Drama is the most neglected genre within Hebrew cultural development. In fact, until shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel, few plays in Hebrew had been staged. Although a large number of works in dramatic form had been written, particularly in the nineteenth century, few of them were viable theatrical dramas. They fell into the categories of rhetoric and allegory, devoid of believable dramatis personae. There were some milestones along the way, such as Somi's Zahut Bedihuta de-Kiddushin (An Eloquent Marriage Farce, c. 1600), Luzzatto's Leyesharim tehilla (Praise for the Righteous, 1743), and some modern plays, but these were not sufficiently feasible for the establishment of a dramatic tradition. An important factor qualifying the late development of Hebrew drama was the language, for within the communities' diglossia throughout the ages, Hebrew was reserved for more elevated discourse than playacting. Moreover, Hebrew, the language of the sacred texts, was inadequate for the expression of everyday life. Nowhere in the diaspora was there a Hebrew-speaking audience; there was no folk life in Hebrew as there was in Yiddish. Also, the potential playwrights were faced with the problem of the divine imperative in Jewish history, which precludes anything like the theodicy that gave rise to classical tragedy. Other religious restrictions against certain forms of representation, together with the small value Jewish religious authorities traditionally placed on theatre for its own sake, were also crucial factors mitigating against the drama's development.

Abraham Abulafia's attempt to meet the pope has preoccupied several scholars who have given various explanations to the aim of this meeting. The present study describes the event which preceded this attempt and interprets it in a new way. According to this explanation, Abulafia was interested in a discussion with the pope on Judaism as it was understood by Abulafia, namely, a religion which focuses upon the completion of the names of God. Abulafia might have been aware of a similar train of thought in Franciscan circles, where meditation on the name of Jesus was coming into vogue.

The misinterpretations of some scholars of Abulafia's mission are discussed, and the history of the false conception, according to which Abulafia met the pope and accepted Christian views in order to save his life, are traced.

At the height of the 1525 Peasants' Rebellion, Josel of Rosheim negotiated directly with the peasants. Although he described this interaction in his writings, he omitted the content of their conversation. Previous scholars have examined the contemporaneous negotiation between the Christian authorities in Strasbourg and the peasants as a parallel to Josel's negotiation. Their interpretations of what transpired between Josel and the peasants, heavily shaped by modern Jewish-Christian relations, are wanting. This article uses histoire croisée to reassess the negotiation. By considering the personal relationships between Josel and Strasbourg's political and religious leaders alongside Josel's writings, it argues that the Jewish and Christian negotiators coordinated their efforts. This case study models a method through which scholars can begin to move beyond recognizing parallels and toward analyzing the transmission of information and ideas between Jews and Chrisitians.

Fantasies of deviance, including latent homosexuality, are not a major or overt theme in the fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim (pen name of S. Y. Abramowitz, 18357–1917) and Samuel Joseph Agnon (1888?–1970) but are, nevertheless, an unmistakable part of the characters whom they depict. These characters, for various reasons and to varying degrees, are deflected from normal heterosexual attachments and are inclined, for this reason, to forms of perversion which at times mirror the distortions and breakdown in the societies in which they live.

This book is, without a doubt, a major contribution in the field of Judeo-Persian Studies. Judeo-Persian literature, which extends for about eight centuries, has been severely neglected except for the work of a small number of scholars. There are only four scholars in the United States who have dealt with any aspect of this field, and not many more elsewhere. The existing Judeo-Persian texts are a vast collection of all sorts of material and deserve much more attention. Vera Basch Moreen has made a great step forward by providing translation of a wide variety of literary texts. Especially valuable are her commentaries, explanations, and bibliography.

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.

These “kabbalistic musings on time, truth, and death” originated as the Taubman Lectures delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. Wolfson summarizes them in his preface to Alef, Mem, Tau (henceforth AMT): “The goal of my lectures was to illumine the nexus of time, truth, and death elicited from the symbolic imaginary of the Jewish esoteric tradition known by both practitioners and scholars as kabbalah” (xi). Without attempting further to isolate an “argument,” I can, at least, sketch for the potential reader some salient characteristics of these lectures.

Commemoration of the Holocaust, scholar Halina Taborska recently argued, has entered a new stage in Poland. For more than a decade after communist rule ended in 1989, politicized slogans remained on many Holocaust memorials and other forms of commemoration, remnants of the period “when politicians and ideologues, the ruling powers and the ruled, artists and administrators accepted a definitive version of events as true and obligatory,” she wrote in a collection of articles. Only in recent years has Holocaust commemoration sought to grapple with the “falsified semantic expressions” of Holocaust memory and to depoliticize commemoration in the public sphere.