Rabbi Herbert Mandl has taken some special trips over the years. His most recent trip to the Vatican in October, where he studied in its exclusive library, will surely rank high on his list of memorable experiences.
He has described the experience as both incredible and awesome, saying he was barely able to skim the surface of what he wanted to research. Even though he has a doctorate, as a pulpit rabbi he said he felt somewhat out of place actually being in the prestigious library with other academics.
“I’m fascinated by Jewish and Catholic law. I guess every rabbi is somewhat scholarly in what they do. (But) I felt like a peon sitting there with all these people and all these things. I really felt like the boy from the cornfields of Kansas. You really feel humbled when you do something like this,” he said.
The rabbi emeritus of Kehilath Israel Synagogue will give a presentation about his research during services on Saturday, Dec. 7. His talk will begin at approximately 11 a.m. That gives him a few weeks to sort through what he found and get a better idea what to present. Other than this presentation, he doesn’t know what he will do with this research long term.
This article is too short to mention all the things that fascinated him about the library itself and the books and manuscripts he got to see. He can’t even pinpoint what he enjoyed the most.
“I don’t think there was one particular best part. It was like going into a candy story every day. What am I going to find today?”
It’s not easy to get the chance to study in the Vatican Apostolic Library. A person has to meet a variety of standards for admittance — a doctorate is one of the requirements — and basically jump through many hoops to obtain the proper credentials. Rabbi Mandl, who is considered an expert in Medieval Jewish and Catholic matrimonial law, is not the only rabbi who has ever studied in the exclusive library, but according to a Vatican archivist, he is the first rabbi to be invited to do so.
“They sought me out, which I thought was kind of cool,” he said. “I know one or two rabbis who have been in there and they have been in there not as functioning pulpit rabbis but more as researchers that happen to be rabbis,” said Rabbi Mandl, who continues to teach a course each semester at Rockhurst University in Jewish theology.
Rabbi Mandl explained the library, established in 1475, is vast and filled with 75,000 codices from throughout history. He’s especially happy that he didn’t decide to visit until recently. It was closed for remodeling from 2007 to 2010 and is now completely computerized, making it must easier to do research.
“The library had been living in the Middle Ages. Everything was paper card files and they really brought it into the 21st century,” he said.
“Everything is electronic. You scan your way onto the elevator. I felt like I was in the CIA in a lot of ways.”
When he was there, about 20 to 25 people were also researching at the same time. He expects a third to a half of those were Catholic priests or nuns. The rest were academics.
“The person next to me — you can’t talk in there but I met her in the locker room — was an art professor from Penn,” he said. “
Rabbi Mandl said he worked three to four hours a day when he was there. It’s closed on weekends.
“It is such an intense experience I really couldn’t concentrate more than that. I felt my mind wandering after about four hours,” he said.
The security to just get in to the library is difficult he said. Unfortunately, his wife didn’t have the clearance to get on the private property.
“I wanted her to at least get to see the reading room, which was quite an experience,” he said. “It’s extremely impressive,” noting that he has no photos because taking photos is not permitted.
In fact while you are in the library, you have to lock up your personal items in a locker, including cell phones, cameras and pens. Researchers are allowed to use pencils, small laptops or iPads, which Rabbi Mandl used, in the library.
His plan was to find certain books that he knew about when he was writing his dissertation for his doctorate, but he couldn’t actually get access to at the time.
“I wrote it in the early ’80s. There were no computers then. It was so hard. I would find excerpts about books. I traveled a couple of times to Washington, D.C., to get my hands on certain documents … I couldn’t get a lot of primary sources.”
Rabbi Mandl said he never could have finished his doctorate without one particular book from 1600 — there are only five in the world — and one of them is at Conception Abbey in Conception, Mo. He used it at the abbey and they actually let him borrow it.
“It was piecemeal and anyone who wrote a doctorate prior to 1990 or whatever will tell you,” he said. “But at the Vatican library I was able to get my hands and eyes on a lot of things I was looking for when I wrote my doctorate.”
His original invitation from the Vatican gave Rabbi Mandl admission to the book part of the library and limited access to the manuscript room.
“When I got there, somebody had approved total access to the manuscript room, so I had total access to anything that they had. That’s why I wish I had more time there than I did,” he said.
He plans to return someday because he really didn’t get a chance to complete everything he had hoped. His admittance file will remain active for five years.
Rabbi Mandl said he was blown away by some of things he got to see, especially a manuscript, stitched together with thread, from the early 1500s. It was a partially handwritten and partially printed (the printing press came out in the late 1400s) treatise attacking the Catholic Church at the beginning of the Protestant revolution.
It turns out the German comments he saw written in the margins of that manuscript were by Martin Luther. He also saw an original love letter written by King Henry VIII to Ann Boleyn.
“This is not my field but once I was in there I was like a kid in a candy store,” he said about looking at the English documents. “I knew certain rare things were there I wanted to see.”
While he was at the Vatican, Rabbi Mandl was supposed to get an audience with Pope Francis. Unfortunately it didn’t happen. But the rabbi said he felt a little less disappointed when he learned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was also in Rome in October, didn’t get a chance to meet the Pope either.
This was the very first time Rabbi Mandl has been granted access to the Vatican library, but not the first time he’s been to the Vatican. Even though he didn’t meet Pope Francis, he did meet Pope John Paul II in January 2005 right before died. He was with a delegation of 100 rabbis who thanked the pope for his Holocaust work.
In fact Rabbi Mandl said the pope told him, “You are the rabbi who wrote on cannon law. That’s unusual.”
Rabbi Mandl also still has a standing invitation to attend the Oxford Roundtable of Scholars, held twice a year. At this time he has no specific plans to attend.
