In a fascinating chapter dealing with the “nature of eating” in Shulhan shel Arba, a short thirteenth-century manual on rabbinic eating rituals, R. Bahya b. Asher suggests that Torah scholars alone are fit to eat meat, based on the following passage from the Talmud: “it is forbidden for an ignoramus [am ha-aretz] to eat meat, as it is written, ‘This is the torah of beast and fowl’ (Lev 11:46); for all who engage in Torah, it is permitted to eat the flesh of beast and fowl. This passage raises many questions, especially for a vegetarian! First, why would an intellectual or spiritual elite use meat-eating as a way to distinguish itself from the masses? The field of comparative religions offers many counter-examples to this tendency: the vegetarian diet of the Hindu Brahmin caste, of Buddhist priests and nuns, the ancient Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonist regimen advocated by Porphyry in On Abstinence, or even contemporary eco-theologians, animal rights activists, and feminist vegetarians like Carol Adams.

The literary and historical study of rabbinic literature increases our understanding of rabbinic texts and enables us to isolate different stages in the history of traditions. Amoraic teachings, in particular, have undergone a complex process of enunciation, interpretation, transmission, adaption, and application prior to their incorporation into their present contexts. They have likewise received literary enrichment and suffered recasting in the course of their integration into wider units and of the overall compilation of gemara. Accordingly, the extant versions may not reflect the most fundamental or original use and import of a tradition. Once aware of these processes we can, moreover, better appreciate the concerns which elicited and shaped the early stages of the teachings as well as the later ones which may have contributed to the transformations.

With the sure touch of the true historian (a rare gift) Gershom Scholem has opened up for us new avenues toward the understanding of Jewish messianism and, in particular, its most fateful manifestation after the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt: Sabbatianism. There are no pseudomessiahs, he teaches us. For any attempt to translate the idea of messianism into reality is doomed to end in failure, but failure is not its end. This is demonstrated by the movement connected with Sabbatai Sevi, or, if one may associate two such incongruous phenomena, the death of Christ on the cross.

Scholars of rabbinic literature have often noted the widespread tendency to question and argue with God in rabbinic literature. Oddly, they have largely ignored the unequivocal antiprotest traditions found in these writings. Responding to this scholarly lacuna, this essay collects anti-protest traditions of the midrash and Talmud, and explicates their exegetical and conceptual basis. In the process, the paper makes two central arguments: First, that later anti-protest texts intensify or radicalize their opposition; while early anti-protest traditions merely prohibit one from challenging God, later aggadot tend to attach harsh punishments to that prohibition. Second, from a comparative perspective, rabbinic anti-protest sentiments diverge from similar sentiments voiced by the church fathers. While both critique the act of protest on exegetical and (similar) conceptual grounds, they have different ways of harmonizing their conservative attitudes with a biblical tradition that problematically, at least for them, seems to tolerate, if not valorize, confronting God. More specifically, whereas the rabbinic position tends to retell the biblical confrontation by having God castigate or punish the protester, early Christian thinkers, by stark contrast, tend to reject the literal reading of Scripture altogether: any apparent protest by a biblical hero is deemed a dangerous misreading.

In his study Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks defines plot as that which “makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning.” Plot proves to be a rich and multifaceted concept to explore in reading Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004), in which counterfactual histories, personal plotlines, a cluster of subplots, and the reader’s awareness of metanarrative (“masterplot”) all contribute to the complex shaping of the text.

Not least among the bittersweet gifts of modernity to the Jews is the complication of dealing with the Bible both as sacred scripture and as a document subject to the same canons of inquiry as any other historical, or putatively historical, record. The problem goes far beyond the familiar one posed by narratives that ancient historians find doubtful or quite impossible. For historical critical research into the Tanakh (as into all other scriptures) also uncovers the processes of development of the worldviews within the literature and thus puts a painful question to those who wish to affirm Judaism as a contemporary reality. How can a literature so variegated and contradictory speak with a normative voice today? It is no wonder that so many biblical scholars avoid the normative theological questions altogether and content themselves with historical and philological description (which, of course, presupposes norms of its own). It is also no wonder that so many religious practitioners neglect the historical issues and treat their scriptures as representing a static, uniform, and unvarying worldview—not surprisingly, the worldview of their own, postbiblical affirmation.

This article discusses the ways scholars have outlined the process of Jewish adaptation (or lack of it) from their Christian surroundings in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. Using the example of penitential fasting, the first two sections of the article describe medieval Jewish practices and some of the approaches that have been used to explain the similarity between medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian customs. The last two sections of the article suggest that in addition to looking for texts that connect between Jewish and Christian thought and beliefs behind these customs, it is useful to examine what medieval Jews and Christians saw of each other's customs living in close urban quarters. Finally, the article suggests that when shaping medieval Jewish and Christian identity, the differences emphasized in shared everyday actions and visible practice were no less important than theological distinctions. As part of the discussion throughout the article, the terminology used by scholars to describe the process of Jewish appropriation from the local surroundings is described, focusing on terms such as “influence” and “inward acculturation,” as well as “appropriation.”

