What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.

[PrinceofApathy]

This is probably the best Jewish TL on this site. If I had a crown, I'd give it to you

 

[jacob ningen]

THE ANTIQUARIAN
SEPTEMBER 1840​

“They found another Yehuda Halevi poem,” said Meni the clerk as he laid the document on Avram Cohen’s desk.

“Tell me when they find a poem by someone I’ve never heard of,” Avram answered. But still, he picked up the yellowed, brittle paper with care and put it on the shelf for documents that would be copied before being cataloged and stored. The Sanhedrin would be interested in a new Halevi poem; the college at Acre would be interested, maybe even al-Azhar would be interested. Avram’s eyes glanced down the lines of spidery Hebrew and saw that the poem was an ode to the hospitality Halevi had found in Egypt – yes, al-Azhar would want to see that. Muhammad Ali would want to see that. So he put it on the left-hand shelf in a place protected from the sun, to be copied for all his many masters.

Unlikely due to survivorship bias. Only Cairene or Palestinian unknowns are likely. From Al Andalus, economics dictates youre only getting superstars

The deed done, he turned back to the other documents he’d laid out for the day’s work. None of them was as dramatic as a Halevi poem – they were letters, contracts, accounts, rulings and more, many of them fragmentary, all of them needing to be read and noted for what they were before being archived. Most of them were in Hebrew, but some were in Arabic, Aramaic, Ladino or even Yiddish. Avram could read all those languages. That was why he had this job even at twenty-three, and despite having been expelled from the Or Tamid.

Was it really an exile?

The first one – Avram picked it up with a forceps, because it looked ready to crumble in his hand – was a cargo manifest for a ship that had sailed from Aden to Suez five hundred years ago, bearing lapis lazuli, indigo and spices originally purchased in India. The second, from about the same time, was a letter from a Romaniote mother to her son in Cairo – this one written in Greek, although it used the Hebrew alphabet – informing of his father’s ill health. The third was a legal opinion from two hundred years later, declaring that a woman’s husband couldn’t forbid her from going to the baths to visit with other women and that he had to allow her money for the admission fee.

demonstrating how cairene society was.

Avram lingered over that one for a moment, making a few notes on the scrap of paper he kept to one side. Such a ruling could figure into the salacious novel he was writing – the one about an affair between a Karaite woman and the Rambam’s grandson. For the rest, he made his entries in the catalog ledger, consigned them to their proper places in the archive rooms, and realized it was time for the midday meal.

the classical Romantic scholar-novelist.

Some archivists brought lunch to their desks, but Avram never did; he needed the air, needed an hour of freedom. He walked out of the archive building – not the Ben Ezra synagogue itself, but a new house that had been built on the grounds to store its records – and through narrow streets, past Coptic churches and public scribes’ stalls and water-sellers crying their wares. He passed ancient stone walls and keystone windows with patterned wooden shutters; he moved through the sound of donkeys braying and women bargaining and men gossiping in the coffeehouses; and in an alley around the corner from an oil-seller’s window, was the tavern.

Only in this part of Cairo, in a neighborhood of Copts and Jews, could there be a tavern, and even here, the landlord kept the windows shuttered so the qadis wouldn’t have to take notice. Inside, though, the Jews and Christians were joined by Muslims who honored the prohibition of alcohol in the breach, singing Abu Nuwas’s praise of wine and drinking imported Galilee vintage with as much gusto as anyone else.

Avram, his own cup next to a plate of koshary and stuffed squash, listened to the singing and worked on a scene from his novel. He’d publish it in Acre if he ever finished it – they published anything there – and when the Sanhedrin banned it, it would sell twice as many copies. He drank a second cup and his mind drifted again from the novel to another poem of Halevi’s, this one written when he was young:

Banned in Boston effect. Youd think the Sanhedrin would learn the best response is ignore.

I'm too young to put down the cup
I've only begun to pick up. To and for
What end should I stop
When my years are not yet two and four?

Eight more months, Avram had, before his own years were two and four. He imagined the passage of time, both his own years and the centuries since the first records in the Ben Ezra geniza had been laid down. He imagined poets, sailing ships, women with property going to law against their husbands. He drank a third cup and imagined more. And that was where Meni found him.

