In 1962, J. L. Austin published a set of lectures entitled How to Do Things with Words. In this founding document of speech act theory, Austin argues that language not only can say things, but it can also do things (what he calls the illocutionary force of language). Austins signal example of the illocutionary force of language is the wedding ceremony, in which words properly recited actually create a marriage. Later students of speech act theory have expanded the application of this insight: all language, written or spoken, has an illocutionary force that depends on the context of the speech act. All language not only, or even primarily, says; it also does.

The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif, whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and sacrificed on the altar of the most primitive version of Jewish theodicy.

It is impossible to discuss the social life or the organization of the Jewish community in the Middle Ages without noting the fact that the synagogue was its center. In many cases the synagogue was the only building owned by the community as such, the only institution that actually was at everyone's disposal. It did not always happen to be a special kind of building constructed or dedicated to the worship of God: sometimes one of the city's houses, or an apartment, or a room, would serve as a synagogue. Thus we hear that in the town of Manosque in Southern France—the location of our episodes—there was in the year 1311 a synagogue located at what had formerly been the house of Macip, one of the community's members.

This is a welcome corrective to the many recent polemical and scholarly—but tendentious—studies of black-Jewish relations that portray Jews as differing little from other whites. As Seth Forman indicates, many of these studies bear the imprint of the Black Power movement, whose influence mounted in the late 1960s. Seeking to undermine the integrationist civil rights coalition in which Jews occupied a leading role, the writers of these works severely minimized or denied any special Jewish empathy for the African-American cause. David L. Lewis claims that Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement was motivated by self-interest rather than by heightened sensitivity rooted in a memory of antisemitic persecution. Jews allegedly “us[ed] Blacks as surrogates” (p. 12) to eliminate discrimination against Jews, blacks deriving little benefit from the alliance. Harold Cruse similarly portrayed Jews in the civil rights movement as opportunistic, as a privileged group that had not suffered in the United States and therefore had nothing in common with African Americans. According to Forman, Taylor Branch even cites Israel's refusal to grant citizenship to members of Ben-Ami Carter's “Black Hebrew” sect as evidence that Jews have been “perpetrators of racial hate” (p. 14). But Branch ignores the invalidity of the sect's claim to be Jewish as well as its virulently antisemitic and anti-white theology.

In 883 CE, a man appeared in Kairouan, one of the centers of Jewish life at the time and told a tale about the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom. He called himself Eldad and claimed to be from the tribe of Dan. Since then, the story of the Ten Lost Tribes—that the tribes of the Northern Kingdom still exist intact in a faraway land, living in exile beyond the sabbatical river, a mysterious body of water that was passable only on the Sabbath—has continued to generate excitement. It is astonishing, however, to realize that this motif did not develop until many centuries after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. After the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, many northerners remained in their ancestral homeland in the north. Other northerners lived among their southern compatriots in Judah after fleeing south, while deported northerners and southerners mingled in exile in Mesopotamia. It is only after the end of the Second Temple period that the notion of the Ten Lost Tribes, inviolable and unreachable, developed.

The description of the divine world as a mythical struggle between good and evil is one of the basic symbols of the kabbalah, and a detailed mythology based on it is found in the Zohar late in the thirteenth century. The main source of the Zohar on this subject is a treatise by Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen, called “On the Emanation on the Left,” written in Spain at the beginning of the second half of the thirteenth century, a generation before the Zohar. The problem studied here is: What were the sources of Rabbi Isaac's myth of evil?

Rabbi Isaac described Samael and Lilith as a pair, being the central powers in the Emanation on the Left. It seems that the literary development which brought forth this formula began with the myth of Lilith as presented in the satirical Pseudo-Ben Sira (tenth century?) and later revisions of that work which were known in Europe in the eleventh century and included a description of a sexual relationship between Lilith and a “Great Demon,” who was later identified as Samael. Both Lilith and Samael in these stories are not principles of evil; this transformation probably occurred only in the work of Rabbi Isaac.

