The various efforts to reform Jewish society in Poland from the late eighteenth century on elicited reactions among the representatives of Jewish society, both among those who supported the reforms and among others, much more numerous, who were less favorably inclined toward reform. The hasidim were, of course, among the latter. All the reforms affected the hasidim, just as they did other members of the community, but certain actions directed against their movement as such affected them specifically. It seems natural, therefore, that hasidim were not simply passive victims of the deeds undertaken by the central and regional organs of the state. It would be hard to expect otherwise because, after all, the hasidim were a party most interested in the favorable resolution of antihasidic government investigations.

The analytic tools of anthropology originally were fashioned on smallscale tribal groups that possessed no written traditions. After World War II, as anthropologists became involved in the study of complex societies in different “developing areas,” the discipline began to relate its findings to the concerns of other fields. Simultaneously, scholars from other social and humanist disciplines, who previously had assumed that anthropologists focused only on “primitives,” began to incorporate anthropological methods and concepts into their tool kits. As part of these general trends, there were anthropologists who turned to the study of Jewish society and culture. One natural expression of this trend has been the study of contemporary Jewish communities. There are now dozens of studies of Jewish life from one or another anthropological perspective, most of them dealing mainly with Jews in the United States of Ashkenazi background or with communities in Israel whose origins were in the Middle East. A very different trend is found in the analysis of classic texts, notably the Bible but with some attention being given to rabbinic literature, using structuralism and related methodologies. At first initiated by anthropologists who were not themselves specialists in the biblical period, these approaches have now been adopted by some students of ancient Judaism, who combine them with the more standard methods used in research on biblical and rabbinic texts.

Starting with its opening scene, A Serious Man offers a complex, provocative engagement with the role of storytelling in Jewish life, past and present. Many viewers have wondered how the film's “shtetl” prologue relates to its main story, set in Minneapolis in 1967. They have often speculated that there is some plot-driven relationship that they somehow missed. But the connection, by the filmmakers' own assertion, is not diegetic; rather, it is thematic, and storytelling figures strategically in articulating this link.

Informed by a common commitment to taking the reader “beyond the Pale,” new histories of Russian Jewry strike at the complex of images encapsulated in the single most important signifier of the Russian—Jewish condition. Between the partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the First World War, tsarist law restricted Jewish residence almost exclusively to the Pale of Jewish Settlement, an administrative unit that encompassed the Western borderlands of the empire. In Jewish memory, this confinement was not merely geographic but cultural and social; reference to the Pale evokes a sense of isolation from Russia proper inflicted from the outside by effective legal discrimination and buttressed from within by the force of tradition. The only way for Jews to leave the Pale presumably involved either emigrating or opting out of Judaism altogether. For some, conversion to Christianity relieved all of the burdens of communal authority and juridical disability associated with the Pale. For others, the turn to the universal faiths of the nineteenth century—Enlightenment, socialism, Marxism—constituted an analogous act of departure. The reduction of the Russian—Jewish experience to simple contrasts may be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that until a decade ago historians were forced to rely on anecdotal literary evidence; archival materials remained hidden behind the iron curtain. Four recent studies attribute their own historiographic departure from the pale directly to the availability of documentary sources that bring to light a variety of possibilities for defying the internal and external constraints of the Pale without abandoning one's Jewishness in the process.

Of the various genres of classical aggadic literature, the Talmudic “sage stories” are perhaps the most open to literary interpretation using contemporary methods. Other aggadic forms lack parallels in the conventional Western literary canon. Sage stories, in contrast, are short narratives that have much in common with those found in other, more well-studied, literary traditions. The tools of narrative analysis that have been developed by scholars of other literatures can thus be fruitfully applied to these rabbinic sage stories. It is therefore somewhat surprising that despite the proliferation of literary studies on midrash and aggada appearing in English in recent years, the analysis of sage stories has remained a relatively neglected field of inquiry among Anglophone scholars. This field has been dominated by Israeli scholars such as Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir, whose work has appeared largely in Hebrew. Jeffrey Rubenstein's Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture and the recent translation of Shulamit Valler's Nashim ve-Nashiut be-sipure ha-Talmud (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993) under the title Women and Womanhood in the Talmud are thus welcome and important additions to the world of English-language rabbinics scholarship.

