About Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares

I was glad to see Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares (1869-1931) mentioned in Rabbi James Rosenberg’s February 2025 “It Seems To Me” column.

Tamares studied at the Kolel ha-Perushim in Kovno founded by Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, followed by two years at the Volozhin yeshiva, and served as the rabbi in the village of Milejczyce, in the Białystok region. McGill University Professor of Jewish Studies and History Gershon David Hundert z”l, in his entry on Tamares in “The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe,” quoted from a 1913 article of Tamares’ that “for us, the Jewish people, our entire distinctiveness is the Torah and Judaism; the kingdom of the spirit is our state territory.” Hundert added: “In this essay and elsewhere, Tamares attacks Jewish nationalism as a subversion of the purpose of the Jewish people, which inheres in ethics and spirituality. Thus, he argued, Jewish life in exile has a positive value.”

Tamares’ writings on issues like exile and diaspora, Torah study, freedom, Zionism, nationalism, and violence and pacifism – some of which are available in Rabbi Everett Gendler’s “A Passionate Pacifist: Essential Writings of Aaron Samuel Tamares – remain relevant and challenging.”

Morty Miller

Cumberland, RI