Megilath Sedarim

HOROWITZ, JUDAH BEN MORDECAI HALEVI

n.p.

Prague

1793

Hebrew and censor’s approval in Latin

Vinograd, Prague1009

In this fictional trialogue, the author, a physician of Lithuanian origin, attempts to make peace between the three warring factions of the Kabbalah, Talmud, and Haskalah (Enlightenment). The participants in the debate are the three sons of Jedidiah: Obadiah (the Kabbalist), Hashavyah (the Talmudist), and Hodayah (the Maskil). The aged patriarch Jedidiah is called upon to act as a referee in their debate.(A much later attempt at such peacemaking would be El’azar Zweifel’s Shalom al Israel.) At the end of the eighteenth-century Prague was a center of debate between traditional Talmudists opposed to the introduction of kabbalistic meditations into prayer, and kabbalists of various stripes who agitated for such emphasis on the esoteric. The most famous expresion of this clash is the exchange betwen Rabbi Ezekiel Landau (author of “Noda bi-Yehudah”) and R. Chaim Tchernowitz (author of “Be’er Mayim Chaim”), in which the former opposed the saying of “Le-Shem Yichud” before performing a commandment, and the latter, a representative of the new Chassidic school, upheld the kabbalistic meditation. See Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press, 2002), pp. 345-348