One of the most celebrated aspects of rabbinic literature is its adducing of multiple interpretations of scriptural verses and its valorizing of multiple legal opinions as expressed in debate among the rabbinic sages. This celebration has come from several quarters, with each finding in the purported rabbinic polysemy and pluralism support for agendas that could not possibly have been those of the ancient rabbis. For example, in the 1980s, some literary critics and philosophers found support in rabbinic midrash for their theories of indeterminacy of textual meaning in literature and language in general. Likewise, moving from the linguistic to the social domain, those seeking more harmonious relations among modern Judaism's competing denominations have found a pluralistic model to emulate in ancient Judaism, following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when sectarian rivalry is thought to have been replaced by the “big tent” inclusiveness, marked by respectful debate among multiple opinions, of the rabbis at Yavneh.

The various efforts to reform Jewish society in Poland from the late eighteenth century on elicited reactions among the representatives of Jewish society, both among those who supported the reforms and among others, much more numerous, who were less favorably inclined toward reform. The hasidim were, of course, among the latter. All the reforms affected the hasidim, just as they did other members of the community, but certain actions directed against their movement as such affected them specifically. It seems natural, therefore, that hasidim were not simply passive victims of the deeds undertaken by the central and regional organs of the state. It would be hard to expect otherwise because, after all, the hasidim were a party most interested in the favorable resolution of antihasidic government investigations.

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.

In the study of medieval biblical interpretation, the tension between commentators' fidelity to rabbinic midrash and their independent quest for peshat continues to command serious attention. The place of the important Provençal exegete R. David Kimhִi (Radak, ca. 1160–ca. 1235) in the history of peshat commentary is of particular interest, influenced as he was by an especially wide range of traditions. On one hand, Radak's family, which was of Spanish origin, produced grammatical works and commentaries that exemplify the strict text-based approach of the Andalusian exegetes. Indeed, R. Abraham Ibn Ezra, the most prominent representative of this school, influenced Radak considerably. Furthermore, Radak's dedication to Maimonidean rationalism, which has been amply demonstrated by scholars, would only have sharpened his resistance to fanciful midrashic speculation.

Thus we are told in one of the most famous narratives in talmudic literature, in its most elaborate and complex version in the Babylonian Talmud. The late ancient and early medieval rabbinic popularity of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai's (henceforth Rashbi) sojourn in the cave is demonstrated by the wide distribution of the motif in various rabbinic texts. It later gained additional prominence in the Jewish collective imagination to such a degree that no less than the composition of the Zohar was attributed to Rashbi; indeed, the text was considered a product of his sojourn in the cave. As is the case with other extensive narratives in the Babylonian Talmud about early rabbinic sages from the days of the Mishnah, different and most likely earlier versions of the whole or parts of this story can be found elsewhere in rabbinic literature. Others have gone about the task of carefully assembling and comparing the versions of the story, and various interpretations of it have been offered. Surely, any additional attempt at making sense of the story and decoding what the rabbinic narrators in the Babylonian Talmud sought to convey with its inclusion in the larger corpus needs to take this work into account.

The omission of Moses' name from the entire Haggadah is both well known and puzzling. Why has the main character of the Exodus drama vanished without a trace? Moreover, the mere omission of Israel's supreme prophet does not suffice for the redactor of the Haggadah. At the end of the “fugitive Aramean” exegesis, which is central to the Haggadah as a whole, Moses' involvement in the Exodus is expressly denied. The Haggadah comments on Deuteronomy 26:8: “The Lord brought us forth from Egypt”—not by an angel, not by a seraph, nor by an agent, but the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. Not only did no heavenly angel or seraph take part in the Exodus; not even a flesh-and-blood agent was involved. And “agent” in this context can mean only Moses.

In this essay, I posit that the ’aylonit essentially receives her sex/gender assignment from her parallel, the natural eunuch. I reach this conclusion by demonstrating that the aggregate simanim (signs) of the ’aylonit are chosen specifically for their sex/gender-crossing attributes, fitting neither any known modern condition nor any ancient condition. Given that in the legal material the rabbis do not, in fact, understand the ’aylonit as a sex/gender crosser, the list of attributes seems to emerge from nowhere. The answer to the riddle of its origin is to be found in the text describing the seris ḥammah (the congenital eunuch, whose description parallels that of the ’aylonit in many ways). That is, the simanim of the seris ḥammah also present him as a sex/gender crossover despite the lack of supporting halakhic literature. But whereas the ’aylonit has no ancient corollary in the Greek and Roman literature, the attributes of the seris ḥammah directly match those of the Roman eunuch, who does appear in many of the contemporaneous Christian and Roman materials as a sex/gender crosser. It would seem, then, that the seris ḥammah shares his sex/gender with the Roman eunuch, and the ’aylonit receives her sex/gender from her mirror image, the seris ḥammah.

For more than a century, his story has regularly exercised historical and literary imaginations alike. How could it be otherwise? Diplomat, playwright, journalist, politician, and visionary, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785–1851) was an extraordinary individual. In the course of his life, he wrote and produced successful plays, fought a duel, established himself as a popular newspaper columnist, rescued enslaved American sailors during his tenure as U.S. consul in Tunis, published an important book on his travels in Europe and North Africa, influenced presidential elections through his editorship of major newspapers, and served as judge and port surveyor of New York City. He was easily the most prominent and influential Jew in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he has been described as the first public figure “to demand continuous recognition as both a devoted American and as a devoted Jew.”

This brief article offers an overview of the various Kurdo-Jewish records preserved in Tehran in the Iranian Parliament Records archives. The documents reflect the perspectives of Jews and non-Jews alike and were originally reported by Kurdish officials of the Jewish colonies in Iranian Kurdistan, by Jewish senators of the National Parliament of Iran, as well as by Kurdish peasants of Kurdistan. Most of the documents are in Persian, with the exception of perhaps nine in French stemming from Westernized Jewish circles.

Mordecai Kaplan's journals from 1913 to 1934 offer a window into the mind of a tormented and lonely Jewish thinker. As a pioneering theologian, sociologist, and teacher of American Judaism in the twentieth century, Kaplan (1881–1983) stood as a towering figure at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, where he worked for a good deal of his very long life. Yet even with the publication of his groundbreaking work Judaism as a Civilization (1934) and his popular following, he felt marginalized and embattled throughout his life. To help manage and defend those professional conflicts, Kaplan turned to his journal to record his personal struggles and anxieties. These diary entries offer important clues to the ways he discovered and created an American Jewish identity through the art of journal writing.

Emil Fackenheim's philosophical response to the Holocaust is permeated by the worry that Auschwitz marks a rupture so severe that it compels any attempt to philosophize in its wake either to ignore the magnitude of this rupture or to lose itself in radical nihilism. “Perhaps no thought can exist in the same space as the Holocaust,” Fackenheim writes in To Mend the World. “Perhaps all thought, to assure its own survival, must be elsewhere.”

Studies of textual traditions about menstruation in Judaism are seldom without an agenda. Perhaps they cannot be. The polemical history of the literature is simply too entrenched by now. This is also the case with Evyatar Marienberg's series of studies, recently published in France, about the place of menstruation in Jewish culture.