Yeshayahu Leibowitz Wears a Kippah: A Story of 1967

It was July of 1967 and the clean-shaven Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the Hebrew University wore a kippah. Yes, a kippah adorning the head of a biochemist, talmudist, philosopher, and medical doctor, a Riga-born Jew keeping the Sabbath, the dietary laws, etcetera, a Zionist by way of Berlin, Heidelberg, and German-speaking Switzerland. His lantern jaw was familiar in the small town Jerusalem was then, especially in the Rehavia neighborhood where the yekkes at the university—the German-speaking Jewish refugees—made their homes. Leibowitz was not a yekke himself but an Ostjude, from the East. Still, you couldn’t ignore the Berlin and Basel degrees, or his wife Greta, herself a PhD in mathematics, a yekkit from North Rhine-Westphalia. Not an unimpressive couple.

The derivation of the word? Some believed yekke referred to the German Jewish habit of wearing jackets and ties in the Middle Eastern heat. Others insisted it was acronymic for Y’hudi kasheh havanah—dimwitted Jew.

Be that as it may Kranzdorf remembers his own father as a yekke, an atheist, a Wagner-besotted, non-Zionist refugee who always wore a jacket and never went tieless in the Middle East. He would salute Leibowitz on King George Street. He also thought of his own refugee mother chatting in German with the Frau Professor in Shemtov’s vegetable and fruit stand at the corner of Aza Road and Radak Street. Greta with a pram—if Kranzdorf was Ernst’s and Dora’s only kid, the Leibowitzes had six children. Pru ur’vuh—be fruitful and multiply, as the Torah commands. Leibowitz the husband, father, and commandment-keeper was regularly seen in the neighborhood by Kranzdorf in boyhood. In retrospect, he noticed Leibowitz carried himself as a good and an observant Jew; noticed, that is, in contrast to Kranzdorf himself, now a father of two, a bad Jew who, a few years previous, was committing adultery and writing his MA thesis on Kafka. He’d see Leibowitz walking fast between Rehavia and the campus at Givat Ram and overhear him talking to himself.