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.

In the past few years, a number of works have appeared which have tried to utilize different methods in the analysis of midrashic and aggadic texts. These recent efforts include the application of literary structural analysis, formula comparison, linguistic tools, and form and redaction criticism, in addition to concern for the sitz im leben of particular passages, i.e., sociohistorical studies.

This study examines Rabbi Yehuda Hayyûj′s (945–1000 C.E.) use of two derivational processes: underlying forms and linguistic analogies (singular: Arabic Hebrew ), which were an integral element of his work. Since his goal was to show the derivation of Hebrew verbs from triliteral roots, he focused on weak verbs whose surface forms did not demonstrate all three radicals. He compared many weak verbs to other verbal forms in order to identify the exact inflection of words, especially their verbal pattern and consonantal roots.

[Reb Zevi] saw and realized that the business was leading [Reb Issachar] astray, that he was being distracted by it and was distracting others, until finally he felt like one tugged by a distorted idea, a senseless bit of sophistry or vain embellishment, like one who becomes increasingly bogged down as he trudges from one pilpul to the next, from one piece of vanity to the next, until it finally drags him into a morass from which he can never emerge.

Yigael Yadin's publication of the Temple Scroll (ts) from Qumran is a pioneering work of scholarship that will stimulate a generation of further research. At this relatively early date, most attention naturally will focus on understanding the scroll itself and its place within Qumran literature. Alongside these concerns, however, are many tantalizing prospects for comparative study, through which the literature and life of Qumran might illumine the larger context of Judaism in late antiquity. Clearly, for example, the way TS treats biblical law is of both intrinsic and comparative significance. This study is a preliminary contribution to a fertile area for future investigations.

In the early 1880s, the staunch Hebraist and bibliophile Ephraim Deinard (1846–1930) became a reluctant witness to the fast-paced growth of modern Yiddish culture that began in his hometown of Odessa. At the time, Deinard owned a Hebrew bookshop that had been sliding toward bankruptcy until he grudgingly adapted his wares to better reflect the market forces of the Jewish reading culture. In Memories of My People (Zikhronot bat עami), he briefly accounts for (in his view) the ill fortune of being forced to sell the Yiddish books that his customers demanded of him rather than the Hebrew literature he held so dear. Although he mentions a host of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers whom the reader will come to know in the following pages, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to remark upon the catalytic agency he assigns to the Yiddish romance novelist Nakhum Shaykevitsh (aka Shomer) (1849–1905) and Avraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), best known as the father of the Yiddish theatre. Deinard writes:

Christopher Browning is perhaps most widely known for his seminal study of the motives of the “ordinary men” who perpetrated the systematic murder of European Jewry at the behest of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, in the past two decades he has devoted much of his attention to studying the processes and decisions that led the Reich to make systematic mass murder its official policy and to provide the impetus and means for its implementation. Now he has brought his empirical findings and interpretations together in a single volume that provides the most rigorous, cogent, and lucid analysis currently available of this crucial problem in the history of the encounter between Nazi Germany and the Jews.