Students of religion are aware that the same ritual act can have many meanings depending on the cultural context. As Walter Kaelber observes, “Viewed cross-culturally, a given ascetic form may have different, even opposite objectives.” Accordingly, the same detail may have entirely opposite meanings in different ascetic regimens. Thus for the biblical Daniel and his ascetic heirs, beans were an ideal food, probably because they are dry and not susceptible to impurity; but for Pythagoreans and others, they were to be avoided perhaps because in certain Mediterranean populations, they presented an actual medical danger. These factors alert us to the principle that understanding a ritual system in its cultural context is vital. They also encourage us to read rituals and actions as we read texts–coding their creators' statements about what they value in a religious system and what they aspire to be.

A gender analysis of some of the representations of women in Sefer Hasidim and related texts finds that the German-Jewish pietiests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries express a profound ambivalence toward women. While Sefer Hasidim places great importance on happy marital relations, its authors also see potential adulteries at every turn. Moreover, in their mystical yearning to transcend the physical pleasures of the material world, they go beyond rabbinic norms in their displacement of women in favor of devotion to the divine. This essay suggests that situating this ambivalence, and the frequent objectification of women which results from it, within the larger context of medieval social history can expand and enhance our knowledge of Jewish social norms, family life, and spirituality in medieval Ashkenaz.

There is probably no topic in Maimonides' philosophy more thoroughly explored than that of human perfection, many of the studies dealing explicitly with the notion of imitatio Dei. Maimonides' view of ultimate perfection has been interpreted alternatively as primarily either intellectual, political, ethical, or halakhic. Many have interpreted Maimonides as positing a harmonious combination of the contemplative life and the life of socially oriented activity—bios praktikos—despite the evident tension between the two.Others have explained the apparent inconsistency in Maimonides' approach in terms of the distinction between exoteric and esoteric doctrines. The appropriate texts in Maimonides' writings have been analyzed in detail, and the sources at his disposal have been discussed at length. The challenge facing the student of Maimonides' thought, however, lies not only in explicating the individual texts which deal in a direct manner with the topic, but also in identifying all the issues and texts which are relevant to the topic, as well as their sources, and how they are related.

In late Ottoman times and until the end of the British Mandate in 1932, the community in Baghdad was one of the glories of modern Jewry. In the contemporary Middle East and Mediterranean world, Baghdad Jewry was rivaled in size and institutions only by the Jewish community of Salonika. But despite its prominence, and that of its descendants in Israel today, Baghdad Jewry has been studied very little. Our understanding of Jewish societies in obscure regions such as Yemen and Tripolitania is more advanced. This paper offers the outlines of a sociological portrait to fill the gap.

Fantasies of deviance, including latent homosexuality, are not a major or overt theme in the fiction of Mendele Mocher Sefarim (pen name of S. Y. Abramowitz, 18357–1917) and Samuel Joseph Agnon (1888?–1970) but are, nevertheless, an unmistakable part of the characters whom they depict. These characters, for various reasons and to varying degrees, are deflected from normal heterosexual attachments and are inclined, for this reason, to forms of perversion which at times mirror the distortions and breakdown in the societies in which they live.

Alexander Altmann passed away six years ago, yet his presence is still very much felt by all who work in the field of medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The recent publication of his early essays on Jewish theology and the crisis of German Jewry in the thirties will bring him to the attention of a still wider circle of readers. His place among the foremost scholars of Judaic studies in our century is assured.