This paper reveals one of the most unique Zoharic Shema mysteries identified as “Rav Hamnuna Sabba's Mystery of Unity” [רזא דיחודא דרב המנונא סבא]. This mystery is deeply connected to two narrative figures in Zoharic literature: The Yanuka (the Zoharic wunderkind) and the Saba (the wise old man). This paper argues that various poetic aspects of these two figures illuminate the theosophic and mystical contents of their homilies as can be shown in the various homilies of the Yanuka and Saba on their unique Shema mystery.

This article proposes a new set of critical historical practices, with the aim of constructing Jewishness into an interpretive historical mode. Jewish history is most commonly understood as the history of the Jewish people and its territories. In setting this as the foundation of Jewish history, scholars have allowed empirical evaluation of the Jewishness of a person or place to precede analysis. Two basic approaches, clearly foundational and tied to personalist and nationalist conceptions of Jewishness, have guided the field of Jewish history: the conjunctive and contingent. A third method—termed here a critical constructive approach—offers a nonfoundational vision for freeing Jewishness and Jewish history from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability and, instead, reconceiving Jewishness as a structuring mode that can affect how a broad range of subjects have operated within history.

Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden of 1781 is generally believed to be the first call issued in Germany for the improvement of the Jews' civil rights. This commonly held belief is mistaken. Following in the footsteps of Volkmar Eichstädt's Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Judenfrage of 1938, Jacob Toury called attention to the Schreiben eines Juden an einen Philosophen nebst der Antwort (in what follows: Schreiben), a pamphlet published anonymously in Berlin in 1753, which is “the first German composition on the Jewish question” calling for complete equality of the status of the Jews in Germany. Toury shed important light on this work but was unable to identify its author. Subsequent historiography took little notice of the Schreiben, perhaps because its author, and hence the context in which it was composed, remained unidentified. In this article, I show that the author of the Schreiben is the Berlin physician and early maskil Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, also known as Aaron Zalman Emmerich (1723–1769) and that his friend, the noted poet, playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), was directly involved in its publication. This identification should give Gumpertz and his Schreiben the place they deserve in German history and in the history of the Jews in Germany; at the same time, it enhances our appreciation of Lessing as a central figure in promoting the rights of Jews in Germany.

Abraham Miguel Cardoso was born to a crypto-Jewish family living in Rio Seco, Spain, in the year 1626. He left Spain with with his older brother Isaac in 1648. Abraham Cardoso has usually been discussed within the larger context of the Sabbatian movement, which he served as one of its major theoreticians. Until his death in 1706, Cardoso found himself almost constantly under attack by the rabbinical authorities in the cities where he tried to settle with his family, although he sometimes found local non-Jewish authorities who would offer him protection. He served for some time as the personal physician to the bey of Tripoli and later to the local potentate in Tunis. In the last decades of his life, after the death of Sabbatai Zebi, he engaged in bitter debates with other leading Sabbatians about the divinity of the Messiah. Cardoso rejected wholeheartedly what he saw as their adoption of a Christian messialogy. Gershom Scholem's analysis of Cardoso's theology as Gnostic has remained fundamentally unchallenged. Scholem saw in Cardoso's thinking the crystallization of what he believed was the latent antinomian Gnosticism within Kabbalah and especially within the later strata of the Zohar, and he pointed to Cardoso's likely acquaintance with Gnostic ideas, filtered through the Church Fathers (read during theological studies in Spain), as the most significant factor in precipitating this crystallization (see expecially Scholem 1980, pp. 333–334; Scholem 1971a, pp. 65–74; Scholem 1971c, pp. 104–107).

In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,”

The name of Rabbi Barukh Schick of Shklov (1744–1808) does not figure in the pantheon of great eighteenth-century Jewish personalities, alongside those of R. Israel Ba′al Shem Tov, Moses Mendelssohn, and R. Elijah, the Vilna Gaon. Unlike the latter, his teachings were not distinguished by great originality or profundity, and they exerted rather limited influence. Indeed, Schick's name might well have fallen into total oblivion were it not for a few lines in the introduction to one of his books (a Hebrew translation of Euclid's Elements), in which he related certain remarks made to him by the Vilna Gaon in support of the study of science.

