D. Sperber has confirmed, from rabbinic sources, the argument of J. Drescher (Le muséon 82 [1969]: 98—100) that τράπεζ was used to mean a “paten, tray, dish” in addition to its better known meaning of “table.” We shall here try, through the use of rabbinic sources, to show the real, archaeological background behind the semantic change from “table” to “tray” and to suggest that this background may have been a cause of that change.

In 1940, just before the Germans entered Paris, Haim Sloves, an Eastern European Jewish intellectual, finished writing a play in Yiddish, Homens mapole, or The Downfall of Haman. It was an act of resistance, as Haman, the great enemy of the Jews, was a transparent reference to Hitler, but within and beyond that, it continued a project that had absorbed many Eastern European Jews since the second half of the nineteenth century. Rabbinic tradition, they felt, was dying. It was urgent to discover a new source of inspiration for the Jewish people. In 1944–45, when Sloves and other Jewish survivors returned to Paris, where they had immigrated years before the war, the task of rebuilding seemed more urgent still. To continue to search for a new, secular mode of expression was intimately tied to the very revival of the Jewish people. Between 1945 and 1949, Homens mapole, considerably shortened and somewhat modified, played to resounding acclaim not only in Paris but also in several cities across three continents.

The subtitle tells it all: the book is not about bioethics, business ethics or communal ethics, but about the kind of ethics one should establish for one's personal life. Starting with issues of privacy, the book moves us through sexual ethics, relationships within families, forgiveness, and finally, hope. Although traditional Jewish sources are mined for their insights, in the end, this is one person's notion about what Jewish ethics can (and should) say about issues of personal ethics. Dorff acknowledges this right in his preface, “throughout the book, I present what I take to be an authentic reading and application of the Jewish tradition but surely not the only one. I therefore take care to use judgment [emphasis in the original] in assessing how the tradition should be best applied to modern circumstance, by providing arguments from the tradition and from modern sources and circumstance to justify [emphasis in the original] my reading of the tradition and arguing against alternative readings” (p. xii). In short, the book is not descriptive of the Jewish tradition but prescriptive, laying out how one should think about these issues as a modern American Jew who wants to think “Jewishly.”

In this book, based upon his Lancaster-Yarnton Lectures in 1996, David Novak argues that natural law has always played a central role in Jewish thought and discourse. He also argues that natural law ought to be seen in a positive light; in other words, this is a work of constructive theology as much as it is a survey of the influence of natural law in Jewish intellectual history. Its “historical” side shows itself in Novak's interpretations of various biblical narratives; the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sodom, and Abraham and Abimelech are coherent only if we recognize that the characters share a conception of a universally valid moral law based upon reason rather than revelation. In addition, the long record of investigation by Jewish thinkers into the reasons for the particular commandments (ta‘amei ha-miṣvot) suggests both that Jews have sought to explain the substantive content of revelation in rational terms and that, in Novak's words, “more often than not the rules cannot be cogently applied unless we have some understanding of what these rules intend” (p. 64).

Most research has a preliminary story embedded in earlier writings, which raise questions and spawn new inquiries conducive to new findings. The present study was born of other circumstances: I was asked by the directors of the early music group Ensemble Lucidarium if, for purposes of performance, I knew of a translation of Samuel Archivolti's Hebrew wedding ode “Keḥi kinnor” (Take a lyre). I had run across the ode in various listings, but was unfamiliar with any translation, so I suggested doing my own. That is where the problems began. To establish a clean reading for the poem, I consulted its manuscript and printed sources; to confront its verbal obscurities, and pinpoint its meanings, I traced its references to biblical and rabbinical literature; and to satisfy my own curiosity about how it was sung, I looked into the few recorded examples of its melodies. It follows that in this article, I shall be concerned mainly with semantics and music. Yet, to begin, I shall present some information about the author, sources, and prosody of the poem; and, to conclude, I shall compare it with other wedding odes of his and his contemporaries, and, in an epilogue, appraise its singularity.

On July 27, 1656, the Jewish community of Amsterdam expelled Baruch de Espinoza. As Josef Kaplan's work has shown, the community used ḥerem as a standard disciplinary instrument, usually on a temporary basis. In Spinoza's case, however, the Amsterdammers issued a fierce and permanent denunciation on grounds of “abominable heresies” and “monstrous deeds.” Speaking for the community, the rabbis “excommunicate, expel, curse and damn” him with formidable intensity. In addition to forbidding contact with Spinoza himself, the ḥerem concludes with a prohibition against reading “any treatise composed or written by him.” What were these heresies and deeds, and why was the ḥerem so harsh? Only twenty-three years of age, Spinoza had not yet, so far as we know, begun to write the philosophical works—the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the Ethica (1677), the former published anonymously, the latter only posthumously—that would to make him notorious well beyond the domain of the Portuguese Jews. Looking at the later texts, it is not difficult to imagine the cause of the outrage: Spinoza denies creation and divine providence, individual or personal immortality (together with the doctrine of eternal reward and punishment), and the truth of the Torah. But what exactly was Spinoza doing in the mid-1650s, and why were his ideas and actions so offensive to the community?

Kessler's erudite book aims to prove not only that exegetical encounters occurred between the ancient rabbis and the early church fathers in both directions, but also that “to understand properly Jewish or Christian exegesis in late antiquity it is essential to understand each other's interpretations and the influence of one upon the other” (182). He begins by reviewing the shortcomings of previous approaches to Jewish–Christian interaction in late antiquity. Kessler then puts forward what he terms the exegetical approach, suggests some controls on this method, and proceeds to test his hypothesis by conducting a verse-by-verse examination of Genesis 22. In each chapter, he first surveys a few major early interpreters, such as Philo and Josephus, and then compares Rabbinic and early Christian interpretations on Genesis 22 in some detail. There is also a final chapter that examines ancient artistic renderings of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.