_______​

“I should have known you’d be here,” Meni said. “But sober up. A letter came from the Or Tamid. You’re to go there at once, with all the marriage contracts between Karaites and Rabbanites.”

“The original contracts?” Avram wasn’t sober, not quite yet, but he was startled enough to give a good imitation. “Not copies? Do they understand how fragile they are?”

the problem of documents.

“The letter says the contracts, not copies. If they’re working on a ruling – and that’s what I’d guess – they may want to say they’ve examined the documents themselves. Especially since your translation of them might be…”

and is it Avram's translation thats the issue(or as shown later) they need the exact phraseology not a translation as these are legal formula and performatives.

Avram held up a hand. “Never mind,” he said. “I hear and obey.” There was little love lost between him and the Or Tamid since its dean had discovered a cache of his least reverent poetry,

but a summons from that school was not to be ignored.

as it could enact more than exile and may withdraw funding

A generation ago, when al-Azhar had been called in to arbitrate because no one could agree on who owned the geniza, it had decreed that the Jewish and Karaite communities of Cairo, the Haham Bashi of Egypt, the Egyptian government and its own Grand Imam would sit on the governing board, but that the documents belonged to the Sanhedrin as patrimony of the Jewish people. The money that paid Avram’s wages was mostly the Sanhedrin’s money, which meant that of all his masters, the Sanhedrin, of which the Or Tamid was an appendage, was the one that had first claim on his allegiance.

We spared no expense. They belong in a museum!

And so he hurried back to the archive, sewed two sheets of heavy paper together with thread to make a protective folder, and found the marriage contracts in the drawer where he’d put them. Then he went to the Sassoon offices; they had fast ships and they knew well how valuable the Sanhedrin was, so Gideon, their new junior factor, found passage for him without delay.

Speed, of course, was relative; even the fastest steamer took two days to go from Cairo to Acre. But from there, luck was with Avram; the mail coach was just about to leave, and his letter from the Sanhedrin got him a seat. It had once taken a day on horseback or two on foot to go from Acre to Tzfat, but the mail coach got there in four hours, and from the window, Avram could see workers laying the track that would cut it to less than three.

It had been four years since Avram had last seen Tzfat. That had been the year before the earthquake. But the building codes that the Sanhedrin had decreed after the quake of 1759 seemed to have done their work; the outline of the city had changed, but only a little, and much of what Avram remembered was still there. As the coach began to climb toward the city, he could see the houses spiraling up the mountainside, the steeples and minarets, the dome of the great synagogue and the four towers of the Or Tamid, the vertical gardens that occupied the lower slopes and the spaces between buildings. Tzfat had taken long to grow into its role as a capital city, but it had the majesty of one at last, and the bustle of its markets and coffeehouses and its hundred lesser synagogues came unbidden to Avram’s memory.

Soon the mail coach was rumbling up the winding streets, pulling up finally at the post office that was a short distance below the Or Tamid. The alley between was full of rabbis and students, all deep in conversation; Avram, joined them, unnoticed, and passed through the gate.

As luck would have it, the registrar of the day was Noam Benveniste, the same professor who’d presided over the committee that expelled Avram. He recognized Avram at once; the look he gave him wasn’t one of approval but also wasn’t unfriendly or surprised; Avram had been summoned, after all, so his presence was expected.

“Still a Hollander, I hear,” said Noam – it meant a modernist, a skeptic, one who didn’t care to follow the Law.

“Even more of one,” Avram answered, and the other man nodded; he could see for himself that Avram had neither fringes nor sidelocks.

“Yet you serve the Name well, whether you mean to or not. Your work piecing together the Yannai fragments…”

Hegels cunning of reason at play or Whiggish conceptions at work.