A central concern in the study of gender in Judaism is the status of women and the relationship between partners in a marriage. In this article I explore a concealed dialogue, or perhaps more accurately, a dialogue that has been condemned to silence, on that subject.

Haskalah autobiography, as S. Werses has surveyed it, is a wide field which includes such well known figures as I. S. Reggio, S. D. Luzzatto, M. H. Letteris, A. Gottlober, S. Y. Fuenn, J. L. Gordon, M. A.Guenzburg, and M. L. Lilienblum. The fact that these names are well known—and known to us from works other than their autobiographies—is significant. Most of these works are accounts of the author's literary and cultural activity, and they interest us now, if they do at all, as portals to a more complete comprehension of that activity. Reggio, for example, describes his call to Jewish learning and the progress of his career as a scholar; in provoking detail in the pages of Ha-maggid, Luzzatto gives an authorized version of the canon of his works; Letteris and Fuenn offer not so much portraits of themselves as reminiscences of such famous figures from the milieu in which they worked as Rappaport and Krochmal; and Gottlober deflects attention from himself in another way by confining himself to an ethnographic account of the Volhynia and Podolia of his youth.

Though much has been done in the past half century to clarify boundaries and crossing points on the religious-intellectual maps of “Ashkenaz” and “Sepharad,” a large body of evidence that advances this complex exercise in cultural cartography has been wholly neglected: supercommentaries on Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah. Though it was produced in that part of Europe that Jews came to call (perhaps under Rashi’s influence) “Ashkenaz,” the Commentary traveled to points far and wide. Among the diverse responses that it elicited in its new homes, the vast supercommentary literature that came to surround the Commentary stands out. Though scholars working in diverse cultural orbits produced this literature, Sephardic and Ashkenazic writers created most of it. This genre continues to flourish, at times in new forms. Yet although some of the major rabbinic figures (e.g., Judah Loew of Prague) produced Rashi supercommentaries, and although these works reflect significant trends in premodern Judaism, the genre’s neglect among scholars has been well-nigh total.

Bialik may have protested in “halakhah and aggadah” that aggadah had become too dominant in his day, but for countless generations it was halakhah that possessed greater gravitas, thanks to the geonim and their successors. Bialik was onto something, however, since even he succumbed to the power of aggadah—his most popular work was Sefer Ha-Aggadah. In the contemporary academy, aggadah continues to flourish. The encounter between midrash and literary theory in the 1980s, and between talmudic aggadah and stam-oriented source criticism in the 1990s and today, have firmly secured aggadah's territory on the academic map. Some aggadot have been scrutinized by so many scholarly eyes—the oven of Akhnai, the heresy of Elisha ben Abuya, the partnership of Rabbi Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish—that they seem to constitute a new Jewish core curriculum.

The forms of interpreting sacred texts are many, and, of course, the concept of sacred text is fluid and part of a process depending on the attitudes of society which change over time. For Maimonides, an important method of interpretation was the philosophical mode. In order to get a better understanding of what Maimonides understood by that method of interpretation, Chapter Two of the First Part of his Guide of the Perplexed on the fall of man is examined in terms of structure and content. Then, the principle underlying the possibility of the philosophic mode of interpretation of the Hebrew Bible according to Maimonides is discussed. Finally, the general place of the philosophic mode of interpretation within the general theory of the interpretation of literature is touched on briefly.

Among Yehudah Hallevi's poems which have come to light since H. Brody's edition of the Diwan (1894–1930), the great majority are liturgical and only very few are secular poems. Here a new fragment of an unknown secular poem by Hallevi is published according to two Genizah manuscripts, T-S NS 96.18 and MC IV 136. The T-S manuscript, our main source, is a single torn sheet, which contains the first three lines (written as six hemistichs) and traces of the fourth. It explicitly attributes the poem to Yehudah Hallevi. The verso contains the end of a known piyyut by Abraham Ibn Ezra and two anonymous poems (one of them homonymic) whose unusual meter and awkward phrasing seem to point to a later period.

