The status of religious authority and the obligation to obey its rulings are crucial concerns of traditional societies, and they are repeatedly voiced in halakhic literature. The ways in which traditional societies contend with these issues may be indicative of a basic ethos, extending far beyond the level of interpersonal relations. As it is embodied in certain persons or institutions, authority often reflects not only a necessary social order but also the most basic values of a traditional culture.

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.

In the following pages, I will address the relationship between Jewish thought and aesthetics by bringing Joseph Soloveitchik into conversation with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment remains an imposing monument in the history of philosophical aesthetics. While Buber and Rosenzweig may have been more accomplished aesthetes, Soloveitchik's aesthetic proves closer to Kant's own. In particular, I draw upon the latter's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and the notion of a form of indeterminate purposiveness without determinate purpose. I will relate these three figures to Soloveitcchik's understanding of halakhah and to the ideal of performing commandments for their own sake (li-shemah). The model of mitzvah advanced by this comparison is quintessentially modern: an autonomous, self-contained, formal system that does not (immediately) point to extraneous goods, such as spiritual enlightenment, personal morality, or social ethics. The good presupposed by this system proves first and foremost “aesthetic.” That is, immanent to the system. Supererogatory goods enter into the picture only afterward as second-order effects.

As Soviet Jews returned to their hometowns after the Holocaust, they encountered a catastrophic landscape of mass graves that defied Jewish traditions of dignified, secure burial. Throughout the postwar decades, survivors strove to bring their relatives “to a Jewish grave”—in other words, to provide them a burial consistent with Jewish burial norms. These norms included the desire to bury children beside their parents, concern for the physical security and legal status of grave plots, a reluctance to disturb the dead, and a fear of exposing human remains to public view. Given the chaotic circumstances under which these graves had been created, it was impossible to uphold all four principles. Thus, some survivors chose to transfer mass graves to the local Jewish cemetery immediately after the war. Other communities chose to mark and preserve the graves at their original locations, only opting for exhumation in the face of a direct threat such as erosion. Although grave exhumation is generally prohibited in Jewish tradition, Soviet Jews did not embrace exhumation out of religious ignorance, but instead performed them out of a desire to approximate traditional Jewish burial norms under novel, catastrophic circumstances. Thus, these exhumations illustrate how traditional values and practices can continue to linger and evolve, even in the absence of religious texts, institutions, and clergy.

The Haskalah of the late eighteenth century, it is often observed, dealt a major blow to many traditional Ashkenazic institutions, including the rabbinate. Formerly extolled by their communities in nearly God-like superlatives—such as “Chief shepherd, a dignitary in the land … Prince among princes in Torah and wisdom”—rabbis became the object of trenchant criticism during this period. The maskilim, formerly denizens of the yeshivot, cast special aspersion on rabbis and their assertion of the authority of Jewish law, charging that the rabbinic insistence on stringencies and legal minutiae was the source of all that was wrong with Diaspora Jewish life. Much of the critique of the rabbinate targeted the culture of yeshiva learning that supported it; the maskilim promoted the study of philosophy, science, Hebrew literature, and the scientific study of Judaism. Often, this literary and philosophical assault on the authority, role, and Talmud-centeredness of the rabbinate took the form of a critique of arranged marriages and the unequal status of women in Jewish law.

When Chief Rabbi Ḥayim (Vittorio) Castiglioni of Rome (b. 1840) passed away in 1911, he was cremated as per his request and his ashes were then buried in the Jewish cemetery of his native Trieste. One local Jewish newspaper pointed out that Castiglioni's position—cremation is permitted according to Jewish law and is even preferable to traditional burial—was definitely a minority one within the Italian rabbinate. By no means, however, was he accused by any of his rabbinic colleagues of being a heretic.

This essay treats the contradictions that beset Samuel Hirsch's Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden in order to clarify the nature of the study of modern Jewish thought. I begin by examining how Emil Fackenheim presents the contradiction in Hirsch's thought as evidence of the incompatible assumptions underlying dominant strands of modern philosophy and “authentic” Jewish theology. Agreeing with Fackenheim that Hirsch's work is contradictory, this essay diverges on both the nature of this contradiction and its implications for Jewish thought. I claim that the argument of Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden founders as a result of Hirsch's refusal to choose between three different, and ultimately incompatible, strategies for articulating the relationship between God and human beings. I then conclude by exploring the implications of the collapse of Hirsch's position with regard to the dispute between theocentrists and ethical monotheists and for the field of modern Jewish thought more broadly.

