One of my first research tasks was to determine the historical timeline for RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER. While 10th century Babylonians are unlikely to know accurate birth and death dates for 3rd and 4th century sages, I accept that Rav Hisda was active between approximately 250-300 CE and Rava between 300-350 CE. As you can see, lots of important history was happening in their world around that time.
235-285: Political crisis in Rome; over a dozen emperors rule with most soon assassinated by rivals. Very high taxes instituted throughout the empire, especially in Israel.
240: Shapur 1 becomes king of Persia, ruler of Babylonia, and begins Sasanian dynasty. Shortly thereafter, Persia and Rome go to war.
260: Shapur 1 captures Roman emperor Valerian. Shapur accepts a truce and receives tribute from Rome.
275: after Shapur's death, Zoroastrian high priest Kartir oppresses other religions. However, Jews suffer only mildly.
275-310: four different Sasanian rulers, none particularly competent.
285-305: stability returns to Rome under Emperor Diocletian, who persecutes Christians.
295: Persia defeated by Rome, loses Armenia and upper Euphrates
306-337: Constantine becomes first Christian Emperor of Rome.
310: Shapur II born; his mother rules for him.
313: Constantine issues Edict of Milan, proclaims religious tolerance throughout the empire.
320: Israel/Holy Land begins as center of Christian pilgrimage; Jews begin to flee Israel for Babylonia.
325-380: King Shapur II successfully rules Persia
335-363: Rome and Persia at war
355-363: Julian [the Apostate] is Emperor of Rome; restores Hellenistic paganism as official state religion and orders Jewish Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem.
363: Persia defeats Rome, death of Julian the Apostate.
Now that I have an idea what was happening in Persia and Rome, I need to determine how these events would affect my characters and then create a plot that places them in crucial locations at critical times.
Way back in 1997, when considering whether to write about Rashi's Daughters or Rav Hisda's daughter, one of my biggest concerns was that while Rashi's daughters names were known to be Joheved, Miriam and Rachel, nobody seemed to know [or care] what Rav Hisda's daughter was called. Writing a novel about a nameless woman would be challenging, to say the least, especially for a novice author. While I knew I would have to create names for secondary characters no matter which of the two subjects I chose, I was reluctant to invent a name for my heroine. So I went with Rashi's Daughters.
Now that trilogy is finished and I am back to planning a novel about Rav Hisda's nameless daughter. But I'm [hopefully] no longer a novice writer, so I thought I could solve my problem by writing her story in first person. If I'm using "I" instead of "she," then I might not need to have a name for her. Her parents could call her "daughter," her siblings "sister," her husband "wife" [you get the idea]. I wasn't happy with that solution, but I didn't see that I had any other options.
But after a day of research at HUC's library in Cincinnati, I'm pretty sure I have the name for Rav Hisda's daughter. In addition to the Talmud, a valuable source of information about Jews in Babylonia are the thousands of "magic bowls" produced between 300-600 CE. The names written in these bowls are matronymics, i.e. son/dau of the person's mother. Going over all the women's names from the magic bowls, I noticed that many of them end in "dukh," such as "Rasnendukh, Burzandukh, Barandukh. In Touraj Daryaee's book on Sasanian history, he mentions two women's names, Sabuhrduxt and Hormizduxt, who are daughters of Sabuhr and Hormizd respectively.
Following this logic, Rav Hisda's daughter would be named Hisdadukh, which means that the Talmud redactors merely dePersianized her name. In other words, my heroine's name really is "Hisda's daughter." Hisda is a Persian name [it's definitely not a Hebrew name], and his sons' names [Mari, Pinchas, Chanan, Tachlifa, Nachman, Yenukah and Keshisha], are Persian except for Pinchas. So it seems likely that Rav Hisda would have given his daughter a Persian name as well.
So now that I have her name, do I still write her story in first person? I think I'll decide that later.
When starting my research, one of the first places I went to was Los Angeles Public Library online catalogue. I knew from researching RASHI'S DAUGHTERS that they have a decent Judaica collection, plus the convenience of sending any book I want to my local branch, which is about a ten-minute walk from my home. As I searched for books on the subject of Jewish Women in the Talmud, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many the LAPL had in circulation, including some recent titles I would have considered rather obscure.
"Cambridge Companion to Talmud and Rabbinic Literature" by Fonrobert, "Talmudic Stories: Narrative and Culture" by Rubenstein, "Jewish Marriage in Antiquity" by Satlow, "Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender and History" by Peskowitz, and even "Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the Talmud" by Hayes [does it get more arcane than that?] - slowly but surely, I read them all. But I couldn't help but wonder what prompted the LAPL to add these kinds of scholarly volumes to their collection. Surely very few library patrons would be reading them.
After the fourth book arrived, I had my answer. For I noticed an identical bookplate on each of their inside covers: "Spielberg Family/Righteous Persons Foundation Collection." An internet search brought me to their grants archive, where I discovered that in 2008 the foundation had donated $100,000 to the Library Foundation of Los Angeles to endow the Los Angeles Central Library's Jewish collection of books and periodicals.
Wow! A hundred thousand dollars worth of Jewish books donated to my public library, with no fanfare or even an article in the local press, at least none I've seen. This was amazing. Thank you Spielberg family. Now I can't help but wonder who decided which titles to acquire and how that decision was made. I may just try to find out.
