Yoel Maccabi

Yoel Maccabi

Founder of the Israati University of Judah

Born	c. 1685 AN Haifa
Died	c. 1751 AN (aged about 66) Judah, Wechua Nation
Resting place	Judah
Occupation	Philologist and scholar of religion
Spouse	Devora Katani
Known for	Founding the Israati University of Judah (1734 AN)

Yoel Maccabi (c. 1685 AN to c. 1751 AN) was an Israati-descent philologist and scholar of religion, the founder in 1734 AN of the Israati University of Judah. Born among the Israati-descended families of Haifa, the eastern diaspora that the migrations known as the going out had carried out of Israat, he spent his working life gathering the scattered record of the Judahite rite and brought it to Judah, the rite's former seat, to constitute it as a teaching collection.

The rite whose literature Maccabi recovered had ended as an organized body with the fall of Caputia on 30.XV.1668 AN, and its own writings had not survived it. What survived was the Yerenist quotation literature that had preserved the rite by quoting it to refute it, and Maccabi's scholarship rested on the position that such a hostile record is worth keeping.

Maccabi was of the confessional descent and not of the confession, and the record does not make him a practitioner of the rite he recovered. He is remembered less as a believer than as the collector who saved a faith that was not his own, and the university he raised over the collection preserved his method as its founding principle: that a rite known only through its enemies is a rite worth recovering.

Early life and formation

Maccabi was born about 1685 AN among the Israati-descended families of Haifa, whose ancestors the Haifan record places in the undated migrations that carried the Israati population east from their homeland. The Judahite rite to which his forebears had belonged had ceased to function as an organized body seventeen years before his birth, and the community that still carried its vocabulary and its surnames no longer carried its worship.

Little is recorded of his early life, and no school claims him. The university's later account has him formed in the diaspora itself, through the household literacy by which the going-out families had kept the rite's liturgical Haifan as an inheritance after they had let its worship lapse. By that account he learned Haifan as a language of memory rather than of belief, and the Common Tongue as the language of the surviving record, and came to the study of the rite as a philologist before he came to it as anything else. That the man who founded the first Israati institution of learning had no institution to form him is a commonplace of the tradition, and one it treats as fitting rather than as a want.

Return to Judah

In middle life Maccabi made the return to Judah. Judah, the administratively senior of the two historical Israati cities and the former seat of the rite's court, had passed on the fall of Caputia to Alduria-Wechua and lay by his lifetime within the Wechua Nation of Nouvelle Alexandrie, where the Faith of Inti is established and the Yehudi of the region keep a license of practice among its residual congregations. How he supported the years of collecting that followed is not securely recorded. The tradition credits his trade, the work of a translator and copyist in the Common Tongue, together with the patronage of the residual Israati-descent community of Judah, whose families kept him while he gathered.

He married into that community. His wife, Devora Katani, came of one of the Judah families of Israati descent, and the marriage bound him to the congregation that would later establish his university, the same community that had kept him at his work. She and their line were of the descent and not of the confession, as he was. A son, Aharon Maccabi, is named in the university's memory as the one who carried the surname on among the Israati-descended families of Judah, where it is borne still.

The recovery

The record Maccabi set out to recover had been lost with the states that held it. The Israati collections kept by the courts at Judah and Ben Aliv were dispersed through the Hammish Civil War and the Alexandrian Flu of 1650 AN to 1652 AN, and by the fall of Caputia what remained of the rite's teaching survived only inside the Yerenist polemics written to refute it. His undertaking was to gather that hostile record and read the rite back out of it. Over several years he located surviving Yerenist commentaries across the former Hammish and Caputian lands and brought copies together at Judah, where the assembled polemics became the working collection of his study.

Whether the quotations could be used at all had divided the rite's own scholars while it still stood: one position held that a hostile witness is preferable to none, the other that a text known only through its enemies is an allegation and not a text. Maccabi took the first position and built his work upon it. What the hostile record had preserved most fully was less the rite's theology than its long disputes over the reckoning, the office that fixed the liturgical calendar against the Norton year, and it was there that his collection was richest. The authorities it recovered best, among them Nahum of Judah and Eliav of Ben Aliv, are known almost entirely through the citations of their opponents.

