Jacob Ettlinger - Education

Education

A typical story is reported by Abraham Geiger, who formed Ettlinger's acquaintance as a student in 1829. At a school examination a teacher said that Joseph's brothers had acted in an unbrotherly fashion, whereupon Ettlinger rebuked him indignantly for speaking ill of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. His views can be judged from his first work, Bikkurei Yaakov, in the preface of which he says that he chose this title because it had the numerical value of Jacob and Rachel, who are mystically represented in the law of the Sukkah, with which the book deals. A similar belief in the doctrines of the Kabbalah is expressed in a sermon in which he urged early burial, because as long as the body remains unburied evil spirits have power over it. In his will he left the request that the four capital punishments (stoning, burning, decapitation and asphyxiation) should be performed symbolically on his body.

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