Now it was Avram’s turn to nod, without false modesty. Yannai was a paytan – a writer of hymns – who’d lived in the Holy Land around the reign of Justinian, a place and time from which all works had been thought to be lost. His piyyutim were among the oldest records in the geniza, and they had been torn and scattered; it had been the work of a year to recognize that they had all been transcribed in the same hand and to piece together their fragments. And that had led to the discovery of Solomon al-Sanjari and other paytanim who’d written in the Byzantine and early Islamic periods, who’d written with great passion and defined the liturgy of their day.

the true work of an archaeologist not mr Ford's renditions of it. and could it be the same scribe or did he recognize a stylistic of Yannai's work. Like Tsappho, Pindar, Laozi, the Analects, Alcuin, Abelard, Sophocles "Lost Plays" and so much more. And the process of production means we probably only have the pop paytanim.

“I hear those have caused a stir,” Avram said, and Noam didn’t deny it. Far though Avram now lived from the Or Tamid, he knew how the rediscovery of the Palestinian paytanim had reignited the debate over whether there should be a distinct minhag for the Land of Israel, a new nusach that incorporated the ancient hymns that had been written there. Curiously enough, the greatest resistance to the idea had come from the traditionalists in Jerusalem and some of its most enthusiastic supporters were numbered among the liberals; regardless, the arguments and exchanges of briefs would likely go on for decades…

see Germany during the Romantic period. The new minhag of older traditions is like Jena and Gottingen folklorists. especially as old forms that are now traditional might be overturned. see xkcd as well

“What you have brought us, hopefully, will cause less of a stir,” said Noam at last, “though it is no less important. Come with me and meet the men who will rule on a matter of marriage.”

_______
​

“Meet,” it turned out, wasn’t quite the right word; four of the five hahamim on the committee that had summoned Avram had known him as a student. The fifth, Zvi Ginzberg, had come from Vilna the previous year with a following of mitnagdim in the hope that this might be the year Moshiach came. It was the eleventh of Elul, so there were twenty days left, but the fact that Ginzberg had become part of the Or Tamid faculty made clear that he’d already renounced the dream.

Or the council subtly twisted the Sanhedrin's arm to admit him. Or is Or Tamid more restrictive than the Sanhedrin itself?cf. the Maharitz controversy from the previous century.

It took until suppertime to gather everyone in a workroom full of open books and scribbled notes. Ginzberg, who knew only so much of Avram as he’d been told, was the most disapproving; he scarcely looked up from the text he was perusing, and said “so the Hollander is here.”

Right then, Avram decided that Ginzberg – with another name, of course – would be a character in his novel. He said nothing, though, and laid the precious folder of marriage contracts on the table. “You asked for these, and I brought them.”

good or bad

“Very good,” said Yisrael Abuhatzeira, who sat at the head of the table and the one among them, other than Noam Benveniste, who was recognized as being a posek – a scholar with legal authority. His voice, unlike the others, was friendly; he’d been fond of Avram, though he’d agreed that he was a poor candidate for the rabbinate, and he approved of Avram landing on his feet as one of the geniza’s archivists. “You should know, I would think, why we summoned you. There is a Jew from Ethiopia who came to the Galilee last year – Ageze Molla, a student for the priesthood in his own land, but he settled in a fishing village. He intends to marry, and we’ve been asked for our opinion on the forms.”

“The forms,” Avram repeated. “Then your ruling will not be on whether the marriage can take place, but how?”

“Very good. You are a wise one, Hollander that you are. Yes, there can be no doubt that the marriage is lawful. Few Jews have ever come here from Ethiopia, but our library contains a responsum from the Radbaz – David ibn Zimra, who was asked to rule on an Ethiopian woman sold in Egypt as a slave. This was three hundred years ago, but the customs the Radbaz attributes to this woman are very much like what Molla has related to us, and what we have read in his books. There is also a letter from Elijah of Ferrara a hundred years before that, claiming to have met an Ethiopian traveler in Jerusalem, and he describes their beliefs very similarly. And both agree – Ageze says this too – that the Jews of Ethiopia are descended from the tribe of Dan. The Radbaz ruled as much; we see no reason not to accept his ruling as authoritative, and we will say so in ours.”

“But?” asked Avram, intrigued in spite of himself – or possibly not in spite of himself at all.

