The second century CE has long been recognized as a time of intense preoccupation with medicine and health in the Graeco-Roman world. Medicine had always been a part of the Greek paideia, and acquaintance with it was traditionally required of every aristocrat, but it was during the second Sophistic period that a new form of medical self-presentation emerged in which the knowledge of medicine was hailed not only as one of the apices of the intellectual habitus, but also as indispensable to everyday life. As Michel Foucault observed, the literature of this period placed an enormous emphasis on the body not just as a tool to be used but also as an end in itself, and the classic philosophical ideal of “caring for the Self” (epimeleia heautou) came to entail unrelenting attention to one's health and physical well-being. In this setting, the doctor—the bearer of medical knowledge and the ultimate caretaker of the Self—was seen as offering more than physical relief: The doctor was both a healer and a mentor, and functioned as a watchperson and a guide to right living. Indeed, it is in this period that we first come across the appellations iatrophilosophos (doctor-philosopher) and iatrosophistes (doctor-sophist). Medical knowledge had thus become a most esteemed form of knowledge during the Antonine period of the Roman Empire, and doctors, as its guardians, interpreters, and practitioners, were invested with substantial power and authority.

Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (1800–1853) has been described as “the most radical of the Jewish mystics” and as a religious anarchist.Joseph Weiss, “A Late Jewish Utopia of Religious Freedom,” in David Goldstein, ed., Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 211. Along similar lines, see Rivka Schatz, “Autonomy of the Spirit and the Law of Moses” (Hebrew), Molad 21 (1973–1974), pp. 554–561 and Rachel Elior, “The Innovations in Polish Hasidism” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 62 (1993), pp. 381- 432. This position has already been moderated to some extent in Morris M. Faierstein, All is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (New York: Ktav, 1989). Other works on R. Mordecai Joseph include Jerome Gellman, Fear and Trembling, and the Fire (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1994) and Shaul Magid, “Hasidism and Existentialism? A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 15 (1995) pp. 279–294. Some scholars have wondered how he managed to resist the antinomian pull of his own doctrine, and to “suffer the chaotic without perishing within it.”Weiss, A Late Jewish Utopia, p. 245. Yet this characterization bears witness to a profound tendency in much of the academic scholarship on Hasidism—and on religion in general—to privilege doctrine over practice, or to frame the object of study in theological and philosophical rather than ritual and hermeneutic terms.See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), each of which treats the difficulty associated with “belief” as an analytic category in the study of culture and religion. Moshe Idel's Hasidism Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) provides a welcome correction to the doctrinal focus in Hasidic studies, but the specific ritual models he describes (i.e. ecstasy and magic) are inadequate to R. Mordecai Joseph's oeuvre. It neglects, for instance, the fact that Hasidic texts are often devoted to the elaboration of ritual cosmologies, and that ritual “work” (including the management of emotional dispositions) almost always takes place over time. As the anthropologist Victor Turner has shown, this means that ritual symbols can take on different or even contradictory sets of meanings depending on where in an ongoing ritual process they are deployed.Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967). An influential statement on the role of ritual in promoting religious dispositions can be found in Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). For a critique of Geertz with special reference to Hasidic sources, see Don Seeman, “Ritual, Emotion and ‘Useless Suffering' in the Warsaw Ghetto” (in press). When R. Mordecai Joseph makes seemingly contradictory statements about the existence of free will or the place of anger in religious experience therefore, it is in ritual process rather than anarchy or inconsistency that an explanation should be sought. He was moved by a distinctive understanding of divine glory (kabod shamayim) to reevaluate ritual strategies that promoted ecstasy, emotionalism, and self-annihilation or martyrdom as religious ideals in Hasidism, and to suggest new forms of ritual work in their stead. In short, R. Mordecai Joseph sought to reconcile divine glory with divine law, and to do so at the level of the individual human will.

