Leaning Walls: History and Significance of an Architectural Metonymy of Rabbinic Judaism

The image of the »leaning walls of the House of Study« in the aggadah of the Oven of Akhnai has been understood as a foundational myth of rabbinic »power/knowledge.« Through the survey of some significant uses of the image, this paper endeavors to recast its long history as a metonymy of rabbinic Judaism and to bring out its significance. It analyzes the role of the image in medieval anti-rabbinic polemics and rabbinic responses, the architectural rhetoric of the maskilic critique of the rabbinic elite, and some modern literary invocations of the image to express either a radical critique of traditional Judaism or an ambivalent attitude towards it, as well as the Orthodox reappropriation of the phrase. It concludes with some thoughts about the paradox of an image used to affirm a »will to power,« while at the same time avowing an inherent fragility.