“But the Ethiopians’ beliefs are much like those of the Karaites. And while Karaites are Jews – that, too, is beyond question – there have been very few marriages between them and rabbinic Jews within the Sanhedrin’s jurisdiction, and in all of those, the Karaite spouse has adopted rabbinic customs. But Ageze will not do that, and we understand that there are contracts in the geniza in which the Rabbanite and Karaite spouses accommodated each other. We have asked for those contracts so we can review their wording, determine what conditions are lawful – and perhaps, speak to you about what you’ve learned of that place and time.”

how to deal with minhagim colliding something America and the Yishuv are uniquely forced to address.

And now there was no more mystery – yes, the contracts in Avram’s envelope had dealt with that very situation. He drew the first one out carefully and spread it on the table, pointing to where the bride and groom had each made declarations, how the groom agreed that he would not force the bride to light Sabbath candles or forbid her from celebrating Karaite holidays, how the bride agreed that she would celebrate Rabbanite holidays with the groom and his family.

“They aren’t all the same,” he said. “The agreements are different for each couple. But they are all similar to this, and the form is for each party to execute a declaration, made binding by witnesses…”

He trailed off as Benveniste looked closely at the contract and Ginzburg pulled out another one, comparing the two, noting down the legal language that sealed the bargain. They were disagreeable old men, some of them, but Avram was suddenly sure that their ruling would honor the wishes of Ageze and its intended, and would set a precedent for the other Jews of Ethiopia who would surely come – and maybe for the Karaites of Jerusalem, if the next one to marry a Rabbanite chose to do so differently than in the past.

Maybe such a contract belonged in his novel. At the end, of course – the Rambam’s grandson would not be deprived of his affair – but how better to wind things up than for he and his Karaite paramour to marry? And they would go on a journey. It hardly mattered where, but as the rabbis argued, Avram looked out the workroom window and to the lights of Tzfat below.

excellent as always.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

well this surely was a fascinating update, wanting to learn more about the theological debates caused by the documents in the Geniza and also happy of seeing things though lost to the sands of time being rediscovered we may seem the dead sea scrolls being found in the late XIX early XX century hat surely would be interesting not only for Jews but also for Christians

The Qumran caves were certainly known, but it's a matter of stumbling on the right one. IOTL that happened by accident, and it might have to happen that way ITTL as well, but with more people in the area, the odds go up. Hmmm, President Grant is due for a visit in 1878, and he's got a wife who's very interested in holy sites and Biblical archaeology...

And yes, not only the Sanhedrin but 19th-century missionary societies would love the Scrolls. The question is whether they'd help the Sanhedrin collect and buy them in exchange for library access, or whether they'd compete and start a bidding war. Maybe U.S. Grant will even stay long enough to referee the drama.

This is probably the best Jewish TL on this site. If I had a crown, I'd give it to you

Thank you! Anything in particular you'd like to see? We're getting toward the end of the 1840 arc but there are still possibilities.

Unlikely due to survivorship bias. Only Cairene or Palestinian unknowns are likely. From Al Andalus, economics dictates youre only getting superstars

True, the works of minor Iberian poets are unlikely to be found - unless some of those minor poets traveled to Egypt or the Holy Land and left documents. (Which is something I don't know.)

Was it really an exile?

Less than it was intended to be, certainly - or maybe not, if (as you guess later) the rabbis who expelled Avram nonetheless saw his worth and wanted to send him someplace where he could do work that was more in his nature. He'll marry soon enough, and probably live in Cairo the rest of his life. If the universe has a sense of humor, he'll marry a Karaite.

BTW, y'all might enjoy these amazing photos of 19th-century Cairo that I used as inspiration. They're mostly from the 1860s-1880s, but I don't think the older parts of the city were very different then from 1840.

Banned in Boston effect. Youd think the Sanhedrin would learn the best response is ignore.

Bodies like that rarely do, though.

and is it Avram's translation thats the issue(or as shown later) they need the exact phraseology not a translation as these are legal formula and performatives.

That was just Meni guessing - it was of course the latter reason. And the Karaite marriage contracts are in Hebrew rather than Aramaic, so they didn't even need to be translated.

the true work of an archaeologist not mr Ford's renditions of it. and could it be the same scribe or did he recognize a stylistic of Yannai's work. Like Tsappho, Pindar, Laozi, the Analects, Alcuin, Abelard, Sophocles "Lost Plays" and so much more. And the process of production means we probably only have the pop paytanim.