Because the rite's liturgy had been kept in Haifan while its court corresponded in the Common Tongue, those citations were for the most part translations, and much of Maccabi's labor was philological. He worked to distinguish what the rite had held from what its opponents had made it appear to hold, correcting the errors that hostile paraphrase introduced, both the technical vocabulary of the reckoning rewritten by translators who did not keep it and the selective quotation that carried a position only far enough to condemn it. The method treated the polemic as a flawed witness to be read against its own intent, and it was this reading, rather than any surviving scripture of the rite, that his collection preserved. By his time no living authority could correct the reconstruction. The rite's own courts had ended with Caputia, and the surviving Benacian branch of the tradition had never held jurisdiction over the Israati rite and had by the Disputation of Siyachia of 1703 AN fallen into a succession quarrel of its own. What Maccabi recovered was answerable to his philology alone.

The university and rectorship

In 1734 AN, sixty-six years after the fall of Caputia had ended the rite as an organized body, Maccabi constituted the assembled commentaries as a teaching collection and founded the Israati University of Judah around it. The residual community of Israati descent supplied the congregation, Maccabi the collection and the design, and the Wechua Nation the charter under which it stood. The institution he set up joined two purposes that the loss of the rite had made inseparable, the salvage of a scattered record and the teaching of what could be read out of it, and it took as its principal holding the same Yerenist quotation literature he had spent his working life assembling. In 1746 AN, twelve years after the foundation and within Maccabi's lifetime, the Grand Federal Tour brought King Sinchi Roca II and Queen Adelaide to Judah, where the royal party held interfaith ceremonies and visited the city's historical religious sites.

Maccabi led the university as its first rector from its foundation until his death, some seventeen years. It remembers him at its head as a teacher of the recovered rite and of the philology by which it was recovered, and it keeps the principle he set at its center as its motto, A hostile witness is preferable to none. What he taught was not the rite as a living confession, which no one at the university professed, but the rite as a thing to be reconstructed, held at the distance of scholarship from the belief it described.

Death

Maccabi died at Judah about 1751 AN, at the age of some sixty-six, still rector of the institution he had founded. The circumstances of his death are not recorded. He was buried at Judah, the city to which he had returned and where he had raised the university, and the university has kept his grave since. The rectorship passed on his death to the keepers of the collection he had assembled, and the university continued under them without a break in its work.

Religion and the descent

To the rite he recovered, Maccabi stood as a scholar and not as a believer, of the descent but not, on any record, of the confession. That distinction the Israati sources keep carefully, since a count of the Israati descent is not a count of the rite, and the community from which he came had carried the vocabulary and the surnames of the Judahite rite long after it had ceased to carry its worship. The distinction was not confined to his scholarship: raised in late 1716 AN, within his lifetime, the Israati-Haifan Defense Force drew Haifan and Israati former Caputians by descent alone, and counted itself Israati where the confession no longer did. His work rested on that separation rather than in spite of it: the rite was to him an object of recovery, approached through the record of its enemies, and the university he built professed no confession and required none of those who studied in it.

He lived out his life within the establishment of the Faith of Inti in the Wechua Nation, among the residual congregations that hold a license of practice there, but the record does not place him in any of them, and it does not resolve his own belief. That the recovery of the Judahite rite was accomplished by a man who did not profess it is the fact the tradition returns to most often, and the one on which it rests its claim that the recovery was scholarship and not devotion.

Historiography and reception

The question that had divided the rite's scholars while it stood, whether a text known only through hostile quotation could be treated as the text at all, outlived the rite and settled on Maccabi's own work. His collection is a reconstruction assembled from the writings of the rite's opponents, and the objection that such a reconstruction reports the polemic rather than the rite has followed it from the beginning. On the university's telling, the objection is answered by necessity, since none else survives, and it has kept Maccabi's method as the working principle of the collection he left it.

He is assessed less as an original thinker than as the collector and reader through whom a lost rite is known at all. The authorities his work recovered, Nahum of Judah and Eliav of Ben Aliv among them, are read to this day in the form his philology gave them, corrected out of the paraphrase of their opponents, and the reservation that attends any such recovery, that the correction is itself a reading, attends them still.

Legacy and the name

Maccabi is remembered through the institution he founded, which keeps and studies the Yerenist collection he assembled, and through the surname he carried. Maccabi was among the few pieces of Judahite vocabulary to outlast the confession that coined it, attested on both sides of the going out and borne after the courts were gone by the club Maccabi Judah and by the Maccabi River. The name's persistence in these public forms is a matter of the wider Israati onomastic inheritance rather than of Maccabi's household, though his own line is remembered to have carried it on among the descent families of Judah.

See also

• Israati University of Judah
• Judahite rite
• Nahum of Judah
• Eliav of Ben Aliv
• Yerenism
• Maccabi Judah
• Hapoel Ben Aliv
• Carrie Fitzwater
• Wechua Nation