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Rabbi Ganzfried's two million Kitzurs - Shlomo Ganzfried's book 'Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Jack E. Friedman

The week my grandfather died my grief-stricken mother, perched on her low shiva bench in our living room, urged my father to make certain that her parent's tombstone included the line: grandson of the author of the Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh. I was only six, but old enough to recognize the reverence in her tone when she mentioned the well-known work by her nineteenth-century ancestor, Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried.

The Kitzur, the Abridged Code of Jewish Law, was a peripheral presence when I was growing up: a staple of classroom instruction in the yeshiva I attended and a frequent companion in our family's quest for the religious, ethical, and social norms of everyday Jewish life.

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About a decade ago, approaching retirement and affected by the retrospective posture that often accompanies one's later years, I began to reach back to my celebrated progenitor and to the story of his famous book. I quickly discovered that I had underestimated the staying power of the Kitzur. One hundred and thirty years after its publication in 1864 in Ganzfried's home town of Ungvar (now Uzhgorod in southwest Ukraine), the Kitzur remains the halakhic handbook of choice for Orthodox Jews worldwide. The fourteen editions seen through the press by the author before his death in 1886, plus about a half dozen pirated reprints, have been supplemented by some hundred reissues in the century since, the original Hebrew complemented by translations into Yiddish, English, French, Hungarian, German, French, and Spanish, many with glosses and commentaries by their respective editors.(1) As a visit to any Jewish bookstore will confirm, new editions continue to proliferate. Recently, the Kitzur became available on CD-ROM.

In 1986, the Jerusalem Institute, which has been editing a cache of Ganzfried's unpublished manuscripts, brought together several hundred descendants in Bnei Brak to commemorate the writer's centennial yahrzeit. The occasion, accompanied by an outpouring of full-page articles in the religious press, was followed three years later by the publication of the first of the new Ganzfried volumes. In an introductory essay on the author's life, Rabbi Joseph Buchsbaum, Director of the Institute, estimates that over two million copies of the Kitzur have come off the press since its initial printing.(2) That figure, probably close to the mark, needs to be increased by several score thousand to account for the flourishing Kitzur "industry" in the years since 1989. With the exception of the Bible, the prayer book, and perhaps the Talmud and the Passover Haggadah, no Jewish publication has approached that record.

Ganzfried was in his sixtieth year when he published the Kitzur, a time when the struggle between Hungarian Reform and traditional Orthodoxy was at its height. By providing the lay Jewish population of Hungary with a work that embraced the myriad requirements of religious observance in an easily accessible format, he was acting, probably with intent, to shore up their convictions against the assault of the reformers.

The agenda of the reformers, known as Neologs, was not as radical as Reform in Germany. Other than some extreme voices that called for the Sabbath to be moved to Sunday, the ideologists of the movement sought to achieve centralized supervision of the Jewish community and its educational system, to establish a rabbinical seminary, and to introduce synagogue innovations such as the relocation of the bima - the reader's table - to the front of the congregation, the use of the secular tongue in sermons, and ritual attire for the cantor. The Orthodox leadership reacted with outrage to these proposed changes. They accused the Neologs of emulating gentile practices and warned of an existential threat to the primacy of the Shulkhan Arukh and the survival of Torah Judaism. The internecine struggle waxed fiercely during the 1840s and '50s and was finally joined in 1868 at the General Jewish Congress convened by the Austro-Hungarian government to determine the organizational structure of Hungarian Jewry.

Ganzfried was a delegate to the congress from Ungvar, along with the city's chief rabbi, Menachem Ash, a national spokesman for the Orthodox cause. And he did not hesitate to express his opposition to the Neolog positions. A Neolog observer records Ganzfried's caustic reaction to the proposal that the seminary curriculum include a course on the secular philosophers. "If you want the rabbis to study philosophy, we have the Moreh Nevuchim . . . and Chovot Halvavot" - references to Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed and the well-known moral treatise, Duties of the Heart. "And these are sufficient."(3) In Aperion (1864), his commentary on the Torah readings, Ganzfried concludes a discussion in the Exodus portion of Bo on the education of the young by warning that a father who exposes his child to non-Torah knowledge opens the door to the disappearance of Jewish identity.

Despite his identification with the Orthodox onslaught against Reform however, both nationally and in Ungvar, Ganzfried was not in the front ranks of the battle. In view of the prominence he attained through his writings, his absence from the leadership may have been by choice. More precisely, it may have been a reflection of his personality and temperament. Although he could display disdain against the enemies of Orthodoxy, he was by nature a humble man.(4) "I, the worm," and "a stranger with Him, insignificant and impoverished," are the word portraits that appear on his title pages. Similarly, in his first endorsement, haskama, of a fellow scholar's work,(5) the first in a long string, he writes, "I know my small worth, that I have not attained the stature to offer a haskama to holy books." This was in 1865, a year after publication of the Kitzur.

Rabbi Ganzfried's two million Kitzurs - Shlomo Ganzfried's book 'Kitzur Shulkhan Arukh

Judaism, Fall, 1997 by Jack E. Friedman

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