[Mendele] Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements--In Memoriam Prof. Dr Shlomo Z. Berger (1953–2015)

[Victor Bers]

Mendele Personal Notices and Announcements

Aug. 24, 2015

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[Sent to Mendele by Marion Aptroot <aptroot at phil.hhu.de>]
Aug. 25, 2015

In Memoriam Prof. Dr Shlomo Z. Berger (1953–2015)
PROF. DR. EMILE SCHRIJVER

‘A tayerer fraynd,’ a much-loved friend: those were the words that came to
mind when I received the startling news that Shlomo Berger had passed away
last Wednesday, 19 August 2015. He would have been 62 on 1 September. He
died following an acute bacterial infection which he fought off for a few
days, yet ultimately in vain, leaving his friends and colleagues devastated.
            Born in Tel Aviv, Shlomo Berger attended Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev in Beer Sheva and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. There he
gained his doctorate in Ancient History in 1987, with a thesis on
Revolution and Society in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy, which appeared
in print in 1992. It was shortly after this that he was invited by Prof. Dr
Rena Fuks-Mansfeld to come to the University of Amsterdam, where he worked
on two post-doctoral projects and began teaching in 1995. He taught Jewish
History, Modern Hebrew, History of Modern Literature and Yiddish, the
language of his mother as he fondly recalled. On 1 January 2005, the status
of his Yiddish course was elevated when he was appointed extraordinary
professor in Yiddish Language and Culture (with special reference to the
Netherlands) under the auspices of Menasseh ben Israel Institute. The
formal reason for establishing the chair was that the University of
Amsterdam wished to safeguard Yiddish as an academic study; the informal
reason was that the proposed candidate, Shlomo Berger, had long been
professorable. Funding and continuation of the chair had only recently been
organised in yet another testimony to the magnificent scholarship and
mammoth reputation of this most modest of men.
            His academic articles, the first of which appeared in 1988,
focused originally on the Ancient World, an interest that remained close to
his heart; later, following the publication of his Classical Oratory and
the Sephardim of Amsterdam: Rabbi Aguilar’s ‘Tratado de la retórica’ in
1996, in which he combined his classical expertise with his Jewish
knowledge, he moved definitively into the world of Jewish Studies. He
always regarded himself primarily as a historian, less so a Yiddish
scholar, although he adored Yiddish (and Hebrew) language and literature
and held many an impassioned lecture on the subject. In recent years he
gradually drew closer towards the study of the Jewish book, a subject to
which he brought many innovative contributions. His latest volume, with the
poetic title Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books
in Paratextual Perspective, appeared in 2013. It is a curious work which is
based on a meticulous scrutiny of forewords, title pages, approbations and
epilogues, paratext, in Yiddish books published in Amsterdam. While the
study of this kind of text, which French historian Gérard Genette neatly
describes as ‘the fringe of the actual text’ has received considerable
attention among students of the non-Jewish book, it was Shlomo Berger who
first applied this form of research to Jewish books, indeed to date he is
the only scholar to have ventured into this particular area. I cherish warm
memories of our many discussions; he would often visit Bibliotheca
Rosenthaliana as he prepared for the publication and we would peruse this
or that Yiddish book together and discuss the greater or lesser
significance of some aspect of paratext.
            That pleasure in the study of old sources is something we had
shared for many years. Berger published his Travels among Jews and
Gentiles: Abraham Levie's Travelogue (Amsterdam 1764) in 2002, an
historical analysis of one of my favourite manuscripts in the Bibliotheca
Rosenthaliana collection: a Yiddish account by Abraham Levi of his journey
through Europe, written in 1764. We spent many hours poring over that
manuscript. Sadly, he never got to finish his planned book on Readers and
Modes of Reading in Yiddish, 1500-1850.
            He was an original thinker who stood firmly for the importance
and above all for maintaining the highest standards in scholarship and his
chosen terrain. He brooked no compromise in that respect. If a person’s
work was below par he saw no reason not to say so in the most explicit
terms. To engage in Jewish Studies it is essential to know all the relevant
languages, he was convinced of this, and not without reason. Moreover,
researchers should dare to venture beyond their own methodology and
specialisation. If his candour was resented and resulted in the rupture of
a relationship, so be it; he could not do otherwise, and he could never
hide his frustration whenever he detected a lack of quality or a lack of
genuine effort.
            Menasseh ben Israel Institute’s major international research
project into Yiddish in the Netherlands as an Expression of Ashkenazic
Culture, which we set up in the late 1990s with Marion Aptroot, Irene
Zwiep, Rena Fuks-Mansfeld, Henk Meijering and Falk Wiesemann, would have
been totally different without him. I look back with pleasure at the
countless hours we spent together at the computer in my Menasseh ben Israel
Institute office in Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, juggling texts in
our respective English, arguing the benefits of one formulation against
another. He had a profound distaste for the red tape that Dutch and German
bureaucracy entailed, and was not averse to saying so with undisguised
relish, yet he understood that administration was required if he was to
achieve his academic goals and so he was prepared to knuckle down time and
again to make yet one more effort. Together with Irene Zwiep, he started a
periodical, Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, first published in 2001
by Brill in Leiden, and he was on the editorial board of Studia
Rosenthaliana, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana’s scholarly journal. As an
extraordinary professor, he was also editor of a series of Menasseh ben
Israel Institute publications issued after each of the annual Amsterdam
Yiddish Symposia that he organised, the ninth volume of which recently
appeared.
            Shlomo Berger was a cosmopolitan. He was an Israeli
Amsterdammer who had worked all over the world, from Jerusalem to
Philadelphia, and from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Dublin (where he had just
been appointed external examiner for Jewish Studies at Trinity College).
Spain was a particular love of his, where he would regularly take a pile of
books and recharge his batteries in the sun, and not to mention every
researcher’s Valhalla: Oxford. In Oxford he was Visiting Fellow at
Brasenose College and had recently led an Oxford Seminar in Advanced Jewish
Studies at Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies on ‘Jewish Books in
Amsterdam, 1650-1850: Authors, Producers, Readers and the Construction of
Jewish Worlds’. Indeed, he was a past master at thinking up these ingenious
titles. There, in his beloved Oxford, is where I saw him last, we lunched
together in the Common Room at Brasenose College where he basked visibly in
the gently elitist atmosphere of the place, and where we enjoyed the
excellent food and drink after my own lecture at his seminar. It never
occurred to me that this might be the last time we would embrace. Jewish
Studies will be the poorer now that this thoroughbred intellectual has left
us. And like so many other friends, colleagues and students, I shall
cherish the memory of this ardent, curious man, an aesthete in every fibre
of his being, my ‘tayerer fraynd.’

_____________________________________

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