Hallevi's poem, “Shalom lekha shemesh be-'et hillo” (Peace upon you, radiant sun) is a panegyric addressed to a patron or friend. It starts in medias res with highflown eulogies, dispensing with the introduction often found in other poems of this genre. With regard to style and meter the fragment is adroitly written; however, its imagery and attitude are largely conventional. The patron or friend is extolled as a sun, a star, a mast and a cedar tree—all of which are conventional materials in panegyrics. Moreover the images are linked only by their common subject and not at all on the metaphorical level, and the formulation is impersonal. These traits were very common to contemporary panegyrics, one of the more conventional genres of the school, but Yehudah Hallevi usually took care to interweave the images in various subtle ways. Of course, he may also have done this here, in the lines that did not survive—probably the greater part of the poem. The text is printed with a commentary that includes parallels from Hallevi's and Moses Ibn Ezra's poetry illustrating the more conventional imagery

Joseph Perl's two epistolary novels, published in 1819 and 1838, far surpass typical Hebrew prose from the early nineteenth century. The leading Enlightenment authors (the maskilim) were deliberate epigones, because they favored the rhetorical modes called shibuẓ and meliẓah. By imitating the Hebrew of the Prophets—under the influence of the ornate style known from medieval Spain—the Berlin Enlightenment authors and their followers strove for what they considered to be “pure language” (leshon ẓaḥ). Their preference for allusion and quotation encouraged epigonism and made originality a lesser priority; many Berlin maskilim valued the adherence to norms more than original self-expression. The epitome of that devotion to literary norms was the genre of the Briefsteller, exemplified by Buchner's and Naiman's works, which taught Jews how to write polite German or Hebrew letters and sound like cultivated, well-educated Europeans.

Although scholars have written extensively about Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto and his literary oeuvre, there has been virtually no work on his stay in Amsterdam (1735–43). The controversy over his supposed Sabbatianism, which engulfed much of the European rabbinate and led to his self-imposed exile from Padua, did not rage overtly in the Dutch Republic, and historians have generally regarded these years as nothing more than a quiet period for Luzzatto and of little consequence to him personally.

Using previously unpublished archival material, this article demonstrates that Luzzatto was highly regarded in Amsterdam's generally insular Portuguese community. He received charity and a regular stipend to study in the Ets Haim Yeshiva, forged relationships with both rabbinic and lay leaders, and arguably influenced the community's religious outlook. However, a comparison of the manuscript and print versions of Mesillat yesharim, his famous Musar treatise composed and published in the city, reveals the limitations under which Luzzatto lived. Research into Luzzatto's time in Amsterdam shows the man's enduring self-assurance and relentless critique of his critics, as well as the Portuguese rabbinate's broadening horizons.

Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have tried to explain Karaism in light of comparative scripturalist trends in the history of religion. These trends manifest a common desire to reinstate the revelational text (i.e., the Hebrew Bible, the Qur'an) as the sole basis for religious law and practice. They deny or considerably delimit, on the other hand, the role of “received tradition” (i.e., Jewish torah she-be‘al peh, Islamic Sunnah) as an independent or complementary source of religious authority and legislation. Consequently, the Karaites’ rejection of Jewish oral law as codified in the Mishnah and Talmud and their attempt to reinstate the Hebrew Bible (in its entirety) as the binding source for Jewish law and religious practice, have often been described as the Jewish variation on the theme of sola scriptura.1

Hunting scenes are common in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and are understood as allegories of the Jew, usually represented as a hare or a deer, being persecuted by the Christian, shown as a hunter and his dogs. This article will discuss a hunt scene from the Worms Maḥzor, an Ashkenazic illuminated prayer book produced in 1272, probably in Würzburg. At the top of folio 130r, an illumination of the piyyut (liturgical poem) “ʾAyelet ʾahavim” (the loving hind, or doe) for Shavuot displays a deer being hunted by a devilish hunter and his dogs. Examining the illustration in the context of contemporary textual evidence, I shall demonstrate that the deer in the Worms Maḥzor portrays the Torah itself being persecuted by the hunter, who can be understood not only as a Christian or Esau, but also as Jesus.

The legal theorist and classicist James Boyd White argues for an understanding of law as a rhetorical activity through which meaning and communities are created. While law contains rules, its definition should not be limited to those rules. Rather, law is a literary and compositional activity, one of our social modes through which we aim to constitute community. Significantly, for White, law is a cultural activity, a language, one of the ways in which we shape and give meaning to our world. The written records of classical rabbinic culture, the Talmuds and the midrashim, present us with an example of this world in which law is a cultural and rhetorical mode of expression. In fact, as these texts, and the Talmuds in particular, usually do not present us with codified rules but rather artfully construed discussions, models of “thinking” about a particular legal decision, they are excellent examples of the ways in which the creation of law is the creation of meaning. Classical rabbinic literature presents us with a textual world of law and narrative, a weaving of one genre into the other, and a use of one genre in the service of the other. Rabbinic texts often inform us precisely which stories the rabbis choose to utilize for specific norms. Law does not exist in its own bordered realm, but is part of a larger web of meaning in which it and narrative together create behavioral claims. A claim to legal authority, therefore, is not only a claim about which stories are authoritative, but also a claim to a specific understanding of a tradition, a move toward narratival authority.