The Western perception of Islam as a belligerent religion owes many of its stereotypes not only to the Crusades, but also to the early modern rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe. Heated debates about the “Turkish menace” dominated European political discourse until the (second) Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, as documented by the innumerable Turcica that circulated both swiftly and widely thanks to revolutionary advances in printing. Sixteenth-century Christian authors provided their eager readers with constantly updated versions of Ottoman history, as did some of their Jewish contemporaries. Probably the first Jew to make the Ottomans the major subject matter of his work was Elijah Capsali of Candia in Venetian Crete, who in 1523 completed a Hebrew chronicle titled Seder ءEliyahu Zuta (“Minor Order of Elijah”).

In their rhetoric, the ex-conversos who settled in “lands of freedom” outside the Iberian Peninsula tended to emphasize the anguish and lack of freedom they had endured while in the orbit of the Inquisition–in stark contrast to the free and thriving Jewish collective life they had now built outside it. If the Peninsula had been a swamp of “Egyptian idolatry,” the Jewish ex-converso communities in Amsterdam, Venice, Livorno, and London (to name only the most vibrant) were, by implication, encampments on the way to the Holy Land. Yet one aspect of their new condition subtly undermined the ex-conversos' confidence as Jews vis-a-vis the gentile world. Ever sensitive to their image, they were exquisitely aware of their now unambiguous identification in Christian eyes, not with conviction rewarded, not with faith triumphant, but with a defeated and exiled people.

Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting various movements for Jewish national-cultural autonomy. After World War II, however, Diaspora Nationalism vanished almost overnight. So too was its intellectual afterlife marked by silence, as postwar historians of Jewish political thought largely ignored its legacy. Recently, however, Diaspora Nationalism has emerged as a growing field of scholarship. The results are impressive: a striking new wave of studies on its intellectual leadership, political parties, cultural projects, and various interwar East European Autonomist experiments. This abundance of fresh research promises to reframe not only the history of Diaspora Nationalism, but also that of Zionism and Jewish nationalism more generally.

The Book of Ben Sira is a wisdom composition written in Hebrew toward the beginning of the second century BCE. It is well preserved in a Greek translation that, according to its prologue, was done by the author’s grandson, and a Syriac translation of a few hundred years later is preserved in the Peshitta. Between fragments found at Masada and in the Cairo Geniza, some 60 percent of the book survives in Hebrew.

The “killer wife” superstition, by which we mean the belief that the husbands of certain women are doomed to die, is examined here as it appears in Jewish sources from the Bible to Maimonides. The many pertinent developments in post-talmudic-midrashic sources require a separate study. For this period we confine our discussion to Maimonides, the most significant medieval spokesman on the subject. Our topic is a popular theme in folklore. Here our primary interest is in how the religion of Israel reacted to the superstition, both conceptually and practically.

Students of poverty in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim social, literary, and legal contexts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages have noted the phenomenon of wealthy people who fall into poverty and the provision of charitable assistance to them. This essay's principal purpose is to point out an important difference between the development of attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor in rabbinic literature of late antiquity and in other religious and legal contexts. Peter Brown notes evidence of late Roman empathy for the wellborn poor, hypothesizing that this empathy can be attributed to a desire to preserve these remnants of the old, proud plebs romana in the uncertain sixth century. Ingrid Mattson demonstrates that between the eighth and tenth or eleventh centuries CE, Islamic jurists moved in the direction of taking the “social and economic context” of a poor person into account in determining that person's legitimate needs. By contrast, as this essay will show, rabbinic literature of late antiquity moved in the opposite direction, from third-century empathy for the formerly wealthy poor to growing ambivalence in the fourth through the seventh centuries.

A baraita cited in both the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmud (pKetubot 12:3, 34d-35a = pKil'aim 9:4, 32a-b; bKetubot 103a-b) describes Rabbi's dying testament to his sons. In the Babylonian version, Rabbi designates his elder son, Gamaliel, as his successor, and his younger son, Shimeon, as the next hakham. In its analysis of this part of the testament, the BT interprets Rabbi's declaration, which begins, curiously, with the younger son and the lesser position, as concessive: although the younger son is wise, the elder shall be the patriarch. In the continuation of this discussion, the Talmud manifests its concern over Gamaliel's appointment: Gamaliel does not “fill his forefathers' place in wisdom.” This problem is so great, according to the BT, that it would negate the elder son's claim to the dynastic position were it not that Gamaliel has another quality, “fear of sin,” with respect to which he does, in fact, “fill his forefathers' place.”

