In 883 CE, a man appeared in Kairouan, one of the centers of Jewish life at the time and told a tale about the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom. He called himself Eldad and claimed to be from the tribe of Dan. Since then, the story of the Ten Lost Tribes—that the tribes of the Northern Kingdom still exist intact in a faraway land, living in exile beyond the sabbatical river, a mysterious body of water that was passable only on the Sabbath—has continued to generate excitement. It is astonishing, however, to realize that this motif did not develop until many centuries after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. After the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, many northerners remained in their ancestral homeland in the north. Other northerners lived among their southern compatriots in Judah after fleeing south, while deported northerners and southerners mingled in exile in Mesopotamia. It is only after the end of the Second Temple period that the notion of the Ten Lost Tribes, inviolable and unreachable, developed.

Throughout the past two centuries, the corpus of rabbinic writings, called either tannaitic midrashim or halakhic midrashim, has served as a pivotal foundation upon which scholars have based their historical reconstructions of the development of rabbinic Judaism. The reasons for this dependence are manifold. Predated in redaction by only the Mishnah, these documents contain a wealth of traditions attributed to the founders of rabbinic Judaism who flourished during its nascency. Moreover, these texts differ significantly in rhetorical style, logic, scope, and concern not only from those rabbinic documents which precede them (Mishnah), follow them (Palestinian/Babylonian Talmuds and amoraic midrashim), or are, perhaps, contemporaneous with them (Tosefta), but also among themselves as a corpus of writings. Finally, these documents are the earliest collections of rabbinic biblical exegesis (“Midrash”) and, were it not for a small number of examples of exegesis preserved in the Mishnah and Tosefta, they would also represent the earliest examples of rabbinic biblical interpretation known today. For reasons such as these, the tannaitic midrashim have figured prominently in research conducted over the past century on the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism.

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.

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”).

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.

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:

Throughout the Talmudic era, the Jewish community of Babylonia lived under Persian rule while Zoroastrianism, serving as a state religion, was enjoying something of a renaissance. In Babylonia, known in the later geographical literature as the Persian heartland, Jews lived alongside Persians. Babylonian Jews had also already experienced Persian rule for centuries prior to the Talmudic era under the Achaemenids, and later under the persianized Arsacid dynasty. This alone should have sufficed to lure a number of scholars into exploring various cross-cultural contacts between the two neighboring religious communities during this period. Until recently, however, scholarship has not been greatly drawn to this field, despite an exhaustive focus, of venerable antiquity, on the relationship between Israel and Persia in the biblical and Second Temple periods, including the Qumran library.

Jewish sources emanating from the Islamic world of the Middle Ages abound in references to individuals bearing the title nasiء (“prince”; plural, nesiءim). In the unique religious and cultural world of the medieval Near East this biblical designation signified, with rare exception, descent from King David through the line of the Babylonian exilarchs. While at one time the title was restricted to incumbents of the exilarchate, by the eleventh century CE it had been appropriated by a broader circle of individuals who claimed descent from David but were often only distantly related to occupants of that office. These nesiءim enjoyed a measure of status in the Jewish communities of the Near East that was informed by the importance of noble ancestry in Arabic society in general and Islamic veneration for King David in particular.

Among scholars of Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Yemen has gained a poor reputation for treatment of its ancient Jewish minority in comparison with other predominantly Muslim societies. Although Yemen had, until the 1950s, a sizable Jewish population whose presence dated back centuries before the advent of Islam, various Muslim rulers of key parts of Yemen enforced the sumptuary laws and other restrictions stipulated in the Pact of עUmar with unusual stringency, and the Jews' history under Islamic rule was marred by sporadic instances of outright persecution.

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.

Among the stranger assertions made by Werner Sombart in The Jews and Modern Capitalism was that “it can be proved with great certainty that the Jew's freedom from the evil effects of alcohol (as also from syphilis) is due to his religion.” Yet, the Jewish religion, unlike Islam, never prohibited alcohol per se, and even when “kosher” wine—untouched by gentiles—was in short supply, beer or more potent beverages could be found by those so inclined. More to the point is S. D. Goitein's trenchant remark in the final (and posthumously published) volume of his A Mediterranean Society that “the proverbial sobriety of East European immigrants to the United States should not be taken as inherent to the genes of the race.” Although Maimonides in his Guide memorably described “gatherings with a view to drinking intoxicants” as “more shameful than gatherings of naked people . . . who excrete in daylight sitting together,” he was clearly speaking there more as philosopher than halakhist. In the medieval “Geniza society” in which he lived, as we learn from Goitein, all “important matters, such as sending a son overseas or promising a bequest, would be arranged at a drinking bout.”

This paper explores the development of a particular talmudic halakhic theme—the restitution of lost property—through the philosophical prism of Hilary Putnam's distinction between concepts and conceptions. This distinction holds that one can affirm a set of concepts without commitment to the underlying conceptions from which they are drawn. The focus here is upon substantial discrepancies between tannaitic and amoraic authorities in the presentation of the halakhot of restitution of lost property. These discrepancies testify to a significant change in the underlying conceptual framework of tannaitic and amoraic halakhic thinking on this topic.