Academic achievement was prized in Babylonian rabbinic culture (fourth to sixth centuries CE). Yet alongside examples of scholarly ingenuity, the Babylonian Talmud records intellectual setbacks. How academic failure is constituted and the reactions to it within the talmudic text are key to understanding dynamics between sages and the cultural values of Babylonian rabbinic Judaism. Academic failure depends more on the social rank of the man than on the nature of his mistake. The modes of failure for sages in teaching positions differ from those for sages in lower-ranked social positions. Higher-status sages are treated more sympathetically, while lower-rank sages encounter derision within brief narratives and critique from the later editors. These exchanges demonstrate the high degree of expertise expected of participants in the scholastic culture, while normalizing scholastic failure (to a certain extent) as part of academic innovation. Analyzing brief narratives depicting scholastic failure in talmudic legal dialectic necessitates literary analysis of legal passages as a whole, emphasizing the continued importance of literary theory in the study of rabbinics.

In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Behind this exercise in local history, however, lies a broader intention: to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply “a gloom-filled parenthesis” for Morvedre's Jews but instead “an era of remarkable resurgence” (3)—nay, “a Jewish Renaissance,” as the book's title provocatively proclaims—Meyerson challenges the regnant vision of Spain's Jewish communities as sliding almost inexorably toward expulsion after 1391. In making his case, he weds an awareness of the historical aerial view with a fluency in older and more recent historiographic trends and an extraordinary mastery of events on the ground. The result is a copiously documented, lucidly written exploration of a treasure trove of hitherto mostly unknown archival sources that dazzles with its wealth of detail and enlivens through regular recourse to vivid vignettes.

This article examines the reception of rabbinic literature in South Korea, focusing on a series of books titled Talmud (T'almudŭ). We analyze dozens of volumes published between 1979 and 2016, identifying the subgenres that have been produced, individual editions that exemplify the development and diversity of the editions, and the religious traditions—Jewish, Confucian, and Christian—with which these books engage. The article also reflects on the place and significance of these Korean texts in the long reception of rabbinic literature.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the representational realist painter Israel Hershberg in his Jerusalem studio, where he was busy working on a small painting, one of a series of “tree portraits.” It was an exquisite work, in which each dappling of light on every needle of a towering cypress was exactingly represented on a miniature scale. But I was startled to see that, while he had blocked out the shape of the tree and the general parameters of light and shade “in the wild,” this champion of rendering from life was actually completing most of the painting in the studio. At first I thought the tree must be outside the window, or that he must be working from a photograph, but when I asked him where the detailing was coming from, he tapped his finger to his forehead.

This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan, using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography. Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?

The various versions of the story about the daughter of Nakdimon ben Gurion may be used to explain two phenomena: (a) the story as a hermeneutic device, by which the very act of presenting the verse as part of the story imparts to it a new meaning, which differs not only from the peshaf (plain meaning), but also from the other exegeses of the sages concerning this same verse and (b) the modification that results in this new meaning because of the diversities in the different versions of the story.

In the introduction to his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides provides us with a rationale for the composition of this work as well as instructions for the targeted reader on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style. Such devices as contradiction, diffuse and seemingly discordant treatment of subject matter, and deliberate ruses are employed to accommodate both halakhic legal constraints on the overt teaching of physics and metaphysics and the wide intellectual disparity of his potential readers. The sensitive nature of the topics to be explored demands an unorthodox pedagogy that both illuminates and conceals, allowing entrance to the qualified few while excluding those who cannot cope with the intellectual rigors involved. Rabbinic stricture prohibits revealing anything more of the Account of the Chariot (metaphysics) than chapter headings, and therefore Maimonides cautions, “my purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed so as not to oppose that divine purpose which has concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths requisite for His apprehension.”

King Herod ruled Judea from 37 to 4 bce. His life and achievements are described in detail in the writings of Flavius Josephus and have been explored in numerous historical studies. In rabbinic literature, however, mention of Herod's image and achievements is scarce. The few sources that do exist are very brief, with the exception of one significant source in the Babylonian Talmud (henceforth: BT), which will be discussed in this article.