What does it mean to study women's religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women's religious life and practice to the history of particular religious traditions? I shall explore these questions within the context of a very specific topic: the religious life of Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) Jewish women in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, as seen through the popular religious literature of the period. This literature, which was addressed primarily to women, was in Yiddish, the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews, rather than in Hebrew, the sacred language, understood almost exclusively by men. My thinking about the different approaches one could take to this material, and the different uses to which it could be put, was stimulated by a lecture given by Joan Scott on the study of women's history. Using a framework of analysis suggested in part by Scott's work, I will distinguish between three general approaches to the study of women's religion: (1) those that add an account of women's religious lives to an already existing history of Judaism; (2) those that consider women's Judaism within the framework of other groups usually omitted from the history of Judaism; and (3) those that seek to transform our understanding of Judaism through the incorporation of the perspective gained from the study of women's religion.

Not how halakhic texts tell stories about other things, but how they tell stories about themselves is our concern here. Confronting us is not the problem of extracting evidence regarding trade or communal organization from law, but the question of how one cracks the colorless and highly impersonal mold into which the thought of the medieval period was cast to reveal a world of individuality, development, and ambivalence. Can the fragmentary and recalcitrant halakhic texts be made to talk history?

Rabbinic responsa can at times furnish an entree into the private and public lives of individuals involved with the judicial system. The case under discussion provides an in-depth portrait of a marriage in twelfth-century Cairo and of a woman's life–in this instance, a woman struggling to maneuver within the strictures of Jewish law and contemporary Judeo-Arabic society.1 The original Judeo-Arabic of the two responsa under discussion, as well as the Hebrew translations, are, no doubt, well known to Judeo-Arabic, Geniza, and Maimonidean scholars alike, as are the basic details to some English readers. Nevertheless, the case is certainly worthy of a separate study of the text in conjunction with a detailed analysis.

The desire of the Franco-Jewish elite to foster the acculturation of French Jewry during the nineteenth century is a theme that has been explored in considerable detail in recent years. Historians of French Jewry have described the development of an ideology that identified Judaism primarily as a religion, have analyzed the attempts of various communal institutions to mitigate Jewish distinctiveness, and have demonstrated that the leaders of French Jewry adopted a policy of social integration both because they were attracted to the mainstream culture of France and because they felt that acculturation was the implied price of empancipation.

Much has been written on rabbinic polysemy over the past two decades, and yet the precise nature and dating of this phenomenon remain a matter of controversy. This note, which aims to help clarify the issue, is a response to Steven Fraade's essay, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” published in this journal. Surveys of the history of the polysemy debates are readily available; my present concern is with Fraade's position, and the positions to which he is responding, chief among them Daniel Boyarin's claim that rabbinic polysemy is a relatively late, post-tannaitic, phenomenon. Fraade sets out to refute this claim, and his essay provides a dozen passages that serve as “countertexts to [Boyarin's] arguments” (5). The aim of this response is to show that the rabbinic sources in question are not countertexts, and that polysemy is, in fact, a post-tannaitic phenomenon.

There is probably no topic in Maimonides' philosophy more thoroughly explored than that of human perfection, many of the studies dealing explicitly with the notion of imitatio Dei. Maimonides' view of ultimate perfection has been interpreted alternatively as primarily either intellectual, political, ethical, or halakhic. Many have interpreted Maimonides as positing a harmonious combination of the contemplative life and the life of socially oriented activity—bios praktikos—despite the evident tension between the two.Others have explained the apparent inconsistency in Maimonides' approach in terms of the distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines. The appropriate texts in Maimonides' writings have been analyzed in detail, and the sources at his disposal have been discussed at length. The challenge facing the student of Maimonides' thought, however, lies not only in explicating the individual texts which deal in a direct manner with the topic, but also in identifying all the issues and texts which are relevant to the topic, as well as their sources, and how they are related.

