumcised, as a matter of practical policy, separate from and alongside the Biblical punishment.
I would add one more possibility to Shadal's two. Who were the people a Roman in Italy would actually see becoming Jews, and taking a blade to themselves as adults? Proselytes. A Gentile drawn to Judaism, who kept some practices but balked at circumcision, would indeed not be counted among the people. Seen from outside, that looks like "unless he cuts, he is excluded from the people". And the "courage of heart" Petronius admires is the courage of the adult convert. If so, Petronius's mistake about the eighth day is a mistake of perspective. He described the Jews he could see, and generalized.
