Sometime in the afternoon of Wednesday, August 22, 1781, in one of the narrow houses along the Jewish lane (Judengasse) in Frankfurt am Main, Gumpert (Gumperz, in Hebrew sources, Gumpel) Aaron May (Mai) prepared himself to go out to attend to some business matters. Like many of his contemporaries involved in trade, Gumpert's business activities did not focus on just one line of work; he did his best to turn a profit in a number of ways, including selling wine and lending money at interest. Gumpert, who was in his thirties or perhaps even early forties, wore underneath his shirt a fringed garment (ẓiẓit, see Num. 15:37–41), as religious custom obligated Jewish males to do. His green jacket had silver clasps and his partially bald pate was covered by a wig with two curls in the back, topped by a hat. His elegant appearance made it clear to all observers that he was from a well-situated family, and that he had adopted some of the modes of contemporary fashion. Indeed, Gumpert came from what would soon be, if it was not already, one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Frankfurt.

This paper studies the varied forms of interaction between the rabbinic and Roman legal systems by investigating similarities between the laws of personal injury found in the eighth chapter of Mishnah Bava Kamma and the contemporaneous Roman law. The rabbinic shift away from the talion happened under the influence of the Roman statutes that had replaced the talion with monetary compensation centuries earlier. Roman norms of shame prompted an expansion of the significance of shame in the rabbinic reckoning of damages. Influence, however, is rarely a matter of the passive reception by a minority culture of the dominant culture's norms. The rabbis adapted and reshaped Roman norms in line with the Torah's discomfort with the concept of personal honor. Personal injury laws in the Babylonian Talmud also bear a striking resemblance to the classical Roman laws, though this should not be attributed to direct Roman influence on the rabbis. The Babylonian rabbis shared the Romans' discomfort with evaluating free people as slaves in order to determine compensation for injury. Because rabbinic statements are terse and enigmatic, whereas Roman law is elaborated in detail, the Roman laws shed light on obscure rabbinic teachings and the cultural concerns that they reflect.

In recent years Jewish philosophers and theologians from across the religious spectrum have claimed that the philosophy of the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is a crucial resource for understanding Jewish belief and practice. The majority of these thinkers are drawn to Wittgenstein's work on account of the diminished role that he ascribes to religious belief—a position that affirms the widespread view that theology has played a minimal role in Judaism. Another line of thought sees in Wittgenstein's philosophy resources that can illuminate the forms and functions of Jewish theological language and bolster the place of theological reflection within Jewish religious life. This article undertakes a critical analysis of the reception of Wittgenstein's philosophy among contemporary Jewish thinkers with the goal of delineating these alternative responses to his work. The paper concludes by arguing that the way in which Jewish thinkers appropriate Wittgenstein's philosophy will have profound consequences for the future of Jewish theology.

Scholars of rabbinic literature have often noted the widespread tendency to question and argue with God in rabbinic literature. Oddly, they have largely ignored the unequivocal antiprotest traditions found in these writings. Responding to this scholarly lacuna, this essay collects anti-protest traditions of the midrash and Talmud, and explicates their exegetical and conceptual basis. In the process, the paper makes two central arguments: First, that later anti-protest texts intensify or radicalize their opposition; while early anti-protest traditions merely prohibit one from challenging God, later aggadot tend to attach harsh punishments to that prohibition. Second, from a comparative perspective, rabbinic anti-protest sentiments diverge from similar sentiments voiced by the church fathers. While both critique the act of protest on exegetical and (similar) conceptual grounds, they have different ways of harmonizing their conservative attitudes with a biblical tradition that problematically, at least for them, seems to tolerate, if not valorize, confronting God. More specifically, whereas the rabbinic position tends to retell the biblical confrontation by having God castigate or punish the protester, early Christian thinkers, by stark contrast, tend to reject the literal reading of Scripture altogether: any apparent protest by a biblical hero is deemed a dangerous misreading.

Since its publication in 1945, scholarly works on S. Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday(Temol shilshom) have focused on various thematic and poetic aspects of the novel, such as the structure of the plot, the protagonist Isaac Kumer, and the moral and poetic meanings of the novel's ending. Inter alia, scholars have been interested in the geographical spaces presented in the plot, and the protagonist's indecision of whether to settle in Jaffa or Jerusalem, two cities that offer contrasting ways of living. This article offers a new reading of the novel's space scheme in tandem with an analysis of the short story, “The Mines of Falun,” by E. T. A. Hoffman, with which Agnon was familiar, and thus sheds a different light on Kumer's unexpected death at the novel's end. A comparative study of Agnon's and Hoffman's works reveals a similar space scheme that does not emphasize the contrast between two different cities—Jerusalem and Jaffa—but focuses on a single highly significant urban setting—Jerusalem. In Only Yesterday the main conflict is actually between a heavenly Jerusalem and an earthly Jerusalem (Jerusalem of above and below), and not between Jerusalem and Jaffa. Concentrating interest on Jerusalem itself turns the discussion of the novel to the nature of Jewish life in the Land of Israel, an issue that was of great concern to Agnon.

The article examines the reception and transmission of traditions about the figure of Enoch/Metatron in Sasanian Babylonia, and particularly the emergence of Metatron speculation in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch, by reading these traditions in light of Zoroastrian and Manichaean reports of the Iranian hero, Yima. The figure of Enoch/Metatron was reimagined and reconfigured by the Babylonian authors so as to resemble local Yima traditions, though the process of translating and repackaging the figure of Enoch in the image of his Iranian counterpart was not merely a conscious act of comparison, in which an analogy is drawn in an attempt to highlight particular aspects common to both figures; it was an expression of a more comprehensive discourse of identification.

Beyond close parallels in the depictions of these figures, the connections between Metatron speculation and the Zoroastrian and Manichaean Yima traditions are supported by an identification of Yima with the son of man implied in two Sogdian fragments of the Manichaean Book of Giants. The syncretic atmosphere that pervaded Sasanian culture in general and the Manichaean identification of Yima with the son of man in particular facilitated, and perhaps reinforced, the refiguring of Enoch/Metatron in the Babylonian Talmud and 3 Enoch in the image of local Yima traditions.