This article discusses the biographies of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the Rebbe) within the broader context of Chabad historiographic lore, in particular the quasi-historical writings of Yosef Yiẓḥak Schneersohn from the 1930s and 1940s. Described by Ada Rapoport-Albert as “hagiography with footnotes,” these seemingly scholarly and modern texts constituted an alternative narrative to that of academic Jewish history. From this vantage point, I consider how biographies published by academics and by hasidic authors have mutually influenced each other, particularly in their scope, form, and method. To that end, I examine the controversy that surrounded the 2010 publication of the first academic biography of Schneerson, Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman's The Rebbe, and analyze the strategies undertaken by subsequent authors that have allowed them to present the Rebbe's life in a form that was no longer “hagiography with footnotes” (which would have alienated a secular readership) but as seemingly impartial biographies (without alienating the hasidic readership).

The formulation and application of rabbinic Halakhah often depends on the determination of facts that belong, to one degree or another, to the province of professional experts. The resulting structural tension is analogous to that posed by the prominence of the expert witness in the modern American court, or the active role of private industry in administrative law. This article examines the relationship in the classical rabbinic corpus from Palestine between rabbis and farmers, or between rabbinic and agricultural expertise. It considers whether agriculture would have been conceived of in this context as a specialized or technical body of knowledge, and, if so, whether and how agricultural Halakhah accommodates itself to this fact.

Biblical sources that speak of God's participation in human courts notwithstanding, the judicial decision-making process is a human act.On biblical sources, see Ḥanina Ben-Menaḥem, “Postscript: The Judicial Process and the Nature of Jewish Law,” in An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, ed. N. Hecht et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 423–424, 434. Rabbinic authorities, like judges in other legal systems, are fully subject to the many factors beyond the formal rubric of the law that influence interpretation, including educational background and personal experiences and values.From a historical perspective, there is no place for conjectures that halakhic decision-making simply uncovers what was already revealed at Sinai or that it reflects ongoing divine revelation. See the summary of such views in Aaron Kirschenbaum, “Subjectivity in Rabbinic Decision-Making,” in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Moshe Sokol (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), pp. 63–64, 66–67. A criticism of judges as “living oracles” of the law who simply pronounce the meaning of various statutes in general jurisprudence can be found in Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930; reprint ed., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), pp. 35–36. Still, construing jurists may not always be aware of the existence of such non-legal considerations in their thought, and the influence that such concerns wield may rest just beneath their consciousness.See Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 167. Even when they were aware of the influence of extra-legal factors, medieval and pre-modern Ashkenazic rabbis seldom, if ever, revealed them in the course of their halakhic discussions, for the halakhah, like any other legal system, has its own terms of discourse that rarely admit uncloaked expressions of extra-legal concerns into its process of reasoning.Hanina Ben-Menahem, Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law (Chur: Harwood, 1991), p. 13, argues that extralegal considerations were accepted in the decision-making process of the Babylonian Talmud but were rendered normative halakhic criteria by their incorporation into the halakhah by post-talmudic authorities. An extended discussion of extra-halakhic considerations in the legal thinking of Rabbi David Ibn Zimra (Egypt, Safed; 1479–1573) can be found in Samuel Morell, “Darkei ha-shikul be-meṣiut ha-speṣifit be-piskat ha-RaDBaZ,” in ‘Atarah le-Ḥayyim: Meḥkarim be-sifrut ha-talmudit ve-ha-rabbanit le-khevod Professor Ḥayyim Zalman Dimitrovski, ed. Daniel Boyarin et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), pp. 413–438. On the question of determining matters based on internal legal standards alone, see Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 12–13, 23–24, comments germane to the halakhic endeavor as well.

In recent years, scholars have offered valuable critiques of American Jewish exceptionalism that reveal the historical inaccuracy of an exceptionalist scholarly framework. However, as this essay explains, untethering Jewish studies scholarship completely from exceptionalism discourse may risk overlooking the prevalence of these beliefs and what they tell us about those who propagated them. Exceptionalism does not need to be historically accurate for it to warrant attention from scholars. Nor must scholars approve of exceptionalism, or deem it a positive, for it to be a worthy subject of study. Scholars may indeed view American Jewish exceptionalism as a fantasy that prevents believers from seeing the reality—in particular the problems—of their situation, but the fact that this fantasy had so many fervent espousers should make it a matter of interest. Examining the trail of American Jewish exceptionalist voices reveals the multiple ways these voices have been deployed.