One of the most unusual episodes in the annals of Hebrew printing involved the first Jewish printers in Poland—Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz—who began to print in Cracow or, more likely, in neighboring Kazimierz, in 1534.1 Within a year of opening their business, the brothers had produced five relatively short titles, all of which were first editions and four of which were the first Yiddish books ever printed. After about a year of work, the Helicz brothers gave up publishing only to return to the trade about three years later, when they published several classic—and more substantial—rabbinic works in quick succession. However, it was not Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz who returned to the Hebrew publishing business in Cracow in 1538 but rather Paul, Andreas, and Johannes Helicz, neochristiani.2

Last year, a friend drew my attention to the lyrics of a famous song in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, the composer’s first attempt in 1956 to write the “Great American Opera.” The song, “I Am Easily Assimilated,” remains one of the best-loved musical numbers from the play and includes the following lines: My father came from Rovno Gubernya.But now I’m here, I’m dancing a tango….My father spoke a High Middle Polish.In one half-hour I’m talking in Spanish:Por favor! Toreador!I am easily assimilated.I am so easily assimilated. The irreverent lyrics are often credited to Bernstein himself and refer to the biography of his father, Sam, who immigrated to America from the province (gubernya) of Rovno. This Jewish tango exhibits a musical pastiche of Hispanic and Klezmer traditions in its instrumentation and displays a manic shift from Russian to English to Spanish that mirrors the composer’s playful notation that it be played “Moderato Hassidicamente.” The song is both a parody of and a monument to the assimilatory spirit. My friend, however, thought I would be interested in the song because my last name is Rovner; he expected that I would want to track down Bernstein’s reference to the area, Rovno, that lent my family its patronymic.

The Cinquecento was marked by the emergence of expanded and more formalized structures of self-government in Italy's Jewish communities. It is from this century that we begin to have written capitoli (constitutional agreements) and pinkasim (record books).2 By the middle of the century, as Robert Bonfil has demonstrated, the office of community-appointed rabbi had been created and regularized.3 Intense internecine struggles broke out for control over the new institutions, and contemporary rabbinic responsa attest to the slow and sometimes tortuous manner in which early modern Jews felt their way toward new working arrangements, procedures, and understandings.4

Sefer miẓvot gadol (Semag) by the French Tosefist R. Moses of Coucy was a most influential halakhic work in medieval times. Originally titled Sefer ha-miẓvot (The Book of Commandments), it was written in northern France in the first half of the thirteenth century and in many ways reveals the influence of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah. Indeed, to understand R. Moses of Coucy's legal project properly, it is important to comprehend the availability of Mishneh Torah in Europe at the time. Whereas Maimonides completed his Mishneh Torah circa 1180, the work seems not to have reached the study halls of the French Tosefists before 1200. In this article, I explain R. Moses' purpose and program in writing his Sefer ha-miẓvot, examine the format he chose, and clarify who his presumptive reader, or readers, may have been.

The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds preserve fascinating stories about the origins of Roman festivals, through which they attempt to connect Roman history with Jewish history. This paper offers contextual readings of these narratives (Y. Avodah Zarah 1:2 [39c] and B. Avodah Zarah 8b) in light of Greek and Roman texts, epigraphical material, and numismatics, and places these rabbinic narratives within broader debates about cultural memory, Jewish historiography, calendars, and time. In one story, the idolatrous sins committed by a series of Israelite kings are blamed for the geological, mythical, and historical origins of the city of Rome, and a series of Roman imperial motifs and figures (the Tiber River, Remus and Romulus, Numa) are inverted. In another, the Romans are said to draw on the power of the Torah in order to defeat their Greek rivals. The rabbinic stories of Roman festivals and their Jewish origins can be understood as examples of what James C. Scott has called “a hidden transcript”—texts that bring to light an alternative perspective, that of the rabbis, within a Roman imperial context that they often interpreted as hostile or threatening.