Jerusalem is an ancient venue that has been not only a symbol of peace and a focus of religious belief but also a city of dispute. For centuries, indeed millennia, it has been a magnet for conflict between diverse groups with divergent religious interests and others with competing political and/or national claims. It is sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and claimed as a national capitol by both Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Since the mid-1950s it has been a central issue of the Arab–Israeli conflict that emerged to be even more problematic after the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel gained full control over the entire city that had been divided between it and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948–1949. In recent years it has became the ultimate issue among the final settlement stumbling blocks for an Israeli–Palestinian peace. It has served as a pretext for Osama bin Laden and as a concern for Muslim regimes as diverse as Iran and Saudi Arabia because of Jewish control over Muslim holy places, in this instance the third holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina.

As Jacob Neusner and others have argued, before talmudic stories can be evaluated as historical evidence we must ask who the original authors were, what were their motives, and who was their intended audience. Even once we obtain the “original” version of a story, we do not necessarily have access to the historical event which gave rise to the story. For perhaps accounts of the historical event have been colored, even distorted beyond recognition, by the needs, desires, and beliefs of the original authors. Or perhaps the stories they transmit are fabrications, invented by students or later editors with a particular goal in mind.

This study presents the ideas about setting times for Torah study in the writings of R. Shneur Zalman of Liady (Rashaz) as one of the elements that formed the inclusive concept of mystical experience in the Ḥabad movement. The article argues that in his teachings Rashaz invested common experiences and the precepts of normative, non-mystical Judaism with mystical meanings, and thus proposed a new, inclusive concept of mystical experience. The reinterpretation of the precept of setting times for Torah study in Rashaz's writings was one of the factors that greatly contributed to the re-evaluation of the role of ordinary people in religious life, and to shaping Ḥabad's inclusivist vision of mysticism.

In a recent article, “Israeli Literature Over Time,”Aharon Megged describes his work as “unremittingly concerned with burning national issues,” mainly with the issue of Israel′s relationship to the Diaspora.1 Megged′s intense preoccupation with the Zionist ideology of the negation of the Diaspora emerged in his 1955 story “Yad va-shem” (“The Name”). The story presents a scathing criticism of Israel′s dissociation from the history of the Diaspora and especially from the catastrophe of the Holocaust. “Yad va-shem” was followed by an article entitled “Tarbutenu ha-yeshana ve-ha-hadasha” (“Our Old and New Culture”) in which Megged deplored Israel′s severance of its Diaspora roots and urged a reexamination of the negative attitude toward the destroyed European Jewish culture.In 1984, Megged published Massa ha-yeladim el ha-aretz ha-muvtachat (“The Children's Journey”), a novel based on a true story about a group of young survivors of the Holocaust on their way to Palestine.3 This work, as Dan Laor notes in his review, “offers a perspective of the Diaspora in the Holocaust which differs from [the typical Israeli attitude of] contempt infused with pity” toward the Diaspora Jew.

Halakhah does not develop in a vacuum. It grows through its confrontation with the changing conditions in which Jews live. New situations raise new questions which, in turn, require new answers.

This study seeks to explain the origin of the fast of the 13th of Adar. The practice of fasting on this day is puzzling for a number of reasons. Although the Bible describes fasting in the year of the Purim threat, this fast occurred in Nissan and the weeks thereafter. Nor does tannaitic or amoraic literature mention the practice of fasting on the 13th of Adar. To add to the puzzle, Megillat ta‘anit, compiled in the first century ce, includes the 13th of Adar as a day on which Jews were prohibited from fasting.

The mythical ʾeven shetiyah, often translated as the “foundation stone,” marks the physical place where the Jerusalem temples once stood in the rabbinic imagination. In its earliest incarnation it identified the place where the ark of the covenant resided in Solomon's Temple. Over the centuries it absorbed cosmogonic and eventually eschatological meaning. In later post-talmudic rabbinic literature, it adopted another mythic trope—the seal on the tehom. I argue that these two separate narrative strands of a seal on the tehomunder the Temple and ʾeven shetiyahin the Temple became intertwined, but only in late (post-talmudic) rabbinic midrash. I trace this evolutionary trend and argue that while the early rabbis both innovated and reinvigorated older biblical and ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic motifs with their ʾeven shetiyah, the later rabbinic texts were influenced by Christian and Muslim competition for spiritual and earthly Jerusalem. The stone that started as a means for rabbinic self-authorization became a reassertion of God's control of history and protection of Israel and the world, but in the process displaced priestly authority.

This article will examine the development of Yavneh as a literary and cultural construct from tannaitic sources through the two versions of the story of the deposition of R. Gamliel, in Yerushalmi Berakhot 4:1 and Bavli Berakhot 27b–28a. It will explore the ways in which the talmudic storytellers present a more developed narrative world complete with a social and political culture. It will then analyze the complex relationships between the narrative worlds of the Yerushalmi and Bavli and their respective social and ideological contexts. Based on this analysis, I shall propose a model for understanding the way in which the Yavnehs of both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi functioned in amoraic and postamoraic society to create a nuanced and self-critical rabbinic cultural identity.

In an Ashkenazic Bible produced in the thirteenth century, we find a unique micrography decoration portraying Ezekiel's vision. On the bottom margin the Masorah micrography shows the full bodies of the four creatures: the lion facing the ox, and the man, in full armor and holding an object in each hand, facing the eagle. I suggest that the choice to portray the human figure in this micrography as an armored knight can be explained by reference to the tradition describing seeing Jacob's image engraved on the throne in Ezekiel's vision, as also reflected in the writings of Hasidei Ashkenaz. The decoration identifies the human figure as Jacob, which may illustrate the verse 'Avir Ya‘akov, meaning “mighty one of Jacob” or Jacob the Knight.

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