When describing the levels of the spiritual world, Rabbi Isaac discussed a sphere he called “third air” which is the source of both prophetic visions and “use” of demons. This concept seems to be derived from the writings of Rabbi Judah the Pious and Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, the Ashkenazi Hasidim, early in the thirteenth century. In their works, however, there are no dualistic or mythical elements; these were probably added by Rabbi Isaac.

Rabbi Isaac formulated the myth of the evil worlds which were destroyed before this world was created, a myth which became a central motif in the kabbalah. It seems that this too is derived from the works of the Ashkenazi Hasidim, though it was Rabbi Isaac who added the mythology and the dualism. It should be noted that among such additions and elaborations by Rabbi Isaac we also find a detailed messianic myth which was rare if not absent among previous kabbalists.

If we were to unravel the foundation of Jewish identity into its primary components, we would discover that beyond the religious commandments, beyond the various national sentiments, beyond the sense of belonging and connection to the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language, beyond certain historical and family memories that uniquely determine the Jewish identity of each individual, the common basis of all Jewish identities, in their various dosages and strengths, comprises several fundamental stories—stories that have shed any clear indicia of historical time and place and have become myths, metastories, which can no longer be changed, only interpreted. These myths, such as the binding of Isaac (the akedah), the story of the exodus and other bible stories, the stories of the destruction of the Temple (and recently, in a certain sense, the Holocaust), have become the infrastructural components of Jewish consciousness and identity, both religious and secular. They have served for millennia as effective ingredients in the preservation of the identity of many Jews, scattered among various lands and continents, in the midst of various peoples and religions and assorted civilizations, and for centuries without being specifically dependent on the clear historical context of a defined territory or language. These myths are the most primary basis for the existence of diaspora Jewish identity, which makes possible the preservation of Jewish identity “outside history,” in the famous phrase of Gershon Scholem, notwithstanding the terrible toll that this existence has taken on the Jewish people in the end. The power of these myths lies in the fact that one's connection to them can be immediate, in all places and at all times, and beyond their original linguistic form; this connection finds succinct expression in the sentence, “In every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt.”

The author revisits texts and arguments from his 2007 article in AJS Review 31 no. 1 in response to a “response” by Azzan Yadin-Israel in the April 2014 issue (38, no. 1). The central question is whether the widespread rabbinic textual practices of interpretive polysemy and legal multivocality are the product of the post-amoraic (“stammaitic”) editorial layer of the Babylonian Talmud (Yadin-Israel) or are already evidenced and theologically thematized in the earlier “tannaitic” rabbinic collections from the Land of Israel (Fraade).

Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jewish author of brilliant phantasmagoria, was gunned down by a Nazi officer in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942. He left behind a small corpus of narrative work, published in English under the titles The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1 Another manuscript to which he had devoted several years, The Messiah, remained unfinished. Presumably it perished in the Holocaust, for it has never been recovered. Two recent novels, David Grossman's See Under: Love ('Ayen 'erekh 'ahavah)2 and Cynthia Ozick's (The Messiah of Stockholm),3 both turn the influence of Bruno Schulz and an evaluation of the events of his life to explicit thematic focus as they engage, too, in an imaginative reconstruction of the lost work, The Messiah. Though they have written very different books in different languages, Ozick and Grossman both take the same constellation of tensions as the raw material of their texts, and they elaborate on this fundamental similarity of concerns as part of a meditation on the power of the imagination, the possibilities of artistic expression, and Jewish identity in the second generation after the Holocaust.

The traditional opening statements in the debate concerning the beginnings of modern Hebrew literature usually assume the form of claims or accusations of paternity. Claims–if the child is legitimate; accusations–if it is not. I wish to avoid the paternity issue because, as I shall argue, it is essentially groundless and precludes consideration of other perspectives. My strategy shall therefore be an oblique attack from an unexpected quarter using traditional camouflage, I begin with a prooftext.

