The 'Imagined Communities' of Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen: Heresy and Communal Boundaries in Sefer Nizzahon
Abstract
Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen, a Jewish scholar active in Prague at the turn of the fifteenth century, is best known as a religious polemicist thanks to his widely disseminated Sefer Niẓẓaḥon (The Book of Polemic). In this article, I argue that despite the important place assigned to arguments against Christianity in Sefer Niẓẓaḥon, inter-religious polemic constitutes only one facet of a much broader project embodied by the book's structure and content, a project that fits very well with Lipman's interest in the integration of philosophical and Kabbalistic knowledge expressed in his other works.
Lipman's primary aim in Sefer Niẓẓaḥon was to popularise among wider strata of Ashkenazic society a rationalistic interpretation of Jewish religion based on the writings of Maimonides. He chose to respond to what he perceived as the short-comings of late-medieval Ashkenazic religiosity, especially its use of anthropomorphic expressions in prayer and literal interpretation of Talmudic haggadah, by fashioning Jewish identity as constructed primarily around belief based on carefully delineated theological principles.
To underline such vision of the Jewish community, Lipman in his book invoked different classes of dissenters as rhetorical interlocutors. Through the medium of literary polemic, Lipman attempted to address the cultural challenges of his time by imagining communities of 'others' and re-imagining his own community.
However, this project was not isolated from its non-Jewish intellectual surroundings. Lipman's repeated criticism of sceptics (meharherim) reflects his awareness of the dangerous potential of unbridled philosophical speculation that may have resonated with the concerns of his Christian contemporaries expressed in the debates on academic heterodoxy, heresy, and their impact on religious community.
Furthermore, Lipman's attitudes to authorship and literary practice parallel approaches employed by some late-medieval Christian theologians, thus suggesting that he should be seen as a participant in a broader literary culture.