In the mid-1930s, when the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow began to publish his autobiography, he gave it the formidable title The Book of Life: Reminiscences and Reflections, Material for the History of My Time. Drawing not only on his memory, but on copious diaries and a prodigious literary output going back to the 1880s, Dubnow traced his journey from shtetl Judaism to Jewish nationalism—a journey typical (onemight almost say prototypical) of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewish intellectual's search for a new definition of himself as Jew and modern man. The substance of Dubnow's Book of Life frees the title from pretentiousness; more than a mere compilation, much of the autobiography (especially the first volume and a half) was an act of synthesis and integratsiia dushi (“self-integration”), two of Dubnow's favorite terms. My aim in this paper is to reflect anew on the process of Dubnow's self-integration, bridging the gap between a purely biographical approach and a purely ideological one in order to show how a distinctive nationalist stance crystallized out of Dubnow's personal growth. Nationalism was a hard-won, by no means self-evident solution to an overlapping sequence of emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Dubnow provides us with a picture of the groping that this self-transformation entailed, a picture that can be supplemented, and to a certain extent revised, by listening for resonances between life and thought undetected by Dubnow himself.

Among the many themes to which Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man speaks so richly and suggestively, I will focus here on three that seem especially pertinent to our understandings of American Jewish identity, as well as to the academic practice of Jewish studies, and that exhibit the film's blend of complexity, clarity, and opacity. All three are closely related aspects of a larger question about the possibility of communication and, hence, of relation, but it should be useful to articulate them separately here. Each may be said to present, through the characters' interactions and the things they read and hear, its own question for judgment, but in no case does A Serious Man indicate how the viewer is to rule on that question.

In his Epistle to Yemen, Moses Maimonides answers an anonymous Jewish apostate's polemical claims about the truth of Islam. This apostate challenged the Yemenite Jews by presenting quotes from the Torah that Muslims considered proof of the future advent of Islam and Muḥammad (dalā'il). The identity of the apostate, however, has been disputed by researchers. This article proposes that the apostate Maimonides had in mind was Samaw'al al-Maghribī, the Jewish convert who authored Ifḥām al-Yahūd. The reasoning is based on unique characteristics of Samaw'al's tract that distinguish it from other polemical works. Samaw'al discussed the dalā'il with much greater sophistication than any earlier polemicist and used an advanced manner of presentation, in response to which Maimonides provided well-conceived refutations. This combination of Samaw'al's sophisticated polemical arguments and Maimonides's replies demonstrates that the two appear to be matched.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp. @T2first: During the past three decades, several major scholarly studies and personal accounts of Egyptian Jewry have been published in Europe, Israel, and the United States.The most noted scholarly publications include Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yoram Meital, 'Atarim yehudiyim be-Miṣrayim (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995); Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Change: Halachic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Changes [Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920]. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993); and Yosef Algamil, Pirqei Tuvia ben Simḥa Levi Babovitch: 'Aḥaron ḥakhmei ha-kara'im be-Miṣrayim, 2 vols. (Ramlah: Center for Karaite Jewry, 1998). Some of the best personal accounts are Maurice Mizrahi, L'Egypte et ses Juifs: Le Temps revolu, xixe–xxe siècles (Geneva: Imprimerie Avenir, 1977); Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, Blanche [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Jacqueline Kahanoff Mi-mizrah. shemesh (Tel-Aviv: Yariv Hadar, 1978); Ronit Matalon, Zeh ‘im ha-panim 'eleynu (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); Rachel Maccabi, Mitzrayim sheli (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat ha-Poalim, 1968); and André Aciman, Out of Egypt (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). Joel Beinin's book is the product of several years of research in Israel, Egypt, France, and the United States, in which he consulted not only books but also newspaper articles in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as archives, among them the YIVO Institute records; the Haganah, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, and the Central Zionist archives (Israel); the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection of Yeshiva University (containing the records of the Cairo community); and the U.S. National Archives. He also interviewed Egyptian Jews and non-Jews.

In his introduction to A Study of History, Toynbee observed that “in modern Western historical research, as in modern Western industry, the quantity and location of raw materials threaten to govern the lives of human beings.” In an inability to manufacture his own sources and yet with a reluctance to overlook any means for brightening an obscure picture of the past, the historian may at times allow insufficient evidence to support interpretations that gain acceptance merely for lack of anything better. Such an occupational hazard inevitably plagues all branches of historiography, but it is more prevalent in the efforts to unravel the mysteries of “darker” epochs, like those of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. Not only does scanty source material limit the historian's treatment of this period, but the peculiar interests, motivations, and backgrounds of medieval writers restrict the legitimate use of the few documents which do exist. The medievalist's eye must be at once discerning and critical, careful not to overlook any evidence but wary so as not to misuse it, even if no other sources point to contradictory conclusions.