The audacious goal of Hermann Cohen's philosophy of religion is to reconcile Judaism and modern culture. Interest in Cohen's Jewish writings, especially his posthumous Religion der Vernunft, both on the part of Jewish scholars and the English and Israeli reading public, bears witness to its lasting significance. For the contemporary reader, the value of Cohen's project is, it appears, not canceled even by the historic fact that the Holocaust proved Cohen's messianic dream tragically—even obscenely—out of phase with the grim reality of modern Germany. As Ernst Simon pointed out, Cohen was not the only sage to follow “a false prophet”; Maimonides, for example, found nothing wrong with Rabbi Akiba's fateful allegiance to Bar Kochba.

The acculturation Ashkenazic Jews in Italy is the focus of the present discussion. By 1500 Jews had been living in Padua for centuries, but their cemeteries were destroyed in the 1509. Four cemeteries remained with over 1200 inscriptions between 1530–1860. The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those of medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry. The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the Renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices. The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazic origins to its Italian setting. These developments are situated in the broader context of Italian Jewish art and architecture, while the literary innovations are shown to reflect the revival of the epigram among poets of the Italian Renaissance.

According to a ninth-century midrash, God asks the wicked of the world why they did not come closer to God. Each person responds, “I was so steeped in my wickedness that I was ashamed.” Too ashamed, it seems, to muster sufficient courage to admit failures, change behaviors, and move closer—ritually if not spiritually—to God, and so they wallowed deeper into wickedness. Had these people not been so wicked, their shame might have spurred a return to God. A few centuries later, Moses Maimonides prefaces his introductory remarks to the Mishneh Torah with a quotation from Psalms: “Then I would not be ashamed when I regard all Your commandments.” This verse, coming after and completing the psalmist's prayer, “Would that my ways were firm in keeping your laws,” suggests that between action and complete lawfulness shamefulness exists. It is unclear whether the shamefulness Maimonides speaks of inspires fidelity to the law or impinges it. Either way, shame precedes (seeing) the law both lexicographically and phenomenologically. Before lawfulness, shame facilitates both regard of self as well as regard of notions of uprightness and of wickedness. At least according to these two sources, shame intertwines self-consciousness with self-evaluation; it mixes a sense of dark depths with a notion of ascent toward righteousness. Shame breeds inwardness and otherness, and can debilitate as well as empower. In short, shame simultaneously damns and redeems.

This article portrays and theorizes a new utterance of landscape architecture within Israeli Jewish-Arab urbanity, which aims to represent the prolonged and multifaceted Palestinian urban loss since 1948 in the design of a major city park. The analysis of design discourses at Jaffa Slope Park examines differing Israeli and Palestinian landscape sign systems. Dominant and breaching landscape architecture utterances in the constructed landscape of the park will be interpreted and theorized in the context of the discursive landscape sign systems, together with the local post-1948 history of urban institutional ruination and planning. The park's design involves both the intensive use and destabilization of a traditional Zionist/Israeli landscape mold that aims at greening ’Ereẓ Yisra'el and at concealing ruined pre-1948 Palestinian locales under green shields. Through a close reading of the park's landscape, the paper explores ethical, political, and allegorical utterances of landscape architecture, immersed in both Israeli and Palestinian landscape semiotics, yet undermining these sign systems at the same time.

This essay explores the rhetoric and performance of grief by examining two related bodies of texts composed in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic: eulogies for deceased individuals (hespedim) and communal laments (kinot) for Jerusalem; also included are two “narrative laments” from the same corpus that construct the voices of grieving biblical characters. In the analysis, the dynamics among the living participants in the mourning rituals are investigated, as well as the ways rituals of individual grief and rituals of communal mourning shape each other. Throughout the analysis, specific rhetorical techniques associated with mourning in both the Jewish world and in classical Greco-Roman sources and early Christian materials merit particular scrutiny, as do the experiential components of rhetorical techniques such as refrains, antiphony, anadiplosis, and dialogue. Along the way, contextual features important for understanding the function and efficacy of these works are addressed: social setting, liturgical station, affinity for biblical texts, and the status of the mourned party.