With the passage of time the notion of original sin became a matter of increasing concern for medieval Jewish critics of Christianity. The foundation of this criticism was laid by the earlier polemical writers, specifically those of the period from the second half of the twelfth through the early fourteenth centuries. The later authors, from the late fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, incorporated practically all of the arguments raised by their predecessors and added new criticism reflecting their greater familiarity with Christian beliefs and literature. The earlier polemicists, while approaching their task from a rational, “common sense” perspective, relied heavily on Hebrew biblical and, to a lesser degree, New Testament passages. The later writers reflected a greater intellectual independence of scriptural sources. Because the earlier works are generally structured as running commentaries of scriptural texts relevant to Christianity, their treatment of original sin, and other Christian doctrines for that matter, tends to be unfocused.3 The issues that are raised emerge piecemeal as the salient biblical passages are interpreted. The later works tend to be built on discussions of concepts. Consequently, a number of arguments are coalesced into coherent analyses. Such structural differences are the results of different patterns of inquiry. The earlier textually oriented critiques are, on the whole, products of the Franco-German polemical writers.

Moritz Steinschneider opened the greatest monument in the study of Hebrew bibliography, his Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, with the following statement:

Roman Jakobson's now classic distinction between metaphor and metonymy defines two primary modes of linguistic thought: on the one hand relations of similarity and dissimilarity, and on the other relations of contiguity or, we might say, dependence and independence. Though they find their most condensed expression in the tropes metaphor and metonymy, these same principles govern phonemic, lexical, and phraseological levels of language, and they operate as well in larger segments of discourse. A piece of fiction or poetry, for example, may develop along lines of association by likeness or through links of sequence and consequence.

Researching the translation and commentary of the tenth century Karaite scholar and exegete Yefet ben ʿElī on the Book of Proverbs, numerous statements that seemed to ring with egalitarianism were found. Some of these statements found in Yefet's commentary on wisdom literature and biblical narrative will be examined in this article. One case in which he speculates on biblical Hebrew syntax will also be examined. Gender equality in Yefet's work is anchored in the principle of logical inference, also known as analogy, qiyās, which served as one of the three major sources for the determination of Karaite halakhah. This article includes also a brief discussion of the role of qiyās in Karaite halakhah on marriage, divorce, and inheritance laws.

What was Maimonides' attitude toward the typically medieval description of the universe presented at the beginning of his great law code, the Mishneh Torah? Was that account of the physical universe meant only as a statement of the best description of nature available at the time (and thus radically distinct from the halakhic matters which make up the bulk of the Mishneh Torah), or was it meant to be a description of the true nature of the universe as it really is, not subject to revision in the light of new paradigms or new models (and thus essentially similar to the halakhic matters in the text)?

Among contemporary literary theorists—and in the humanities in general—theological approaches toward interpretation have been dismissed in favor of hermeneutic models committed to the contingency, partiality, and historicity of all interpretative practice. Against the grain of this tendency, which tends to dismiss all vestiges of theology from postmodern habits of reading and interpretation, critics like Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, have, over the past decades, attempted to recover the distinctly Jewish modes and discourses of reading and interpretation. In the process, they have, as Boyarin himself underlines, introduced a specifically Jewish mode of reading—that of midrash—into the literary theoretical canon.

In the spring of 1881, Jewish communities within the Pale of Settlement in Russia and Romania witnessed the creation of the Jewish nationalist groups, regional associations, and other core organizations that would subsequently evolve into the movement that came to be known as Ḥovevei Ẓion (lovers of Zion), or Ḥibbat Ẓion.

Although anti-Semitism played an important role in stimulating the emergence of Ḥibbat Ẓion, the movement's establishment must be understood as having been shaped by two concurrent processes. One was the conclusion of Jewish emancipation in central and western Europe, which brought central figures in the national movement, such as Leon Pinsker, to the decisive conclusion that the Jews could only be truly emancipated in an independent Jewish state. The second stemmed from the poor socioeconomic conditions faced by Jews of the time, particularly in eastern Europe. The demographic growth experienced by the Jews of eastern Europe, which reached a high point during the last few decades of the nineteenth century, required a dramatic socioeconomic solution that was nowhere to be found. Proponents of the Jewish nationalist movement argued that the establishment of a Jewish state would also help relieve the Jews' social and economic plight.