As you may have heard, two separate arson attacks in January have devastated the 600-year-old synagogue on Crete and left its extensive library and archives in ruins. Two Americans, two Britons, and a Greek citizen have been arrested. The Yiddish Book Center has offered to help replace some of the books that were destroyed - and we in turn are calling on our members and friends. You'll find a current list of needed titles at our website .
Most of these books are in English, Hebrew and Greek (there are no Yiddish readers in Crete). Could I ask you to look through the list and check your shelves at home? Any of these titles you can spare will be enormously appreciated. To save time and money, books may be transshipped at domestic media mail rates through an American APO address. Please send any books directly to:
Lorenzo Garcia
PSC 814 Box 36
FPO AE 09865-0036
Please email us or use our website to let us know which books you send, so we can update our online list and avoid duplication.
Many thanks,
Aaron Lansky, President
National Yiddish Book Center
P.S. According to David Webber, a Canadian in Crete, the Jews there "continue to pray in a burned and gutted sacred structure one has known to be blessed, beautiful and gracious." When I emailed Nicholas Stavroulakis, a leader of the Crete community, to tell him I would be writing to our members, he sent this reply: "Thank you so much for your help - books are of course the heart of our lives, and the loss of so many has really been very hard to handle. Be well my friend."
I'm finally home from my Great Lakes book tour, which was great by the way. One nice bonus of my trip was having lots of time, mostly in airports and on airplanes, to read some of the many books and articles I've accumulated for my research on Jewish life in 4th-century Babylonia. An even better bonus was spending Shabbat in Cincinnati after my Thursday evening speaking event, which enabled me to spend most of Friday at the Hebrew Union College library.
This was my first foray into a university library since starting my new project, and what a difference from researching Rashi's Daughters. People in the Jewish world know who I am now, and many are eager to assist me with Rav Hisda's Daughter. Professor Jason Kalman, whom I met at the AJS conference last December, made me excellent coffee and offered excellent advice on how to proceed. He then spent several hours helping me find the books I wanted, including some in another professor's office, as well as photocopying pages from both their books.
HUC is a rabbinic school, so of course its Judaic content is huge. My goal was to determine every call number that could possibly pertain to my subject and then search the stacks to see what books I'd find with those numbers. I suppose it would have been more efficient to search the online catalog earlier at home, but nobody's perfect. When I had a full page of numbers, I went upstairs to begin my treasure hunt. BM 509 W7 for women in the Talmud, BM 729 A4 for ancient Jewish magic, BM 177 for Jews in Babylonia, and lots more. But when I got to those shelves, many of the books I wanted were missing. Obviously someone else was researching the same topics that I was. How disappointing.
But I still had plenty to start with, so I headed to the carrel at the end of the BM 177 aisle. Some student named Ben had obviously appropriated it for his personal study area, but signs indicated that all carrels were for public use. So I sat down and out of curiosity, perused the books on his shelf. And there they were - exactly the books I'd been looking for! And more, since he had his own books there as well. When Jason came back from lunch [I gobbled mine down in the library's stairwell], he told me that Ben was a rabbinic student whose thesis topic was "Rabbis vs demons in Jewish History." I will certainly be emailing this guy.
I had thought I'd have plenty of time to photocopy what I needed and still get to the rare books collection, but suddenly I learned that the library was closing early due to heavy snow. That's when Laurel Wolfson, head librarian, stepped in to help. I never did get to the rare books, but as I worked the copy machine, Laurel scanned what I couldn't get to and emailed me the pdf files. Now I have even more things to read, plus a list of books to available at the HUC library in Los Angeles.
Some of you may have wondered why I haven't posted recently. No, I'm not ill, nor am I deeply engrossed in researching my next novel. I'm on a 12-day Great Lakes book tour [until Feb 8], visiting 10 synagogues, six cities, five states, and two countries. Today I'm in Toronto and tomorrow I'll be in Detroit.
Last Shabbat, I attended what I consider a pretty unique shul: Kol Sasson in Skokie, Illinois. I was staying with my former Talmud teacher, Rabbi Benay Lappe, and when she heard I was saying kaddish for my father, she suggested going to the minyan she attended, which was just down the block. Looking forward to sleeping in, I wasn't sure I wanted to go. Until she told me this was an 'egalitarian' Orthodox minyan where women wore tallit, had aliyah to the torah, and even read torah.
This I had to see. So I put on my winter hat, borrowed a tallit from Benay, and off we went. Sure enough, there was a mehitza down the length of the room, but it was white lace hung like a shower curtain on a long rack, so men and women could clearly see each other. In the middle was the large table where Torah was read; those honored with an aliyah came up from their own side of the room and stood on their side of the table. Not very long after I sat down, a woman came over and asked me if I'd like an aliyah, which I accepted with alacrity.
When my turn came, the Torah reader was a woman, who did an superlative job. This was Shabbat Shira, so not only did I get to see the special layout on the Torah page where Moses' Song of the Sea appears, but I heard a woman chant the passage in its special trope. Was it a coincidence or planned that a woman was chosen to read the words attributed to Miriam as she led the women of Israel, now on the safe side of the Red Sea with Pharoah's army drowned in front of them? In order to be on time to my next event, I had to leave Kol Sasson just after kaddish. So I didn't get to ask her.