Yes, especially the very early ones who wrote in the 5th-9th centuries - they would have had to be popular, and their works would need to have been widely copied, even to survive long enough for copies to enter the geniza.

see Germany during the Romantic period. The new minhag of older traditions is like Jena and Gottingen folklorists. especially as old forms that are now traditional might be overturned. see xkcd as well

True - and naturally, every possible outcome will come to pass: the revived Holy Land nusach will be compiled, some congregations will accept it, others will reject it, and still others will adopt parts of it. Two Jews, three opinions is eternal.

Or the council subtly twisted the Sanhedrin's arm to admit him. Or is Or Tamid more restrictive than the Sanhedrin itself?cf. the Maharitz controversy from the previous century.

Not every member of the Sanhedrin teaches at the Or Tamid. As mentioned in The Debtera, some Sanhedrin members dissented from the body's skepticism of the messianic prophecies, but they keep a tighter rein on what gets taught at their official school than what individual rabbis might teach.

excellent as always.

I figured you'd like this one - Geniza content and an inside look at how the Or Tamid does its work. We might see one or both again before 1840 is out, and both will definitely appear in 1878.

 

[jacob ningen]

The Qumran caves were certainly known, but it's a matter of stumbling on the right one. IOTL that happened by accident, and it might have to happen that way ITTL as well, but with more people in the area, the odds go up. Hmmm, President Grant is due for a visit in 1878, and he's got a wife who's very interested in holy sites and Biblical archaeology...

the coupon problem.

And yes, not only the Sanhedrin but 19th-century missionary societies would love the Scrolls. The question is whether they'd help the Sanhedrin collect and buy them in exchange for library access, or whether they'd compete and start a bidding war. Maybe U.S. Grant will even stay long enough to referee the drama.

Thank you! Anything in particular you'd like to see? We're getting toward the end of the 1840 arc but there are still possibilities.

True, the works of minor Iberian poets are unlikely to be found - unless some of those minor poets traveled to Egypt or the Holy Land and left documents. (Which is something I don't know.)

I think some did but then again people who can travel in those days tended to be major due to travel cost.

Less than it was intended to be, certainly - or maybe not, if (as you guess later) the rabbis who expelled Avram nonetheless saw his worth and wanted to send him someplace where he could do work that was more in his nature. He'll marry soon enough, and probably live in Cairo the rest of his life. If the universe has a sense of humor, he'll marry a Karaite.

probably.

Bodies like that rarely do, though.

That was just Meni guessing - it was of course the latter reason. And the Karaite marriage contracts are in Hebrew rather than Aramaic, so they didn't even need to be translated.

of course an older archaic more legal dialect but the Sanhedrin being a body of scholars would know it.

Yes, especially the very early ones who wrote in the 5th-9th centuries - they would have had to be popular, and their works would need to have been widely copied, even to survive long enough for copies to enter the geniza.

True - and naturally, every possible outcome will come to pass: the revived Holy Land nusach will be compiled, some congregations will accept it, others will reject it, and still others will adopt parts of it. Two Jews, three opinions is eternal.

the one universal constant

Not every member of the Sanhedrin teaches at the Or Tamid. As mentioned in The Debtera, some Sanhedrin members dissented from the body's skepticism of the messianic prophecies, but they keep a tighter rein on what gets taught at their official school than what individual rabbis might teach.

of course. Ive been stumbling on German academic politics again due to a Topology video. So Weber is fired over the constitution crisis and Gauss suggested Listing(who coined the term and discovered the mobius strip at the same time as Mobius)

I figured you'd like this one - Geniza content and an inside look at how the Or Tamid does its work. We might see one or both again before 1840 is out, and both will definitely appear in 1878.

thanks

 

[St. Just]

He may be a Hollander but Avram Cohen is a "top man" by the sound of things! Cool to see Ageze and Gideon woven back into the story.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

He may be a Hollander but Avram Cohen is a "top man" by the sound of things! Cool to see Ageze and Gideon woven back into the story.