The justification of plans and programs is a necessary condition of the relationship between systems of education, both obligatory and voluntary, and the publics they serve. Those who are responsible for the conduct of the educational enterprise in general and the schooling of the young in particular must provide those who support the system, financially and otherwise, with acceptable and defensible reasons for the efforts and activities of the schools. The idea of justification in education rests on the assumption that the process of schooling, whatever its form and content, is subject to rational control and that the authority for the conduct of schools is derived from the principles inherent in the justification offered. A proferred justification is most effective and likely of acceptance when the positions it generates on educational issues fit the general fabric of ideals and aspirations of the society to which it is addressed. If, as we believe, justification is a necessary part of the rhetoric which surrounds legislatively determined and state maintained school systems—i.e., systems whose right to existence is not subject to question or doubt in any modern society and where attendance is required by law—then it follows that it is of even greater significance for voluntary school systems which lack the coercive power of their governmental counterparts—i.e., Jewish education.

A strange statement appears in Maimonides' (d. 1204) code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah. When dealing with prohibited marriages, Maimonides writes that a convert from among the gentiles, including the seven Canaanite nations (Deuteronomy 7:3), may marry within the Jewish community. Originally there were some exceptions to this in regard to four nations: Ammon, Moab, Egypt, and Edom. However, Sennacherib, King of Assyria, commingled all the nations, and since then these four nations have been mixed up with all the other permitted nations, and they have all become permitted. “Thus a convert these days, whether he be an Edomite, an Egyptian, an Ammonite, a Moabite, a Kushite, or any other nation, whether male or female, is permitted to enter the community [of Israel, i.e. to marry within the community] immediately.”

Despite the focus by the popular media on the revival of Jewish instrumental klezmer music during the past decades, surprisingly little of a scholarly nature has been written until recently about either the klezmer tradition or its revival. Since 1999 a relatively large number of new book publications of both a scholarly and a popular nature have appeared. Besides the four volumes under review here, they include books by Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin, Moshe Beregovski, Seth Rogovoy, Mark Slobin, Zinovij Stoljar, and Yale Strom. It is hoped that the publication of these four works (and the other recent works not reviewed here) will open a broader discussion of the complex of issues surrounding klezmer and ḥasidic music and stimulate further research in these areas.

When in 1981 the Israeli Cameri Theater performed The Passion of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin, the leading avant-garde playwrightin Israel (viewed by some as “the bad boy of the modern Israeli stage”),1 public outrage reached unprecedented heights.The scandal was partially provoked by Levin′s staging.His taste for the carnal and the cruel was much too unpalatable for many stomachs to digest.“People actually walked out, while others covered their eyes,” reported a review in the Jerusalem Post.2 No less detrimental, however, was the specific angle from which Levin th? playwright elected to retell the biblical story.For although the Hebrew title of the play, Yisurei Iyov, may be literally rendered as “Job′s Afflictions,” our translation was advisedly chosen: In his version, Levin catapults Job from the fictional land of Uz to Palestine of the Roman era, thereby embedding Job′s ordeal in that later agon between man and God–the passion of Christ.Accordingly, this dramatized Job does not live to hear an answer from the whirlwind, nor does he see his life redeemed.With a dramatic sleight of hand he is, paradoxically enough, the only character in the play who refuses to deny the existence of God–thus condemning himself to the stake.

Literary approaches to rabbinic literature entered the field through biblical studies, in which scholars from different quarters and different points of reference were using them to make sense of the biblical text as it has come down to us. The literary approach took umbrage at the way in which the historical source-critical approach dissects the Bible into its constituent sources. The literary approach was an overt attempt to overcome the fractures that historical criticism had introduced into the surface of the biblical text. It proposed instead to read the text—with all of its surface irregularities, gaps, and hiatuses—as coherent and meaningful.

Not otherwise known as a bright era for the Jews of Christian Europe, the late fourteenth century nonetheless counted a number of thriving Jewish medical careers. One physician who surfaced in this period was Jacob b. Solomon of Avignon (sometimes called Jacob b. Solomon haTzarfati), whose career has been documented in two cities. In northern France, the land of his ancestors, we find him in the 1370s in the orbit of the University of Paris and its prestigious medical faculty. By the early 1380s, however, Jacob was at the papal court in Avignon, where or near where he was raised. There, in his own day at least, he achieved some renown while serving as physician to Pope Clement VII's brother, Count Pierre of Geneva.