new certainties and new mysticism 385
The wide circulation of the codes thus had the effect of spreading
some customs which had previously been confined, while entrenching
some other differences. Among these differences are the distinctive rules
of Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the categories of food prohibited on
Pesach: Ashkenazim refrain from kitniot (legumes and grains, such as
rice, peas, lentils, beans and peanuts) which are permitted to Sephardim.
The origin of the Ashkenazi restriction is unclear. The best guess is a
concern that they might be contaminated with forbidden grain (hametz )
when stored. But the result of these different customs can be consider-
able, for it renders the food of even the most pious Sephardi Jews
forbidden to an Ashkenazi for the whole of Passover.^10
Thus the concerns of Hayyim b. Betsalel that the codes of Karo and
Isserles would end local variety proved exaggerated. So too did his
warning that students would neglect study of the Talmud if all they
needed was these handy reference works. In fact the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries witnessed an explosion in yeshivah study in eastern
Europe, with major centres in Lublin, Cracow, Prague, Lvov, Brest-
Litovsk, Pinsk and Slutsk, and numerous small yeshivot in other
communities. Talmud study flourished in Italy (notably Venice and
Livorno) and Greece (especially Salonica), and in Constantinople, and
in the two main centres in the land of Israel, Jerusalem (where the small
Jewish population from the late medieval period had been enlarged by
an influx of Sephardim after 1492) and Safed. When the yeshivot in
Poland and Lithuania suffered a period of temporary decline after the
Chmielnicki massacres in 1648– 9, many eastern European scholars
migrated to teach in the German communities in Frankfurt am Main,
Hamburg, Metz and elsewhere. Others ended up in Hungary, in Eisen-
stadt and Pressburg (today Bratislava in Slovakia), and in the nineteenth
century the communities of central and western Europe developed their
own indigenous scholarly traditions, as we shall see (Chapters 17–19).^11
On the other hand, approaches to Talmud study did change, with far
less concern to discover from the ancient texts the halakhah in practice,
which was now easily available in the codes. Characteristic of study in
these academies, in Ashkenazi countries, was still intensive instruction
in the text of the Talmud, with the commentaries of Rashi and others
from the medieval French and German tradition. But the method of
teaching, pilpul, owed something to a humanist stress on intellectual
independence, albeit still allied to respect for the traditional sources.
Pilpul (a word derived from the verb pilpel, ‘to spice’ or ‘to season’)
involved intense oral disputation between the head of the yeshivah and