You have to be pretty good to get a job at a synagogue archive after being expelled from rabbinical school. And the Galilee in 1840 still isn't that big - it has the population of Fort Collins, Colorado, so stories are going to intersect.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

So I think I've got the last three 1840 stories in place.

The Feast of Atonement, Constantinople, October 1840: Sabbateans, the Ahrida Synagogue, the Tanzimat, and intrigues involving Central Asian emigres;

The Day of Joining, Beit Mina and Tiberias, December 1840: Eid al-Banat, a by-election (of sorts), and a wedding;

and finally

1841: 18-19-year-old Joseph Sebag Montefiore takes the Grand Tour. This will bookend the 1840 arc with a journey to the Holy Land from the north to complement Ageze Molla's journey from the south, and will also show several European cities we haven't yet visited. I don't have a title yet other than "The Grand Tour," and maybe that's what I'll stay with, but if you've got a better one, I'm listening.

I've got the notes for The Feast of Atonement done - I've written the notes for the last few stories first; I've found that helps a lot with fine-tuning the plotting - and hope to have the story finished this coming week. The other two will follow at the speed reality allows.

 

[durante]

Sorry to have missed the above when you posted it. I hadn't known of the controversies involving etrogim, but now that I've gone down that rabbit hole, I'd imagine that, like most things, it could go either or both of two ways. On the one hand, etrogim were already being produced outside Palestine by the 1600s and the Sanhedrin might facilitate production outside the Holy Land by certifying the lineage of trees for export. On the other hand, the greater number of Jews in Ottoman Palestine would mean higher domestic etrog production and more fruits available for export to the diaspora.

Also, reading about etrog production sent me down another rabbit hole - shmita. I'm assuming that shmita years wouldn't be a big problem at first - few of the Jews who settle in the Galilee under Nasi in the 16th century or under the Sanhedrin in the 17th/18th would be farmers, and most of those who do work in agriculture would either be in silk production, which is not a plant crop, or would have orchards or vineyards, which are subject to the otzar bet din (which the Sanhedrin would control). The few Jewish farmers could be supported by the community during the fallow year while the food supply would come from the great majority of farmers who are Muslim or Christian. But eventually more Jews would farm, and the Sanhedrin would have to decide whether land could be placed in trust with a non-Jew for the year or whether that is forbidden. I'd guess that this would come to a head sometime in the 19th century much as IOTL - if I get to that point in the story, it might be a major controversy.

This brings up another question I had about shmita - could the requirement be fulfilled via crop rotation? Like, leaving one-seventh of your land fallow every year?

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

This brings up another question I had about shmita - could the requirement be fulfilled via crop rotation? Like, leaving one-seventh of your land fallow every year?

I Am Not A Rabbi, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no - shmita is a time-bound commandment, and as such it isn't one that can be fulfilled in installments, any more than you can skip Shabbat by taking one-seventh of each working day off during the week. The only way to deal with shmita in a society where there are many Jewish farmers and a money economy - palace economies are fine - is either self-sufficient kibbutzim/moshavim or a legal transfer of custody similar to OTL. And TTL has both!

This reminds me, BTW, that 1839-40 (5600 in the Hebrew calendar) was a shmita year, and that I'd intended to make it a plot point. Since I didn't - these things happen - I'll rule that the Sanhedrin came up with the same solution as OTL and that a non-Jew, probably the chief qadi of Tzfat, was given custody of the land for the year. Fruit crops, including grapes, are dealt with by the otzar bet din as usual - by 1840, the Sanhedrin's administrative clerks will have this down to a science - and farmers outside the Talmudic borders of Israel (in 1840, that basically means the few who own land on the coastal plain north of Acre) can ignore the whole thing.

 

[durante]

I Am Not A Rabbi, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no - shmita is a time-bound commandment, and as such it isn't one that can be fulfilled in installments, any more than you can skip Shabbat by taking one-seventh of each working day off during the week. The only way to deal with shmita in a society where there are many Jewish farmers and a money economy - palace economies are fine - is either self-sufficient kibbutzim/moshavim or a legal transfer of custody similar to OTL. And TTL has both!