Sometime in the afternoon of Wednesday, August 22, 1781, in one of the narrow houses along the Jewish lane (Judengasse) in Frankfurt am Main, Gumpert (Gumperz, in Hebrew sources, Gumpel) Aaron May (Mai) prepared himself to go out to attend to some business matters. Like many of his contemporaries involved in trade, Gumpert's business activities did not focus on just one line of work; he did his best to turn a profit in a number of ways, including selling wine and lending money at interest. Gumpert, who was in his thirties or perhaps even early forties, wore underneath his shirt a fringed garment (ẓiẓit, see Num. 15:37–41), as religious custom obligated Jewish males to do. His green jacket had silver clasps and his partially bald pate was covered by a wig with two curls in the back, topped by a hat. His elegant appearance made it clear to all observers that he was from a well-situated family, and that he had adopted some of the modes of contemporary fashion. Indeed, Gumpert came from what would soon be, if it was not already, one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Frankfurt.

On the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, October 28, 1926, the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg) gathered for a commemorative service led by their chief rabbi, Dr. Samuel Funk. They were joined by representatives of the government administration and other religious confessions. Toward the end of his sermon, an increasingly agitated Rabbi Funk turned and pointed with an angry finger at the members of the assimilationist Union of Slovak Jews (Sväz slovenských židov) in attendance from his position behind the podium. He publicly accused them of destroying Jewish unity and making it impossible for the Jewish Party to win a parliamentary mandate. He concluded his sermon by recalling a meeting that he had recently enjoyed with the president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. President Masaryk, Funk related, regarded it as very embarrasing that in spite of the 100,000 votes that the Jewish Party had received in 1925, it was not able to obtain even one parliamentary mandate. Funk reported that Masaryk only respected those Jews who declared Jewish as their nationality.

The homily near the beginning of Tractate Avodah Zarah of the Babylonian Talmud, folios 2a–3b, surely must be numbered among the most fascinating rabbinic compositions. A brilliant creation of the rabbinic imagination, the homily depicts the inauguration of the “world to come.” A richly detailed eschatological drama unfolds as God places a Torah scroll in his lap and summons those who busied themselves with Torah to collect their reward. While rabbinic literature teems with static descriptions of the glorious miracles that await the righteous in the next world and parallel illustrations of the painful sufferings the wicked should expect, extended narratives of the initial stages of the process are rare. Not the nature of the world to come, but the test for admission is the subject at hand.

Gershon Hundert, one of the leading scholars of Eastern European Jewry, has portrayed Hasidism as “one of many movements of religious enthusiasm that arose in the eighteenth century.” Though most scholars today agree with this description, they diverge regarding the goals of the movement, the causes of its emergence and spread, and its impact on Eastern European Jewry. Simon Dubnow, the father-founder of modern Eastern European Jewish historiography, considered Hasidism to be a response to the seventeenth-century communal crisis. He portrayed Hasidism as a spiritual movement of ordinary Jews who rebelled against the stringencies of rabbinic Judaism and sought spiritual accommodation from charismatic yet uneducated leaders. Benzion Dinur saw Hasidism as a popular revolution against the corrupt power of the kahal, the umbrella self-governing organization of Polish Jewry. Gershom Scholem maintained that it was the popularization of Kabbalah that was responsible for the phenomenal success of Hasidism, its rapid spread, and the mass following of the zaddikim, the hasidic masters. By the end of the late twentieth century, most scholars agreed that Hasidism was a popular movement triggered by the economic breakdown of Polish Jewry, directed against the legal authorities, and led by mystically oriented leaders with no significant rabbinic pedigree or deep knowledge of traditional Jewish sources.

Beruriah, reputedly the greatest Jewish woman scholar of all times, has figured prominently in anthologies describing the lives and deeds of Jewish sages, and in particular in books and collections dedicated to Jewish women. Most of these presentations are no more than paraphrases of the sources on which they are dependent, accepting their judgments at face value and thus giving an idealized description of the woman Beruriah.

This article examines the dynamics between the halakhic and aggadic components of a sugya in the Babylonian Talmud, in which the halakhic discussion of the Yom Kippur afflictions listed in M. Yoma 8:1 is followed by a seemingly unrelated aggadic passage that focuses primarily on the manna in the wilderness. A close reading of the aggadic passage reveals that it in fact contains substantive links to the preceding halakhic discussion. Moreover, when the aggadic passage is read in the context of the preceding halakhic discussion, it provides an alternative understanding of the Yom Kippur afflictions that challenges the understanding that arises from the halakhic discussion. Nevertheless, a close look at the redaction of the sugya shows that the alternative understanding that arises from the aggadic part remains on either the conceptual plane or the supererogatory one, and does not cross over to the normative plane.