The two dictionaries under review represent the product of decades of assiduous research and persistent effort on the part of Professor Michael Sokoloff of Bar Ilan University. Previoiusly, he has contributed major works in the Aramaic field in collaboration with other scholars. There is, first of all, A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Gröningen: Styx Publications, 1997), a multivolume edition of texts prepared in collaboration with Christa Müller-Kessler. This was followed by a Hebrew work, [Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, 1999), prepared in collaboration with Joseph Yahalom. However, the dictionaries reviewed here, which represent his most ambitious projects, bear his name alone, with only technical and electronic assistance in their actual preparation provided on the part of others. Sokoloff has also published A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2003), covering sources from 150 BCE to 200 CE, which includes the rich material preserved in the Aramaic papyri from the Judean Desert.

The purpose of Wright's study is to trace “the evolution of the depictions of Baruch ben Neriah . . . from the biblical materials through the early Jewish and Christian texts and traditions that either mention Baruch or were allegedly written by him” (xi). The book succeeds admirably. In three main chapters, Wright collects and analyzes most of the material about Baruch from the first mention of him in Jeremiah as the prophet's scribal assistant to works as late as 3 Baruch that picture him as a recipient of apocalyptic visions. A fourth chapter contains traditions about Baruch in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources into the Middle Ages.

Genocide, a neologism coined during World War II and now enshrined in international law, reflects an ancestral phenomenon as old as human history, if not older. It is a secularized version of what our predecessors understood by holy war, just war, and jihad as divine sanctions of murder and mayhem. The twentieth century anachronistically has applied the term to the Armenian massacres of World War I, and the United Nations today struggles how not to apply its definition to similar actions such as the tragic events in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan, let alone threats of mass terrorist murder by a bevy of religious killers. While our contemporary market is nearly saturated with books on the rebirth of jihad in its current terrorist manifestation, and a number of studies have examined the biblical antecedents of genocide, Louis Feldman offers a unique perspective on several ancient rereadings of a revered text that can be read as potentially genocidal.

Despite the focus by the popular media on the revival of Jewish instrumental klezmer music during the past decades, surprisingly little of a scholarly nature has been written until recently about either the klezmer tradition or its revival. Since 1999 a relatively large number of new book publications of both a scholarly and a popular nature have appeared. Besides the four volumes under review here, they include books by Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin, Moshe Beregovski, Seth Rogovoy, Mark Slobin, Zinovij Stoljar, and Yale Strom. It is hoped that the publication of these four works (and the other recent works not reviewed here) will open a broader discussion of the complex of issues surrounding klezmer and ḥasidic music and stimulate further research in these areas.

David Noy has labored in the past decade to update J. B. Frey's Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum (vol. 1 [Rome 1936; revised by B. Lifshitz, New York, 1975]; vol. 2 [Rome, 1952]). He has already produced two volumes on the North Mediterranean (the Balkans and southern Italy, 1993, and Rome, 1995) and another for Greco-Roman Egypt (with William Horbury, 1992).

This set of interrelated studies is full of closely reasoned analyses and bold but careful speculation. Several of these studies provide a model, almost unique within biblical studies, of how to integrate biblical and extra-biblical data within a framework deeply informed by theory. The book is intended for specialists with expertise in technical details the book addresses but rarely pauses to describe.

In this wide-ranging overview of biblical literature, Israel Knohl argues that the Hebrew Bible does not present a consistent or monolithic viewpoint concerning ancient Israel's or Judaism's understanding of God, itself, and the world in which it lived. Rather, Knohl contends that the Bible presents a pluralism of viewpoints that to a great degree anticipates the pluralistic outlook of Rabbinic Judaism. This will hardly come as a surprising thesis to anyone familiar with modern biblical and theological scholarship. Indeed, it takes up the classic question of unity and diversity within the Hebrew Bible that might be illustrated by Gerhard von Rad's well-known Old Testament Theology. Von Rad recognized the diversity of traditions that informed the various writings and viewpoints now gathered in the Bible while simultaneously trying to systematize them into a general concept of Heilsgeschichte, that is, “salvation history” or “sacred history.” Such Heilsgeschichte moved inexorably to what von Rad believed would be the ultimate culmination of human history. Knohl's contribution comes not in relation to the model of pluralism in the Bible per se, but in relation to his argument that so much of the priestly literature that engages in pluralistic debate with other biblical works is rooted in the monarchic period of ancient Israel's (or Judah's) history. In this respect, Knohl's own work—although original in its own right—owes much to an earlier model advocated by Yehezkel Kaufmann, one of the founding fathers of modern Israeli biblical scholarship.

In the present study, Hindy Najman addresses two fundamental aspects related to Second Temple Jewish literature: pseudepigrapha and the rewritten Bible. Pseudepigrapha as a literary genre signifies texts which claim as their author some privileged individual from the past. In reality, however, the attribution of authorship to some ancient figure masks the present-day composition of the text. The term rewritten Bible, in its broadest use, refers to the interpretive reworking of the scriptural text and story through such means as expansion, deletion, harmonization, and conflation. The final product retains the narrative sequence of the scriptural account though in a significantly modified form. Both of these literary techniques seemingly have at their base a manipulation and subversion of the integrity of the scriptural story and text. Pseudepigrapha asserts for a latter day author the authority and prestige of an ancient figure; rewritten Bible presents itself as a new and improved scripture.