This reminds me, BTW, that 1839-40 (5600 in the Hebrew calendar) was a shmita year, and that I'd intended to make it a plot point. Since I didn't - these things happen - I'll rule that the Sanhedrin came up with the same solution as OTL and that a non-Jew, probably the chief qadi of Tzfat, was given custody of the land for the year. Fruit crops, including grapes, are dealt with by the otzar bet din as usual - by 1840, the Sanhedrin's administrative clerks will have this down to a science - and farmers outside the Talmudic borders of Israel (in 1840, that basically means the few who own land on the coastal plain north of Acre) can ignore the whole thing.

Interesting! I suspected this would be the case. I ran into a similar concern when worldbuilding for "Shtetl House on the Prairie". My solution was a symbiotic relationship between Mennonite and Orthodox Jewish farming communities on the Prairies, to much the same effect. Shmita year as a plot point is a cool idea.

Loving this thread by the way! Cheers to both yourself and @jacob ningen for the idea

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

Interesting! I suspected this would be the case. I ran into a similar concern when worldbuilding for "Shtetl House on the Prairie". My solution was a symbiotic relationship between Mennonite and Orthodox Jewish farming communities on the Prairies, to much the same effect.

That wouldn't be an issue on the American prairie, because the laws of shmita apply only in the Land of Israel. A relationship between Jewish and Mennonite farmers would still be beneficial, though, because the Mennonites could teach the Jews how to farm land that is unfamiliar to them.

Loving this thread by the way! Cheers to both yourself and @jacob ningen for the idea

Thanks! I hope the stories are giving a sense of what it's like to live in this world.

 

[PrinceofApathy]

That wouldn't be an issue on the American prairie, because the laws of shmita apply only in the Land of Israel. A relationship between Jewish and Mennonite farmers would still be beneficial, though, because the Mennonites could teach the Jews how to farm land that is unfamiliar to them.

Thanks! I hope the stories are giving a sense of what it's like to live in this world.

As for what I would like to see, more of daily life for Galileaan/Palestinian Jews. Especially the nagidah and other notables

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

As for what I would like to see, more of daily life for Galileaan/Palestinian Jews. Especially the nagidah and other notables

In that case, I think you'll like the December 1840 story.

 

[durante]

That wouldn't be an issue on the American prairie, because the laws of shmita apply only in the Land of Israel. A relationship between Jewish and Mennonite farmers would still be beneficial, though, because the Mennonites could teach the Jews how to farm land that is unfamiliar to them.

Thanks! I hope the stories are giving a sense of what it's like to live in this world.

It's beneficial for the Mennonites, too. In general, they only come to town on Sunday for Church. As religious Christians, they can't run shops on Sunday. Someone needs to watch the horses while everyone's in Church, the Mennonites need people who can run shops on Sunday. This is how/why my own family ended up on the prairie.

 

[Jonathan Edelstein]

It's beneficial for the Mennonites, too. In general, they only come to town on Sunday for Church. As religious Christians, they can't run shops on Sunday. Someone needs to watch the horses while everyone's in Church, the Mennonites need people who can run shops on Sunday. This is how/why my own family ended up on the prairie.

So wait, Mennonites independently invented the Shabbos goy? Somehow that renews my hope for humanity.

 

[durante]

So wait, Mennonites independently invented the Shabbos goy? Somehow that renews my hope for humanity.

Lol I never thought of it like that. But yes. Haha now I'm thinking there would be some Mennonite German word like "sabbathjüden".

 

[Meshakhad]

Interesting! I suspected this would be the case. I ran into a similar concern when worldbuilding for "Shtetl House on the Prairie". My solution was a symbiotic relationship between Mennonite and Orthodox Jewish farming communities on the Prairies, to much the same effect. Shmita year as a plot point is a cool idea.

Loving this thread by the way! Cheers to both yourself and @jacob ningen for the idea

Can I get a link to "Shtetl House on the Prairie"?

 

[FriendlyGhost]

Can I get a link to "Shtetl House on the Prairie"?

Shtetl House on the Prairie

What if the Canadian prairies became a refuge for Jews from the Russian empire, beginning prior to large-scale immigration on the Canadian prairies? The Canadian prairies are distinct because of the larger numbers of settlers that came from the Austrian and Russian Empires, especially leading...

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