The past few years have witnessed an expansion of the range of sources that Talmudists regularly employ in their research on the Bavli. Scholars now turn to Iranian epic and folk literature; to Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Eastern Christian ritual and theological writings; to Sasanian civil law; and to other nonrabbinic sources in an effort to broaden and deepen their understanding of the Bavli and its place in the “splendid confusion” that was Sasanian Mesopotamian society. As Yaakov Elman has pointed out, this research trend serves as a corrective for more than half a century of scholarly neglect, which was only encouraged by a dearth of critical editions of Middle Persian literature and more general studies of Sasanian culture and religions. Now, following a steady output of some long-anticipated editions, and, more significantly, as a result of recent collaboration between Talmudists and Iranists, the coming years hold great promise for a radically new understanding of the Bavli and its world.

This study presents a new interpretation of tithe references in Scripture. It departs from the conventional view that the tithe is merely a tax levied on the people. Rather it sees the tithe as a partnership or compact with God in which tangible goods are exchanged for intangible ones. Taking the Pentateuch in its entirety as our contextreveals the tithe to bepart of a pattern of reciprocities in which goods are exchanged for divine acceptance, protection, and blessing.

In recent decades, talmudic studies, along with other disciplines devoted to the study of texts, have experienced numerous paradigm shifts regarding both methods and goals. The naive presupposition that a text provides reliable information about historically situated characters, whether those described in the text or those who authored the text, has been vigorously challenged on many counts and from many angles. Responses to the challenge have ranged from sophisticated attempts to recover hermeneutical stability, whether rooted in authorial intention, in textually grounded meaning, or in some form of dialogue between the reader and the author or text, to the panoply of deconstructive approaches and other forms of postmodern recontextualization.

In the year 1620, Abraham b. Naphtali Hirsch Schor, the head of the rabbinical court of Satanov, Poland, wrote to Rabbi Mordecai b. David Katz of the neighboring community of Lvov (Lemberg) about a “great and terrible act of God which I heard and saw with my own eyes here in the holy congregation of Satanov.” R. Abraham related the following story:

…Here in the holy congregation of Gródek (Gorodok) three parasangs away from Satanov, there lives a man named R. Gedaliah with a small four-and-ahalf- year-old son. The youth is a mere boy having no superiority in his studies over the rest of the children of his age. But when his father began to study the Hebrew alphabet and the prayer book with him and saw that the holy spirit rests upon him, he subsequently brought the boy before me to the holy congregation of Satanov to test him. And I tested him several times—a hundred times and more—myself along with my colleagues who were with me and we saw the work of the Lord and his wonders, for He is exceedingly great. I asked him: “Please tell me the beginning of the halakhah learned today.” He immediately related the halakhah, answering: “Rabbi Ashi said that our mishnah states: I can likewise prove,” etc.

In 1638 a book entitled Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia (A Discourse on the State of the Jews, Particularly Those Dwelling in the Illustrious City of Venice), written by the prominent Venetian Rabbi, Simone Luzzatto, was published. This Italian work, 184 quarto size pages in length, was addressed to the Venetian patriciate which constituted the governing body of the city. On the basis of information contained in a seventeenth-century Hebrew chronicle first published in 1949, it appears that it had been written in order to avert an expulsion which threatened the Jews of Venice in 1636–37.

The Bavli's story of Herod's rise to power, murder of the Hasmonean family and of the rabbis, encounter with Bava b. Buta, and construction of the temple, found at Bava Batra 3b-4a, has long puzzled scholars. Many aspects of this story diverge from Josephus's account, our main source for historical knowledge of Herod's life and deeds. This paper argues that the storyteller has been influenced by Persian sources from the Sasanian period. Important elements of the Bavli story were modeled on the account of the rise of Ardashir, founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as recounted in a Sasanian text known as the Karnamag i Ardashir i Pabagan, “The Book of the Deeds of Ardashir son of Pabag.” The rabbis understood the transition from the Hasmonean to Herodian dynasties through the prism of the transition from the Parthian to Sasanian dynasties. They identified Herod with Ardashir, and constructed a story of Herod's usurpation and rise to power on the basis of Ardashir's usurpation and rise to power as recounted in Sasanian sources.

In both halachic and aggadic contexts the Talmud frequently supplies information about the relationships between sages. Sages interact with each other, or comment on each other's erudition, piety, personality, and the like. From what sources does the Talmud derive this information? From sources contemporary with the sages involved, or from sources of a much later time?

Some of the talmudic information is attributed to named authorities, some of it is presented anonymously. Are the attributed statements pseudepigraphic or authentic? Are there substantive distinctions between the attributed and the anonymous statements? Are the anonymous statements amoraic or post-amoraic?

Despite a distinguished life and a remarkable written and intellectual legacy, history has not been kind to Nathan Birnbaum. While alive, he was acknowledged not only as one of the founders of central European Zionism but also as a major figure in Jewish politics and thought. As a journalist and essayist, he contributed to and was read widely in a staggering number of Jewish periodicals in central Europe—several of which, such as the first Jewish nationalist periodical in the German language, Selbst-Emancipation—he founded and edited himself. Yet today, little of his legacy is known, and his massive literary and intellectual production has received surprisingly little attention from Jewish historians.