In a paper entitled, “Newer Emphases in Jewish History,” published in 1963, Salo Baron wrote: “All my life I have been struggling against the hitherto dominant “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” … because I have felt that an overemphasis on Jewish sufferings distorted the total picture of the Jewish historic evolution….” Indeed, if one was to choose a single idea that encapsulated the legacy of Baron, perhaps the pre-eminent Jewish historian of the twentieth century, it would probably be this: Jewish history is not to be seen simply as a series of persecutions, which determined its nature and its course, but rather as a process of ongoing engagement between the Jews and their surroundings.

In a work of moral philosophy which first appeared in the year 1168, Moses Maimonides finds that human speech, when considered from the standpoint of religion, is divisible into five categories: the prescribed; the cautioned-against or prohibited; the rejected; the desired; and the permitted. For each classification he provides appropriate examples, then he stops to observe a difficulty that may seemingly be posed for this entire scheme by one highly particular form of speech, which is poetry. Maimonides begins to resolve the difficulty as follows:

Know that poetical compositions, in whichever language they may be, should be examined with regard to their themes in order to determine whether they follow a manner of speech which we classified. Indeed, I explain this even though it is clear, inasmuch as I have seen elders and saintly men of our coreligionists when they are at a wine banquet, such as a wedding or some other occasion, and were a man to wish to recite an Arabic poem, even if the theme of that poem were the praise of courage or generosity, of the category of the desired, or the praises of wine, of the category of the permitted, they would protest it with every manner of protest, for in their opinion it is not permitted to listen to it. However, were the bard to recite any manner of Hebrew poem, they would not protest it, and it would not be evil in their sight despite there being in those words themes that pertain to the categories of the cautioned-against or the rejected.

Applying a social interaction approach to the study of the reception of different literary genres, this article focuses on an unnoticed Judeo-Arabic Genizah fragment whose contents deal with the relative cultural value of midrash and piyyut in medieval Mediterranean society. The fragment describes a debate concerning the identity of Elijah and his connection to the zealous act of Phineas. The debate, which probably took place in the early thirteenth century in Fustat, occurred in reaction to a synagogue performance of Havdalah liturgical poetry. The arguments for and against the poems were based on aggadic traditions. A survey of relevant piyyutim reveals that this debated motif was indeed subject to variations and alterations. A similar development can be traced in the evolution of another Havdalah piyyut composed by Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Levi. The fluidity of the poetic texts likely reflects the same literary hierarchy presented in the events recorded in the Genizah fragment (and at the same time reinforced by them): a growing appreciation of the authority of aggadic midrash, alongside the perception of the Havdalah piyyut as creative performance, and not as an authoritative source of knowledge.

In 1820, a volume entitled Israel Vindicated, written by "An Israelite," was published in New York City. It was the first Jewish polemic composed in response to the founding of a missionary society, the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews, and it remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. The author of this work, however, has never been identified. Nor has the volume itself received the attention it deserves. This article attempts to fill both of these lacunae.

Section one describes and analyzes Israel Vindicated. It places the work within the context of its times, and compares it to other, more traditional anti-Christian polemics. Section two outlines the postpublication history of Israel Vindicated. Soon after it appeared, some New Yorkers attempted to have the work banned, and its author exposed and punished. Later, the work was variously invoked by Jews and Judeophobes alike, though, of course, for different purposes. In section three, the author of Israel Vindicated assumes center stage. A review of old and new evidence leads to the conclusion that the work flowed from the pen of freethinker George Houston, assisted probably by his Jewish printer, Abraham Collins. Finally, section four analyzes the motivations of George Houston and his Jewish supporters. As is shown, this was far from the first time that Jews joined forces temporarily with other, sometimes hostile minority groups in pursuit of self-interest. Adversity makes strange bedfellows.