Samuel ibn Tibbon (died ca. 1232) is best known as the translator of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. But as Aviezer Ravitzky has shown in his doctoral dissertation and in a series of recent articles, ibn Tibbon was an important thinker in his own right. First and foremost, ibn Tibbon appears to have been the earliest significant interpreter of Maimonides' philosophical thought. He was also one of the most influential. While there had been suspicions, even during his lifetime, that Maimonides held radical esoteric philosophical views, ibn Tibbon was the first to lend sophistication to this viewpoint by developing an elaborate system of interpretation for unlocking the secrets of the Guide, one that would have a significant impact on subsequent interpreters of Maimonides.

This article explores rabbinic traditions that see in the character of Joseph a figure of uncertain sexual orientation. I examine a series of rabbinic and biblical texts in which an unconventional gender dynamic may be present. While it is true that these biblical and rabbinic texts ran contrary to the normative ideational and behaviorally prescriptive traditions concerning sexuality presented by the main body of biblical and rabbinic texts, it is nonetheless true that the texts I examine invite readers to see an alternative dynamic through their stories. I will employ a variety of methodologies, including philological/critical scholarship, close literary reading, and queer theory, through which we might most profitably examine the interpretative traditions I consider.

Some time in the second half of the eighteenth century, there emerged a Jewish legend that glorified a conversion to Judaism and a martyr's death of a Polish noble from a very prominent Polish aristocratic family, sometimes referred to as Walentyn Potocki, or Graf Potocki—the legend of ger ẓedek, a righteous convert, of Wilno. The story was enthusiastically embraced by Eastern European Jews, and it subsequently became a subject of numerous novels and novellas. Even today its appeal continues. It is currently mentioned on a number of Jewish web sites as “a true story of a Polish Hrabia (count) . . . who descended from a long line of noble Christian rulers and who sacrificed wealth and power to convert from Christianity to Judaism,” and it serves as a basis for school plays in some Ḥaredi schools for girls. Although converts to Judaism were not unheard of in the premodern era, few stories of this kind emerged. Rabbinic authorities had an ambiguous attitude toward non-Jewish conversions, and few encouraged proselytizing or glorified non-Jewish converts. The legend of ger ẓedek of Wilno, though said to be a true story, appears to be a carefully crafted tale of conversion, a polemical and apologetic response to a number of challenges that the Polish Jewish community faced from the mid-eighteenth century.

In this paper I will examine the rabbinic exemption of women from the obligation to perform any “positive time-bound commandment” (), as it appears in M. Kiddushin 1:7. This rule states that women are exempt from the obligation to perform those commandments, such as, for example, sitting in a Sukkah on the Feast of Tabernacles, or saying the kriءat shemעa, the declaration of God's Oneness, morning and evening, in which the requirement for the mandated action comes about with the arrival of a specific time. I offer this analysis of a particular rabbinic ruling, in its literary context in the Mishnah, as a case study in what I claim to be a major component of the rabbinic discourse of gender: the male appropriation of the “feminine” into their own identities, and the resultant exclusion of women from those areas of appropriation. In this paper I will employ a literary/anthropological approach to reading the Mishnah, which I believe is very useful in uncovering such underlying cultural patterns within its succinct, legal writing style.

Voltaire's voluminous writings on religion contain, as is well known, a large number of attacks on the Jewish people and Judaism. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for this sustained animosity on the part of a great rationalist and proponent of religious toleration toward a people and a religion which continued, in his own day, to be victimized by unjust persecution. While much remains in dispute, there does seem to be general agreement that Voltaire attacked Judaism at least in part because its most sacred texts constituted the foundation of Christianity, the religion he wished to destroy.

In October 1912, the twenty-four-year-old Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon embarked on a ship in the port of Jaffa, then Palestine, the destination of his trip being Germany, or, to be more exact, the city of Berlin. Agnon left for Germany in the company of Dr. Arthur Ruppin, known as the “father of Zionist settlement in Eres Yisra'el.” The friendship between Agnon and Ruppin had developed in Jaffa, where Agnon had tutored both Ruppin and his wife in Hebrew. And it was probably with the support of Dr. Ruppin, himself a native of Germany and a graduate of a German university, that Agnon decided to leave Palestine, where he had resided for more than three years, to see the world, which in those days meant Berlin.

One of the markers of the emerging Reform movement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the publication of synagogue regulations that introduced new norms of decorum and, occasionally, slight changes in the prayer service. Scholarly discussions of the first synagogue regulations have been limited to the available published regulations, namely, the Westphalian (1810) and Amsterdam's Adat Jesurun regulations (1809). The recently discovered regulations composed by Joseph Perl for his synagogue in Tarnopol (1815) enable us for the first time to consider an east European perspective for understanding the different varieties of the new trend of synagogue innovations in the early nineteenth century. In addition to an analysis of Perl's regulations, the following article explains the circumstances in which Perl's synagogue project took shape, and highlights the historiographical significance of his synagogue regulations. I argue that Perl may be credited as the first to suggest a religious path that was both traditionalist and modern, a path that later characterized the synagogue innovations in several Habsburg cities. An English translation of the regulations is provided in an appendix.